Warlpiri versus the Queen

Featured in

  • Published 20130903
  • ISBN: 9781922079985
  • Extent: 288pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

In Alice Springs, the trials of young Warlpiri men reveal the threads of anarchic Warlpiri resistance to Australian law. Police and the courts grapple with cycles of violence wrapped in a web of kinship, custom and rupture. Since the middle of last century Warlpiri have come to live in small settlements scattered across their desert lands in the south-western corner of the Northern Territory. Yuendumu, some 300 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs, population 1000, is one of the largest. Most of the protagonists in this story come from there. It has been the seat of an ongoing feud between rival families, at times breaking into armed raids and riots. Some have fled the settlement for the town camps (Aboriginal housing estates) of Alice Springs. The charming names of the two camps in this story, Little Sisters and Hidden Valley, belie the over-crowding, squalour and violence often found there.

 

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Persephone’s picnic

ReportageTHE OLD STONE quarry sits in the range high above Ilparpa Valley, on the south side of Alice Springs. Once there was a road...

More from this edition

In a fix

MemoirI FLY TO Wadeye with wary curiosity. People say the generation of elders there has lost all authority, that adults live in fear of...

Promise or peril

EssaySelected for The Best Australian Science Writing 2014 AS SOON AS the midwife placed my newborn son on my belly, moments after a twenty-three-hour labour...

The promise of belonging

EssayMARDI GRAS IS a time of high emotion. When a Tasmanian contingent marched in the parade for the first time in the mid-1990s, a...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.