‘We are the ones who know the intimacies of the soil’: Grazier claims to belonging and changing land relations in Cape York Peninsula, Queensland

Abstract

Across Cape York Peninsula, the cattle grazing industry has declined in recent decades due to falling cattle prices, shorter wet seasons and land tenure changes. Remaining graziers perceive their status in the region as increasingly marginal and explain this precarity with the ‘locking up’ of Cape York land regimes and environments by National Parks and Aboriginal interests. Based on 14 months of ethnographic research in south-east Cape York conducted in 2018–2019, in this article I describe and analyse how graziers construct their claims to belonging in the region in response to land tenure changes. Drawing on recent scholarship on non-Indigenous forms of belonging in settler states and using the case study of one particular grazing family, I discuss how graziers position themselves as those who ‘know the intimacies of the soil’, as one grazier stated, due to multigenerational work on the land. Their claim to belonging tends to ignore prior Aboriginal occupation and instead emphasises their long-term relationships with local Aboriginal families, while the third main stakeholder in the region, Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service, is perceived as a kind of dispossessor representing non-local ‘Green’ ideologies and interests.