The Symbolic Politics of Belonging and Community in Peri‐urban Environmental Disputes: the Traveston Crossing Dam in Queensland, Australia

Abstract

This paper examines a recent dispute generated by the Queensland State Government proposal to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland, Australia. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which interrelated issues of belonging, community identity, and social diversity were negotiated during the anti-dam campaign. As an unusual alliance of farmers, environmentalists, urban retirees, some Aboriginal people and others, it takes a view of the anti-Traveston Crossing Dam campaign as a fluid network of people and approaches the notion of community identity as the symbolic construction of similarity. Locally specific, the paper describes pertinent aspects of community politics in the context of rural socioeconomic change, and the mobilisation of heritage. With regard to local senses of belonging, it also discusses the involvement of Aboriginal people during the campaign. More broadly then, this paper attempts to make an ethnographic contribution to the study of environmental disputes and the politics of alliance in peri-urban areas of settler-descendant societies such as Australia.Aboriginal people played an important role in large public campaign events, the day-to-day management of the campaign was largely the concern of non-Indigenous local residents, particularly those I broadly categorise as relative newcomers and longer-term primary producers. As a result of colonial dispossession, violence and forced removals, Aboriginal people now form less than one per cent of the total population in the Mary Valley, the area about 170km north of Brisbane in southeast Queensland that was to be inundated by the proposed dam (see Map 1). As I will demonstrate further below, the resulting absence of local contact between settler-descendants and Aboriginal people over the last century was a factor important to the way their relationships developed during the campaign.Because of the mutually reinforcing decline in local agricultural production, increasing subdivision of farms, rising land prices and the influx of large numbers of (often semi-retired) urban residents to the Mary Valley over the past three to four decades, I classify the region as peri-urban rather than rural, even though it is commonly described as a rural region, or 'rural hinterland' in planning documents and regulatory frameworks (on processes such as counterurbanisation, amenity migration and the development of 'exurbia' see e.g. Cadieux and Hurley

Identity and Sustainability: Localized Sense of Community Increases Environmental Engagement

“…This perspective, applied to environmental engagement, predicts residents will act to protect and sustain environmental resources when their sense of community is strong rather than weak (e.g., Agrawal & Gibson, ; Theodori & Kyle, ). For example, de Rijke () examined a very diverse group of residents protesting the Traveston Crossing Dam in Queensland, Australia. The anti‐dam alliance included individuals who belonged to different social categories: retirees, farmers, environmentalists, local Aboriginal peoples, and so on.…”

It's the Lungfish, stupid: knowledge fights, activism, and the science–policy interface

“…In response, local residents established a no dam campaign and began questioning the suitability of the dam on economic, social and environmental grounds (Save the Mary River Coordination Group, n.d.). The campaigners raised concerns about the impact of a large dam on the local community, especially focusing on the fact the newly created reservoir would physically fracture the community and cause the loss of homes, farmland and sites of cultural and spiritual import to the Aboriginal People of the area, including the Gubbi Gubbi, Waka Waka and Badtjala Aboriginal groups (de Rijke, ).…”

“…Attempts were made to assuage their concerns; the Queensland Government began buying land at market price (which rose as a result of the dam proposal), its spokespeople argued that the dam would bring water security and offer a new recreational facility in the area, and a social impact assessment was commissioned (Wasimi, ). Aboriginal groups were offered an Indigenous Land Use Agreement that two groups accepted and one group – the Gubbi Gubbi – refused (Crow_Boy, ; de Rijke, ). These arguments and offers failed to appease the affected community.…”

“…As also noted by de Rijke (), the campaign focussed on the issue of threats to species rather than the more local, and inevitably emotional concerns of the community. These ‘rational’ arguments had much broader currency; they were able to be presented to policy‐ and decision‐makers in Australian Government in a way that others were not, and it gave them recourse to urge the Environment Minister to overturn the dam approval under the EPBC Act.…”

Unstable relations: a critical appraisal of indigeneity and environmentalism in contemporary Australia

“…Finally, third, the other major transformation has been the efflorescence since the mid‐2000s of small local organisations focused on individual issues or sites, which are variously positive, ambivalent or wholly negative about the categories of environmentalism (e.g. de Rijke, ; Mercer et al ., ). Though they attract ‘green’ allies and express conservationist ideas, groups that actively oppose coal and coal seam gas extraction such as Save Liverpool Plains and Lock the Gate do not represent themselves in such terms.…”