WfHC - cover page (not to be used with pre-printed report ... - CSIRO

communities, Lockhardt [River] and that had little homelands here and there. Not too many
but a few. Everybody was wondering what we were doing, and then suddenly it just caught
on. I think it had a lot to do with funding as well, because DAA was running a homeland
funding [pool]. We got onto that for Oriners and that certainly opened the door for a whole
lot of others - 14 odd [homelands around Kowanyama].
Viv Sinnamon
Oriners pre-dated the new homelands, already had major high quality infrastructure in place,
and was considered by the Oriners Mob to be something different from a normal homeland. 14
But it was also by far the furthest residential site from Kowanyama, and the drain on time and
resources created by the homeland movement and changes in key Kowanyama personnel
meant that the early Oriners visions and strategies reaffirmed in later planning documents
(Burdon Torzillo and Associates 2000) could not be realised. The difficulties in maintaining a
support base at Kowanyama, particularly reliable communications monitoring, meant that,
despite the successes in establishing viable key infrastructure, residence at Oriners began to
decline in the early to mid 2000s.
Figure 13. Oriners house from the air in 2012.
This decline in residence led in turn to damage caused partly by a lack of maintenance, but
in the main due to repeated thefts and vandalisation of important infrastructure. A particularly
critical loss was the theft of the solar power system. The road through Oriners currently goes
straight past the station, and during fieldwork visits to it, a number of through-travellers were
observed in the course of a few hours in the peak dry season. One commented after
stopping that the station was generally considered to be abandoned. The logistical difficulties
of resourcing Oriners from Kowanyama and the major competition and drain on resources
created by the temporary explosion in outstations during the early 2000s are important
14 Strang 1997:101 notes that „Oriners, partly because it is a cattle lease, has tended to generate quite
ambitious plans, but other „outstation‟ ideas are more modest, simply expressing the desire of many
older people to return to their own country...‟
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
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