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Pastoralism, Local Knowledge And Australian Aboriginal Development In Northern Queensland, Benjamin R. Smith

Aboriginal Policy Research Consortium International (APRCi)

Over the past three years, Indigenous policy in Australia has taken an interventionist turn. The work of Noel Pearson (see Pearson 2000), a prominent Indigenous intellectual from Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland, has provided much of the impetus for this push. As a result, the chronic social problems of the Peninsula's Aboriginal communities have become a focus of state and federal government action, driven by the recommendations of the 2001 Cape York Justice Study (Fitzgerald 2001), commissioned by the Queensland government and developed in partnership with regional Aboriginal organisations. Pearson, along with other commentators, politicians and bureaucrats, has asserted …