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People with chronic diseases are likely to require some form of domestic care, however their care needs acquire low visibility in housing policy frameworks. Amongst Yolŋu (Indigenous Australians from north-east Arnhem Land), high rates of kidney disease reinforce needs for housing and care. I consider how access to housing shapes relations and practices of care in the families of Yolŋu renal patients in Darwin, Australia; and how Yolŋu relations and practices of care are implicated in housing policy. Through an ethnographic case study approach, I show that in Yolŋu families, practices of extending shelter to kin are care practices fundamental to the performance of domestic labour. I argue that while housing policy frameworks rely on familial relations and practices of care to reduce rough sleeping and achieve other policy objectives, Yolŋu relations and practices of care are also marginalised through the governance of public housing. The politics of care that play out in their places of residence reproduce housing precarity. [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]