15 Understanding Country

School of Social Science

Understanding Country is central to the challenge of Indigenising the curriculum (Bunda & Barney, 2024). As Ngugi/Wakka Wakka Professor of Indigenous Education Tracey Bunda puts it: “[Australian universities] are located on Aboriginal Country, and the knowledge that we bring to our students about Country will enable students to have a more meaningful relationship with this Country” (Bunda & Barney, 2024). Yet as Dyirbal architect and academic Carroll Go-Sam cautions, it is important for students to engage with the concept of Country as more than just a “romantic notion” (Bunda & Barney, 2023). “It is very easy”, Go-Sam warns, “for people to have this sort of idea of and get carried away with Indigenous spirituality and relationships in a very romantic[] … way, but [it is really important] to also see people living on Country, and the way that people do that in a very contemporary sense as well” (Bunda & Barney, 2023).

Understanding Country is especially important given the rapid recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ legal rights in land and waters across Australia. Since the passage of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, some 50% of the Northern Territory’s land mass, and 80% of its coastline, has been recognised as Aboriginal land (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2024, n.p.; Northern Territory Government, n.d., n.p.), with land rights likewise recognised across sizeable areas of South Australia, Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. Since the 1990s, almost 45% of the Australian continent has also been subject to a positive determination of native title under the Native Title Act 1993 (Smith, 2025). Building the capacity of graduates to work on Country has consequently become important across a range of subject areas, with Australian graduates increasingly required to identify and engage with Indigenous rights holders in relation to a host of activities. Yet Country can be difficult to understand, especially for non-Indigenous people.

This chapter presents a brief discussion of the concept of Country prior to describing how I have sought to Indigenise the curriculum and prepare graduates for meaningful careers working with Indigenous people on Country. In this chapter I particularly focus on the undergraduate course Applied Anthropology and Indigenous Territories, which I have taught for the last 10 years.

I am a non-Indigenous anthropologist who specialises in working with Indigenous people. I live in Brisbane but began my anthropological career in the Gulf Country of northern Australia in 2007. Since then, I have worked with multiple Indigenous groups in the Gulf, especially the Ganggalida, Garawa, Gkuthaarn, Kukatj and Kurtjar peoples, plus other groups across Queensland, the Northern Territory, New South Wales and Western Australia.

I have written numerous expert reports for native title proceedings and given evidence in the Federal Court in Rainbow on behalf of the Kurtjar People v State of Queensland (No.2) [2021] FCA 1251, the Nyamal Palyku Proceeding (No. 8) [2024] FCA 11, and Malone on behalf of the Western Kangoulu People v State of Queensland (No 6) [2025] FCA 363. I have also undertaken the expert review of native title connection materials on behalf of respondent parties. Prior to my anthropological training, I lived and worked at Aurukun in Wik Country in western Cape York.

What does Country mean?

Country denotes the totality of Indigenous relations with land and waters across Australia. As Yaruwu lawyer and academic Mick Dodson explains in The University of Queensland’s Welcome to and Acknowledgement of Country Guidelines:

When we [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples] talk about traditional “Country” … we mean something beyond the dictionary definition of the word. For Aboriginal Australians … we might mean homeland, or tribal or clan area, and we might mean more than just a place on the map. For us, Country is a word for all the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with that area … It describes the entirety of our ancestral domains. While they may all no longer necessarily be the title-holders to land, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are still connected to the Country of their ancestors and most consider themselves the custodians or caretakers of their land. (n.d., n.p.)

This definition of Country involves the accumulation of multiple concepts such as homeland, tribal or clan area, and, as per Dodson’s quote above, “all the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with [those] area[s]”. For Dodson, it includes “the entirety of our ancestral domains”, including areas in which Indigenous people lack formal “title” but still “consider themselves the custodians or caretakers”. However, in addition to these areas, Country, in Dodson’s definition, is “something beyond the dictionary definition” – suggesting that Indigenous relations to land and waters remain untranslatable, even exceeding the meaning of the Aboriginal English word “Country”.^[1]

Like Professor Dodson, the anthropologist William Stanner describes Country as something difficult to convey in English: “No English words are good enough … A different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance” (Stanner, 2009b/1968, p. 206). Yet Stanner and his Aboriginal informants nevertheless sought to find the words to bridge the cultural divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, especially in seeking to identify a form of Aboriginal title that might be recognised under Australian law.^[2] For Stanner, drawing on the writings of his mentor A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the English word “estate”, with its connotations of dominion, was useful, alongside the notion of “range”. He wrote:

The estate was the traditionally recognized locus (“country”, “home”, “ground”, “dreaming place”) of some kind of patrilineal descent-group forming the core or nucleus of the territorial group. It seems usually to have been a more or less continuous stretch. The range was the tract or orbit over which the group, including its nucleus and adherents, ordinarily hunted and foraged to maintain life. (Stanner, 1965, p. 2)

In Stanner’s formulation, the patrilineal descent group or clan thus had its estate, while the “band” (including individuals belonging to a number of clans) had its range, with members of this band able to activate non-primary connections to other landowners’ estates, with primary and non-primary rights holders supporting each other in the exercise of rights across the whole of the group’s life-space or “domain”. For the anthropologist Nancy Williams (1986), building on Stanner, “property” in Country is thus vested in the group by the Dreaming, which “establishes ownership under right of title” (p. 102).^[3] As Williams put it (arising from her fieldwork with Yolngu people in north-east Arnhem Land in the 1960s and 70s), the patrifilial landowning group are considered ngurrungu (first) or bunggawa (boss) for Country but are complemented by “tenure in land based on relationship to [a] female land-owner”, being a person’s mother and mother’s mother who “look after” the estate (Williams, 1986, p. 80). Thus, patriclan members ngayathama (hold) or gaama (carry) property in and associated with estates, and ngandi-watangu (mother-owners) look after it (Williams, 1986, p. 93, p. 78; see also Keen, 2012, p. 112).

Some 10 years after Stanner proposed his formulation of estate, range and domain – with the failed Milirrupum land rights case heard in the meantime – the Commonwealth passed the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (hereafter ALRA), which provided for the legal recognition of Indigenous rights in land (not water) in the Northern Territory of Australia. Section 3(1) of that Act defines “traditional Aboriginal owners” in terms largely consistent with Stanner’s formulation as “a local descent group of Aboriginals who … have common spiritual affiliations to a site on the land, being affiliations that place the group under a primary spiritual responsibility for that site and for the land”. Of course, the description of such persons varies from place to place in the Territory, and the reality is never quite as neat as Stanner (and the ALRA) depicts. In the Western Desert, for example, land-owning groups are bilateral, rather than patrilineal; egocentric, rather than sociocentric; “open to much negotiation”; and generally subject to a much less systematic system than elsewhere, with conception filiation (or the finding of baby spirits in places) and other generative means of establishing connection (such as birthplace, father’s deathplace, places of longtime residence and association, especially ceremonial association) more important than in other areas (see Sutton, 2003, passim; see also Hiatt, 1996, pp. 31–32). Yet as claims proceeded under that Act, the Aboriginal Land Commission found ways to recognise a variety of different conceptualisations of Aboriginal landowners and rights. In 1979, for example, the Commissioner found that a Western Desert person holds “inchoate” rights in their father’s Country, mother’s Country and the Country of their birthplace, thus belonging “to two or even three estates”, although “more is required before [traditional rights] can be exercised in respect of any one estate” (cited in Sutton, 2003, p. 9). Other land claims likewise recognised different formulations of Aboriginal rights holders as claimants came to articulate their distinctive traditional systems to the Commissioner.

While research documenting the diversity of traditional land tenure systems across the Northern Territory was ongoing across the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, anthropological research outside the Territory sought to clarify the traditional systems of land tenure that existed elsewhere. In 1994, when the Native Title Act 1993 (hereafter NTA) commenced, research intensified, with hundreds of Aboriginal groups collaborating with anthropologists to document their own traditional systems. Freed from the overly restrictive definition of “traditional Aboriginal owners” provided in Section 3(1) of the ALRA, section 223(i) of the NTA defined native title as arising from the “traditional laws acknowledged, and the traditional customs observed, by the Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders”. Thus, rather than requiring the application of a legal (and anthropological) model, native title – or, better, native titles – are sui generis; that is, “unlike others; one-of-a-kind, unique” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2023). Research has consequently focused on traditional laws and customs, and changes thereto, with many claims coming to describe the connections of surnamed families of polity recruited via cognatic descent and grandparental or serial filiation to “territories” associated with language names or “tribes”.^[4] This has been the case even where earlier land rights hearings have described the same group in different terms. Thus, Waanyi people in the southern Gulf Country (to take a single example of a more widespread occurrence) have their land rights in the Northern Territory recognised based on their membership of local descent groups, which “normally consist of a patrilineage and the children of the women of the patrilineage” (as the Aboriginal Land Commissioner (1985) found at para. 60, noting these groups are more accurately described as patriclans). In contrast, Waanyi people in north-west Queensland hold largely undifferentiated legal rights across the whole of the Waanyi native title determination based on their membership of cognatic descent groups, notwithstanding widespread recognition of these groups’ primary attachment to one or more historical cattle stations (or ranches) where key forebears lived and worked (e.g., the “Lawn Hill mob” from what is known as “Lawn Hill Country”).^[5]

The complexity and diversity of traditional systems across the continent, and the variability of colonial impacts, presented significant challenges for the recognition of Indigenous rights, especially in the early years of native title. Yet while it initially seemed that native title would produce merely “piecemeal concessions” on the part of the state (see, e.g., Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. xi, p. 179) – especially after Justice Olney found that Yorta Yorta people’s connections to Country along the Murray River in southern New South Wales and northern Victoria had been “washed away” by the “tide of history” in Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v Victoria [1998] FCA 1606 – native title has now been recognised across almost 45% of Australia (Smith, 2025), with some 173 applications yet to be resolved.^[6] This “land titling revolution” (Altman & Markham, 2015) means that Australian university graduates increasingly need to develop a sophisticated understanding of Country. This is especially so for anthropologists who continue to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on Country.

What kind of work do anthropologists do on Country?

While land claims under the ALRA are now (in 2025) confined to a single unresolved matter and potential revisions of previous decisions, and hundreds of native title claims have been determined, anthropological research on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ Countries continues across Australia. Such research informs heritage protection and royalty distributions relating to development activities ranging from large-scale mining and renewable energy projects to small-scale activities such as crocodile egg harvesting. Across the Northern Territory, organisations such as the Northern and Central Land Councils consequently require graduates with a nuanced understanding of traditional relations with Country to determine who has the right to negotiate (under the NTA) or veto (under the ALRA) activities. And as Aboriginal life in the Northern Territory has changed, graduates are increasingly required to address how land tenure systems are changing, with the orthodox inheritance of traditional role relationships evolving in different ways. As readers will readily imagine, adjudicating disputes between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about royalty distribution among those expressing different kinds of connections to a site is a challenging research task requiring a sophisticated understanding not just of the traditional system, but also of cultural change. As Langton (2010, p. 95) forcefully points out, the Aboriginal world of the past has changed enormously in recent decades. In many parts of the Northern Territory, change has obviated the kinds of fine-grained connections to estate areas documented by earlier anthropologists. Such representations are simply no longer sophisticated enough to adequately describe the complex mix of cultural continuity, change and loss that has occurred as Aboriginal peoples have adapted their traditions in response to pastoralism and other pressures associated with the colonising society (Martin, 2023).

A sophisticated understanding of the kinds of tradition-derived rights and interests Indigenous people hold in Country is also required by anthropologists working in settings such as South East Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and the south-west corner of Western Australia. Indeed, the identification of rights holders can be equally – or more – vexed in these areas, especially in the context of intra-Indigenous disputes, which are regrettably common in these settings (Sutton, 2003, p. 86).^[7] In my research experience, such disputes typically involve contradictory statements from contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about the ownership of areas expressed in terms of their language or “tribal” identity. Individuals’ and families’ participation with one or other of the disputing parties may also be a focus of intensive politicking in communities, with researchers faced with statements from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people which simplify or distort the relevant issues. The contested “truth” of such disputes may be very difficult to establish, requiring scrutiny of different parties’ claims about Dreaming stories and other threads of connection. Critical scrutiny of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander claims about Country is also required where anthropologists are employed by respondent parties to native title claims, such as local governments, state governments and the Commonwealth, as well as pastoralists and mining companies, with these engagements raising challenging intellectual, political and ethical issues, especially for recent graduates committed to supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander claims as part of the “decolonisation” of Australia.^[8]

So how to prepare graduates for such work?

How has the curriculum been Indigenised?

To effectively work on Country, Australian graduates need to develop a range of knowledge and skills. Following Billet (2011, passim), I categorise such knowledge and skills as (1) conceptual knowledge of facts and theories, (2) procedural knowledge or skills in applying techniques, and (3) dispositional knowledge that attends to the alignment between actions, learning and “who I am”. In the context of the course Applied Anthropology and Indigenous Territories, this includes a reflexive sense of themselves and their own identity; a detailed, critical and conceptual perspective on Australian native title; and robust procedural knowledge of fieldwork techniques.

I consequently begin the course by asking students to reflect on their own positionality in relation to Indigenous territories. For non-Indigenous students, this includes reflecting on their relationships with Indigenous people and the history of Australian colonisation, and the kind of professional identity they see themselves adopting in their career. Students vary in their responses: some see themselves as activists, committed to pursuing “social justice”; others see the value of engaging with dominant institutions to create change, tending to eschew the politics of their activist peers in the effort to find employment and build a career. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, reflecting on their positionality is perhaps a more familiar task, but thinking through their professional identity in relation to Indigenous territories is challenging in different ways. For some Indigenous students, supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights is central to their self-identification, regardless of the challenges that involves; for others, the inevitable compromises of participating in the native title process are too confronting. Both groups are nevertheless encouraged to think through the politics and “anti-politics” of their position.^[9] For example, students who wish to devote themselves to a career in applied anthropology are encouraged to think about the “cunning” of postcolonial recognition (see, e.g., Povinelli, 2002), and especially the Australian legal system’s response to assertions of Indigenous sovereignty (which Mabo and Others v Queensland (No. 2) [1992] HCA 23 identified as non-judiciable). In contrast, students who describe themselves as activists are asked to think about “performative allyship” and other ways in which advocating for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities might inadvertently reinforce systems of power linked to colonialism (see, e.g., DiAngelo, 2018; Kendi, 2019).

To assist students in this assessment, I present my own positionality as it relates to applied anthropology, beginning with a critical self-reflection about my identity (see Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2022, p. 8, for a series of questions to guide self-reflection). While I present several criticisms of the native title system as part of this self-reflection, I explain how the Federal Court’s Expert Evidence Practice Note (GPN-EXPT) – General Practice Note 25 October 2016 (Allsop, 2016) shapes my engagements with communities in relation to native title research. That practice note, I explain, sets out the role and duty of an expert to provide “relevant and impartial evidence in his or her area of expertise”, to “never mislead the Court or become an advocate for the cause of the party that has retained the expert”, and to “willingly be prepared to change their opinion or make concessions when it is necessary or appropriate to do so, even if doing so would be contrary to any previously held or expressed view of that expert” (Allsop, 2016, para. 4.1, para. 4.3). To aid students in thinking through their own positionality, I especially emphasise what I perceive to be the practical benefits of engaged research and participation in legal processes in pursuit of justice against what I consider to be the more nebulous outcomes of politicised academic critiques of Australian society. I hope to thereby elicit debates on the merits of activist research versus cultural critique (see Hale, 2006), with students ideally coming to articulate the politics and anti-politics of these positions in their own presentations. I also invite other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people who work in this area to come into the classroom and discuss their own positionality, modelling different ways to be on Country.

Following their positionality presentations, I ask students to conduct an anthropological review of a native title judgement. Because native title is sui generis, each claim is different in terms of the rights being claimed, the basis of the claim, the description of the claim group, and so on, so this is a challenging task. To understand the judgement they have chosen, students need to develop a basic understanding of traditional law and custom and its changes in the region of their claim, as well as the requirements relating to proof of connection in the NTA. Students are also required to present scholarly criticism of the reasons for judgement in the claim they review. This involves nuanced engagement with the judge’s decision as well as more academic critiques. As part of this exercise, I invite Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to visit the class and discuss their experiences with successful and unsuccessful claims, drawing on the network I have developed by working in the sector. These speakers have tended to complement critiques of the “social effects” of native title in the published literature (see, e.g., Smith & Morphy, 2007), as speakers have generally presented (surprisingly) positive accounts of native title. For example, a member of the applicant in Malone v State of Queensland (The Clermont-Belyando Area Native Title Claim) (No. 5) [2021] FCA 1639 told students that their native title claim, which failed to establish connection, was nevertheless “positive” in generating genealogical and anthropological research about the claim area. A member of the applicant in Rainbow on behalf of the Kurtjar People v State of Queensland (No. 2) [2021] FCA 1251 similarly extolled the benefits of that claim for his people, describing the day he gave evidence before the Federal Court as one of the “proudest days of my life”. These perspectives assist students in developing a balanced opinion of the native title system, while also paying tribute to Indigenous peoples’ experiences of that system.

Finally, the students participate in a short fieldtrip to document Indigenous cultural connections in the local area. Over the years we have visited a range of locations across South East Queensland with a variety of Aboriginal knowledge holders, including Brisbane’s central business district, the Mimburi campus of Noosa District High School on the Mary River near Belli Park and the suburb of Southport on the Gold Coast. These locations were chosen because they are all easily accessible via coach from the main campus of the University of Queensland (UQ). Cost is another consideration, with limited funding preventing travel further afield.^[10] Nevertheless, the three aforementioned locations aptly illustrate Aboriginal peoples’ connections to Country in South East Queensland, where most of the students at UQ grew up. They further demonstrate the diverse impacts of colonisation in different settings. Above all, they enable students to learn firsthand from Aboriginal people explaining their connections to Country, centring storytelling (or “storying”) to promote experiential learning of such cultural knowledge (Bunda et al., 2024).

Prior to the fieldtrip, students are given a mock “brief” for an expert report about these locations, which varies year to year in what it requires them to do based on unique features of each site as well as contemporary developments affecting them. For example, Mimburi is an educational campus which is replete with tangible Aboriginal heritage (such as culturally modified trees), raising questions about cultural heritage identification, documentation and protection, as well as relevant cultural protocols relating to sites and significant areas. In contrast, Brisbane’s central business district and the Gold Coast suburb of Southport have been heavily modified by development activities occurring over the last 200 years. Both Brisbane and the Gold Coast are nevertheless richly layered with Aboriginal oral histories and ethno-historical records.

While the brief to students changes every year, in recent years they have been tasked with documenting cultural information about the Gold Coast to inform the design concept for a hypothetical development. This assessment seeks to test students’ ability to work on Country in multiple ways, including their conceptual and procedural knowledge and their ability to identify the relevant rights holders and document any credible cultural information about the location. To do so, the students need to understand the NTA, especially sections 223(i) and 225, as well as the history of native title claims around the location. But, above all that, the assessment tests their dispositional knowledge to be, and feel oneself being, an anthropologist on Country.

What has worked and what hasn’t?

Reflecting on a decade of running this course, the first point to make is that the concept of Country is challenging to explain in the classroom. Indeed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing expressed in the concept of Country are in some respects untranslatable and incommensurable. What does it mean when a Yolngu person says, “I am the water” or “I am the tree”? Do they mean to say they are “like” those things, as Stanner (1966, pp. 260–262) suggests, or do such statements express the “simultaneity” of subjects and objects in Yolngu thinking, as Magowan (2001, p. 24) argues? What is the difference? How does one come to an understanding of the tradition in which such statements have meaning, especially when one is non-Indigenous? There is no easy way to explain this immanent system of connectivity and kinship with nature to those who belong to Western traditions (Bennetts, 2024). We remain, as Stanner (2009b/1968) put it, “tongueless … towards this other world of meaning and significance” (p. 206).

The different ways in which Indigenous relations to Country have changed is also challenging to convey to undergraduate students. To what extent do Yolngu people today continue to “view themselves as multiple, simultaneous entities encompassing and being encompassed by the landscape and seascape”, as they have been described by anthropologists (see, e.g., Magowan 2001, p. 24)? Do Yolngu individuals continue to acquire “rights in a direct way determined by patrifiliation; that is, each one succeeds to certain rights by virtue of membership in a patrilineal clan” (Williams, cited in Sutton, 2003, p. 9)? Do “inchoate” and “potential” rights continue to exist now that “primary rights holders have their “property” codified in the Northern Land Council’s Land Interest References database? Again, there are no easy answers; things have changed and, if we fail to account for history, then Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests will be misconstrued.^[11]

Of course, it is challenging for students to understand Country. What I have found works best is to focus on a specific location, enabling students to engage carefully and critically with the density and specificity of traditional land tenure, cultural change and intercultural relations with the encapsulating society. Understanding land rights and native title is critical because Indigenous property rights have been recognised across vast swathes of the Australian continent, and even in areas where they have not been, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders hold other legal and moral rights in Country. Anthropological literature is also critical, encompassing finely nuanced accounts of traditional land tenure systems and change. However, foregrounding contemporary Indigenous perspectives about Country through guest lectures, presentations and storying on fieldtrips is especially important, as it brings the complexity of this concept into the classroom. This is critical for both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and non-Indigenous students. Indeed, I have found that students understand the issues best when they are explained by Indigenous knowledge holders. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, learning from knowledge holders (especially from senior Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) complements their own lived experiences, fostering a deeper understanding of Indigenous identity and traditions; whereas, for non-Indigenous students, being on Country provides an opportunity to learn about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives they may have never previously encountered. Across a decade of teaching this course, I have found that it is only when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous people are face-to-face in this way that the “veils of race, culture and interest” part (Stanner, 2009a/1959, p. 56), and the “meaning and significance” of Indigenous traditions are truly felt by students (Stanner, 2009b/1968, p. 206).

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by The University of Queensland. I thank Noosa District High School, the Kabi Kabi people and the Gold Coast Aboriginal community for supporting fieldtrips connected with the course Applied Anthropology and Indigenous Territories. I also thank the wide range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who have participated in my research and assisted with my teaching over many years, especially Alex Bond, Shannon Best, Fred Pascoe, Patrick Malone and Jonno Malone. I am grateful for the time and effort that has informed constructive comments and suggestions from the anonymous reviewer and editors of this book.

References