Indigenous mobility and the sustainability of communities: Case studies from Northwest Queensland and Eastern Northern Territory

This paper is concerned with the relationship between Indigenous mobility and the sustainability of remote Indigenous communities in Australia. Indigenous people in remote and rural Australia are frequently moving between places. Such movement is a key to the maintenance of Indigenous relationships to places and to kin. This cultural maintenance continues despite a period of 100 years or more when the government employed strategies to disrupt traditional Aboriginal social and geographic patterns. Recently there have been renewed attempts by government to question the sustainability of remote Indigenous communities based on the economics of remote service provision. Given the widespread reporting of high mobility in the ethnographic and Indigenous housing literature, and the recent political call to reconsider the role of small-scale remote Aboriginal settlements, this paper addresses the need to understand both the role of mobility in sustaining and expressing the attachment of Indigenous people to their places and kin and the relationship between mobility and service needs. The paper examines case studies of the mobility of two remote Indigenous communities, Alpurrurulam in the eastern Northern Territory, and Dajarra in northwest Queensland. The paper outlines the implications of Aboriginal mobility for service provision in this study region. The paper reveals a policy challenge to balance the forces for continuity of remote and rural lifestyles, and those of changes in service needs and supplies