River grabbing from the source: groundwater extraction and the self-perpetuating colonial practices of dispossession in Australia's Northern Territory

Indigenous people of the Roper River in Australia's Northern Territory (NT) have strong legal rights to most of the land through which the river flows, including its bed and banks. Yet the settler-colonial state asserts control over its waters, whether flowing across or under the surface of the land. We show that the Northern Territory government has applied lessons from its colonial history of land grabbing to thwart Indigenous claims to water, including those established via the Aboriginal Water Reserve, a mechanism of settler water law. Our focus is on regulatory procedures in the Mataranka region, where groundwater extraction is occurring on a scale that puts at stake the very existence of the Roper River and its complex of sacred springs and wetlands and threatens to undermine vital socio-cultural practices. A river grabbing frame centres the river as a living, socially unifying, and hydrologically interconnected entity. It moves the focus of justice struggles from water conceived as a disembedded, divisible resource to the relations that underlie settler-colonial state domination. Here, river grabbing is materialised through rampant water hoarding, speculation and over-extraction, which are legitimised by a racialized system of water governance that entrenches and protects non-Indigenous water use. We contribute to literature on the political contingencies of dispossession by showing how the administrative exercise of state power in water planning and allocation processes perpetuates a colonial mode of extraction that denies Indigenous peoples' legitimate expectations for water rights and real power to make decisions over the region's future.