The Wire

On the edge of the Tanami desert in the Northern Territory is a town camp called Yuendumu… it’s the home of the Warlpiri people and is the type of camp that’s been in the spotlight over the last week with the Northern Territory’s review of Homelands policy… and whether Aboriginal people should be shifted into larger towns. There’s no doubt that housing policies over the years have failed both people in remote communities and our expectations of what they should do with those houses, but few people have been able to say why. Yasmine Musharbash is an anthropologist who went and lived with the Warlpiri people in Yuendumu and studied their lives over a period of three years. What she found was a contradiction between the Warlpiri way of living and organising their lives around their extended families and the type of dwellings that suit their values… and what the Australian government is trying to impose upon them in terms of how they should live and what their houses should look like.