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and/or may relate to the way that Aboriginal voices were largely repre-
sented by other semi-professionalized voices. In either case, it suggests
that the categories are not very helpful in furthering the analysis where the
Aboriginal discourse is concerned.
A similar point can be made about the discourses of the independent
scientists and the residents of Wattle Hills. The independent scientists
adopted a strong critique of contemporary industrialism. This very much
put them on the borders between a reformist and a radical discourse. It
certainly distanced them from the more i rmly pro-status-quo stance of
the government scientists. And while, like the government scientists, they
remained prosaic rather than imaginative in their discourse, it did make it
dii cult to simply assign the independent scientists to either the problem-
solving or survivalism category. The Wattle Hills story-line emphasized
the need to 'let nature take its course'. Policies promoting i re were seen as
misleading and neglectful of life, reverence for life being of primary impor-
tance. This suggests a radical, imaginative departure from industrialism
that i ts within Dryzek's dei nition of 'green radicalism' (Dryzek, 1997). In
much of their more specii c discussion of management practices, however,
the discourse of the Wattle Hills residents is distinctly prosaic, suggesting
a place in the survivalism category instead.
Indeed, only the government scientists (clearly a prosaic reformist
discourse of problem-solving) and the pastoralists (an imaginative but
reformist discourse of sustainability) fall clearly into one box of Dryzek's
typology. This can be interpreted in two ways. Either the typology fails
the 'ideal type' test and is not a useful analytic tool. Or the lack of discur-
sive clarity of some of the actors' discourses may be a signii cant factor in
explaining the pattern of discursive coalition formation and the success
or failure of individual actors to achieve discursive inl uence. Before con-
cluding on this, however, the second part of Dryzek's framework deserves
consideration.
This concerns the detailed social constructivist/rhetorical analysis of
the discourses. Some, but by no means all of this analysis is summarized
in Table 6.3. What is immediately evident here is the wealth of detail that
such an analysis of ers. Furthermore, such an analysis is able to incor-
porate more of the emotional impact of the dif erent discourses. The
emphasis on story-lines, while couched in terms of narrative rather than
logic, still privileges an account of connections and makes little reference
to the language in which the narrative is delivered. Much of the impact
of language is not just to be found in the plot of the story being told but
in how that story is told. It is here that rhetorical analysis in particular
demonstrates its strengths.
Starting with the Aboriginal discourse, the key entities here are
