Caging the Rainbow

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

“…In scholarship that perhaps begins in the Manchester School's urban ethnography in Central Africa (Mitchell ; cf. Ferguson ) it has become almost a truism that forms of urban migration may amplify forms of ethnic, class, or Indigenous identity, resignifying perhaps but not dissolving their value and importance (in Australia see Cowlishaw and Merlan ; Goddard for PNG; Goldstein for Bolivia; Hartigan for Urban North America). This broad literature often also describes the political and cultural work entailed in signifying the urban and the remote, the city and the country.…”

“…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 ).…”

“…Similar forms of urban camping and Aboriginal town life have received attention in monographs by Basil Sansom () for Darwin, Jeff Collman () for Alice Springs, and Francesca Merlan () for Katherine . Sansom aimed in this work to describe the strategies and forms of enduring cultural practice embraced by Aboriginal people then newly cut adrift by changes in labor law and conditions of stock work and rationing in remote and rural areas of the Northern Territory.…”

“…For at least the last decade long grass camping has been a site of anxious concern on the part of non‐Indigenous Darwinites. Campers are frequently figured in conversation and in local press as drunks and criminals, and even those more sympathetic to Indigenous people's presence in Darwin may describe campers with the local, evocative term ‘runamoks.’ In part these anxieties must be seen as historically coextensive with long standing settler concerns around ‘fringe dwellers’ and town campers, concerns that stretch far back into settler colonial history (see Collman ; Jacobs ; Merlan ). And yet, transformations in Darwin's property market and the increased value of tourism in local estimations of Darwin's prosperity have amplified the need to address the ‘public nuisance’ and ‘antisocial behavior’ that black bodies in Darwin's streets can represent for non‐Indigenous residents (Fisher ; Lea et al.…”

Other‐than‐humans and the remaking of the social

“…Similar ontological transitions have been described in other Australian ethnography. Writing about Jawoyn people in the Katherine region, Merlan says that ‘experiential remove from country’ has contributed to generational differences: while older individuals have ‘feeling‐complexes’ associated with country which are ‘vital and personally felt’, younger people's ‘sense of country had been shaped at least as much within a framework of developing Western institutional influences as in some socio‐spatial experience of their elders’ (: 113). Burbidge, too, writes of generational change amongst Wiradjuri, suggesting that ‘Wiradjuri subjectivity is shifting’, linking this with ‘the bush’ now being ‘associated with new meanings of country and land ownership’ (: 426).…”