Scales of Coexistence : Tackling the Tension between Legal and Cultural Landscapes in Post - Mabo Australia Richie Howitt

Questions of coexistence are deeply geographical. They are about the challenges of being-together-in-place. My experience of working at some of the difficult interfaces between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia – mining, infrastructure development, cross-cultural negotiations and self-government – has shown that there are few customs in common. Peoples’ co-occupation of both space and time on the Australian continent has rarely produced deeply rooted commonality. In reflecting on this lack of commonality, this messy and discordant coexistence, I aim to be both provocative and constructive. I write explicitly from the vantage point of a professional geographer, not as a legal technician: I am a social scientist grappling with what I have come to think of as the fragile geographies of Australian coexistence, and the challenges of ontological pluralism in the places where Australians coexist.