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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the placemaking of Indigenous people on Darwin’s peri-urban edges, attending to the dilemmas and ironies that animate relations between owners, visitors, and helpers as each works towards some more just accommodation to an urban politics and political ecology in transit.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic and historical research on Indigenous camps and communities at the edges of Darwin, this paper explores the relations that underpin and enable the place-making practices of Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory's urban capital. Indigenous people craft kinds of landing place here through relations with one another, with those on whose country they camp, with settler agencies and offices, with non-Indigenous neighbors, and with an increasingly mutable landscape. Foregrounding the dilemmas and ironies that accompany the placemaking of Indigenous people on Darwin’s peri-urban edges, I thus attend to the relations between owners, visitors, and helpers as each works towards some more just accommodation to a landscape and political ecology in motion.

While it may be something of a truism that places are made via such relations, this ethnographic case study underscores and explores a less frequently described paradox: The particular relations that make such camps habitable are also those that mark the limits of such habitability, making negotiation, evasion, and flight all key ingredients to the permanent impermanence of many long grass camps. The paper will examine the radical mutability of both ‘camp’ and ‘ground’ in Darwin’s long grass from the ground of this paradox, underscoring and lending ethnographic specificity to the ways that Indigenous camps afford novel kinds of home, and a valued autonomy and respite for Indigenous residents of Darwin, and the ways that such respite is both supported and undermined by the untethered, if not yet run-away character of changes to the landscape itself.