Making Badlands All Over the World: Local Knowledge and Global Power

Abstract

Bob Hawke’s recent proposal for turning Australia’s “dead heart” into the world’s nuclear waste dump is a classic example of badland making and a timely reminder of the relevance of Ross Gibson‘s Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002). Closer to my home, in Central Queensland, a controversy is raging about globally significant developments in the Shoalwater Bay Military Training Area.

Australia (if not the whole world) may well be a badland in the making. The ways in which a powerful institution exploits a place is intimately related to pre-existing ideas (myths and assumptions) about that place. Ross Gibson asks us to seek “something good we can do in response to the bad in our lands” (3). One response begins by asking: is the badness in the land or does it reside elsewhere? If we analyze the discourses and practices of the various agencies and institutions governing the badland we may be able to formulate useful tactics of resistance to their strategies of domination.