Agreement-making in the post-claims era: Continuity and change over 22 years in western Arnhem Land

As claims under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976 (ALRA) have drawn to a close, the work of ‘agreement making’ between Indigenous groups and developers has accelerated to become the primary function of land councils. In this paper, we trace dynamics of continuity and change in Indigenous and Western institutional lives across two ethnographic surveys in the stone country of western Arnhem Land. These surveys were conducted by the authors for the Northern Land Council (NLC) in the years 2000 and 2022 over identical tracts of land as part of the NLC's agreement-making procedure under Part IV of the ALRA. The 22-year interval between the surveys offer a lens to attend to historical trends in Indigenous intergenerational knowledge transmission, state and corporate development agendas, and applied anthropological practice itself. The article illuminates benefits of the agreement-making process for Indigenous peoples in western Arnhem Land not previously accounted for in the literature on mining negotiations under the ALRA. We highlight the need for greater reflexivity on the part of land councils in considering how the priorities of their constituents might be brought to the forefront of agreement-making procedures.