Imagining Mumeka: Bureaucratic and Kuninjku perspectives
Imagining Mumeka: Bureaucratic and Kuninjku perspectives Book Section
Experiments in Self-Determination
- Author(s): Altman, Jon
- Secondary Author(s): Peterson, Nicolas, Myers, Fred
- Published: 2016
- Publisher: ANU Press
- ISBN: 9781925022902
Abstract: Mumeka is the name of a place; it was once the location of a seasonal camp. Since the late 1960s it has been called an outstation or homeland. The name first appears in the archive in the late 1960s, but the immediate precursor to its establishment was the blazing of a vehicular track from Oenpelli to Maningrida in the Northern Territory in 1963 that crossed the Mann River adjacent to this wet season camp (see Figure 14.1). That place was inhabited by members of a community that speak what we now refer to as the Kuninjku dialect of the pan-dialectical Bining Gunwok language (Evans 2003). In this chapter, I want to say something about the lives of Kuninjku people over the 50 years since 1963 through the locational lens of Mumeka and their engagements with the Australian state and capitalism, including during a policy period termed self-determination. I then want to say something about current Kuninjku circumstances and the indeterminacy of their future, even as the future of Mumeka, the place, seems reasonably assured.
- Urls: https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p331981/pdf/book.pdf
- Publisher Location: Canberra