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5 WORKING KNOWLEDGE: CONCLUSIONS AND
RECOMMENDATIONS
5.1 Introduction
For the people of Kowanyama, and for the Oriners Mob in particular, Oriners is a special
place. Its distance from Kowanyama makes travelling to, living and working there logistically
difficult and expensive, even in the dry season when vehicle access is possible. In the wet
season, the impassable Mitchell River and the unique „flooded forest‟ terrain make air travel,
which is vastly more expensive, the main modern option to get in and out. However,
traditional story lines used to navigate the forest country, water bodies and ridgelines during
the wet and dry season were designed for walking, and in the time when many Indigenous
families were settled at Koolatah, walking back to the Oriners area was still common (Strang
2001). While walking into and out of Oriners is still practical and possible, this has become
much less common in recent times, and travel by horse is similarly unusual. The most
practicable modern solution for management of the Oriners Station year-round is dry season
access by vehicle to stock supplies for permanent residence and management, and isolated
wet-season residence at the Oriners homestead by a smaller group of people. From the
Oriners homestead base, access to the surrounding country during the wet season and early
dry season for management and cultural purposes (i.e. fire, fishing, ceremony) can be by
walking, and by quadbike when bogging and erosion risks are not too great. Wet season
emergency access and resupply would still need to be by helicopter, unless an all weather
air strip can be developed.
The isolation of Oriners also gives the area its character, and has resulted in it retaining
considerable ecological value in a landscape where other parts of the Mitchell catchment are
severely degraded (Strang 2004). As Viv Sinnamon recalled (1.6.5 ), David Hughes said at
the time of the Kowanyama purchase that Oriners was „a piece of the way Cape York used to
be.‟ For the Hughes family as a whole, Oriners represents one stage in an ongoing
relationship with the country of the Mitchell catchment that now stretches back 100 years –
Cecil Hughes first saw it in the 1950s, Colin Hughes spent his infancy there and mustered it
as a teenager with his brother Brian, and David Hughes negotiated the sale to Kowanyama
in the early 1990s. As Strang describes, the relationship between the Hughes‟ and the Yam
family (which has the strongest traditional association with Oriners in the present day), is
similarly extensive, stretching back several generations to the early years of Koolatah Station
(Strang 1997).
However, Strang‟s detailed anthropological work with both white cattlemen and Indigenous
people in the Mitchell also emphasises a level of incommensurability of perspectives
between the two groups. The consequences of cultural differences and intertwined but very
different histories impedes communication and understanding in a range of ways, not least in
the sphere of wider catchment management in the Mitchell (Strang 2004). Strang‟s own work
successfully identifies the underlying bases of the differences, an act which can sometimes
have the effect of reinforcing them. However, when such analysis is done well, it more often
enables the bridging of such differences, or at least provides the opportunity to avoid their
most negative consequences. Despite this project‟s apparent differences in approach and its
limited scope, it relies significantly on foundations and relationships which were facilitated by
that previous successful research effort.
„Working Knowledge‟ was developed here as the term best able to summarise the kind of
knowledge recovered and recorded in a project focused on Indigenous and non-Indigenous
cattlemen operating in a remote location. To use the language of Strang‟s primary account, it
focuses on the „common ground‟ of a range of men familiar with the area. As described in
1.1, „Working Knowledge‟ simultaneously describes:
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
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