Kirsty Howey | The University of Sydney (original) (raw)

Papers by Kirsty Howey

Science, Technology and Human Values, 2022

Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous e... more Despite widespread acceptance that their emissions accelerate climate change and its disastrous ecological effects, new fossil fuel extraction projects continue apace, further entrenching fossil fuel dependence, and thereby enacting particular climate futures. In this article, we examine how this is occurring in the case of a proposed onshore shale gas "fracking" industry in the remote Northern Territory of Australia, drawing on policy and legal documents and interviews with an enunciatory community of scientists, lawyers, activists, and policy makers to illustrate what we call "divisible governance." Divisible governance-enacted through technical maneuvers of temporal and jurisdictional risk fragmentation-not only facilitates the piecemeal entrenchment of unsustainable extraction but also sustains ignorance on the part of this enunciatory community and the wider public about the impacts of such extraction and the manner in which it is

How it started... Gurambai, which has come to be known by some as Rapid Creek, is on unceded Larr... more How it started... Gurambai, which has come to be known by some as Rapid Creek, is on unceded Larrakia Land. This zine acknowledges Elders past, present and emerging. In November 2020 A bunch of TopEndSTS members met online to workshop suggestions for the annual AusSTS conference event. We imagined a series of locally organised, place-based events in different sites around the country. Participants would travel to the events by foot or by bike or by car and would learn with local authorities, instead of fl ying around the country or overseas to listen to academic experts. Importantly, the events would be designed so that participants could engage and refl ect on the multiple and diverse histories, activities and events that make this place where we live. Fast forward to June 2021 The original TopEndSTS group who conceived this idea were scattered around Australia, but three events had come to life in Darwin. We began with a walkshop along Rapid Creek, led by Larrakia Elders Donna Jackson and Lorraine Williams. We started near the airport and walked a length of the river, experiencing place as not just 'already there' but as complex ancestral relations abutting and abrading with legal, military, ecological and personal forms of place-making. Then a fi lm event on the Nightcliff Foreshore where, sitting cross-legged on the ground with the sea breeze rolling off the ocean, we were transported to Gapuwiyak, East Arnhem Land, through Yolŋu ringtones thanks to Miyarrka Media, and to Michif country through the stop motion animation fi lms of Amanda Strong. Finally, to a workshop at Lakeside Drive Community Garden, where we shared food, stories and tea, as we walked with Nadine Lee and considered our responsibilities to Larrakia Land. It was through these events that Gurambai/Rapid Creek was brought to life by those who live here and shared their stories and experiences. They called up this place in both old ways and new, inviting engagement by those who travel here. This Zine This collection is comprised of pieces and meditations on Gurambai/ Rapid Creek emerging out of our events. They both report on-and call upelements of people-place making, as an act of engaging with old and new friends of Rapid Creek, within and beyond academia, and for those who live here (and those who don't).

Australian Book Review, 2021

Kirsty Howey reviews 'Dead in the Water: A very angry book about our great environmental catastro... more Kirsty Howey reviews 'Dead in the Water: A very angry book about our great environmental catastrophe... the death of the Murray Darling Basin' by Richard Beasley

Australasian Journal of Water Resources, 2021

Drinking water security has been a neglected issue in Australian water reform. This article consi... more Drinking water security has been a neglected issue in Australian water reform. This article considers Australia's chief water policy of the past two decades, the National Water Initiative, and its aim to provide healthy, safe, and reliable water supplies. Taking the Northern Territory as a case study, we describe how despite significant policy and research attention, the NWI has failed to ensure drinking water security in Indigenous communities in the NT, where water supply remains largely unregulated. The article describes shortcomings of legislated drinking water protections, the recent history of Commonwealth water policy, and areas where national reforms have not been satisfactorily undertaken in the NT. We aim to highlight key regulatory areas that require greater attention in NT water research and, more specifically, in the Productivity Commission's ongoing inquiry process.

Learning Communities Journal , 2020

Wealth from extractive development has been at the forefront of political aspirations for the Nor... more Wealth from extractive development has been at the forefront of political aspirations for the Northern Territory of Australia (NT), and of northern Australia more broadly, for many decades. According to political, bureaucratic and industry rhetoric, the north is insufficiently developed to reach its full potential. The most recent iteration of this development agenda has been catalysed by the Commonwealth Government's White Paper on "Developing the North". Eschewing the usual frames for analysing 'development,' this paper proposes that northern development can be seen as a going on together doing differences with development "objects.' It mobilises a ground-up STS to understand what such objects are in an unorthodox way, as socio-material entities.

Australian Geographer, 2020

This article considers the spatial and material implications of drinking water regulation in the ... more This article considers the spatial and material implications of drinking water regulation in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. Responding to water contamination and scarcity events in remote NT communities, we argue that the politicobureaucratic edifice of uniform drinking water governance and service provision across the NT is a state-curated fiction. The article outlines the available legislative protections for drinking water supply in the NT, which include minimum quality standards, water allocation mechanisms, testing regimes, and so on. These are shown to vary significantly between geographic locations and we argue that this produces a racialised ‘archipelago’ of differentiated islands of drinking water governance (Bakker 2003. “Archipelagos and Networks: Urbanization and Water Privatization in the South.” The Geographical Journal 169 (4): 328–341). Using the Gulf country town of Borroloola as a case study, the article then examines the colonial and land rights bases of this spatial variegation, and its significance for drinking water infrastructure provision and remediation. In doing so, we consider how the entropic materialities of ageing infrastructures work to further confound effective drinking water regulations and their practical enactments. The article argues that it is crucial to understand the limits of drinking water regulation in the NT, in order to elucidate the racialised distribution of potential environmental harms, and to mitigate further toxic inheritances.

Policy Forum, 2020

The Northern Territory Home Improvement Scheme (HIS) is underway, with applications submitted, as... more The Northern Territory Home Improvement Scheme (HIS) is underway, with applications submitted, assessments in process, vouchers awarded, and job lists compiled.
Established to ease the economic burden of the coronavirus pandemic, and with a Northern Territory (NT) election scheduled for August, the HIS aims to support the construction industry by subsidising residential housing upgrades. By using the HIS, the public are “helping save a Territorian’s job,” Treasurer Nicole Manison said.

Sydney Environment Institute, 2020

Many remote Australian communities regularly experience water contamination and supply failures, ... more Many remote Australian communities regularly experience water contamination and supply failures, shortfalls which are often excused with localised factors like droughts or infrastructural damage. However, Kirsty Howey and Liam Grealy argue that this “archipelagic” water governance is symptomatic of a wider climate justice issue that privileges certain populations over others.

Transformations, 2020

Native title agreement-making or "contractualism" has become one of the dominant legible frames b... more Native title agreement-making or "contractualism" has become one of the dominant legible frames by which to understand Indigenous-settler relations in Australia, simultaneously providing benefits to Aboriginal groups yet constraining opportunities to configure these relations differently (Neale). In this paper, I examine the very first mining agreement of its kind in Australia: the Ranger uranium mine agreement negotiated in 1978. Borrowing Russian literary theorist Bakhtin's analytic, I argue that the agreement is a "chronotope" with specific spatiotemporal dimensions. I focus on two key temporalities of the chronotope-the urgent temporality of development authorisation that conditions how, when and where agreements are produced, and the forward-looking "temporal inertia" that prospectively embeds these practices as precedents to be replicated in future mining negotiations. These two temporal logics shaped and were shaped by the spatial dynamics of the institutions tasked with negotiating the agreement, as events shifted back and forth between different venues. Exploring "how different legal times create or shape legal spaces and vice versa" (Valverde 17) reveals the productive and hegemonic conditions of the agreement chronotope in Indigenous-state relations in Australia as well as the compromised conditions for Indigenous institutional survival in the entropic north of Australia and beyond.

What legal, policy, political, and administrative work is required to build houses in remote Indi... more What legal, policy, political, and administrative work is required to build houses in remote Indigenous communities? This article examines the promise of housing for Borroloola, in northern Australia, and the situation of deferral and delay that residents endure. In particular, it shows the extensive governmental work involved in presiding over sites of neglect.

Crikey, 2019

After a spate of drinking water contamination incidents in remote communities in the Northern Ter... more After a spate of drinking water contamination incidents in remote communities in the Northern Territory, we ask "what legal protections and governance regimes do exist for drinking water in the NT?" There are significant limits and gaps in the current regime. To summarise, under the legislation that applies to drinking water in the NT, there is no general provision or power to reserve water for current and future drinking water supply against other uses. Further, there are no mandated minimum standards set for water quality across the NT. Finally, different legal regimes govern how drinking water is supplied depending on residence in the NT, privileging urban and town populations over Indigenous communities and outstations located on Aboriginal land.

Available here: https://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2019/05/31/are-there-legal-protections-for-drinking-water-in-the-northern-territory/

Australian Environment Review, 2019

We revisit the contentious history of environmental authorisation and regulation at McArthur Rive... more We revisit the contentious history of environmental authorisation and regulation at McArthur River Mine, asking whether the unfolding environmental impacts of the mine are capable of being understood by the regulators, let alone managed. We note that even the NT EPA seems unable to comprehend how the mine, which on the company's own admission will need to be monitored for over 1000 years, can be closed and eventually rehabilitated.

EASST Review, 2019

Pushed by the experience of two recent STS conferences and the realisation that a "hub" of STS re... more Pushed by the experience of two recent STS conferences and the realisation that a "hub" of STS research was developing in northern Australia, the authors discuss the emergence of "TopEndSTS", explaining how it evokes a sense of situated research which includes and engages disparate climatic environments, complex interplays of connection and ‘remoteness’, and the co-presence of many differing Western and Indigenous modes of people-place making.

Drawing on campaigns waged and administrative burdens managed by the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corpor... more Drawing on campaigns waged and administrative burdens managed by the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation (GAC) in Kakadu National Park to manage the effects of existing uranium mining and further proposed mining, this article draws attention to some of the techniques and coalitions that GAC has created to manage its would-be managers. It uses the case of monitoring the operations and particularly the rehabilitation of the Ranger Uranium mine and of halting the opening of a second mine, known as Jabiluka, to consider the less conspicuous paperwork battles that take place amid and in the aftermath of these public battles. In considering these contests, we argue that the double valency of holding to account needs to be considered, to avoid dichotomising Indigenous people as either co-opted by or opposed to administration, a bifurcation which fails to recognize the complexity and inevi-tability of contemporary Indigenous management regimes. This is neither a celebration of Indigenous counter-administration, nor a false positing of Aboriginal alternatives to institutionalized worlds. Concluding , we note that when the organizational toil of drawing the locus of power in decision-making towards Aboriginal interests is made apparent, the notion that there is an alternative to institutional-ized forces of settler colonialism, represented by Indigenous resistance, is complicated. We mark this organizational work as evidencing the unrelenting nature of administrative violence under active colonization.

$Research paper thumbnail of "Cement: materialities and temporalities of fracking in northern Australia" Sydney Environment Institute http://sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/blog/cement-materialities-temporalities-fracking-northern-australia/$

I consider the historical and cultural circumstances underpinning the Northern Territory's weak e... more I consider the historical and cultural circumstances underpinning the Northern Territory's weak environmental assessment laws, including the way the North's buoyant development narrative was simultaneously given life and confounded by political events in the 1970s, and principally the enactment of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cth) on the eve of self-government. I argue that the importance of "northern development" mythology to the NT's political identity, and its imagined opposition to both Aboriginal land rights and environmental regulation in northern political discourse, has been a key factor hindering far-reaching environmental reform to date.

In this article, I explore the concept of stops and starts by describing the negotiation of the s... more In this article, I explore the concept of stops and starts by describing the negotiation of the settlement of the 40 year old Kenbi land claim (lodged under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976), and briefly reflect upon the multiplicity of turning points during this phase (the watersheds), and the times the whole thing seemed to grind to a halt (the waterlogs).