ABSTRACT
Despite the substantial impact of colonialism on the Indigenous population of central Cape York Peninsula and resulting sociocultural transformation, population mobility remains at the heart of Aboriginal life across the region. This chapter seeks to explore the contemporary rates, forms and motivations of Aboriginal mobility among the Indigenous population associated with Coen, a township in central Cape York Peninsula, Australia.1
Over the past decade, the region has seen a return to a high rate of population mobility after two decades of spatial concentration and sedentarization, this mobility being closely tied to the development of regional decentralization and the emergence of what has been generally labelled an “outstation movement”. In common with a number of other areas across northern and central Australia over the past thirty years (see Chapter 2 and Davis and Arthur 1998), local Aboriginal people have established a number of small settlements, generally called “outstations”, in a 100 km radius of the township of Coen (Figure 12.1) and the majority of the population now move frequently between these, the township of Coen and other regional population centres.
