Lisa Slater, ‘Saltwater Cowboys: Life in a Time of Death and Destruction’, working paper, centre for muslim and non-muslim understanding.

This paper begins at the Derby (western Kimberley, WA) bull rides, where young Aboriginal men compete to be champion bull riders – with the prize of a social status akin to an AFL football star. The abundance of life performed in this arena lies in stark contrast to the too often rehearsed appalling health and social statistics, which has produced policies such as the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, Shared Responsibility Agreements and ‘Close the Gap’. Too many Indigenous Australians are in a state of relentless poverty, which is responded to with short-sighted instrumentalist policies. Achille Mbembe argues that the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die – the creation of death worlds (2003). Notably, above the Tropic of Capricorn 90% of the prison population is Indigenous, leading some to contend that we are in a state of war. The wounded Indigenous body is represented as an aberration – outside of the healthy civic body – and in need of mainstreaming. In the political moment there is a focus upon the war on terror, but what of the war at home? War upon Australian soil seemingly has been consigned to history. Is it productive to consider the ongoing death and destruction in Indigenous Australia as forms of state based terrorism? The challenge as a postcolonial scholar is to not only critique our time but to also think relationally and trace paths of decolonization – to create models of thinking that renew life.