I’ve called this seminar ‘the mantra of certainty’, to reflect the way in which the demand for certainty, and its constant reiteration, dominated the campaign of the mining industry in the 1993 debate over the Commonwealth’s Native Title Bill and  continues to be an industry delusion.

In this seminar I will firstly situate the decision-makers of modern resource companies – in this case, specifically Rio Tinto – as inheritors of the ambivalences and ambiguities, but also of the quest for certainty, of Western modernity including, of course, a capitalist market economy, and what this means in practice when they engage with people still attempting to assert traditional meanings and practices in the face of modernisation.

Secondly, I want to look at the impact of the quest for certainty on those latter groups. My focus is on how Pilbara Aboriginal people experience the events of their time, in particular the resource boom, and how culture shapes but does not determine the ways in which they are responding to change.

Finally, I want to attempt an analysis of the Agreements Project, its successes and its failures, and what these might mean for certainty as ‘a failed historical enterprise’. At the same time, I want to suggest that the importance of the Agreements Project sits in a broader context. The Agreements Project, along with native title itself, has become one of the intercultural arenas where Pilbara Aboriginal people are demanding attention, and forging new meanings for their traditional cultural beliefs and practices as they attempt to maintain them under the general pressure of modernisation and the particular and intense pressure of the resources boom.

Mary Edmunds is a social anthropologist who has worked in Thailand, Spain, and Australia. Her key focus has been on social change, the impact of modernisation on traditional groups, and the role of human rights in these arenas. Her work engages the often contested nexus between theory and practice, with the objective of achieving practical results and the practical application of research findings.