The Ranger uranium mine agreement revisited: spacetimes of Indigenous agreement-making in Australia

Abstract

Native title agreement-making or “contractualism” has become one of the dominant legible frames by which to understand Indigenous-settler relations in Australia, simultaneously providing benefits to Aboriginal groups yet constraining opportunities to configure these relations differently (Neale). In this paper, I examine the very first mining agreement of its kind in Australia: the Ranger uranium mine agreement negotiated in 1978. Borrowing Russian literary theorist Bakhtin’s analytic, I argue that the agreement is a “chronotope” with specific spatiotemporal dimensions. I focus on two key temporalities of the chronotope – the urgent temporality of development authorisation that conditions how, when and where agreements are produced, and the forward- looking “temporal inertia” that prospectively embeds these practices as precedents to be replicated in future mining negotiations. These two temporal logics shaped and were shaped by the spatial dynamics of the institutions tasked with negotiating the agreement, as events shifted back and forth between different venues. Exploring “how different legal times create or shape legal spaces and vice versa” (Valverde 17) reveals the productive and hegemonic conditions of the agreement chronotope in Indigenous-state relations in Australia as well as the compromised conditions for Indigenous institutional survival in the entropic north of Australia and beyond.