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Indigenous youth living in Alice Springs are subject to routine forms of surveillance, facilitated by a range of stakeholders, including police, security guards, government agents, business owners and members of their own communities. 'The problem' of youth is the subject of much attention in media and community forums as well as Northern Territory specific legislation, resulting in increased levels of policing in town. Drawing on recently collected fieldwork data, this paper explores some of the nuances in the relationships through which these processes of surveillance are enacted. Encounters observed and described by young people themselves are often at once both intimate and oppressive. This paper will first explore recent policy approaches and then focus on some examples of youth experiences with policing to outline some of the ways in which young people navigate and resist surveillance in Alice Springs. Understanding youth experiences of surveillance and policing enables a distinctive perspective on a shifting social world, and offers insight into contemporary forms of disadvantage faced by Indigenous youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2019, members of Willowra community marched on the local police station in protest against the police shooting of Kumunjayi Walker at Yuendumu. Expressing solidarity with family at Yuendumu, individuals breached the barbwire fence of the vacant police compound. Unlike settlements such as Yuendumu, which have had resident police for decades, Willowra police station is 1 of 18 Northern Territory 'Taskforce Themis' stations set up as a temporary measure during the 2007 Intervention. Although the police presence is recent and inconstant, Lander Warlpiri Anmatyerr people have long experienced the agonistic effects of police authority in their region—beginning in 1928 with the gunning down of their relatives by Constable Murray and his accomplices during the Coniston Massacre. No charges were laid against these murderers, a reflection of the moral economy and 'politics of life' of settler society at the time. Although policies have changed, the past reverberates in the present, as people find creative ways to survive the effects of totalising state institutions and punitive regimes. Furthermore, while locals might back a police presence at Willowra, they continue to assert the importance of Warlpiri Law. This paper reflects upon narratives and events that illuminate local perceptions of police and their role in the community over time. In the course of this account, the focus shifts from policing to people's hopes that unbearable situations might improve, as they use shields both as object and metaphor to deflect the weapons of the state and maintain the Warlpiri socio‐moral order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In remote Indigenous communities, people with end stage kidney disease have limited access to dialysis services and the vast majority of patients contend with urban displacement in order to access treatment. Through ethnographic encounters with Yolŋu renal patients and other actors in Northern Territory healthcare systems, this paper explores how the threats posed by end stage kidney disease are multiply conceptualised and imbued with different forms of moral and political value. Drawing on Mary Douglas' cultural theory of risk, I consider how Yolŋu, health professionals and health policymakers construct topographies of safety and danger. I argue that medical risk is deployed in Northern Territory healthcare systems to perform the 'dirty work' of governing uncertainties and threats to renal patients' health and of distributing treatment amongst patients and over space. The 'dirty work' of medical risk recasts questions of value and the distribution of resources into matters of safety and liability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's connections to places, and place-related identity, as a function of their differential historical relationship to a town. Among Aboriginal people who have lived for some decades in camps around Katherine, Northern Territory, descendants of those who appear to have the most clearly discernible long-term relationship with the area in the vicinity of the town do not relate to places, nor conceptualise them, in stereotypically 'traditional' terms. Their relationships to town and nearby places tend to be of an ideologically unelaborated, homely sort. Kinds of territorial relationships their antecedents can be shown to have had to the area have undergone dissolution. The paper seeks to develop discussion of such variation and the historical and sociological processes involved. The Katherine case brings the social and historical significance of 'towns' as sites of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal interrelationship into focus, and also requires a critical view of notions of 'group' that have tended to dominate recent public process and understanding in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the cultural significance of ephemeral public greetings on the highways of Australia's Northern Territory. Despite the exceptional speed at which vehicles pass one another and the fact that such salutations are mostly between travellers who have no acquaintance with one another, few drivers fail to acknowledge the co-presence of others on the highway. The main concern of this account is to detail how this greeting system works, including the diverse meanings which can be attached to participation in it. In conclusion, it is suggested that this is a form of phatic communication which, as Malinowski (1923) said, eschews engagement with weighty economic and political issues, but contributes significantly to a sense of community between those involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout Australia, many Aboriginal responses to the legislative and administrative pressures of the native title regime have been couched in a nation-building idiom expressed through legally incorporated Aboriginal associations. The membership criteria of these umbrella associations are often derived from definitions of the 'tribe' or 'language group'. Yet, in a kind of Balkanisation, those who see themselves as marginalised to positions of uncertainty on the peripheries of the nation often seek to establish their own independent corporations on the basis of exclusive ties to specific areas of land within it, in search of greater recognition and in competition for scarce resources. In Katherine, in the Northern Territory of Australia, the administrative and legislative gaze of the State, particularly the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, brought into focus a Jawoyn 'tribe', soon to express itself in the idiom of nationhood, closely followed by a Wardaman 'tribe' and 'nation'. More recently, a native title gaze has now brought into focus 'new' configurations of kindred clusters, apparently located on the 'peripheries' of the Jawoyn and Wardaman nations, and named and valued them as Dagoman. This paper discusses the processes associated with an emerging, but seemingly already fragmenting, Dagoman nation. It argues that divergent and changing Aboriginal subjectivities disrupt what might be seen as mimetic processes as Aboriginal people employ strategies of transforming essentialist representations of their collective selves in changing conditions of possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes two of the principal roots allowing the expression of emotions and feelings in Dalabon, an endangered language of South-Western Arnhem Land. The first root, kangu, 'belly', is depicted linguistically as the location of emotions induced by interpersonal relationships. The belly is thus presented as the locus of good and bad moods generally and of conflict more specifically. Furthermore, the material properties of the belly-its fluidity in particular-impact on one's temper and ability to deal with others in an ideologically prescribed manner. Speakers describe ritual manipulations undertaken on the belly of young infants in order to shape their temper. Kangu-no may thus be described as a malleable interface between the person and the outside world, principally other people. The second root, yolh, may at first sight translate as 'feelings', either good or bad, but also means 'appetite', 'drive', 'pep'. Yolh-no is associated with the most intimate part of the person, one's own aspirations that are independent of interactions with others. Although yolh-no connotes the core self and kangu-no, the belly, connotes relatedness to others, they are conceived as physiologically connected, so that material properties of the belly impact on the self. Thus, the semantic analysis of Dalabon, along with related anthropological observations, unveils an explicit conceptual and cultural attention to the distinction between emotions and feelings (as respectively defined in the article) and to the autonomy of the person within a constraining social framework. The article shows how this concern echoes and challenges both anthropological and philosophical considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]