When I meet Rodney Scott Dillon in April, he is lounging on the front porch of his residence in Tasmania’s Lower Snug, overlooking the boats bobbing in Snug Bay at low tide. After decades of run-ins with law enforcement and going head-to-head with the Australian government, the 66-year-old Palawa elder—who traces his ancestry from northeast Tasmania—now has a seat at not one, but two tables. He is presiding over the Referendum Working Group, which aims to establish a permanent Indigenous voice in the Australian parliament. He’s also leading the first commercial fisheries program run by Australian Aboriginals.
“I lay dog-eyed for 10 years saying, ‘I’m not going to criticize the government at every chance that I get,’” Dillon says. “‘I’m just going to try and work with them.’”
Dillon successfully led a decade-long negotiation with the Tasmanian state government, backed up by a six-year study on Aboriginal leadership in fisheries management led by Emma Lee, an associate professor at Swinburne University and a descendant of the Trawlwulwuy people, one of the oldest Tasmanian Aboriginal clans. The government ultimately granted a three-year lease for 40 quota units of abalone (9 tons a year) to the Land and Sea Aboriginal Corporation of Tasmania. The agreement is the first of its kind, giving commercial fishing rights to the Aboriginal community, who up until then only had rights to fishing for sustenance and practicing their customary traditions.
Lee says the Tasmanian fishery agreement is also helping to change the perception of Aboriginal communities from “fish people” to leaders in regional development. By being a part of the AUD $136 million fishery that has so long excluded them, Lee says, Aboriginal communities hope to establish fisheries food tourism in Tasmania; to use cultural fisheries to reduce juvenile justice interventions for Aboriginals; and to turn commercial fisheries into social impact ventures.