Walgett is located in northwest New South Wales. Over 60% of the town’s population of around 2,300 is of Aboriginal descent. With a few exceptions, they are from the Kamiraloi, Yuarralai, and Wiradjurai linguistic groups.
Walgett town was founded in 1835 on the banks of the Namoi river, near its junction with the Barwon river. The name Walgett is an Aboriginal name for the confluence of two rivers. It grew as a pastoral industry and grain farming centre until the 1960s. From then until the 1980s the industry became more mechanised and as a result almost all the Aboriginal people who worked as skilled fencers, boundary riders and shearers were put out of work. Upon becoming unemployed many Aboriginal people who had lived at Namoi Reserve, Gingi station and on the fringe of the town moved to live on a camping ground at the western end. Here, housing of New South Wales, a State Government Department, and Walgett Town Council built some houses which are now called “top camp” and “bottom camp”.
In the 1980s the Town Council built “Flash Town” near the airport outside the town where school teachers, police and doctors from the district hospital began to live. For Aboriginal people this “Flash Town” created a new contact zone with the wider “white” society; another point of contact away from the old town. The residents of “Flash Town” are educated and, due to their professions, have a good deal of influence on the town’s society (including Aboriginal people).
Thus there now exists an arrangement of three spaces of living and power within the town’s jurisdiction; the two Aboriginal “camps” at the western end, the white community of the town proper, and “Flash Town”. This organisation of space and people comes from and reflects the way this northwest corner of New South Wales was colonised after 1835. Ever since that date the Aboriginal population has been marginalised in its physical and power position in the town, the region, and in wider Australian society.

Key Words: Walgett, Kamiraloi, New South Wales, Local town

Key Words: Tibet, Lhasa, the 13th Dalai Lama

In the study of China’s rural development, anthropologists and other social scientists have tended to focus on changes in property rights, or changes in family planning and birth control policies. The literature has tended to treat each separately, as if they were unrelated. Economists and political scientists look at land policy, while demographers, sociologists and anthropologists look at family planning. Yet the two domains are, in real life, closely related as households attempt to match and manage their land and labor resources. Land and population policy and practice should thus be analyzed together. In this paper I bring together questions about land and family planning in relation to both policy and practice. I also examine the significance of lineage revival. I draw on my own fieldwork in rural north China and comparative material to examine local and regional variations and their significance.

* McGill University, Department of Anthropology

Key Words: China, Land, Population, Sex Ratio, Lineage