"It is widely acknowledged that indigenous communities in Australia are in crisis (Dodson, 2003), and increasingly that this is a crisis of governance. Anthropological analysis of pre-colonial Aboriginal political life has characterised it as?ordered anarchy? (Hia tt, 1998). The introduction of order into anarchy results from the tension between relatedness and autonomy mediated by an ideology of nurturing (Myers, 1986). Colonisation of Australia resulted in the coercion of Aboriginal people into settlements - either missions or pastoral enterprises. Since de jure emancipation settlements have been nominally under Aboriginal control (see Sullivan 1996). The conundrum for post-colonial public policy in Australia, that this paper addresses, is how to effectively service Aboriginal peoples needs, encourage the good governance that self-determination requires, institute regimes of respect for civil and human rights within these communities and still remain sensitive to the fact of a continuing lively Aboriginal culture informed by pre-colonial forms of sociality. The Harvard Project on Indian Economic Development (US) appears to hold out the hope of a postcolonial indigenised governance attractive to both government and indigenous interests. It proposes that there are three pre-requisites for development in indigenous communities: sovereignty, good institutions (meaning, in this instance, good management), and cultural match (Jorgensen and Taylor, 2000; Cornell, 2002; Dodson and Smith, 2003). This paper takes the Harvard project?s prescriptions as problems rather than solutions and asks whether they are reconcilable with Aboriginal political life on the one hand, and contemporary views of intersubjective social relations on the other (eg Jackson, 1998). indigenous communities are clearly embedded in post-colonial settler relations in multiple ways (see Kymlicka?s summary of this view 2001:22; Waldron, 1992). Authority in indigenous life, as much as in post-colonial administration, is layered, contextual, contested and continuously subject to exegesis such that both the totality of the settler state and the essentialised nature of indigenous groups that confront it are called in question. This paper looks for ways of meeting three competing aims: effective indigenous governance, respect for indigenous culture, and acknowledgement of the need for human and civil rights within indigenous communities that reflect that they are embedded in wider socialites" [Taken from abstract].