Tasting the Waters

This article focuses on the pattern of sea ownership in the north of Blue Mud Bay in Arnhem Land, north Australia. Detailed research into the specificities of sea and land ownership in the region has revealed a more complex pattern than has previously been supposed to exist. It is nonetheless one that can be accommodated within previous models of estate ownership in Australia. In the article we seek to explain the pattern of ownership observed according to ontological (mythological), ecological and sociological factors. We argue that these factors are relatively autonomous and act as co-determiners of a system that is both flexible and structured. We argue that the Yolngu view that land/sea ownership is ancestrally determined is entirely congruent with evidence of the long-term stability of the system of relationships between groups over time, in particular given that the Yolngu perspective includes ancestrally sanctioned processes of succession. We show how, through the rhetoric of sea ownership and the metaphoric discourse in which relationships between different estate areas are embedded, the land/seascape serves as an underlying template for spiritual and social relationships which simultaneously underlie, and emerge through, social action.