Abstract

This chapter reviews the context for Indigenous collaborative partnerships in Australia. The author highlights the history of disempowerment through Australian colonisation, and the emerging collaborative management efforts evolving in the Northern Territory. These joint efforts have exposed several challenges, including tensions between wildlife conservation goals and Indigenous hunting that is important for both culture and subsistence, and the tensions between traditional environmental knowledge and scientific knowledge. These challenges along with the concepts of nature and culture that underpinned northern Australian settlement have challenged contemporary cross-cultural collaborative efforts.