Being Moved (On)

Abstract

This article explores contemporary tactics of dispossession in the still-frontier towns of Alice Springs and Darwin in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia, using the politics of walking to bring what was considered a past act of colonial incursion into conditions of the present. Much of the historical material on Australian race relations deploys accounts of violent massacres, authorized dispossessions, and cruel imprisonments to depict the frontier politics of liberal settler occupation. Certainly the settlement histories of Darwin and Alice Springs lend themselves to such renditions. Within the desert and tropical savannah hinterlands, settlers poisoned and destroyed food sources, cleared vegetation, subdivided land, brutally monopolized precious water supplies, and dragooned a lumpenproletariat of semitrained Aboriginal workers into pastoral and mission-led enterprises. Crude attempts at assimilation followed earlier attempts to "breed out the black." The spatiality of colonization mimicked the demarcations of European imperialism elsewhere: an apartheid system of curfews and restricted movements prevailed until well after World War II. Only then were the legal rights of Aboriginal people to fair and equal treatment as citizens of Australia increasingly reflected in changing regulatory and resourcesharing agreements. With the constitutional referendum of 1967, when Australians voted to confer greater legal status to Aboriginal people (essentially conferring the

Becoming the State in Northern Australia: Urbanisation, Intra‐Indigenous Relatedness, and the State Effect

“…They also suggest that we ask what sort of cities and towns campers, migrants, or ‘itinerants’ may in fact make – not just in the image of our own categories, but as a result of their own practices, relationships, and social understandings (see also Cowlishaw ; Lea et al. ; Merlan ).…”

“…This latter emphasizes the structural paradoxes which underwrite efforts to care for campers, and the obstacles facing Aboriginal people in Darwin in both bush spaces and in regimes of housing and institutional intervention (Lea et al. ). Further demographic work has also stressed the forms of ‘temporary mobility’ that contribute to the Northern Territory's particular form of urbanisation (Prout ; Taylor and Carson ).…”

“…To go into state supported housing in the Territory is to become subjected to the powers of a postcolonial state (see Lea et al. ) and to become more susceptible to regimes of police oversight and intervention (cf. Collman ).…”

“…While such work exemplifies the holistic, wide ranging interests of long term ethnographic research, more recent applied work has taken a more instrumental approach in figuring town camping as a kind of homelessness and stressing the ways that campers take to the long grass to avoid significant violence and social drama in home communities (Holmes and McRae-Williams 2009;Memmott and Fantin 2001). Such research overlaps with critical analytical work that focuses on the codependency of long grass campers' mobility and vulnerability with the broader service delivery and development regime of the Northern Territory (Lea 2006;Lea et al 2012). This latter emphasizes the structural paradoxes which underwrite efforts to care for campers, and the obstacles facing Aboriginal people in Darwin in both bush spaces and in regimes of housing and institutional intervention (Lea et al 2012).…”

“…Such research overlaps with critical analytical work that focuses on the codependency of long grass campers' mobility and vulnerability with the broader service delivery and development regime of the Northern Territory (Lea 2006;Lea et al 2012). This latter emphasizes the structural paradoxes which underwrite efforts to care for campers, and the obstacles facing Aboriginal people in Darwin in both bush spaces and in regimes of housing and institutional intervention (Lea et al 2012). Further demographic work has also stressed the forms of 'temporary mobility' that contribute to the Northern Territory's particular form of urbanisation (Prout 2008;Taylor and Carson 2009).…”