8 - Citizenship and Indigenous Responses to Mining in the Gulf Country

Summary

Certain literature on notions of citizenship in societies such as Australia posits a sense of collective commitment to the nation as crucial to being a citizen. A good example is Robert Birrell's argument that:

Citizenship involves a social contract in which members of a society accept mutual rights and obligations towards each other. This contract is unlikely to flourish if members do not feel a sense of affinity towards one another. In this sense […] the two ideals of nationhood and citizenship tend to fortify each other.

In this chapter, I consider the relevance of this proposition to the place of indigenous people as citizens in the Australian nation. Is the ‘sense of affinity’ that Aboriginal people feel with the wider society such that appeals to a common citizenship (underpinned by shared interests) can be embraced? I pose this question in the context of indigenous responses to a large-scale mining development in the Gulf Country of north-west Queensland. More specifically, I address two issues. First, I look at how the discourses and practices of large-scale mining enterprises encompass a particular vision about what being a good Australian citizen entails, this vision mirroring Birrell's sense of a close connection between citizenship and commitment to what is seen as a ‘national good’.