ABSTRACT
The processes of power and authority among Aboriginal people and in relation to bureaucracies in Charters Towers are the subject of this chapter. In particular I examine the categories ‘elder’ and ‘our old people’ and argue that these concepts are central to the ordering of social relations and authority. These categories might be differentiated by pointing to the fact that, firstly, ‘elders’ is a concept that Aboriginal people and agents of the state use in their ‘consultation with the community’ in administration and bureaucracies. Elder is a concept from Aboriginal social practice that draws on notions of gerontocracy, older and knowledgeable men and women have the higher authority, they make decisions for the wider group, are leaders. The term was incorporated by colonial state apparatuses (for example in the Aboriginal Land Act 1991 (QLD)) and turned into a fixed category (see Gledhill 1994: 80). ‘Our old people’, on the other hand, was a phrase I heard Aboriginal people use to refer to their own past in place, their relatedness, relationships and shared history. ‘Our old people’ included those remembered dead and those who are buried in the local cemetery, whose graves (and the tending of these) attested to a certain belonging in place. The category ‘our old people’ was also mobilised to give particular practices an authenticity and authority that was expected from demonstrations of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’, especially in relation to the state. There were interfusions in the categories which has led me to analyse them together here.
