'Sustainable governance for small desert settlements: Combining single settlement localism and multi-settlement regionalism', a paper presented to the Desert Knowledge Symposium & Business Showcase, Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia, 1-3 November 2006.

This paper traces the development of the first private company set up by Aboriginal people in Western Australia. This company, Northern Development and Mining (Nodom), was formed in the late 1940s to enable Aboriginal members of the company to develop an economic base from mining and pastoralism in the Pilbara. The methods by which this company operated and the impetus behind its formation, which stemmed from a pastoral strike and associated social movement, is instructive today.

This paper explores the tensions between localism and regionalism within the Indigenous polity of the Haasts Bluff Land Trust. The anthropological trend has been to focus on localism and the tendency toward dispersal and ‘atomism’. As a result less recognition has been accorded the Indigenous social and political structures that radiate out from the local to incorporate people in a wider region. The early ethnographic material on pre-contact demographic patterns is overviewed to gain perspective on these tensions and how they may be played out in the contemporary context.