Roads to Coen

I was driving south on the Peninsula Development Road (PDR) in the early afternoon of a dry season day when, ten kilometres north of the Archer River crossing, my four-wheel-drive went into a sidelong slide. Within a few seconds the car came to a shuddering halt, inverted in a ditch, its headlights now facing back towards the Lockhart River turnoff. What happened next escapes me, but some specifics remain: a plume of red dust entering the cabin through the driver’s side window; a line of blood travelling down my arm onto the right hand that held me up against the shattered windscreen; I told myself out loud to get out of the car. Crawling out of the vehicle, my foremost thought was that I had been the subject to a significant clerical error that could be set right through appeal to an unknown cosmic authority. But the accident was tenaciously real and within minutes a couple in a ute—two teenagers in rugby shorts with working dogs—stopped to inform me of as much. One helped me take photos and clean the dust off my face while the other salvaged my belongings out of the four-wheel-drive, now slowly pouring its twin gasoline tanks onto the clay verge. I spent the next hour squeezed between them, re-narrating the crash over booming country music, before parting in Coen, the closest township with a mechanic and a police station. The duty officer told me to come back tomorrow. A domestic violence complaint would take up his afternoon, he said, flicking his head towards a woman sitting behind him. In the meantime, he suggested I recover wreck towed before it was stripped for parts.

I did not need to write-off a four-wheel-drive in order to learn that Cape York’s roads are dangerous. As I was reminded in the pub that night, such roads are the subject of daily discussion and interminable comparison in the far north, conversations where ‘good roads’ and ‘bad roads’ are fluid and relative categories. To some my crash marked me out as a rank amateur, either worthy of contempt or not worth regarding at all. A fishing guide introduced himself only to tell me, with studied disinterest, that he had ‘driven these roads for 30 years and never had a single problem.’ For others, my experience on the PDR rendered me a fellow traveller over perilous terrain. To these people I was somebody worth buying a beer for, somebody to incorporate into their own stories of temporary privations and close calls. Often these were locals who, working in hospitality, had made an occupation of representing the region as environmentally perilous and personally welcoming, or they were members of the heterogeneous mix of pensioners, families and wealthy retirees who comprise the category of ‘tourists’ in the Cape.

Fewer than 10 per cent of the 40,000 kilometres of road between Ingham, Normanton and Thursday Island are sealed, and in the Cape the first 200 kilometres of the PDR’s 710 kilometres are almost the sole stretch of asphalt. Despite its singular name the road is an assembly of earlier attempts, former carriageways and drover tracks that were joined together in the 1960s with a new section across Gugu Warra and Thaypan country between Lakeland and Musgrave, creating the first direct route to and from Cairns. Built with state government funds in an attempt to ‘relieve unemployment’ and encourage the pastoral industry,¹ it remains the responsibility of local government but exists solely through periodic injections of federal finances. The new all-weather bridge at Laura owes its existence to a $30 million federal grant, while beyond this, the PDR’s 500 kilometre graded remainder is tended through the dry season by state-funded road crews smoothing the clay moonscape carved out by the wet season rains between December and April. In ‘the wet,’ the east-west courses of monsoonal waterways inundate the singular centre of this arterial road network, removing steep channels of compacted clay or simply submerging the roadway; the Archer River Bridge I crisscrossed in the days before the accident would be a metre underwater three months later, one of the many places where the roads to Coen become reliably impassable.

• • •

Cape York Peninsula reveals the immenseness of Australia. Today, with a landmass of approximately 137,000 square kilometres – larger than Greece or the north island of Aotearoa/New Zealand – and a population of fewer than 18,000 people, the region remains ‘frontier’ land according to colonial measures. Barring the Torres Strait Islands, it is Queensland’s sole remaining region with a majority Indigenous-identifying population (c. 55 per cent), most of whom live in coastal communities founded as missions in the late 19th Century, while its settler population are concentrated around the townships of Cooktown and Weipa, the latter of which services the world’s largest bauxite mine. The Cape’s residents are amongst the most disadvantaged in Queensland, with 83 per cent in the most deprived 20 per cent of the state’s population. Despite local lore, the Cape has never had a large or sustainable pastoral industry, due to the resistance of its first peoples to settler incursion and, more recently, due to its distance from markets and the poverty of its soils. Instead, employment within the region is primarily within public administration, unemployment is high, and private labour markets and private capital are scarce; within most Indigenous communities no homes are privately owned. Nonetheless, almost three quarters of the region is claimed or possessed as native title and approximately a fifth is listed as reserve or national park, several of the largest having recently been transferred to joint-management with Indigenous groups.

The ‘uncompleted colonisation’ of the Cape, as historian Noel Loos puts it,² has produced a place continuously occupied by Indigenous people and largely without private land title, the twin markers through which Australian law today recognises native title. Another outcome is the persistence of undammed rivers and a largely continuous cover of tropical native ecosystems, host to biota comprising, in the ecologist’s lexicon, ‘a complex mixture of Gondwanan relics, Australian isolationists and Asian or New Guinean invaders’ including large numbers of endemic freshwater fish, butterflies, reptiles, frogs and mammals.³ Approximately a quarter of Australia’s entire surface runoff occurs in the Peninsula, and the east-west flow of the Carpentaria basin includes Queensland’s largest perennial river (Jardine River), the river with the largest discharge (Mitchell River) and the most biodiverse freshwater river (Wenlock River). Much of the region is of ‘outstanding universal value,’ as conservationists’ say, and it has been a persistent refrain of green campaigns, government websites and books detailing the region’s ‘natural history’ to present it as an ecological wonder. Such depictions are often based in a pervasive naturalism that falsely implies that the region is pristine, untouched or ‘wild,’ when Indigenous groups have shaped and reshaped its landscape and biota for over 40,000 years. Further, the ‘uncompleted’ settler invasion has also altered these prized ecologies, not least because they sit atop layers of bauxite and kaolin subject to ongoing mineral exploration. Commercial mining has been established at only two locations, but several other projects in various states of decline and development pepper the west coast.

As became apparent through several parliamentary inquiries into the recent Wild Rivers Act controversy, there are no specific answers as to how the region’s complex of land titles and its significant environmental, cultural and mineral values can be used to improve the livelihoods of residents.⁴ In that context, and others, the short term tends to dominate considerations, due to the indisputable economic and social disadvantage experienced by Indigenous people, and answers are typically restricted to vague ideas of ‘economic development’ that are imagined, nonetheless, as uniquely powerful in their ability to provide immediate solutions. In some cases ‘development’ equates to the ‘northern myth’ that has long haunted the tropical savannah—hoping that a fictive agricultural ‘food bowl’ will staunch the need for government subsidy—though more frequently the achievement of enhanced wellbeing is said to flow simply from private labour integration.⁵ Towards this end, for the last decade it has been the site of a series of ‘policy solutions,’ led by Indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson, which hinge on greater engagement with the ‘real economy’ of market labour. But this ‘real economy,’ like the ‘conservation economy’ and the ‘carbon economy,’ remains almost wholly imaginary in Cape York Peninsula. While the three federal inquiries into the Wild Rivers Act all ultimately avowed that the legislation was not preventing any known or desired forms of development, the acrimonious and partisan assemblies of stakeholders had broadly agreed on one point: there was no greater obstacle to ‘economic development’ than the lack of all-season asphalt roads.

• • •

Mobility within the Cape has long been a preoccupation of its settler administrators, though their attempts to create roads have been belated and uneven. The PDR’s sealing began at Mount Molloy in 1976 and reached Laura, 206 kilometres distant, four decades later. At that rate the balance will be sealed in another five decades, about the time that Rio Tinto’s planned expansion of the Weipa bauxite mine ceases operations. While most accept that the attrition of the PDR’s gravel stretches is inevitable, there are factors beyond the estimated completion cost of $750 million working against any acceleration. Through the dry season the road is travelled by locals and road trains shuttling between Weipa and the northern city of Cairns, as well as thousands of ‘pajero pilgrims’ annually on their way to ‘the tip’ of the Cape. Dinghies strapped to their roof racks, saluting each other over their steering wheels, these wanderers make up the majority of the estimated 55,000 to 79,000 annual visitors. According to a state report, ‘isolation and remoteness, open spaces, lack of commercialisation and challenging terrain’ constitute its comparative advantage for these convoys.⁶ Lack of amenity is, in this sense, a key commodity. The morning after my crash I sat with the manager of the Coen hotel and discussed the idea of sealing the PDR, a prospect that typically elicits scepticism and calm assurances from residents that ‘the greenies won’t stand for it’. Blacktop, she told me, would ‘ruin’ the pub’s clientele who, most evenings, were a selection of white locals, sun-creased anglers camping on the back paddock and road workers occupying the pub’s dozen dongas. ‘People who come up here have to really make an effort’ she added, ‘they have to care. We don’t want people blasting up here in Commodores.’ Outside the pub my sullen four-wheel-drive sat beside a police cruiser with a snapped rear-differential, two in the daily queue sustaining the mechanic’s monopoly; both were material evidence of the PDR’s prevailing economies.

The pilgrims who make up the vast majority of the Cape’s visitors present a discrete demographic profile. Over 80 per cent are ‘mature couples’ between 45 and 64 years old whose main motivations are to ‘stand at the top’ and have an off-roading experience, Australian nationals travelling independently and spending less than twenty dollars a night on accommodation; about a quarter, by comparison, hope to also ‘visit Aboriginal rock art’.⁷ Driving up from Cairns or the Savannah Way, official blue-and-white signs saying ‘4WD ONLY’ announce the region’s credentials.

For many residents, the PDR is less a route of pilgrimage than one of several obstacles to securing regular fresh food, medical care and employment. For Indigenous residents in particular, the lack of public transport exacerbates the reliance on four-wheel-drives owned by community organisations or the few road-worthy vehicles owned by those with the private resources to operate them.⁸ A person’s mobility is determined by their access to such communal and private capital, though it is important to note that while such vehicles enable visits to country, community planning meetings and so on, it is too simple to see mobility as essentially positive. Annual rises in the number of Indigenous people ‘sleeping rough’ in Cairns—where the Indigenous homelessness rate is twice the state average—could be viewed as a consequence of both a surplus and deficit of mobility. Stigmatised as ‘grog’ exiles escaping alcohol restrictions, many also travel to receive medical treatment or visit family only to be stranded by weather or a lack of funds. Various measures have been taken to solve this ‘problem,’ the most clandestine being an attempt by Cairns’ mayor in 1994 to secretly coerce people onto chartered buses bound for Lockhart River. More recently, the state government created (and then cut) a program that offered reduced airfares to remote residents. These strategies each indicate how, as anthropologist Tess Lea argues, policymakers alternately figure poor access to transport as a social injustice while also positioning high mobility as ‘a sign of dysfunction’.⁹ Too little mobility equals social stasis. Too much mobility equals social instability. Administrators, Lea argues, find it is easier to suggest Indigenous people are ‘market amateurs’ rather than individuals operating on both the supply and demand sides of ‘the (sur)‘real’ economy’’ of roads like the PDR.

Alcohol is a significant actor in this economy of mobility. Since 2002, controversial Alcohol Management Plans (AMPs) have limited the quantity and type of alcohol anyone may carry in fifteen Indigenous communities, the majority of which are reached through the PDR. Due to the state’s racialised ‘protection’ system, alcohol first became legally available here in 1971, after which the government began pressing councils to establish beer canteens. The state’s strategy was to use canteens to recapture residents’ welfare payments and use the profits from sales to subsidise each council’s diminishing budget.¹⁰ As anthropologist David Martin notes, proposals by the Bjelke-Petersen government to ‘gazette a few roads’ into Aurukun were opposed precisely because their absence helped protect it from the alcohol trade; when the first canteen was opened there in 1985 it coincided with ‘a flourishing market’ in alcohol smuggled in through the improved road.¹¹ In one sense, the PDR is part of the infrastructural squeeze that drives up prices and enables illicit trade in the region while, in another, it undermines attempts to govern Indigenous communities as though they were discrete entities. If remote Australia’s roadhouses are hubs of ‘social exchange,’ in the Cape they are also shaped by forms of state interventionism that both elicit and criminalise mobility.¹²

• • •

I travelled to Cape York Peninsula twice between 2011 and 2012, both times to talk to people involved in the public dispute over the Wild Rivers Act issue. I had been reminded in advance by my supervisors to pay attention to what James Clifford calls the ‘travelling culture’ of such places—their density of patterned movement, their lives lived in motion—and I could see, on reflection, how such a thing would be easy to neglect. The PDR itself is often framed as the result of entropy and accident. A waste. A ruin to ‘get through’. The hundreds of kilometres of sclerophyll savannah that it bisects it can seem interminable, with few borders, monuments, or signposts to cling to for orientation. No signs marked the bend where my four-wheel-drive flipped, no telephone wires were strung overhead, just as no memorials marked the former station I passed through, nor the pastoralist killed there on May 6th in 1889, nor the estimated fifty Kaanju people who were ‘dispersed’ in retaliation three weeks later.¹³ For the thousands who drive across it annually, the region presents as a ‘frontier time-space’ navigable by roads whose corrugated surface, like the routine waves between passing drivers, are an incidental interruption in an otherwise dehumanised wilderness.¹⁴ But the roads to Coen are heavily cultivated, possessing a pace and seasonality that make distance as a diversely valued commodity and render the Cape reachable and remote at the same time. Whether sealing the road would bring the service and economic gains anticipated by some, a larger question is how it might alter the symbolic space of ‘the Cape’ as remote and entropic: Queensland’s ‘last frontier,’ a wilderness seemingly always in its ‘last days’.¹⁵ Its frequently heralded passage into modernity is figured as both tragic and immanent, with the consequence that it is always somehow not modern yet.

In one sense, these ideas of wildness carry an implicit racism, one grounded in the durable colonial tropes that cling to Indigeneity in Australia: people incapable of integrating into ‘modern’ world, or ‘natural’ and incapable of environmental harm. As Emma Kowal suggests, Indigeneity and Indigenous people are often (if not generally) framed in ‘a perpetual state of ending’; a ‘dying’ people despite their persistence; a ‘dying’ culture despite its resilience.¹⁶ But the wildness of the region is also something more than a colonial continuity. In Coen, on the evening of my crash, the local white Sergeant introduced me to his deep-voiced co-worker Barry Port. Over his shoulder, near the greying pool table, several newspaper stories featuring Port were pinned to the wall, many of which carried the epithet by which he is locally known: ‘the last black tracker’. Shaking his hand, Port seemed accustomed to others referring to him as the ‘last,’ a label that required a wholesale forgetting of the continuing Indigenous presence in the State’s police force. Sitting there at the table topped with styrofoam coolers, encircled by other locals, I was reminded of a travel story I had found from 1946, in which Coen was described as ‘one of the last “frontier” towns of this country,’ ‘a little sun-baked settlement with one pub, one policeman’ where the author meets a resident with ‘a nasty spear wound’ received in ‘nefarious days gone [by]’.¹⁷ Such stories fit within a genre that continues in the Cape, one amongst the many emblems of entropy proudly displayed by residents.

The ‘wildness’ of the region is not accidental but cultivated in a particular manner, through and around sites such as the PDR. Its ‘wild and remote character,’ celebrated as the key ‘‘brand” element’ by tourism agencies, is not solely the outcome of its relative sparseness, or its surging rivers, but also a much broader range of objects and dispositions. The rhetorical doubles of, for instance, the dilapidated ruins of frontier stations and sun-bleached roadside signs warning of predatory estuarine crocodiles, are the weathered and dog-eared myths that recirculate between visitors, service contractors, residents and freight-runners as they are channelled together at campsites and in PDR roadhouses: myths of uranium being secretly mined out of Aurukun; myths about community councillors bought off with suitcases of cash; yarns about giant crocodiles, or locals striking it rich by ‘growing a crop’. Each scandalised or amused telling reiterates the broader theme that the Cape remains a resilient autonomous zone, lawless in some indefinable degree, administered but not governed by distant authorities. In this way, it is reproduced as ‘wild’ in the sense used in Aboriginal English to describe people and places without due respect for law, whether they are teenagers, feral animals, old cattle country or Captain Cook.¹⁸ Wildness, in this instance, does not correspond to some prior innate ‘natural’ order, as the ‘pristine’ Cape is often presented, but to the interruption or absence of order. I do not mean to suggest, that traditional custodians have, against settler privation, abrogated their care for country, but rather to make a connection to the sense of legal distance that people in the Cape nurture and disseminate.

That evening in Coen, after the crash, I looked over the laminated news clippings on the pub’s wall and realised there was no mention of Cornelia Rau, a woman who had become a national story after appearing here, seemingly out of nowhere, in the height of the 2004 wet season. As a 2005 inquiry would discover, the pub had taken her in, worried that she would ‘[end] up somewhere she shouldn’t be, or with someone she shouldn’t be with.’¹⁹ Weeks later I would look up the inquiry’s report to read over the details of how Rau had arrived with two painters who had brought her in from another PDR roadhouse. Port paid for her dinner, before local police questioned Rau who, speaking both German and English, identified herself by two other names. She then wandered, barefoot, out of the pub and back towards the PDR before the police detained her again.²⁰ Held ‘on suspicion of being an unlawful person,’ Rau was removed then to a detention centre in South Australia before immigration authorities realised they had mistaken one form of wildness for another: Rau was not an illegal immigrant, she was someone experiencing severe mental distress. Her arrival in Coen had been preceded by her discharge from a mental health facility in Manly, New South Wales, and almost 3,000 kilometres of hitchhiking to ‘the tip’. It had taken the anomaly of a lone traveller on the PDR late in the wet season for her bewilderment to be noticed.

• • •

Periodically, Queensland government’s become flush with a new enthusiasm to seal the PDR, enamoured by the promise of productivity gains in its most disadvantaged. As a rule, this sentiment is followed by delays and, eventually, apologies cloaked in budgetary concerns, but the enthusiasm itself does straightforward political work, appearing to encourage future development and prosperity. It is for this same reason that the Coalition—professed fiscal conservatives—maintained during the 2013 federal election that one of its key election commitments was to spend billions ‘building the roads of the future’. Road building projects avowedly create employment in two ways, first during the process of construction and then in newly possible private developments and gains in efficiency. But when you apply the seductive logic of beneficent infrastructure to places such as the Cape you come across a number of problems, not the least of which is the exorbitant price tag. For over half a billion dollars, a sealed road could reach the primarily white mining town of Weipa and the Indigenous community of Aurukun, which possess between them a population of approximately 4,000 people. At the same time, a sealed PDR would require less in the way of constant (government funded) servicing, though it would not affect the need to service its unsealed tributaries. Long stretches of the road would still be submerged annually where it transects the floodplains of ‘wild’ rivers.

Another curious fact usually absent from such boosterism is that ‘development’ is not so easy as creating enumerable ‘jobs’ and new roads. As a major employment strategy report in 2005 concluded, while unemployment overall is high, the region’s potential Indigenous workforce is actually smaller than existing demand from employers. One of the main reasons for this breach in workforce participation is that the unemployed often lack the training for existing jobs. Creating undefined ‘jobs’ in private enterprise will not radically change the disadvantage of Indigenous people in the workforce, though it will, necessarily, require the importation of a massive non-indigenous workforce. Nonetheless, in the Cape, as elsewhere, new mining projects’ social license to operate is often underwritten by avowed ‘Indigenous jobs’. One news report, for instance, spruiked a possible bauxite mine on the Cape’s northwest coast as offering over ‘1,300 jobs for unemployed Indigenous people,’ ignoring the fact that this equalled the mine’s entire possible indirect employment and that the closest community, Mapoon, has a population of 250 people.²¹ In this context, promised wage labour does the depoliticising work of ‘reconciliation’. A different kind of policy solution has been offered by Pearson, who has suggested that improved infrastructure would allow Indigenous people to ‘orbit’ between communities and employment. While often presented as a ‘finding’ that remote communities ‘could be economically sustainable if people orbit in and out of their home community,’²² the idea itself is pure conjecture; there is simply no way of knowing what effect encouraging people to travel to study or seek work outside the Cape might have.

There is no doubt a sealed road would increase access to markets and, therefore, market development. It would also make it easier for individuals—residents, tourists, drive-in-drive-out labourers—to come and go from remote communities. Yet the discussions continue to be premised on a renovated but nonetheless familiar form of ‘settler dreaming’. Historian Lorenzo Veracini has likened the settler project to capitalism as a rapacious global force that, quoting Marx and Engels, seems to be compelled by an imperative that it ‘must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere’.²³ The foundation for this are two stories settlers tell about the world, the first being the neoliberal tale of the inevitability (and beneficence) of market development, and the second being the Euclidean tale of governable space. There are clear reasons to doubt the merit of these stories in sites of settlement’s failures and capital’s compromise; clear reasons to doubt they can ‘nestle everywhere’. Nonetheless, talk of the ‘promise’ of the north and the ‘roads of the future,’ the imagining of place in terms of present lack and future wholeness, the imagining of development as simply positive rather than contradictory and ambivalent, should all be understood in terms of a faltering but persistent project of settler dreaming. The Cape is not ‘wild’ but the object of an ongoing ‘wilding,’ begun as the first European explorers mistook it for a wilderness, continued through the chaos of nineteenth century settler contact, furthered through the policies of ‘protectionism’ and reshaped by settler imaginings of white belonging in the later half of the twentieth century. The production and reproduction of the region through forms of settler travel, habitation, writing and policing does not capture how Indigenous people have continued to produce and reproduce the region through their own journeys, nor how non-indigenous and Indigenous locals think about the place today. It is reasonable to suggest that such a history of place-making would likely not construe the region as a wilderness or sparse space, as settler histories have, but as an intimate network of toponyms, boundaries and sites sourced from and structured by a multiplicity of histories; a multiplicity within which the dreams of settlers would be only one presence amongst others.

1.  See Lyall Ford, Roads in the Wilderness: Development of the Main Road Network in Far North Queensland, Queensland Deptartment of Main Roads, Brisbane, 2008.
2. Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal–European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier 1861–1897, ANU Press, Canberra, 1982.
3. Dawn W. Frith and Clifford B. Frith, Cape York Peninsula: A Natural History, Reed Books, Sydney, 1995, 41.
4. Timothy Neale, ‘“A Substantial Piece in Life”: Viabilities, Realities and Given Futures at the Wild Rivers Inquiries,’ Australian Humanities Review 53 (2012).
5. See Bruce R. Davidson, The Northern Myth, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1965; John Holmes, ‘Diversity and Change in Australia’s Tangelands: A Post-Productivist Transition with a Difference?’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (2002).
6. Tourism Queensland, The Cape York Peninsula & Torres Strait Tourism Development Action Plan 2008–2011, Tourism Queensland, Brisbane, 2008, p. 43.
7. Tourism Queensland, “Cape York Tourism: Market Assessment & Potential,” (Brisbane, Qld.: Tourism Queensland, 2003), 2–5.
8. See: Benjamin R. Smith, “Between Places: Aboriginal Decentralisation, Mobility and Territoriality in the Region of Coen, Cape York Peninsula (Australia)” (London School of Economics, 2000); Tony Redmond, “Further on up the Road: Community Trucks and the Moving Settlement,” in Moving Anthropology, ed. Tess Lea, Emma Kowal, and Gillian Cowlishaw (Darwin, NT: Charles Darwin University Press, 2006).
9. Tess Lea, “Cars, Corporations, Ceremonies and Cash: Hidden Co-Dependencies in Australia’s North,” ibid.
10. Rosalind Kidd, The Way We Civilise, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1997, p. 302.
11. David F. Martin, Autonomy and Relatedness: An Ethnography of Wik People of Aurukun, Western Cape York Peninsula, ANU, Canberra, 1993, p. 185.
12. Adrian Peace, ‘The Phatic Finger: Public Gesture and Shared Meaning on the Highways of the Australian Outback’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 24, no. 1 (2013).
13. ‘Dispersal’ was a euphemism commonly used during the nineteenth century to describe firing on Indigenous people.
14. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘The Year Zero and the North Australian Frontier’, in D. Bird Rose and A.F. Clarke (eds), Tracking Knowledge in North Australian Landscapes, ANU North Australia Research Unit, 1997.
15. Glenville Pike, The Last Frontier (Mareeba, Qld.: Pinevale Publications, 1983); Percy Trezise, Last Days of a Wilderness (Sydney, NSW: William Collins Ltd, 1973).
16. Emma Kowal, “Perpetual Ends and Perpetual Beginnings” in Anthropology and the Ends of Worlds (Sydney, NSW: University of Sydney, 2010), 1.
17. Leonard Ward, ‘Wild ‘Motoring’ to Cape York, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 December 1946
18. Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human, 2nd ed. (Oakleigh, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
19. Jamie Walker and Tanya Moore, ‘Blonde ‘German’ traveller rang alarm bell for Cape York publican,’ The Courier-Mail, 10 February 2005.
20. Mick Palmer, “Inquiry into the Circumstances of the Immigration Detention of Cornelia Rau,” (Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, 2005), 8–9. 21    Anon, “Playing Wild Rivers Wild Card,” The Australian, 16 May 2011.
21. Anon, “Playing Wild Rivers Wild Card,” The Australian, 16 May 2011.
22. Patricia Karvelas, “Less Than One in Five Indigenous Youth in Work and Study,” The Australian, 8 April 2014.
23. Lorenzo Veracini, “The Imagined Geographies of Settler Colonialism,” in Making Settler Colonial Space, ed. T. Banivanua-Mar and P. Edmonds (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).