6.1 Introduction

In Chapters Six and Seven I discuss the relevance of my work to the recent anthropological debate between Peter Sutton (1998, 1999b) and Basil Sansom (1998, 1999). Sutton is the anthropologist representing the Larrakia language group in the Kenbi claim to land near Darwin under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act, 1976 (Sutton 1995a). In his monograph, Native title and the descent of rights, Sutton (1998:103-113) claims that the Larrakia group is an example of a ‘post-classical Aboriginal society’. As I have already discussed, Sansom is noted for his processual, or ‘fluidist’, analysis of Darwin fringe dweller society. I discuss the Sutton-Sansom debate more fully in Chapter Seven. In this chapter and the next I apply events during my fieldwork in Darwin fringe camps to the theories of the two anthropologists.

Both Sutton (1998) and Sansom (1982b:120) describe Aboriginal cultural continuities which are an ‘expression of a recreated culture’ and an ‘emergent culture’(see Sutton 1998:59). Sutton (p.59) describes a ‘distinctive form of Aboriginal social organisation ... combining features of both classical Aboriginal and modern European societies, as well as a number of innovations...’ Sutton (p.59) states that he does not dispute Sansom’s descriptions of an ‘Aboriginal commonality’ (Sansom 1982b); however, Sutton describes an overarching  system ‘dominated by classical forms of thought, language, religion and social organisation’. The continuities that Sutton (1998, 1999b) describes are those more traditionally associated with Aboriginal social structure than the socially negotiated processes Sansom (1980a) describes in the Darwin fringe camps.

In this chapter, an account of the fringe dwellers’ actions in the 1990s, in addition to my earlier discussion of resistance at Knuckeys Lagoon in the 1970s, acts as a corrective to Sansom’s thesis that Aboriginal resistance  is ‘rooted not in rebellion but in the resilience of cultural practice’(Sansom 1988a:152). That is, I expand my argument that a study of fringe dwellers’ cultural continuities in a ‘segregated social field’ is incomplete without examining the political context of their lives. In the next chapter I give examples of how the long-standing understanding between fringe dwellers and the Larrakia owners is now being tested by the resurgent Larrakia, as one of Australia’s ‘new tribes’ as defined by Sutton (1998:105).

In keeping with my multi-sited study, I ‘follow the conflict’ (see Marcus 1995:110) as the determination of the fringe dwellers at Fish Camp and their allies to find space in Darwin brings them into conflict with the state and with formally incorporated Aboriginal organisations such as land councils. Firstly, I detail the case of three complaints to the NT Anti-Discrimination Commission (ADC) by fringe dwellers against Local and Territory Governments. I describe how media interest gave the fringe dwellers access to government, which had otherwise been refused. The government response then gave impetus to fringe dwellers’ claims of discrimination. These complaints eventually led to government consideration of the fringe dwellers’ claims, in a process that continues into 2001. The ideology supporting the government insistence that all Territorians are treated equally is also examined.

6.2 Previous contact with government and its agencies

The Tangentyere Council (1984/5:1) reported: ‘Historically, Australian towns have been European institutions to which Aborigines were expected to adjust by abandoning their own values’.  Although the NT Government (1990:44) claimed it ‘adopts a non-discriminatory approach to the allocation of its houses’, typically Aboriginal tenants are said to have a ‘lack of urban living skills’ (NTG 1990:45). Alternatively, Coulehan (1995a:339) notes: ‘Lacking a territorial or property base in Darwin, the Yolngu have had to pursue much of their wider group sociality in public places’. Homes get overcrowded and residents evicted (Coulehan 1995a:255). In this regard, the family of the Fish Camp doyen was evicted from her state house years before my fieldwork. ‘Dulcie Malimara’s story’ on the Fish Camp home page on the world wide web emphasises the ways in which Aboriginal people find life in a town camp community more meaningful and familiar than in suburban housing (see Scougall and Osborne 1998:57):

Anyway, we had a Housing Commission house and we was in a house for nearly 19 years. and my people come along making a lot of noise so I get kicked out. But I was in the hospital when my kids got kicked out. My kids was staying in the house. I had injury neck. I had injury leg. My kids was in the house but no one didn’t look after them. Somebody came along - I mean my people, eh - came along, and making a lot of noise. My kids got kicked out and I was in the hospital, and when I came out it wasn’t there. And that’s my big problem.

I didn’t want to go back in the Housing Commission. I’m happy staying outside so I can sing, dance, cry - whatever I like. So I’m free enough to stay here. The Housing Commission, it’s really hard. You can’t even take your family. It’s really hard for us to go back in a Housing Commission, cause I’ve tried that a lot of times. I told my people not to make noise ‘cause that house, it wasn’t mine. Neighbours complaining, it was really hard for me and my kids. But I had all my kids in Darwin, and I’ve been in Darwin when I was 17. Even my brother... and my other brother - he’s blind, he can’t see - they was walking from Maningrida to Darwin, and we’ve been staying in Darwin all our lives. And we’re still here.

The home page explains how Dulcie was born in Arnhem Land and came to Darwin with her two children after leaving her promised husband. This move is typical of many Arnhem Land women who seek to improve their ‘life chances’ (Coulehan 1995a:305, 1995b:220). In Darwin with her daughter and son, Dulcie married a White man and bore two more children. While Dulcie was in hospital after her second marriage failed, she was evicted from her state house. Since then she has moved between fulfilling her ceremonial responsibilities at Maningrida and living in various Darwin fringe camps. In the late 1990s, three of her grown children either lived with or regularly visited the campers, while the youngest son uses his musical talents to promote Aboriginal rights and reconciliation (Wild Water 1996).

For Dulcie, the ‘lack of urban living skills’ translates into prohibitions on traditional activities of dancing, singing, cooking and mourning, which all involve extended family. As Sansom (1982c:8) states, ‘the model of the stable household simply does not fit the way in which Aboriginal people in urban settings manage their affairs’. By restricting her guests and asking her people to be quiet because the neighbours might complain, she recognises the cultural restrictions of living on a suburban housing block. Only by compromising her Aboriginal values can Dulcie experience the autonomy which Coulehan (1995a), Collmann (1979b, 1988) and Burbank (1988) suggest Aboriginal women attempt to achieve by moving to the towns. Coulehan (1995a:33) notes that in the city: ‘The State’s policies and agencies particularly offer [Yolngu] women and children more autonomy from "patriarchal authority", but largely in exchange for dependence on the State’.(1)

6.3 NT Government, Local Government and fringe dwellers

The Northern Territory Chief Minister was criticised for his public statements threatening harsher measures in response to Aboriginal public drinking in Darwin:

I go for a walk every night and I am totally disgusted with what I see and I’m sure other Territorians are too. These people have usually come to Darwin from remote areas. They should go back to their own communities and their own land. They have every right to visit Darwin, but if they do, they have got to behave properly. If they don’t they deserve to be monstered and stomped on by the community. This is not a question of racism - it also refers to white itinerants with drinking problems. Enough is enough. They have no right to hijack our lifestyle (NT News April 13, 1997; see Illustrations 2.2, 2.3).

In his defence of ‘our lifestyle’, the Chief Minister appears to privilege the residents of an enclave of settled Australia and confirm the fringe dwellers’ perception of their exclusion. The dispossession of Aboriginal people also appears to be defended by calls for them to be ‘monstered and stomped on by the community’. The NT News (April 15, 1997) editorialised: ‘Mr Stone’s choice of words was unfortunate. Such comments will do nothing to improve the worsening problem of drunken itinerants’.

Andrew Coward (1997), who was the director of Special Projects in the Chief Minister’s Office from 1988 to 1995, claims the Territory is socially divided between ‘the non-Aboriginal New Territorians who are the haves and Aboriginal True Territorians who are the have-nots’. In a document he circulated widely in 1997 he wrote:

For New Territorians, urban Territorians, the non-Aboriginal Territorians, self-government has been a dream run. They belong to a group that has among the highest incomes in Australia, the most extensive subsidised housing program in the country, multi-car families, many with boats, paid holiday air fares for some, superannuation and more than adequate services and facilities...

They will in the main deny any overt racist sentiment, and yet they have been defined by shared attitudes that often begin with the shock of the new - the observation of drunken, destitute Aboriginal people, dressed poorly and unwashed who sometimes confront and beg for a dollar, producing natural recoil among New Territorians... The dark side of the mind of many New Territorians; attitudes that help some win elections and some lose. The True Territorians could be excused for thinking themselves victims of the ‘external enemy theory’. They are often said to hamper the development ethic, drain resources through their intractable social problems and moreover are likened as rapacious in their continuing demands for Land Rights and Sea Rights (Coward 1997:18-19).

In his conclusion, Coward (1997:27) states emphatically: ‘There is a racial divide that is a political divide that divides the Territory into haves-and-have-nots that 20 years of self rule has not bridged’. The unequal contest between settler and Aborigines in towns is also maintained by what Cowlishaw (1988a:193) refers to as ‘institutional racism’ that ‘in informal ways reflects particular cultural practices and values and disallows others’. The Chief Minister’s objections to the behaviour of homeless Aboriginal people excuse the government refusal to recognise the need for culturally appropriate accommodation. According to Edmunds (1995:25), in Tennant Creek the subordination of Aboriginal interests is legitimised by a discourse that excludes Aboriginal people except where they create ‘problems’ for ‘the [White] public’:

Underlying the discourse was a system of classifications and oppositions - normal and deviant, acceptable and unacceptable, residential zones and camps, development and backwardness, European and Aboriginal - which acted to reproduce the objective relations of economic and symbolic power (p.25).

Settled Darwin now resembles the urban environment described by Cowlishaw in rural NSW (1988a:104), where ‘oppressors and oppressed may never meet each other’. Although the Chief Minister claims he is confronted by drunken Aboriginal ‘itinerants’ which disgust him when he goes for a walk each evening, they are an anonymous group who appear to be unwelcome intruders into the settler domain of the racially-divided community which he represents.

I argue that, in areas where Aboriginal resistance has been defeated or expropriated in settled Australia, Aborigines who confront walkers in the park are the last line of opposition. They are a persistent irritation to the settlers and a reminder of Aboriginal claims to the land, in a city where there is only marginal Aboriginal political representation. (2) Public comments by politicians in Darwin show little recognition of the ‘new language, drawing authority now not from just a European-Australian but from a publicly recognised Aboriginal symbolic system’, noted by Edmunds (1995:8) in Tennant Creek. Illustrating this conflict with the state, I recount the following case of Bob Bunduwabi, who lived at Fish Camp and Lee Point in 1996.

6.4 Bob Bunduwabi at Lee Point

Bob Bunduwabi began his long involvement with agencies of the state in 1958. It was then that Ingrid Drysdale (1974:120) describes meeting him in Arnhem Land during the early years of the Maningrida government-sponsored Aboriginal settlement:

One day I was stopped ... by a young man who had been hiding behind a clump of pandanus palms. I noticed that he had just enough flesh below one ankle to hold a bandage where one foot had been, and enough on the other to maintain his balance on the blood-covered stumps. Only part of his hands remained, with one or two little inch-long claws in place of the fingers he had lost.

‘Sorry, Missus,’ he said in apology for having startled me. ‘I wanna medicine’.

I told him he could go to our hospital [at Maningrida] if he promised to remain, and to this he readily agreed. We learned that his name was Bundawabui, and until he went to East Arm fourteen months later he was the life and soul of the camp, always singing, playing his didgeridoo or sticks, and generally making everyone feel that it was good to be alive.

After spending the next twenty-four years as a patient in the East Arm Leprosarium, like many other ex-patients, Bob opted to stay in Darwin when the institution closed after medical advances made isolation unnecessary (see Hargrave 1977). As I have mentioned in Chapter Three, I first met him at his hidden beach camp in suburban Coconut Grove. At that time, I contacted a local newspaper in the hope that they  might help him in his wish for better facilities. In reply to criticism of the NT Health Department in the article which was published in the Darwin Star (November 26, 1982), a spokesperson for the Department replied: ‘There is a good chance your health might deteriorate if you were not housed properly, but if you chose to live on the beach, then I do not see why or how the Health Department can be blamed for that’ (Darwin Star December 3, 1982).

Bob had camped in many Darwin and hinterland locations since 1982. The people at Fish Camp claimed that he had fought for a camping place beside the Stuart Highway at ‘the 15 Mile’ in the late 1980s. When this area eventually became an official town camp, the land was granted to the Aboriginal Development Foundation (ADF) that built houses on the lease. Eventually, other language groups moved onto the land and, except for one household, the Burarra residents moved out. In 1997, at Fish Camp, Finity told me:

We started off living in bush eh, like this one here [folds in fingers to indicate Bob Bunduwabi]. At Mitchell Creek, where 15 Mile is now, his young brother and old man, that one we lost at Lee Point [Bob Bunduwabi], they fought for that land and they got it. And that’s supposed to be for Maningrida mob. Bernie [from ADF] come along and he started building houses, toilet, shower, everything. That place out there was a quiet place away from stupid people. Actually, this one [repeats gesture to indicate Bob Bunduwabi] was fighting for this land, this one [repeats gesture] and Jimmy North [man still at 15 Mile] ... they [the NT Government] handed it to ADF.

In the early 1990s, until 1996, Bob had lived in various bush and beach camps at Lee Point. The campers lived in corrugated iron structures, tents and under tarpaulins concealed in the bush, close to the road. By crossing the road, they could use the public toilets and showers in the grassed public recreational reserve managed by the NT Conservation Commission. Bob’s relatives later told me that the Keep Australia Beautiful Council regularly emptied rubbish bins at the camps and NT Conservation Commission rangers occasionally helped mow the long grass around the shelters in the wet season. Public telephones are two hundred metres from Lee Point, inside a caravan park beside the single bitumen road leading to the Darwin suburb of Casuarina. The nearest shops are four kilometres along this road (see Map 2).

The camps were spread through the bush along Lee Point Road, down to ‘Beach Camp’, which was variously located on old army concrete slabs beside the beach, shaded by native hibiscus bushes and casuarina trees, or further into the dense coastal monsoon forest thickets. ‘Bottom Camp’, as the fringe dwellers called it, was directly opposite the new public conveniences and car park. The shacks at Bottom Camp were built on concrete slabs laid on special purpose lease 127 granted in 1967 to the Aborigines Inland Mission for a children’s holiday camp and surrendered in 1979. ‘Top Camp’, as it was known, was fifty  metres further up the road on higher gravely soil amongst thick eucalyptus and pandanus forest. The camps were outside the boundaries of the Darwin City Council.

At a public meeting in May 1997 during a protest at the Lee Point reserve, which I describe in a later chapter, a Gunavidji man and a Nakara woman told of their long association with the area. They remembered hunting and camping at Lee Point with Aboriginal Christian and sporting groups before competing in running, spear throwing and team events. During the more recent occupation of the area, songs were written and dances created to commemorate events that occurred there. Bush foods and seafood were gathered from the area to supplement the diet and when money was scarce. Bush timber for structures and firewood is plentiful and nearby a source of white clay is still mined for ceremonial body-paint by Aboriginal residents of Darwin.

As I have briefly mentioned in Chapter Three, on June 17, 1996, Bob and his Burarra relatives were verbally advised that they were ‘unlawfully camping on Crown land’ at Lee Point and requested to move. (3) The next day they were again advised by department officers to move. On 2 July signs stating ‘CROWN LAND - NO LITTERING, NO MOTORBIKES, NO FIRES, NO CAMPING. OFFENDERS LIABLE TO PROSECUTION’ were erected  at the site and the campers were again requested to move. (4) On July 4, ‘Department officers accompanied by police again visited the area and requested the campers to move by 3.00 pm on 5 July’. The Aboriginal Development Foundation, with responsibility for town camps, was notified and asked to assist find ‘appropriate accommodation in Darwin for the evicted campers’. When officers returned on 5 July the campers had moved ‘leaving behind an amount of rubbish and mess’. (5) An officer from the Department of Lands Planning and Environment said there had been complaints about the campers’ rubbish (NT News July 8, 1996).

Once the Lee Point camp had been closed down, the area cleared and a new camp established on Aboriginal-held land at Fish Camp, the state denied all responsibility for Bob Bunduwabi and the other Burarra campers. The Minister for Lands, Planning and Environment later said: ‘Fish Point [sic] isn’t on public land... They accepted an offer to go and camp at Fish Point knowing there were no facilities there. I’m sorry, I can’t be held responsible for that’ (ABCTV Stateline 23 May 1997). The only representatives of government agencies to visit the camp regularly were the Keep Australia Beautiful utility and the Aboriginal health services van. (6) In my fieldwork experience, on the very rare occasions when police or ambulance were called to Fish Camp, they were unaware of its location.

As I have recounted, I re-established my friendship with Bob at the Fish Camp location, close to where we first met. After some persistence I was able to help him get a wheelchair from an community agency. On pension day, he would order a minibus taxi to take him, and others from the camp, to the Kulaluk office to pick up his cheque. From there the minibus would be told to drive to a service station where an employee friend would cash Bob’s cheque without him having to get out of the vehicle. Clutching more than three hundred dollars in cash, Bob would direct the minibus to the supermarket and liquor outlet for a few food items, cigarettes and alcohol, then return to the camp. On the first pension day after this wild trip with about five others in the minibus, I was surprised when Bob handed $150 to me for safekeeping. The rest of his cash he stuffed into the lining of a cushion that he kept close to his side or under his head.

Over the coming two weeks, until the next pension day, Bob would order his basic needs to be delivered on my next visit, until his money was spent. I kept a record of his ‘withdrawals’ but he never disputed my tally. As a sign of trust, he increased the amounts in later weeks. His last ‘banker’ to hold his cash had been an Aboriginal man who lived in the suburbs and provided transport for fringe campers, as well as acting as marihuana dealer. Bob remained very firm with his cash, apart from giving some to his niece, Dulcie, who did the cooking and bought supplies. Like the other invalid pensioners in the camp he paid his ‘board’ to Dulcie. I thought perhaps the younger men and women who came to the camp as drinking companions for Bob on pension weeks may have been resentful of me for holding Bob’s cash. On one occasion he angrily told two young men to leave the camp, but when I remarked to Bob that he was being too hard on his young relatives, the two men retorted to me that their grandfather had the right to reprimand them and I should not interfere. Otherwise they showed no outward disagreement with my role.

6.5 Bob Bunduwabi’s complaint to the Anti-Discrimination Commission

At my suggestion, Bob Bunduwabi lodged a complaint to the NT Anti-Discrimination Commission in September 1996. The complaint was based on statements by the Mayor of Darwin who was quoted saying of Aboriginal ‘itinerants’: ‘I reckon if you keep shifting them around, constantly harass them so they can’t settle, they will get sick and tired of it and maybe some will go back to their communities’ (NT News September 10, 1996). In another media report the mayor said: ‘The only real answer is to get the Aboriginals back to their own communities’ (Bulletin February 27, 1996, p.28). Bob’s complaint, written by me on his behalf, claimed that the mayor’s statements created ‘a climate of persecution against alleged "itinerants" including people like [Bob] who have lived in Darwin for many years’. (7)

To have the complaint accepted was quite an achievement in itself and this aroused media interest (Channel 8 News, October 10, 1996), some of which has been discussed in an earlier chapter. The publicity then incurred the displeasure of the ADC. They objected on the grounds that ‘it is very difficult to get Respondents to move positions if there is the glare of publicity and there may be a public perception that a Respondent is acting illegally and/or they have been pressured into changing policy’.(8) The comment acknowledged that representative bodies like the government and city council are vulnerable to public pressure from the media, which provided a weapon to an otherwise powerless group. In addition, through the media coverage, the workings of the ADC gained some credibility amongst the fringe dwellers. The statutory body remained distant to the campers, other than the impersonal pamphlets explaining the role and processes of the ADC that had been mailed to the complainant, which the campers could not read. However, I recorded a long interview by Nikki Harrison with myself and an officer of the Darwin City Council debating the anti-discrimination case on the local ABC radio (‘Drivetime’, October 11, 1996). After hearing the interview, the Fish Camp residents asked me for a copy of the tape and played it repeatedly in the camp for weeks.

With the collaboration of the fringe dwellers, the media reports placed the private realm - the living conditions of the fringe dwellers - into the public domain to ‘shame’ the government. This was more clearly spelt out in later protests. The media also acted as an intermediary between the Aboriginal campers and the government by gaining direct access to government ministers. In gathering their stories, journalists were able to ask government ministers the questions Aborigines wanted to have answered. Previously, fringe dwellers had no opportunity for face-to-face contact with government representatives or politicians. Positive media images and interviews now categorised the ‘itinerants’ as ‘homeless’, giving interlocutors names, voices and histories.

6.6 The Lee Point protest, 1996

When Bob Bunduwabi decided, after four and a half months, to return to his old camp at Lee Point in late 1996, he was aware of the probable response by the authorities. He told me he was prepared to die at Lee Point, rather than be shifted again. At the request of the residents of Fish Camp, on November 24, I hired a twin-cab utility that transported Bob, his faithful pet hen, four men, one woman and a child to Lee Point. Once unloaded, the campers strung up a tarpaulin besides the sawn-off stumps of the old shelter at ‘Bottom Camp’. The others at Fish Camp, who had been talking about returning to the old camp for months, were eventually deterred by the prospect of a repetition of their July eviction.

Bob was photographed with an expression of grim determination, being pushed on his wheelchair as he led his followers in the return to his old camp at Lee Point (Plate 1; NT News November 26, 1996). The campers joked about the large ‘No Camping’ signs that had been erected at the entrance to their campsite before they were evicted in July. On one sign someone had written with a felt pen, ‘except for blacks’. Contradicting that scrawled comment, two non-Aboriginal travellers and their Maori companion were camped in the bush nearby. When the travellers heard the explanation for the protest camp, they accepted Bob as the owner of the land and offered to pay rent to him. For the next month, Bob kept the neighbouring campers to their promise of $100 per week rental payments.

Bob considered returning to Fish Camp after the first night when we were attacked by swarms of mosquitoes. However, a television crew came to interview him during the day and the Aboriginal journalist asked him the leading question, ‘You’re not going to move are you?’ (ABC TV News. November 25, 1996).  In what is perhaps an example of the way the media makes its own news, Bob then publicly committed himself to making a stand that he maintained until his death. The next day one of the more aggressive protesters returned to Fish Camp and attempted to force those who stayed behind to move to Lee Point. To make his point, the man had ripped down tents and harassed the remaining people with unfounded assertions that I was coming with a vehicle to take everything to Lee Point.

Meanwhile, the response from the DCC to the ADC letter stated that the mayor’s statements were not necessarily Council policy. The reply added: ‘Local government is apolitical and allows all elected members the opportunity to express the views of constituents’. The Council reply quoted minutes and decisions including the creation of a network of agencies to work with itinerants to coordinate the provision of services and facilities for ‘the long grass population group’ and to facilitate the development of appropriate housing needs of people disadvantaged in the rental housing sector. (12)

If the complaint was to proceed, a reply to the DCC’s defence was urgent because Bob was under threat of eviction from Lee Point. I had to leave Bob at Lee Point and return to Perth on the sixth of December. My ticket could not be changed. In a tearful farewell, Bob and the few kin remaining with him vowed they would still be at Lee Point on my return. They did not appear to fear any action the authorities might take. On the same day, the Delegate of the ADC, who was handling the complaint, videotaped scenes at Lee Point and Fish Camp before driving me to the airport. By then, government representatives had asked Bob to move several times, so I felt guilty in leaving him. On 13 December, as requested by the ADC Delegate, from Perth I faxed a reply to the DCC’s response that read:

On 8 November Ms Leeder wrote that ‘the Council is not involved in the provision of land nor does it presume to comment on how Aboriginal organisations determine the utilisation of land managed by them...’ However, [the Community Services Manager] also wrote: ‘since the early 1990s Council has encouraged the pursuit of appropriate land in the northern suburbs which could be used for camping by the "long grass" community and visiting Aboriginal people’.

The fact that Mr Bunduwabi lived without the most basic of facilities at Fish Camp should be a concern of the City Council (DCC). It is discriminatory to maintain that the living conditions in Fish Camp are the responsibility of an Aboriginal organisation. That is, matters of hygiene (infectious diseases, mangy dogs, water supply, sewerage etc) are the concern of the City Council, regardless of race.

Further, decision No 16\5318(13/03/95) states that: ‘Council delivers the same municipal services to Town Camp residents on the same basis it does to the rest of the community’. This has not been Mr Bunduwabi’s experience (for example the DCC ranger refused to remove mangy dogs from the camp). What other people are expected to live without sufficient available water for washing, within the city boundaries?

If the DCC has encouraged the setting up of more camps in the northern suburbs since the early 1990s, as [the Community Services Manager] says (8 November), there is nothing to show for it. This point seems contradictory to the statement that the DCC is not involved in the provision of land. Decision No 16\5318(13/03/95) states that Council acts as ‘an advocate to the NT and Commonwealth Governments in relation to local housing issues’, so at the very least the DCC influences planning and policy. The Lee Point Camp was established for many years and there appears to have been very little in the way of advocacy on their behalf. There has been even less support at Fish Camp, despite the appalling conditions and dangerous health situation there.

In her response dated 10 December, [the Community Services Manager] denies ‘Council’s supposed involvement in conditions of camping at both Kululuk [sic] and Lee Point’. I believe it is necessary to look beyond the legalistic reasoning of [the Community Services Manager], that Council policy is all in the minute book. What is not done is just as important as what is recorded as done. This surely is the point of a complaint of ‘failure to supply a special need’. When Aborigines camp on land controlled by the DCC they are moved on. The camp at Kulaluk is the direct result of these DCC Public Places Program. When they camp in the most shocking conditions without water or any amenities out of the public eye, nobody cares. This shifting of responsibility is a form of discrimination that is little different to the old DCC policy, as listed in the complaint, that Aborigines must ‘utilise existing leases’.

In one year the number of infringements issued has almost trebled... The camps exist because of a failure to provide a special need; the pressures on the more established camps comes from the enforcement of DCC programs; the increase in homeless Aborigines living on the Kulaluk lease is because DCC policies and programs are not in force there. From the granting of the lease in 1979 until the beginning of the present Public Places Programs, there was no similar problem with camps on Kulaluk land. In short it is incorrect to say DCC has no involvement in present conditions at Kulaluk and Lee Point.

Whatever the official policy recorded in the minute book, and the informal nature of ‘a network of agencies working with itinerants’, the DCC policy has clearly been to harass homeless people. The Lord Mayor has taken a prominent role in promoting these policies including a well-publicised election campaign on the issue. There has been no recognition that people like Mr Bunduwabi are not ‘itinerants’ but identify as citizens of Darwin, entitled to be represented by the DCC, not harassed by them. To attempt to force people like him back to their place of origin as is suggested by the Mayor is grossly discriminatory.

The usual response to this complaint is to point out that other accommodation is available. However, Mr Bunduwabi needs the support of an extended family and indeed it is his culturally appropriate life-style to live in a communal group. He was institutionalised by the Department of Health for many years and does not want to go back to an institution. He regards Darwin as his home. He says the 15 Mile Camp was built for his people; however, the houses were gradually occupied by other culture/language groups (from Humpty Doo).

 Mr Justice Woodward, the Aboriginal Land Rights Commissioner, recognised the special needs of Aborigines camped in Darwin in his 1974 final report. Various Parliamentary inquiries confirm this special need. Both the DCC and NT Government  have failed to accommodate this need, with dire continuing consequences for Mr Bunduwabi. This reply attempts to trace the interconnectedness of actions that make it impossible to confine DCC responsibilities to ‘Council resolution which is recorded in the minute book and in the Policies and Procedures guide’. The DCC as a responsible body is the sum of the whole: public statements, the Mayor as head, employees like [the Community Services Manager], informal networks and actual on-the-ground actions. (13)

Two days after I left Darwin, NT Government officers again approached Bob and the other campers at Lee Point. According to a later letter:

[An officer of the Department of Lands Planning and Environment], accompanied by an Aboriginal liaison officer and an Aboriginal health worker from the Territory Health Services visited the camp and spoke to Mr Bunduwabi to encourage him to take up an offer of appropriate alternative accommodation in Darwin’. (14)

Despite the government opinion expressed in the above letter, that it is unnecessary for notices or other written advice to be served before eviction action occurs, Bob received another visit on 19 December 1996:

a Department officer, accompanied by police visited the camp and delivered a letter to Mr Bunduwabi advising that if he continued to stay at the camp then the Department would ask the Northern Territory Police to ask him to leave the area pursuant to the Trespass Act.(15)

The letter delivered to Lee Point by hand, dated 19 December 1996 and signed by the Assistant Director of the Department of Lands, Planning and Environment, stated in full:

Dear Mr Bunduwabi

I refer to your conversation of 6 December 1996 with Mr Greg Lambert of this Department and officers from the Territory Health Services regarding your camping at Lee Point.

I am sorry to hear that you did not accept the offer from the Territory Health Services to look at alternative possibilities for accommodation that were not on Crown land. I understand that this was as a result of advice from Mr Bill Day that the Northern Territory Government has no legal power to ask you to leave the land.

If you persist in this view, this Department will have no alternative but to approach the Northern Territory Police to ask you to leave the area in accordance with their powers under the Trespass Act should you continue to remain on the Crown land at Lee Point.

I would therefore hope that you could reconsider the offer made by the Territory Health Services to help you to find suitable accommodation. In order to progress the matter would you please arrange for further contact to be made with Mr [D] of the Department of Lands, Planning and Environment, who has delivered and explained this letter, on telephone [number], and who will assist you in every possible way to resolve the matter.

6.7 Fighting the threat of eviction

A few days before Christmas, Bob and his small group of kin received eighteen days notice to leave Lee Point (NT News December 22, 1996). The NT News republished the poignant photograph of Bob being carried helplessly from his camp in July 1996 with his stumps of hands and legs exposed, beside a heading, ‘Camper plea: Please don’t kick me out’. Meanwhile I kept in distant contact with the situation at the camp through faxes and telephone calls between myself in Perth, the ADC in Darwin, the NT media and activist supporters who were in regular contact with Bob at Lee Point. The Minister had been quoted on ABC radio as saying that the campers had been given notice to remove themselves before January 8, 1997. (16) On advice from Bob’s supporters, in my role as authorised representative, I urgently faxed an application for an interim order by the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to prevent eviction proceeding on the grounds that it would be difficult for the campers to get legal aid or other assistance over the holiday period. In a letter from Perth published in the NT News (December 25, 1996), I satirised the single-mindedness of the government minister in pursuing the eviction on Christmas Eve:

‘With the poor and weak and lowly,’ goes the old carol. At Christmas-time even Ebenezer Scrooge might hesitate to evict a severely disabled pensioner like Bob Bunduwabi at Lee Point. Not the hard-hearted Minister for Lands, Planning and Environment. In the season of goodwill the minister has issued an eviction notice to Bob and his followers.

Two of the White activists in Darwin, who were working closely with the campers at Lee Point, also sent a fax to the Commissioner on  December 24, which said, in part:

Under section 101 of the Anti-Discrimination Act, we wish to seek interim orders to preserve the status quo pending resolution of the complaint by Bob Bundawabi [sic] before the Commission. We wish to notify your office that in Bill Day’s absence we have been authorised by Bob Bundawabi to make representations on his behalf.

The representations of Bob and his supporters were successful in gaining an interim order from the ADC Commissioner for a stay of eviction until a hearing on January 6 while another complaint, this time against the NT Government, was considered by the Delegate of the ADC. At the January 6 hearing by the ADC Commissioner, an extension of the stay of eviction was ordered until January 17 for the processing of the second complaint from Bob Bundawabi, which was eventually delivered to the NT Government by the ADC on January 14. (17) Theoretically, this delay also gave Bob time to seek legal advice. Until then it was the interconnected actions of the ADC, the media, the Aboriginal protesters, myself and the activists in Darwin that had prevented the government enforcing their eviction notice.

Despite Bob’s failing health after record January rains in Darwin and monsoon gales, the application for an extension to the interim order for maintenance of the status quo was heard at the ADC offices on Friday January 17 (see NT News January 17 and 18, 1997). Bob’s health had continued to deteriorate and he had been admitted to the Darwin hospital, a multistorey air-conditioned building with the same design as a Canberra hospital. He told his friend and supporter, Caroline, that he felt uncomfortable in the enclosed wards, as many Aboriginal patients do. With Caroline’s help he had discharged himself and returned to the camp where he was pictured on television being tended under his tarpaulin by an Aboriginal health worker. The young man said: ‘The main contribution to his sickness is basically living conditions. No basic necessities such as water, power, toilets, not even a roof over his head’ (ABCTV news, January 17, 1997).

The reasoning behind the determination to evict was presented to the NT Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Dawn Lawrie, at the hearing on January 17. Firstly, the representative of the Department of Lands, Planning and Environment requested that the department be allowed legal representation. The departmental official claimed to have a solicitor standing by to attend immediately, if allowed.(18) He also noted that the details broadcast on the morning’s ABC radio news had indicated a breach of confidentiality in the proceedings. The Commissioner also said she had had phone calls from the press all morning indicating they were aware the hearing was to be held. She clarified that the reason for closing the hearing was ‘to preserve the confidentiality of the complaint process which is still on foot’.(19) However, it could be suggested that the ADC’s suppression of media scrutiny was beneficial only to the government.

Caroline, who was now Bob’s authorised representative, asked for more time to get legal advice, which she said was not available until January 22. Her appeal to the Commissioner for an extension of the order is an example of how the media mediates between government, Aborigines, activists and others:

On the last hearing, which was 7 January, the Minister ... was on TV news that night. At that stage I believe [the Minister] had not had a copy of the complaint at hand with the ADC. However, in the news items he said that he would be enforcing the Trespass Act at the close of business today. Which to me states that he’s not interested in the merits of the case at all, or any of those things. He just wants those [Aboriginal] people out of there. So I imagine that at close of business today the Trespass Act will be enforced as the Minister has said, and that as I’ve stated at the opening of this hearing, Mr Bunduwabi has just gotten out of hospital this morning. He’s only got his brother Jackie looking after him at Lee Point at the moment. Most of the other family has returned to Maningrida for funeral ceremonies, and even though he’s left hospital, he’s still not in good condition at all. And he refuses to go to Fish Camp and so he’s ... what will happen at 5.00 or 4.21 today I don’t know. Once again we haven’t had advice on the Trespass Act, what that will mean at the end of today. Whether Mr Bunduwabi - he will be refusing to leave - and what will happen to Mr Bunduwabi at that point I don’t know, I haven’t got legal advice. (20)

In response, the departmental officer pointed out that Bob Bunduwabi ‘refuses to go to alternative accommodation’ and that from the first notice of eviction in December there had been ‘adequate time to seek legal advice’. He continued:

Our contention is that we have responsibility to control both access and the management of this land. We have in the past removed this particular person, his family and many others. We wish to continue to be able to manage the land and continue to remove campers including many others. A continuation of this order would authorise a continuing breach of the law rather than maintaining any rights. It would be seen, we believe, by the public as discrimination in favour of a particular person on the grounds of race, and that would present us wider problems within the community with which we would then have to deal. Thank you.(21)

Caroline pleaded: ‘I don’t think the usual accommodation applied to people with impairment would be appropriate because Bob is not usual, he is Aboriginal and he has lived more or less traditionally all his life’. The Commissioner was also concerned. She asked:

The matter of suitable accommodation which is a very good phrase and something we all believe in but there’s nothing been put to me to say that suitable accommodation is immediately available and suitable to whom - is it suitable in Mr Bunduwabi’s eyes?

In a further example of institutional racism that enforces a racially particular view on others, the government went on to object to the order of a stay of proceedings against ‘Mr Bunduwabi and family’. They claimed, because the complaint was only in the name of an individual, the clause, ‘and family’, should be struck out of the order.(22) The commissioner then asked for a definition of family, to which Caroline replied, ‘a lot of them have gone back to Maningrida over the wet. There’s usually about, well in the dry season there can be anything from twenty to forty’. The department objected to the order ‘in toto’; however, they accepted five people as a reasonable family size.

After hearing both sides, the Commissioner extended the order until February 11, 1997 to give the department time to reply to Bob’s outstanding complaint of discrimination against the NT Government, which was almost the same as that laid against the DCC. Also within that time, Bob was expected to reply to the government response (see Appendix I). Finally, the Delegate would need to make his finding after these designated processes were complete. Making available to the media her judgment for an extension of the interim order for maintenance of the status quo (NT News January 18, 1997), the Commissioner commented ‘it may serve the best interests of truth, honesty and justice if the order itself without any other embellishment [as above] is made known’.(23)