On gravel – socio-material objects of northern development

Wealth from extractive development has been at the forefront of political aspirations for the Northern Territory of Australia (NT), and of northern Australia more broadly, for many decades. According to political, bureaucratic and industry rhetoric, the north is insufficiently developed to reach its full potential. The most recent iteration of this development agenda has been catalysed by the Commonwealth Government’s White Paper on “Developing the North”. Eschewing the usual frames for analysing ‘development,’ this paper proposes that northern development can be seen as a going on together doing differences with development “objects.’ It mobilises a ground-up STS to understand what such objects are in an unorthodox way, as socio-material entities. The entities the paper focuses on are gravelly; gravelly roads, and legal contracts that concern gravel. Northern development certainly requires that these two entities, very different though they are, must go on together. But seeing that necessity, we also see that a third gravelly entity, often obscured, needs to be foregrounded to understand what is also at stake in northern development projects. The ‘people-places’ that are gravel pits need to be explicitly involved as objects if northern development is to be inclusive, and is to disrupt the dominant power relations within which it is enmeshed. As socio-material entities, the places that are the gravel pits, intimately involved with gravelly roads and legal contracts, are about gravel supply. Yet they are owned by Indigenous landowners. These places are constituted in quite different institutions, alternative and diverse languages, and in disparate knowledge traditions, compared with those that constitute the gravelly roads, and the legal contracts concerning gravel. The paper argues that all three are ‘northern development objects,’ and all need to be involved in northern development policy. Introduction: on gravel In recent years, buoyed by the release by the federal Coalition government of a ‘White Paper’ on developing northern Australia in 2015 (Australian Government, 2015), a raft of NT and Commonwealth government agencies have worked furiously towards a common goal of ‘Developing the North.’ The objectives of these development imperatives can nonetheless be slippery, particularly in the underpopulated NT where according to the NT Government a “large undeveloped land mass” has yet to reach its “full potential.”1 But typically, the agenda 1 https://business.nt.gov.au/investment-and-major-projects/investment-and-development/northern-australia-development. 41 Learning Communities | Special Issue: Collaborative Knowledge Work in Northern Australia | Number 26 – November 2020 involves the establishment of large-scale mining and petroleum operations, pastoralism, agriculture and aquaculture, and can also involve state exploitation of land, including for defence training purposes, and infrastructure such as housing, dams or roads. Such projects are presented axiomatically as being for the “common good” (Blaser & de La Cadena, 2017, p. 185), certainly for the NT as a political and economic jurisdiction, but also for Indigenous people who will be lifted from poverty via the jobs, business opportunities and services generated. This paper interrogates the assumptions and knowledge traditions underpinning northern development in an unorthodox way: by mobilising a ‘ground up’ STS approach to understand how often mundane socio-material objects of development in the north are differentially constituted. Taking the example of gravel, the core constitutive element of much of the NT’s road network, I consider how my interlocutors employees at an NT Aboriginal land council enact this rocky aggregate as either a legal contract or as a road according to the material, social and textual epistemic practices they deploy (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985). Absent from this analysis, however, is a third conception of gravel pits as “people-places” (Verran, 2002). In this conception, gravel pits are constituted by Indigenous knowledge practices that recognise the “relations between human beings and other-than-human beings that together make place” (de la Cadena, 2010, p. 356). If we pay attention to the different ways that gravel is enacted, we can begin to recognise what versions of the world are privileged and excluded in the mantra of “Developing the North”, opening up the potential for more inclusive development policy.