Excerpt: In a recent article published in Arena Online, Jon Altman offered several important correctives to the narratives that have surrounded the destruction in late May of two Juukan Gorge sites belonging to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura (PKKP) people in the Pilbara by mining giant Rio Tinto. In particular, he highlighted the underlying issues with the native title regime as an ostensible means of protecting Indigenous rights to land, and pointed towards the settler-colonial logics of contemporary Australia.
Settler colonialism is primarily about land. Settler-colonial formations are premised on the foundational projection of permanent territorial sovereignty. The clue is in the name: unlike the temporary colonial sojourner, the settler stays. The peculiarities of the sovereign intentions of the settler project, which seeks to establish exclusive territorial sovereignty over expropriated Indigenous lands, produce what Patrick Wolfe described as a ‘logic of elimination’. Access to land is, as Wolfe insisted, the primary motivation for elimination. Settlers—and the settler state—aim to displace the pre-existing (and inconveniently persisting) Indigenous presence in order to establish their own direct connection with the land. In the settler-colonial equation, as Deborah Bird Rose has suggested, ‘to get in the way all the native has to do is stay at home’.
