Dependency, extractivism and Indigenous voices: understanding peripheralisation processes in northern Australia

Australia’s persistent and highly politicised ‘develop the North’ paradigm has long existed within a contested space, demonstrating classical features of sociospatial peripheralisation. Development aspirations applied to northern Australia have coalesced around often competing desires for economic development via the exploitation of natural resources, an expansion of environmental conservation and closing the socioeconomic indicator gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. At the same time, the peripheralisation literature has been criticised as only being weakly attendant to issues of race, gender, class and the environment, and under-theorised in relation to dimensions of dependency and extractivism. Here, we seek to explore and adapt the concept of sociospatial peripheralisation with the aim of (i) refining our theoretical understanding of peripheralisation processes as they relate to dependency, and (ii) assisting us in thinking through more dependency-sensitive policy interventions and transformation pathways in northern Australia. Taking a multiple geographies perspective, we highlight the enhanced analytical power of the peripheralisation concept when supplemented with insights from postcolonial geography and extractivism research, in turn creating space for the consideration of more constructive transformation pathways in northern Australia.