Of canoes, tinnies and helicopters: contemporary maritime mobility and place relations in north central Arnhem Land

The mobility of Indigenous Australians has long been a source of bureaucratic attention in the Northern Territory (NT). While much government policy has focused on sedentarising Indigenous people into towns – justified under the agendas of economic viability and streamlined service delivery – anthropologists have brought attention to the way these policies render invisible kin-based relationships to ancestral lands and sanction certain forms of movement. Ethnographic studies of Australian Indigenous mobility have examined the systems of interconnection between people and place that shape distinct Indigenous social and economic values related to movement. This literature, however, has left practices of maritime mobility largely unstudied. This paper examines historic and contemporary mobility between the towns of Warruwi and Maningrida in north central Arnhem Land. This coastline is devoid of both road access and outstations, in contrast to most of coastal Arnhem Land. As such, it is marked by patterns of maritime mobility, once by kupuny (dugout canoe) and now in motorised metal boats known as ‘tinnies’. The paper draws on several months of ethnographic research conducted in Warruwi, Maningrida, and the coastline between the towns to examine patterns of movement across these waters. The paper asks how the temporal acceleration of maritime mobility interfaces with the affective dimensions of relationship in ancestral Country. I argue that as mobility accelerates, non-Indigenous institutions have an increasingly acute mediating effect on encounters between Indigenous landowners and their ancestral lands and seas.