Warlpiri versus the Queen

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  • 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.

 

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