‘This Thing Moves Underground’: Fracking and Indigenous Subsurface Cultural Heritage in Northern Australia

This article addresses fracking and subsurface Indigenous cultural heritage protection in northern Australia. Drawing on 1260 public submissions made to the Scientific Inquiry into Hydraulic Fracturing in the Northern Territory, we think through the implications of the Inquiry’s recommendation that the Aboriginal Sacred Sites (Northern Territory) Act be amended to ensure all subsurface features of Aboriginal sacred sites are protected from future fracking activities. We pay particular attention to the ways in which the Inquiry sought to make cultural alterity legible within the confines of the political order. The subsurface takes us literally and figuratively into unchartered territory, bringing a sense of incommensurability to the legislative delineation of chthonic imaginaries and their oneiric and rhizomatic qualities. While the Indigenous expression ‘this thing moves underground’ captures the ambiguous, dynamic and relatively diffuse components of Indigenous chthonic imaginaries in northern Australia, the protection of circumscribed sacred sites may also have an atrophying effect that impacts this very subsurface movement.