Editorial: Indigeneity and infrastructures of settler colonialism

Abstract

The fields of Indigenous infrastructure research and critical studies in settler colonial infrastructures are rapidly expanding across much of the world. These complementary fields offer compelling ways of connecting disparate research concerns, enriching our understanding of the historical geographies of infrastructure in settler colonies. In Australia, various academic disciplines have engaged in what is often called the “infrastructural turn.” Yet research on the intersections of infrastructure and Indigenous histories and geographies remains limited. To be sure, Australian scholars have undertaken important research about Indigenous access to infrastructure, looking at infrastructural deficiencies and inequalities generated by the geographies and economies of Australian settler colonialism, where access to water, homes, and basic social infrastructure in Indigenous communities continues to lag far behind non-Indigenous Australians (Moskos et al., 2024). By and large, such work illustrates that Indigenous peoples continue to be marginalised in policy spaces where decisions are made about infrastructure developments on their land (Jackson, 2021; Lea, 2020; Norman et al., 2023).

For instance, discussing renewable energy transitions, Norman et al. (2023) show that Aboriginal landowners have been largely excluded from policy discussions, leaving them unable to reap the benefits of emerging new economies and renewable energy projects on their land. Likewise, Jackson (2017) discusses the exclusion of Indigenous people from water planning and its detrimental effects. Rather than viewing this as a failure to meet cultural or economic expectations, Jackson reckons with the historical production of entitlement and access that generate colonising patterns of water allocation. Considering water policy exclusively as a problem of supply and demand, she claims, amounts to “water colonialism” and obscures the deeper issue of water justice. A critique of water colonialism, by contrast, brings to the fore Indigenous ontologies of and relationships with water as central to issues of justice (Hartwig et al., 2022; Jackson, 2017; Jackson, 2021; Laborde & Jackson, 2022. See also Marshall, 2017). Justice considerations extend to other infrastructural domains such as housing. Lea (2015) argues that the development of Aboriginal housing policy reproduces an anthropocentrism that is characteristic of settler colonial ontologies, in part a result of the exclusion of Aboriginal people from meaningful policymaking. Lea’s research situates Aboriginal housing in the Northern Territory as a policy domain where pressures to meet restricted budgets or discipline Aboriginal subjects as homeowners take precedence over the provision of safe and sustainable housing. Thus, “houses-that-are-not-housing” (Lea & Pholeros, 2010, p. 192) proliferate, resulting in structures that appear to be but are not functional homes. Although policymakers, bureaucrats, and contractors tick boxes on housing provision targets, Indigenous housing in remote communities remains untenable (Lowell et al., 2018; Markam & Doran, 2015; Memmott et al., 2022).

Taken together, these examples demonstrate the connection between the ongoing exclusion of Indigenous people from policymaking and the deeply unequal distribution of infrastructure, often framed as an infrastructural “gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This research illustrates that the problem of infrastructure is a problem of settler colonialism. It presents a bind in which, as Lea (2020, p. 21) writes, “Aboriginal people must yield to forms of extraction to receive infrastructural services.” This special section responds and adds to this important body of work by presenting a series of critical interventions into Australia’s settler colonial infrastructure. This collection of papers considers the historical and ongoing entanglements of infrastructure with Indigenous communities on whose lands these infrastructures are built and who rely on them for their survival. Read together, the papers in this special section suggest that without meaningful repair and redress of historical and ongoing infrastructural harm, infrastructure developments will continue to entrench Australian settler colonialism and dispossess and marginalise Indigenous people, even as they purport to include or support them.

In this editorial, we suggest that Australian scholarship can benefit greatly from engaging more directly with the field of infrastructure research and theory and from being in conversation with comparable studies in other settler colonies. This can help draw new connections between the ways that discrete infrastructural forms such as pipes, houses, and railroads come together to facilitate settlement, dis/possession, and Indigenous dislocation. To make this point, we delineate key themes emerging from the literature in places such as the United States and Canada about the relationship between settler colonialism, Indigeneity, and infrastructure. In so doing, we aim to start a comparable conversation in and from Australia.

This special section comes together following a session titled “Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism,” at the Institute of Australian Geographers (IAG) Conference hosted by the University of Sydney in July 2021. In our call for papers, we noted that the planning and construction of infrastructure is a leading edge of invasion and settler colonial development, a practice with which research has been complicit. In the Australian scholarly literature, infrastructure is generally presented and understood through narratives of development that privilege engineering and growth and marginalise Indigenous peoples and their experiences with and of infrastructure. We therefore invited contributors to unsettle such conventional narratives by exploring how infrastructures connect and disconnect, including how they constitute and continuously disrupt spaces, peoples, knowledge’s, and economies in settler colonial Australia. Below, we identify and map four themes in the broader literature concerning settler colonialism, infrastructure, and Indigeneity. These themes are infrastructure as colonisation; resisting infrastructure; surfacing Indigeneity; and life-affirming infrastructure. We present a selection of works in relation to each theme and consider what they offer to the field in/from Australia. We then introduce the five articles in this special section and their respective contributions, before concluding.

Taking the “infrastructural turn” in geography and wider social sciences as our starting point (see Bridges, 2023; Graham & Marvin, 2022; Larkin, 2013; Shafiee, 2019; Star, 2009; Stokes & De Coss-Corzo, 2023), the brief review below focuses on research carried out at the intersections of infrastructure and settler colonialism. Although important work has examined interfaces of infrastructural colonialism and racial capitalism (Dunlap, 2023; Johnson & Nemser, 2022; Pulido, 2017; Strauss, 2020), in this editorial, we include only research that speaks directly to settler colonial contexts. The specificity of settler colonialism is well established in the literature. Wolfe (2006) described settler colonialism as constituted primarily by settler expropriation of Indigenous lands, where invasion is a structure rather than an event, given that settlers come to stay on stolen land (also Bernauer, 2024; Hugill & Simpson, 2022; Kauanui, 2016; Konishi, 2019). In light of this observation, scholars study the ways that settler colonial structures are continuously reproduced and reconstituted, asserting their longevity and lack of “end point” or resolution in the form of a so-called “post”-colonial moment (Carey & Silverstein, 2020; Strakosch & Macoun, 2012). Both in urban contexts (Batman-Thomas & Porter, 2019; Hugill, 2017; Simpson & Hugill, 2022), and elsewhere, the reproduction of settler colonial relations manifests through various modes of land confiscation and the production of property regimes that service notions of White ownership and belonging over unceded Indigenous lands (Bhandar, 2018; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Nichols, 2020).

The work that infrastructure does within the settler colonial project is an important emerging area of research. In Palestine, for instance, Salamanca (2016, p. 65) observes in relation to infrastructural development in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that “while infrastructure networks can be potentially instrumental to broader development and state-building efforts, they can also be part of processes through which power asymmetries are articulated and enacted.” Infrastructure here is understood as relational and situated in colonial structures of power. As Salamanca clarifies, roadscapes “created in the name of development” are also “material objects involved in the social and political production and reconfiguration of colonial space and life” (Salamanca, 2016, pp. 75–76). Alkhalili et al. (2023) present a similar perspective in considering how energy infrastructure developed to address climate change concerns in the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and Israeli-occupied Golan Heights perpetuates colonial claims to possession over these territories while erasing Indigenous claims and rights to the land. In addition, researchers are recognising how infrastructure projects are directly implicated in realising settler claims. This kind of focus is prominent in the North American literature (e.g., Curley, 2021, 2023; Pasternak et al., 2023; Spice, 2018) where—largely Indigenous-led—studies consider how Indigenous communities engage with settler colonial infrastructure on their lands.

Surveying this rapidly expanding field, we identify four key themes that speak to the connections we aim to draw—through this collection—between Australia’s infrastructure and Indigenous peoples’ sovereignties, lands, country, and culture. As noted above, we dub these four themes infrastructure as colonisation, resisting infrastructure, surfacing indigeneity, and life-affirming infrastructure. It is important to note that these themes are not mutually exclusive but tend to overlap in the research in different ways. We also recognise that many other readings of the literature are possible. In identifying these themes, we seek to delineate avenues pursued in the broader field that remain under-represented in the Australian literature. We offer these themes as analytics, a way of illuminating gaps in the Australian research and articulating the contributions made by this special section. Below, we elucidate the four themes using carefully chosen and illustrative examples rather than a comprehensive review of the literature.

The first theme of infrastructure as colonisation explores narratives of technology transfer towards processes of settler colonial claims and practices of acquisition, possession, and development of Indigenous lands. Cowen (2020) examines the colonial complex in action in Canada, where settlers established farms, produced cargo that financed the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and protected this infrastructure from Indigenous resistance to settler colonial infrastructural expansion. For Cowen, “national infrastructure” can be seen as a key technology of ongoing settler colonial dispossession, in both material and discursive terms. In a similar vein, Diné geographer Curley (2021, p. 388) describes infrastructure as a “colonial beachhead” and as “a temporal encroachment on Indigenous lands and livelihoods, … to augment material and political difference that eventually overwhelms Indigenous nations and curtails certain possibilities.” Karuka (2019) likewise considers the crucial role of the US transcontinental railroad in claiming settler counter-sovereignty against diverse Indigenous nations, a process he terms “railroad colonialism.” These incursions all emerge from and are constitutive of settler colonial structures.

Our second theme is that of resistance, which emerges most clearly in research about invasive oil and gas pipelines (following Spice, 2018) that transgress Indigenous territories in North America. Indigenous resistance to these projects does not only refuse the authority of the invaders but also contests the implicit claim that these infrastructures serve public interest: “For the Unist’ot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en nation, resistance to the construction of pipelines in their territory is resistance to the invasion of the Canadian state onto territories that they have never ceded or surrendered to the province or the crown” (Spice, 2018, p. 46). This resistance can, and does, take many forms, operating at various scales (Hughes, 2020; Lilja, 2022; Sparke, 2008) and temporal registers (Fung & Lamb, 2023). One of its key expressions is blockades set by the First Nations people on their land (Estes, 2019). Centring infrastructure in anticolonial struggle and centring anticolonialism in fights against settler infrastructure, Indigenous resistance calls the legitimacy of state infrastructure projects into question (Bosworth & Chua, 2023). As Nick Estes puts it, “[a]ncestors of Indigenous resistance didn’t merely fight against settler colonialism; they fought for Indigenous life and just relations with human and nonhuman relatives, and with the earth.” This resistance is a structure, working towards a freedom evoked by the “amplified presence of Indigenous life” (Estes, 2019, p. 248).

Surfacing indigeneity or making visible the role and lives of Indigenous people in relation to infrastructure is the third theme in our discussion. The everyday life of Indigenous people has long been marginalised in political practice and academic literature surrounding infrastructural developments, which tends to neglect Indigenous peoples’ work in building, maintaining, and servicing those developments. Writing against this marginalisation in the literature, Indigenous feminist scholarship increasingly emphasises what McCallum (2014, p. 226) describes as an essential and “persistent demand for Native labour” in a number of spheres, including those related to infrastructure. Williams (2012, p. 10) argues that Indigenous women’s work itself has been “the essential infrastructure upon which the non-Indigenous settler population depended, experienced elevated self-worth, and economically thrived.” This point is a crucial reminder that Indigenous labour has been both materially and symbolically infrastructural to the settler colony. More recent research recognises the complex entanglements and critical presence of Indigenous peoples in geographies and political economies of infrastructure production and upkeep (Curley, 2023).

Our fourth theme considers the concept of life-affirming infrastructure. LaDuke and Cowen (2020) describe this as “alimentary infrastructure,” which echoes other conceptualisation of “reparative infrastructure” (Webber et al., 2022), or “infrastructural reparations” (Sheller, 2023). This conceptual diversity highlights the overlap among themes insofar as it locates Indigenous engagements with infrastructure not only through the lens of harm and deprivation but also through the lens of repair, survival, and care. Here existing infrastructures are shown to be used, manipulated, and transformed in ways that reorganise and repair historical and ongoing social, cultural, and economic deprivation and exploitation, often caused by these very infra/structures. The transformative use of settler colonial and racial infrastructure, such as rails or pipelines, remains relatively invisible to the state and is often hard to discern in mainstream historical records, thus necessitating more engaged methodologies with Indigenous people to unpack and retell these stories (Blatman et al., 2025; see also Barker, 2008).

To conclude, Pasternak et al. (2023) identify infrastructure studies as crucial to decolonising geographical research. Although this process has clearly begun elsewhere, there is relatively little work of this nature in/from Australia, especially within geography. This myopia reflects a long tradition of infrastructure research (Clements et al., 2025), which tells a celebratory story of infrastructural expansion and modernisation, facilitating the movement of people and goods, bringing new lands into production (cf. Blatman et al., 2025), and unifying the nation (Taksa, 2001). This settler colonial perspective maps over Aboriginal people and the country and obscures the complex relationalities of Indigenous people with state infrastructure. The authors in this special section offer important critiques to this narrative, bringing critical infrastructure research into direct conversation with Indigenous life. Moreover, these scholars engage with Indigenous structures and frames beyond dispossession and the settler colonial “logic of elimination” (Carey & Silverstein, 2020; Kauanui, 2018; Russell, 2020), to consider the ways that Indigeneity is survived through and in relation to infrastructure. The articles in this section thus stand apart from much Australian research into different infrastructural projects, particularly its focus on questions of access and benefit, or policymaking. As we discuss below, the articles in this section draw on a broader literature to frame questions of infrastructure differently.

The special section opens with a review of the “Epistemic silences in settler-colonial infrastructure governance literature” by Clements et al. (2025) who acknowledge the contribution of research on urban planning and development to critiques of neoliberal processes and to addressing issues of equity. These authors demonstrate that this literature is too often “silent on the uncomfortable politics of decolonising infrastructure” and rarely recognises that Australian cities are built on Aboriginal Country (Clements et al., 2025, p. 223). The breadth of this claim, which resonates with Jackson’s distinction discussed earlier between work focusing on demand and work focusing on justice, implicates infrastructure more generally. The systematic review of the contemporary infrastructure governance literature by Clements et al. (2025) highlights how conceptualising country as terra nullius has enabled and fostered the exploitation of unceded land through ongoing infrastructure development and expansion. Critiquing the conceptualising and institutionalising of terra nullius in urban planning and development in Australia’s five largest cities, Clements et al. (2025, p. 222) aim to “contribute to disciplinary reflections on the role infrastructure governance scholarship plays, and might play, in building solidarity with the politics of decolonisation and Indigenous sovereignties.” In particular, they highlight “the stark contrast between … ongoing settler-colonial realities and […] research focuses and norms” and argue that urban infrastructure researchers should “take stock of our silences and commit to exploring forms of truth-telling about the complex entanglements of infrastructure with ongoing permutations of settler-coloniality” (Clements et al., 2025, p. 232).

Rogers et al. (2025) take up the challenge raised by Clements et al. by tracing the process, beginning soon after the First Fleet arrived in 1788 in what was to become Sydney, through which “parcels of land were recognised as property—initially as Crown lands, and later by individuals, businesses and other entities as ‘private’ property.” They show how this process of recognition has been institutionalised “by means of legally enforceable devices,” such that today much of the Australian continent and its island territories are formally rendered not as country but as private property (Rogers et al., 2025, p. 241). Through the use of critical digital mapping tools, the authors illuminate how colonial mapping and surveying infrastructure has been operationalised to assert property rights to the exclusion of Aboriginal people in Sydney, a process also experienced by Indigenous peoples elsewhere. Critical digital mapping should “do the opposite by rendering private property unnatural and as a layer of governance that explicitly arranges patterns of control and access to land” (Rogers et al., 2025, p. 241). Their intention is to “use the critical thinking that sits behind this more-than-maps approach to GIS to contest the basis of the ongoing appropriation and dispossession on Aboriginal land” (Rogers et al., 2025, p. 247).

Katie Maher (2025) analyses The last train ride, an artwork by South Australian Yankunytjatjara artist and Stolen Generations survivor Kunyi McInerney, together with Aboriginal peoples’ narratives. She considers how Aboriginal artists have imagined settler colonial railway infrastructures as not only operationalising government policies of assimilation—particularly child removal—but also as travelling through country. Rail infrastructure emerges in her account as both a technology of colonisation, a “powerful mechanism through which to enact the logics of engulfing Aboriginal lands and peoples into settler colonial possession” (Maher, 2025, pp. 253–254), and as generative of Aboriginal spaces. In her nuanced analysis, she reveals how railway infrastructures were used to remove Aboriginal children from their families and at the same time how Aboriginal people “have shaped and forged connections with the railways and utilised railway infrastructures for their own purposes” (Maher, 2025, p. 257), subverting assimilation and child removal and surviving settler colonial projects.

Coyne (2025) returns us to the early colonising mapping of Sydney, examining the water infrastructure system encapsulated in what colonists named the Tank Stream. Water infrastructure, Coyne shows, is one material manifestation of the structure of settler colonialism, working under the guise of progress to advance settler possession. The Tank Stream was first seen by British settlers as a source of drinking water but was quickly polluted and degraded, before being used as drainage. Today, this infrastructure still crisscrosses beneath the city as stormwater drainage, visible only through remaining place names scattered across the cityscape in the form of a series of plaques. Appearing only as waste, the Tank Stream reflects the way that Aboriginal Country is often imagined as wastelands, an imaginary that renders land ideologically available for improvement, cultivation and civilisation. By contrast, Coyne (2025) develops and operationalises concepts of “hydrontopower” and “kinfrastructure” to recognise the relational contexts through which infrastructure emerges and is mediated. Along these lines, Coyne argues, one might reconsider the Tank Stream as a component of an ochre infrastructure, bringing it back above ground and monumentalising it by designing the urban landscape through and with country (Coyne, 2025).

Lastly, Blatman et al. (2025) focus on the importance of railway infrastructure, in the process highlighting the need for researchers to understand it in its colonising context and beyond. In this paper, we recognise the use of railway infrastructure by Aboriginal people for their own purposes and benefits, including paid employment, and maintaining connections with country and kin relations. From this perspective, the railways not only served to dispossess Aboriginal people but could also enable mobility and community in the face of an aggressive settler colonial project. Blatman et al. (2025) highlight the complexity and contradictions involved in this form of infrastructure, emphasising that these nuanced perspectives can only be achieved if we are prepared to overcome past silences and listen to the stories of Aboriginal people. This article highlights the importance of oral histories and other forms of knowledge preservation by Aboriginal people themselves as integral to this project of truth-telling.

Each of the articles in this special section locates their research concern—whether it be urban planning and development, technologies of private property, the railways, or waterways—in relation to the larger assemblage of settler colonial infrastructure. Collectively, these papers move us away from an inquiry about Indigenous peoples’ access to infrastructure towards critical engagement with infrastructure as a historical, structural and ongoing element of Australian settler colonialism. One way this has been affected is through the articulation of Aboriginal land as terra nullius, which extended to people, places, and millennia-long relationships. Infrastructure has been animated by narratives that intentionally and unintentionally marginalise and obscure Indigenous lives. The articles in this special issue centre, in different ways, Indigenous engagements with infrastructure. Sometimes this involves narrating Indigenous experience by emphasising ongoing relationships with country, both despite and through infrastructure. At other times, this means accounting for Indigenous resistance, including direct confrontation, naming and reclaiming language, and of acts of refusal. And each of the articles shed light on ways that Indigenous people have adapted both infrastructure and practices of engagement to survive colonisation and maintain connections to country and kin. In so doing, the papers in this special section fundamentally unsettle the taken for granted-ness of infrastructure in the settler colony.

There is a troubling silence in Australian academia generally and in geography in particular concerning the roles, impacts and relationships of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in and with infrastructure. This theme issue is an attempt to elevate such research and highlight its significance to understanding Australian geopolitics and history. The type of research we invite here is necessary not only to re-interpret and better understand the past but also to engage more critically with contemporary and future infrastructural developments on stolen land across this continent. This will ensure the visibility of Aboriginal life, culture, and country in imagining, designing, and constructing more equitable and life-affirming infrastructural futures for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Although no ethics approval was required for this editorial, research and writing was conducted in an ethical manner. This piece was written by a team comprised of settler and Indigenous scholars and an Aboriginal community organiser.