Contents -- Bill Day Thesis -- ABORIGINAL FRINGE DWELLERS IN DARWIN

Aboriginal fringe dwellers in Darwin:
cultural persistence or culture of resistance?

Contents

Chapter one

Aboriginal fringe dwellers in Darwin: cultural persistence or a
culture of resistance?

1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 The influence of the Darwin area on anthropological theory 4
1.3 A multi-sited study 10
1.4 Cultural continuities or culture of opposition? 11
1.5 The ‘political’ and the ‘cultural’ 15
1.6 Transitive and intransitive resistance 17
1.7 The politics of culture 19
1.8 Essentialism 20
1.9 Why do fringe dwellers resist? 25
1.10 Resistance in ‘colonial’ Australia 39
Endnotes 41

Chapter two 45

‘Itinerants’ or at home in their land? Defining the fringe.

2.1 Introduction 45
2.2 Clarifying definitions 46
2.3 Long grass people 48
2.4 The itinerants and transients 50
2.5 Media representations of ‘itinerants’ from 1996 53
2.6 ‘Transients’, ‘itinerants’ and ‘homeless drifters’ 54
2.7 ‘Sit down’ and ‘lie down’ camps 55
2.8 Reserves 57
2.9 Town camps 59
2.10 Fringe or town camp? 60
2.11 Fringe dwellers 62
Endnotes 64

Chapter three 65

Locating the field: Fish Camp in context

3.1 Introduction 65
3.2 Fieldwork and the ‘itinerant problem’ 66
3.3 The role of the anthropologist 69
3.4 ‘Finding’ a field site 74
3.5 The establishment of Fish Camp 76
3.6 Fish Camp and Lee Point 1996 80
3.7 Making contact 84
3.8 Fish Camp and the media, 1996 88
3.9 Legitimisation: the case of the Railway Dam camp 93
Endnotes 96

Chapter four   99

Revisiting The camp at Wallaby Cross: a definitive work or
‘jus lotta talk’?

4.1 Introduction   99
4.2 The Knuckeys Lagoon mob: 1971-1997 101
4.3 Cyclone Tracy, the mob and Sansom 106
4.4 The Interim Aboriginal Land Commissioner 108
4.5 The Aboriginal Development Foundation (ADF)
       and fringe dwellers 110
4.6 The mob in 1997 114
4.7 Sansom’s ‘anthropology of return’ 115
4.8 A segregated social field? 117
4.9 Process over structure 120
4.10 Sansom and Rowley 122
4.11 Witnessing 123
4.12 ‘Living longa grog’? 124
4.13 Did the mob at Knuckeys Lagoon use the ‘skin system’
of social categories? 125
4.14 Performative relationships and the Dreaming Powers 128
4.15 Fringe dwellers and the economy 133
4.16 The fringe dwellers’ attachment to place 135
4.17 Bush workers and army camps 136
4.18 On-and-off marriages 139
4.19 Analysing Sansom’s texts 141
Endnotes 149

Chapter five 154

Reaching across difference: the Burarra people of central Arnhem Land

5.1 Introduction 154
5.2 Some observations of life at Fish Camp: 1996-8 160
5.3 Early contact 167
5.4 The Reserves 168
5.5 The ‘drift’ to Darwin. 171
5.6 Maningrida 1957-1999 173
5.7 Maningrida and assimilation 175
5.8 The outstation movement 176
5.9 Unrest amongst Darwin Aborigines in the 1950s 183
5.10 The An-barra Rom exchange ceremony 185
5.11 The Burarra fringe dwellers in Darwin 188
5.12 Resistance as engagement 193
5.13 Ganma and merging 194
Endnotes 197

Chapter six 201

Fringe dweller engagement with representatives of the state.

6.1 Introduction 201
6.2 Previous contact with government and its agencies 203
6.3 NT Government, Local Government and fringe dwellers 205
6.4 Bob Bunduwabi at Lee Point 208
6.5 Bob Bunduwabi’s complaint to the Anti-Discrimination
Commission 213
6.6 The Lee Point protest, 1996 217
6.7 Fighting the threat of eviction 224
6.8 The reply from Lands, Planning and Environment 229
6.9 How notions of equality discriminate against fringe dwellers 231
6.10 The death of Bob Bunduwabi 233
6.11 The combined fringe camp protest at Parliament House 239
6.12 The return to Parliament House 245
6.13 Another Anti-Discrimination Commission complaint 248
6.14 The NT Health Department, a TB outbreak and fringe dwellers 254
6.15 The struggle continues 256
6.16 Another Parliament House protest: August 3, 2001 259
Endnotes 269

Chapter seven 274

‘A conflict of interest’: Fringe dwellers and Aboriginality

7.1 Introduction 274
7.2 Fringe dwellers in the context of the Sutton vs Sansom debate 277
7.3 Fish Camp and the Kulaluk land owners 273
7.4 The Larrakia. 289
7.5 The Larrakia native title claim 292
7.6 Supporting the Larrakia 298
7.7 Native title extinguished 301
7.8 Fish Camp and representative groups 304
7.8.1 Northern Land Council 305
7.8.2 North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service 307
7.8.3 ATSIC 310
7.9 Conclusion 312
Endnotes 314

Chapter eight 318

Blurring the boundaries: Fish Camp gives a barbecue.

8.1 Introduction 318
8.2 An Aboriginal domain? 319
8.3 ‘The white Aborigines of Darwin’ 322
8.4 Fish Camp holds a barbecue 329
8.5 May Day 330
8.6 The Arafura Games 331
8.7 The second return to Lee Point, May 1997 332
8.8 The Mormons 342
8.9 Senator Bob Brown launches the Greens election campaign
at Fish Camp 345
8.10 ‘Rights On Show’: The Human Rights Art Exhibition 348
8.11 Waak Waak Jungi at the Festival of Darwin 349
8.12 The role of music 350
Endnotes 354

Chapter nine 358

Alcohol and race in the Territory: the case of the Beer Can Regatta

9.1 Introduction 358
9.2 Alcohol and citizenship 360
9.3 The decriminalisation of drunkenness 363
9.4 The Beer Can Regatta 366
9.5 The Beer Can Regatta in 1996 and 1997 372
9.6 The 2-kilometre law 374
9.7 An Aboriginal Club 376
9.8 Profiting from Aboriginal drinking 378
9.9 Drinking on the fringe in the 1990s 380
9.10 The ‘spin dry’ 383
9.11 The ethnography of Aboriginal drinking 383
9.12 Alcohol and resistance: another view 389
Endnotes 394

Chapter ten 397

Persistence or resistance?

10.1 Introduction 397
10.2 Summary of chapters 397
10.3 Persistence or resistance? 401
Endnotes 406

Abstract

From 1971 to 1979 I supported the campaign for land and housing by homeless Aboriginal fringe dwellers from many language groups who were living in on vacant Crown land in unserviced shelters they had constructed of scavenged materials in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, Australia. Many of them had been born in the city, while others had migrated from surrounding areas or more remote regions of the Territory. During the 1970s, and until I left Darwin in 1985, I was impressed by the courage of these Aboriginal people in confronting public and government hostility to their claims.

I returned to Darwin in 1996 to begin fieldwork for a PhD thesis, to determine how Aboriginal fringe dwellers in Darwin order their lives in their bush land camps. Was this ordering best described as ‘cultural continuities in a world of material change’, as Basil Sansom claims in his 1980 ethnography, The camp at Wallaby Cross: Aboriginal fringe dwellers in Darwin? Or is cultural reproduction amongst Aboriginal people in towns always in a context of opposition, as Gillian Cowlishaw concluded in rural New South Wales? Can Aboriginal fringe dwellers in Darwin be better understood through theoretical frameworks that stress cultural persistence or those which emphasise resistance?

In academic debates, these dichotomous perspectives are sometimes referred to as the ‘cultural’ and the ‘political’ approaches. The former approach is criticised for neglecting indigenous people’s engagement with the wider social, economic and political world. The latter is criticised for incorporating indigenous people into a Western discourse by prioritising a materialist analysis. My intention was to examine the appropriateness of these approaches amongst the Aboriginal people of Darwin who had continued to maintain camps in urban bush land and on town beaches despite harassment campaigns by Local and Northern Territory Governments.

My study is in the context of an invading socio-economic system rather than the segregated social field described by Sansom. In a critique of Sansom’s conclusions after his fieldwork amongst Darwin fringe dwellers between 1975 and 1977, I find that relatively fixed traditional Aboriginal social structures account for cultural continuities in the fringe camps more than the flexible processes described by Sansom as typical of Northern Australia. Traditional values are also the basis of the ‘oppositional culture’ amongst fringe dwellers. I also suggest that resistance by Aboriginal fringe dwellers involves a greater political awareness than is apparent in the everyday Aboriginal ‘oppositional culture’ described by Cowlishaw in New South Wales country towns.

My evidence suggests that, rather than constituting a closure of the Aboriginal domain, as described in other studies, resistance amongst Aboriginal fringe dwellers can be interpreted as engagement with the dominant society, in a process which I describe as ‘merging’. My conclusions are drawn from fieldwork examples of conflict between the Northern Territory Government and Aboriginal fringe dwellers and the more successful interaction between sympathetic non-Aboriginal people in Darwin and the fringe campers that continued into late 2001.

The struggle by fringe dwellers for space in Darwin is placed in the context of the native title claim over vacant Crown land in Darwin made during my fieldwork by the Larrakia people, who claim to be the Aboriginal traditional owners of the Darwin region. Despite a supposed conflict of interest between the fringe dwellers and the Larrakia people, I suggest that the interests of the two groups are not necessarily in opposition under Western law or in Aboriginal customary law.

Finally, I focus on the opposition between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal drinking in Darwin and its association with dispossession. I argue that a study of the origins of the Darwin Beer Can Regatta gives insights into this conflict. I suggest that the festival serves to distinguish non-Aboriginal drinking as controlled and purposeful, in contrast to ‘antisocial’ fringe dweller drinking. In my analysis, I use Charles Rowley’s division of Australia into ‘settled’ and ‘colonial’, or ‘remote’ regions, and argue that Darwin is now an enclave of ‘settled’ Australia in the remote north. I suggest that this characterisation provides a useful framework for interpreting the position of fringe dwellers in Darwin.

Acknowlegements

Research for this thesis gave me the opportunity to renew my friendships with the Larrakia people of Darwin, whose Kenbi Land Claim remains, at the time of writing, the longest running land claim before the Australian courts. I am grateful to Bill Risk, June and Allyson Mills, Mary Lee, Tina Baum, the people at Kulaluk and other members of the Larrakia Nation for their hospitality, assistance and encouragement during my fieldwork on Larrakia land. Louise Bangun and the community at Knuckeys Lagoon, along with David Timber and the community at Railway Dam were also very welcoming and helpful.

The Burarra people and other residents at Maningrida provided hospitality and assistance during my two visits to their community. In particular, I am grateful for the hospitality and friendship of Dulcie Malimara and her family, George Banbuma and the other residents of Fish Camp, Johnny Balaiya, Bob Bunba, Len Stewart and other homeless Aboriginal people in Darwin too numerous to mention here. I dedicate this thesis to them and to Gojok, who died in January 1996 while resisting attempts by the Northern Territory Government to evict him and his followers.

In Darwin, I thank supporters of the fringe campers who gave their time and energies in defence of homeless Aboriginal people. I acknowledge Stella Simmering, Jude Conway, Sally-Ann, Jessie and Cindy Watson and other activists for East Timor, the members of Resistance, the Territory Greens, Jack Phillips, Stuart Highway, Wes Wagonwheel, Cassandra Goldie, Truce Haines, Anda Fellows, Robbie and Stu (the publishers of Kujuk), Mick Lambe, and an increasing number of valued friends.

To all the above, I am grateful for the being kept informed during my absences from the field and after I returned to Perth to write this thesis. I thank Stella Simmering, Caroline Tapp, Aaron Corn, the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, Anda Fellows, the ABC and Channel 8 for videotapes of fringe dweller activities, ceremonies, meetings and protests. Vaughan Williams and Sally Mitchell and many of the above also gave me copies of their photographs. Staff at the ABC Archives in Darwin have been particularly helpful.