Vision unlimited

IT'S the development challenge every nation-state would love to have: a vast region in its north, more than three times the size of England, yet almost unpopulated, with a mere 33,000 people.

This region is filled to overflowing with nature's store of gifts: enormous supplies of water, rich reserves of minerals, fertile landscape, wide rivers, marine resources: it is a dramatic stretch of country, unlimited in its potential for tourism, pristine across large swaths, home to vividly surviving indigenous cultures.

Yet the Kimberley, though first settled and exploited by Europeans 100 years ago, in the days of goldrush and pastoral expansion, remains an unresolved dilemma for Australia. Its future, and the prospect of its development, raise in concentrated form all the contradictory scenarios that beckon in the north. Populate, or protect? Shape and subdue the land, or fit in with its dictates? Defend the region's indigenous outposts, or bring them more into the Western world?

The broad lines of the Kimberley's story are clear, as is the area's besetting political problem. Initially transformed into a cattle province by generations of dedicated pastoral families, it has been, for much of the past 50 years, a laboratory of big schemes. First there was iron ore mining in the Buccaneer Archipelago; next, most spectacularly, the Ord River irrigated agriculture project, which saw the new town of Kununurra rise downstream from man-made Lake Argyle.

Grand schemes are still popular now, if largely as daydreams: there are visionaries who want the Kimberley's waters channelled through pipelines to feed the southwest, or who yearn for cotton fields, to be irrigated by the Fitzroy, in the plains southwest of Broome.

Former federal minister Wilson Tuckey not only supported the idea of tidal power generation in Derby's King Sound, but hoped it would create a hydrogen-based fuel-cell economy. Pastoralist John Henwood, on the 400,000ha Fossil Downs, believes a network of small-scale dams could create irrigated horticulture on a 150km stretch of Kimberley rivers, much like the farms that line the Murray's banks today. "If you could control the water," he says, "there's no limit to what you could do with this country."

But the truth is there's no official drive behind these dreams. For the Kimberley has no real voice. Unlike the self-administering Northern Territory, it is run from distant Perth, where successive state governments have paid the region lip service, while vaguely hoping market mechanisms, or some other all-transforming magic, will come along to move the Kimberley ahead.

Certainly the contours of the area defy planning: the Kimberley is several worlds in one. Its west, based around the thriving, hybrid town of Broome, is a fast-growing, high-value touristic paradise.

Its centre, round Fitzroy Crossing, the nation's largest Aboriginal town, lives on pastoralism. To the north is hardscrabble country: last month large tracts of it were handed over to Aboriginal traditional owners in the nation's biggest native title determination. East lies Kununurra, where native title questions have also just been settled after a decade-long fight.

Expansion of the Ord scheme, which already yields $57 million a year in irrigated produce from a single valley, could now revive. But the economic focus of the East is the Argyle diamond mine: it generates $450 million a year in income. Negotiations under way could prolong the mine's life and take it underground. If they succeed, a raft of creative regional development measures will be unleashed.

Matters, in other words, are interestingly poised, and many of the more reflective figures in the Kimberley accept that the region stands at a crossroads. The time for hewing the future from the land by brute force is gone: what will work is the application of intellect, and the subtle use of the region's advantages.

Even the most obvious of these are still largely untouched. Tourism and mining are in their infancy. Aquaculture is still more talked about than practised; pearling brings in $150 million a year from a few isolated sites. The Kimberley's jagged northern bays and headlands, which form one of the most remarkable and least-known coastlines of the world, beckon.

National park, or cruise-ship haven, or some combination of the two? Only 325,000 tourists visit the Kimberley each year, spending $237 million: the region may have the Bungle Bungles, but it awaits its well-organised Yulara resort. Even high-value visitor centres showcasing Aboriginal culture have been lacking until today: the first is being built in Mowanjum, near Derby.

This lack of development, despite the vast, obvious opportunity, is in part because of recent history: to be blunt, the Kimberley has been, for the past generation, contested terrain, with competing interest groups, mainstream and indigenous, projecting their priorities.

More than any other region of Australia, the Kimberley is Aboriginal - 47 per cent of the astonishingly youthful population (the average age is 28) is indigenous. With solid native title judgments at last emerging from the legal system, the way ahead for the Kimberley must be forged by co-operation between interest groups.

Hence the assortment of regional bodies beavering urgently away. The Kimberley Land Council recently celebrated its 25th year as a campaigning land rights organisation, but now finds it must adapt itself to a new kind of mission.

Its young executive director, Wayne Bergmann, is trying to set up joint ventures with developers, and speaks glowingly of inspiring examples from Canada's remote north: increasingly the preferred template for northern Australia. Bergmann envisages an era of co-operative nation-building, and aims to destroy the "sit-down mentality" in Aboriginal communities. He has work to do.

Much goodwill and hope for a new chapter seems to exist now throughout the mainstream Australian world of the Kimberley. Ruth Webb-Smith, chairwoman of the Kimberley division of the Pastoralists and Graziers' Association, longs to see a thriving indigenous cattle industry on the 33 Aboriginal-held (and mostly struggling) properties of the region - but she also believes the whole primary industry sector must rejuvenate itself: "The bottom line is sustainably developing business here so it creates employment," she says. "We have very skilled pastoral operators now, and environmental issues are to the forefront. But the Kimberley's still being made. The future's hardly been touched here, in terms of mining and population growth. We need, as a nation, to look at the strength of our presence here, and at the water resources we can use."

But it may be the Kimberley needs to develop, and communicate, a picture of itself before it can find the way ahead. George Gardiner, the cerebral retiring chairman of the Kimberley Development Commission, and one of the key figures in the Ord scheme, is a long-time visionary of the north. He insists the region will only find its true place when it is no longer being caught between divergent blueprints. "We have to work together," he says, "especially in a context where half our population are disadvantaged, and the other half are realising we can't be a stable community with that disparity."

Patrick Dodson will be the new KDC chairman. Gardiner's blueprint is idealistic and unsparing: it serves as a summation of the Kimberley's torments and its hopes: "The openings are there that will allow us to be inclusive. If you look across the landscape, you might go from a verdant, green development on the Ord, with its healthy rivers, to a major tourism focus on the Bungle Bungles, to intensified pastoralism, where you're almost farming the land round Halls Creek, to another irrigated project, on a smaller scale, round Fitzroy, and a range of small-scale, high-value mineral developments."

Instead of today's somewhat meagre commercial landscape, Gardiner glimpses a future with a range of great opportunities for both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people: "I see the next generation has the opportunity to do something good here which will add to the national benefit."

A vision, at last, worthy of the Kimberley's majestic landscape, and of its people.

[ IT'S the development challenge every nation-state would love to have: a vast region in its north, more than three times the size of England, yet almost unpopulated, with a mere 33,000 people. This region is filled to overflowing with nature's store of gifts: enormous supplies of water, rich reserves of minerals, fertile landscape, wide rivers, marine resources: it is a dramatic stretch of country, unlimited in its potential for tourism, pristine across large swaths, home to vividly surviving indigenous cultures. ]

We do its called... ALASKA.... Australia pales in comparison.. with more oil, natural gas, Coal of every type and vast mineral deposits covering the atomic chart... and other wealth beggaring description... is Alaska controlled by Alaska ?. the answer is NO... the federal government controls and by the way inhibits any development on most areas in the whole state.. even roads can't be built... when Alaska became a state the fed retained MOST of it for some utopian purpose with cliches' to match ... Alaska is still mostly a territory called a state... Alaska is almost as big as the entire western lower 48.. theres oil and coal and natural gas in Alaska nobody even knows for sure of yet.. but studies predict its there..

I don't usually post, but I happen to be an expert on the Kimberly wilderness. I went on an expedition in 2000 which began at the Drysdale Station, we floated on canoes for 250 kilometers, with no sign of human activity except for aborigional rock art...some of which was dated as being 40,000 years old. The best use for this region, in my opinion, would be eco-tourism. We all know this is a growing industry, and the Kimberly offers spectacular unadulterated Australian beauty. I doubt the Australian public would be keen to set up another uranium mine there either. Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy Oy Oy Oy!

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