University Colleges Australia

ABSTRACT This paper uses the capability approach to analyse renewable energy developments on Aboriginal land in Australia’s Pilbara and Kimberley regions. These regions in the north-west of Australia have very high rates of Indigenous land tenure, and are attractive for both solar and wind power generation, particularly as developing technology makes it economically feasible to transport power over large distances. They are also remote from Australia’s electricity networks and often rely on expensive fossil fuels for electricity generation. Resident Aboriginal communities are among the most income-poor in Australia yet live in regions rich in renewable energy. Their ability to benefit from the opportunities offered by a transition to renewable sources of energy varies according to a number of factors. This paper examines the conditions under which Indigenous capabilities may be enhanced or inhibited, through examining three scales of energy generation: large-scale developments for export; remote utility-owned networks; and small-scale standalone off-grid applications. This paper will ask what capabilities can Indigenous people achieve from a just approach to a renewable energy transition in northern Australia, and what capabilities are required in order to gain maximum benefit from this current rapid energy transition?

Leela Gandhi demonstrates that friendship is the lost trope in anticolonial thought. Following Gandhi, this article highlights a series of cross-cultural friendships between mostly Pākehā metropolitan dissidents in New Zealand and Pacific Island anticolonial actors in the early to mid-twentieth century. In doing so, this article sheds new light on the well-trodden histories of interwar resistance in Sāmoa (the Mau) and post-World War II agitation in the Cook Islands (the CIPA). While the symbolic act of cross-cultural, anticolonial friendship may have done much to undermine New Zealand’s colonial artifice, it was not enough to guarantee that disaffected Indigenous voices would be adequately heard.

Charles Henry Brian Priestley was born and educated in England. After completing the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge, he joined the Meteorological Office in 1939. For the next seven years he was engaged mostly in wartime work, including a two-year spell in Canada (1941–43) and three years with the Meteorological Office upper-air unit at Dunstable, UK (1943–46). In 1946, aged 31 years, he took up an Australian appointment with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (later to become the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)) to establish and develop a group to undertake research in meteorological physics. Thereafter he was based in Melbourne, Australia, with his career in the CSIRO extending to 1977. Priestley’s own early research focused on large-scale atmospheric systems, including substantial work on global-scale transport, and later on small-scale atmospheric convection and heat transfer, in which he established some significant results. He had a leading role in the development of the atmospheric sciences in Australia, and was strongly involved in international meteorology.