Past times are constructed times and thus contestable. Our view of the past is strongly rooted in the present. The questions we ask and the histories we write are shaped by who we are, what we know and what issues we face in the present, as well as by the events of the past and what we can know of them from fragmentary records. These very records are the products of other minds in the past written for particular purposes and from particular viewpoints, so we have layer upon layer of constructed knowledge to peel back in our pursuit of the past (Broome 1994b, p. 70).
Introduction
TO DISCUSS COMMUNITY development is to engage with a term that has its foundations in Western ideology and epistemology. Within an Indigenous Australian context, before colonisation, this raises the question: Did community development as a process take place pre-colonisation and, if so, what did it look like? Was it similar or different to current Western understandings and processes? Living in today's society and modern world, we may never know the answer to these questions but what we can do is examine community development principles through an Aboriginal lens and provide some insight into what community development might have looked like in pre-colonial times and compare it with the present-day situation.
‘Community development’ is a concept that is widely used and applied across the world, resulting in many definitions and different ways of doing and practising community development. According to Ife (2009), even the term ‘community’ is problematic. He argues that before discussing community development it is essential to discuss what we mean by the term community and to identify ‘what it is that we are aiming to “develop”’ (Ife 2009, p. 9). ‘Community’ encompasses a wide range of uses as a term – it describes groups that are perceived as forming a community but can be diverse in their make-up, purpose, geographical location, language, interests and/or gender.
‘Development’ can also mean different things to different people. In discussing development, Ife (2009) points out that the term can have positive as well as not-so-positive associations. It has been used in a variety of ways, some of which have not always been approved or accepted by the people who have been the subjects of the development process.
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