Doing Ranger Work
Margaret Ayre, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Darwin
I examine two episodes in the training of Aboriginal rangers. The men who are the subjects of my stories were working with Dhimurru, a Yolngu Aboriginal land and sea management agency in Australia’s Northern Territory. I show how doing ranger work is the working of ontological domains and boundaries in particular ways. In the Parks and Wildlife Commission of Northern Territory (PWCNT), through camps such as the one I describe at Yolngu Aboriginal homeland of Daliwuy Bay, rangers are trained in how to work the boundary and tension between the institution as ‘society’ and ‘the environment’/’Nature’. This training has rangers, ‘society’ and the institution of the PWCNT separate and distinct from the universal object of management ‘the environment’/’Nature’. In contrast to this, I describe a worrk (‘burning the land') workshop at another homeland, Dhalinybuy, where Yolngu Rangers are trained to do waanga (place) as the working of the boundaries and relations between clan collectives and land/sea. This training has waanga as a material-symbolic entity where clan and land are co-constituting and ontologically undifferentiated. Comparing these episodes we can see that there is an implicit ontological contestation between the two ranger training camps or workshops. Aboriginal rangers were being sensitised to, and disciplined in working two quite different ‘ontological tensions’ as they were trained to ‘manage nature’. I suggest that an effective curriculum for trainee Aboriginal rangers will make these ontological contrasts explicit.
