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To Know One's Place: Belonging andDifferentiation in Alice Springs TownÅse OttossonPublished online: 14 Apr 2014.

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To Know One’s Place: Belonging andDifferentiation in Alice Springs TownÅse Ottosson

Based on research in the town of Alice Springs in Central Australia the article explores howsocial and material aspects of the town generate meaningful understandings of oneself anddifferentiated others. Drawing on anthropology of place and space and analytical notions ofbelonging, I explore shared and divergent ways in which a range of people in town come to‘know their place’ both in a socio-cultural sense and in the sense of relating to the builtenvironment. Paying just as detailed attention to non-indigenous experience as scholarshave long paid to indigenous lives, the article suggests that a focus on how people formmaterial and social attachments to place can facilitate more open-ended understandingsof changing forms of indigenous-settler relations than the more common focus ondifference and division between categories of indigenous and non-indigenous people anddomains of life.

Keywords: Indigenous-settler dynamics; Alice Springs; Urban ethnography; Place-makingand belonging

To have culture, to be cultural is to inhabit a place sufficiently intensely to cultivateit – to be responsible for it, to respond to it, to attend to it caringly. (Casey 1996, 34)

Introduction

It is Wednesday mid-morning, and I walk past the Town Council lawns in AliceSprings, the only Central Australian town of any size (pop. 27,000), located in thesouth of the Northern Territory. A couple of hundred people have gathered in theshade of trees for the launch of the Kidney Action Network, formed to advocate forbetter services for remote-living Australian Aboriginal people with kidney disease.1

About half of the people are Aboriginal, some of them renal patients from remotedesert communities, others work for indigenous health services based in town and

Correspondence to: School of Archaeology & Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200,

Australia. E-mail: ase.ottosson@anu.edu.au

Anthropological Forum, 2014Vol. 24, No. 2, 115–135, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2014.901212

© 2014 Discipline of Anthropology and Sociology, The University of Western Australia

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some have flown in from bigger cities and other Australian states. The non-indigenousattendees are a likewise diverse lot of health professionals working in remote areas, inAlice Springs town and in bigger cities. The mid-morning street traffic at times drownsout the speakers’ voices, locals walk past as they go about their errands, and a fewtourists take photos of the Aboriginal people. The council lawns are often used byAboriginal locals and visitors from desert communities to eat, drink, paint, playcards, sleep, wait for lifts, or just pass time. A few rather drunk Aboriginal womenand men nearby become increasingly loud and two men in unkempt clothes staggerinto the event, demanding money in Warlpiri language from a few seated Aboriginalwomen. When they are ignored, the men grab a few water bottles provided for eventparticipants before they wander off on unsteady feet.

Walking up the pedestrian Todd Mall I pass the outdoor cafés that offer creativemenus and street designs that attract many higher educated locals working in indigen-ous organisations, as well as visitors looking for more cosmopolitan versions of localambience. Further up the Mall, two Aboriginal women from one of the town’sAboriginal community living areas, the so called ‘town camps’, sit on the lawns bythe heritage-listed stone building that was the first hospital in Central Australia,opened in 1926. The women have rolled out canvases painted in feathery patternson the grass and a couple with an Italian flag on a day-pack stop and look, ask afew questions, and the women move their hands and explain the patterns.

I continue to one of the town’s two indoor shopping centres to get a take-awaycoffee at the food court. In the queue, I say hello to two indigenous women I haveworked with previously. These standardised, undecorated, and artificially lit indooreating areas are often the preferred places for indigenous townspeople and also formany non-indigenous trade workers, small business people, retirees, and stay-at-home mums. Several of these non-indigenous and indigenous people belong tolong-residing families who literally built the town and who continue to form astable economic, political, and social core of town life.

The daily, weekly, and seasonal ebb and flow of people and mundane activities likethese become part of the fabric of an ongoing history of interactions in a shared townspace involving indigenous and non-indigenous people of a diversity of backgrounds,life orientations, and places. That is, as this and other regional service towns continueto provide essential services, job opportunities, and attractions for long-settled andmore transient populations, the built environments become mediating arenas forremote and rural as well as metropolitan and international interests, ideas, and waysof living. At the same time, these urban centres continue to generate their ownplace-specific economic, political, and cultural dynamics, partly shaped by localisedexperiences, responses, and aspirations in broader colonial and more recent patternsof interaction, inequality, and social differentiation. In the process, relations andforms of identification among indigenous and non-indigenous people are reorganisedand transformed.

Based on field research in Alice Springs, where I have also resided for more than adecade, this article explores how social and material aspects of the town generate

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particular understandings of oneself and particular others. Each person at the councillawns and the outdoor and indoor cafés will have a lived sense of these particular townspaces, including the people co-present, based on previous experience, their own mul-tiple social locations, and associated kinds of knowledge. At the same time, they con-stitute town space, themselves and other people as meaningful in a continuum fromthe familiar, comfortable, and desirable to the unknown, awkward, and offensive.Previous ethnographic studies of indigenous and non-indigenous Australian towns

and urban settings provide rich descriptions of these settings as arenas for co-existencebut tend to focus only on indigenous people.2 The research underpinning this articletakes heed of Nader’s critique that ‘[t]he study of the colonized and not the colonizerstill haunts our work’ (Nader 2013, 5) by paying just as much attention to non-indi-genous experience, practice, and understandings as scholars have long paid to thedetail of indigenous lives. Also, while previous descriptions of indigenous people inurban settings indicate similar patterns of life style, taste, and interests to otherpeople there, we rarely see how indigenous and non-indigenous people co-produceconfigurations of class, ethnicity, gender, and other forms of differentiation thatshape all persons’ lives in suburban and small-town settings. We are instead often pre-sented with an indigenous domain in which practices and values are regenerated in itsown cultural logics which seem to remain distinct from a non-indigenous domain ofeveryday life.Gomes notes how ‘the past several decades have witnessed the hardening of the divi-

sive binary between indigenous and non-indigenous’ (2013, 6). Global and nationalindigenous identity and rights politics inevitably energise such a division since thelegitimacy of indigenous rights claims relies on making convincing arguments aboutthe unquestionable nature of certain aspects of difference. Government policy,public funding, legislation, and research also tend to distinguish indigenous issuesfrom other, ‘mainstream’ matters, further perpetuating discourses in which not only‘the categorisation of indigenous has become racialised, essentialised and politicised’(Gomes 2013, 6); so, too, has the related categorisation of the non-indigenous.More important for the place-specific argument I pursue here, is how understandingsof indigenous and non-indigenous relations often become detached from day-to-dayinteractional practice in the particular place in which relations become meaningfulfor the persons involved.Casey (1993, 23) notes that to be somewhere is to be in a place and to be part of its

action, which not only determines where we are in the sense of a location on a map, butalso mediates how we are together with others in a place, and who we can becometogether. Taking such phenomenological observations of social emplacement tomore recent anthropology of inscribed and contested urban place and space (forexample, Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003), I will draw on the concept of ‘belonging’(Yuval-Davis 2006) to explore how a diversity of town residents come to ‘know theirplace’ in Alice Springs town—both in the sense of engaging with the physical environ-ment and in the sense of perceiving oneself and others differently and similarly insocio-cultural terms.

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Used in an everyday sense, belonging is here about how people feel ‘at home’ and atease in the way they form and enact various kinds of attachments to people and thebuilt environment based on their multiple social locations: gender, race, ethnicity,age, religion, education, occupation, kin relations, and more. As I apply this to AliceSprings, class emerges as a stronger theme than race for how many people organisetheir activities and make sense of themselves and others in town space. In this, Irefer to a broader conceptualisation of class that not only includes economic situationsbut that is based also on cultural, social, and individually expressed differentiation(Acker 1999). It takes into account how the attainment of certain lifestyles, kinds ofeducation, occupation, patterns of consumption, cultural tastes and skills, and embo-died patterns becomes grounds for how people identify and are identified in relativeclass terms (Bourdieu 1984).

After introducing aspects of the place-specific relational dynamic in Alice Springstown through a community event, I explore two town areas strongly associated withperceptions of radical difference and division between the two categories of indigenousand non-indigenous. I suggest that a combined focus on material and social aspects ofhow people come to ‘know their place’ can facilitate more open-ended understandingsof changing forms of relations and identification than such binary models allow for,without ignoring the historical fact of dispossession, exploitation, and oppression per-petrated against indigenous populations.

Alice Springs

Each April, the local National Trust group puts on a week-long Heritage Festival inAlice Springs. The theme this year is ‘Our Sporting Heritage’ and the program includestalks, exhibitions, performances, and guided tours that focus on the role a range ofsports have played in the socio-cultural life of Alice Springs, as well as for the designof town areas. Today, fifteen non-indigenous men and women have taken theirseats in the library for a lunchtime talk about local sporting characters. Many arelong-time residents, some are more recently arrived residents, and a few are tourists.Other library users of various ethnic origins read papers and use laptops at nearbytables and a group of Aboriginal men, women, and children are watching anArrernte-language film on a wall-screen a few metres away.

The mix of people in the library reflects the fact that a majority of Alice Spring’sresidents are of British and Irish ancestry, and today their families often includepeople of other ethnic and Aboriginal heritage. About thirty languages other thanEnglish are spoken in homes in town and 19% of the town residents were bornoverseas.3 Long-settled minorities with particular importance for the developmentof the town include people of German, Italian, Chinese, and American back-grounds, and the so-called Afghans, who originally came as camel handlers fromwhat is now Pakistan, Afghanistan, and north-western India (Raikowski 1987).Maori, Pacific Islander, and Filipino families form other well-established minorities,and the Indian and African communities have increased in recent years. The

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town services a likewise diverse population of remote-living people working in therural industries, Aboriginal communities, mines and petroleum operations, andtourist resorts.While the size of the town population has stayed the same in the past decade, the

proportion of residents identifying as indigenous has increased from 15% in 2001 to18.6% in 2011.4 A majority are of Arrernte ancestry, the original people and languageof the area, and while some speak Arrernte, others speak English as first or onlylanguage. A number of mainly non-Arrernte indigenous families have also lived andworked in and near town for generations. The family trees of all these familiesinclude non-indigenous persons of various origins. Indigenous people from cities,towns, and remote communities in other parts of Australia have long come to AliceSprings to work, study, or visit, too. Quite a few higher educated indigenous employeesin the Indigenous sector—the many indigenous services and advocacy organisationsbased in town—come from other places, for instance. The town is also the servicehub for a number of remote-living Aboriginal people who may stay for a few days,weeks, or months, and some stay for years.5 Their home communities report someof the lowest levels of standard education and the highest rates of unemployment inAustralia. Most of these visitors speak Aboriginal languages while their skills inStandard English vary, and many aspects of their lives continue to be organisedaccording to ancestral affiliations to land and kin. These are features of long-residingindigenous town families, too, while they have developed skills, interests, andaspirations with relevance for the multi-ethnic and market-driven town context to agreater extent than people with primary attachments in smaller, Aboriginal-dominateddesert communities.The speaker at the library event, Brian, arrived in Alice Springs as a recently gradu-

ated teacher from South Australia 44 years ago.6 From an Irish-Catholic family andeducational background, he has told me part of the reason he came to town was hisfather’s vivid stories from being stationed here for several years during WWII,working for the army transport division. The town took on a mythological shine foryoung Brian as his father described how much he enjoyed the town, how tough thepeople and the climate were, and he brought back crafted wood pieces and otherexotic objects. Brian was also influenced by two friends from Alice Springs he metduring the teacher training; one of them from an Italian family and the other froma large Irish-Catholic family network. With other long-standing non-indigenous andAboriginal residents, both these families played a significant role in the constructionof Alice Springs town and its economic infrastructure from the 1920s.Alice Springs began as a tiny non-indigenous settlement close to a telegraph station

on the Australian overland telegraph line in the 1870s and has expanded on the landsof the Mparntwe, Antulye, and Irlpme Arrernte groups by the MacDonnell ranges andalong the usually dry Todd River. The town grew slowly with marked increases when itbecame the end station for the railway from the south in 1929 and a base for US andAustralian army personnel during WWII. Its infrastructure initially developed aroundthe rural industry, with large tracts of land in the region taken up as cattle and sheep

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properties (Donovan 1988). Like the parents of Brian’s Italian mate, early settlers alsoarrived as part of short-lived gold, mica, and (false) ruby rushes in nearby areas.Others, like the parents and grandparents of his Irish-Catholic friend, ran hotels, con-struction businesses, shops, small farms, and orchards in or near the town. The earlyeconomic activities involved Aboriginal people, some of them occupying the land of thetown and where pastoralists or miners took up leases, others making their way to thesesettlements for work, food, and protection as they were forced off their ancestral lands(Kimber 1986). Today, later generations of these Aboriginal and non-indigenousfamilies continue to shape political, economic, and social activities in town. Most ofthem recognise or know members of each other’s families from growing up in thesame streets, going to the same schools and churches, playing sports, and workingtogether. Some are also relatives throughmarriage, adoption, and extra-marital relations.

Like for the young Brian, Alice Springs has long occupied a special, almost mythicalplace also in the national imagination. The town and surrounding country represent akind of ongoing frontier and iconic ‘outback’ space that anchors powerful sentimentsof Anglo-Australian settler forms of belonging on the Australian continent. The regionis also marketed globally as a tourist destination where people can engage with a forty-thousand-year-old and still-living Aboriginal culture, and experience the dramaticdesert landscape. Tourism has been a main driving force for the growth of the townsince the 1960s and it has an international casino and a large selection of accommo-dation and restaurants to provide for the up to half a million annual visitors. As aresult of the national policy era of indigenous self-determination and Aboriginalland rights legislation, there has also been a mushrooming of indigenous servicesand advocacy organisations based in town since the 1980s, and many academics andprofessionals with interest in indigenous matters come here for work.

Since Brian was introduced to town through his mates’ families, he and his wife haveraised two children in town while Brian has been involved in a number of sports clubs,community groups, boards, and committees. He is known by generations of indigen-ous and non-indigenous residents as a local radio sports commentator, the town’sFather Christmas, and as their teacher in different schools and colleges. To thelibrary audience, he now tells hilarious stories about the betting, drinking, cheating,and all kinds of dramas and quirky personalities in the history of the local sportsscene. Like other festival-speakers, he describes how major sports-related eventsused to involve more or less the whole small town population. Many locals havealso contributed a lot of time, money, and material constructing and maintainingsports fields and venues over the years. He mentions that the first concrete swimmingpool in town was built by locals. A retired electrician beside me chuckles and adds thatthe sides of the pool ended up uneven.

An Aboriginal man has left the nearby film screening and leans against a bookshelfbehind Brian and listens. He nods to me and I recognise Kevin from a previous work-place. Born into an Aboriginal town family, he left in his early 20s, had two childrenwith his non-indigenous partner, played football, and worked at building sites in otherstates and cities. He returned for his father’s funeral and soon married a local

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Aboriginal woman. Now in his mid-40s, he has worked in maintenance and vehiclesections of indigenous organisations in town, and has completed training and tradecertificates as part of his employments.When Brian invites questions, a more recent resident asks if ‘all people’ were allowed

in the public pool and a tourist asks if Aborigines could participate in sports in the past.The long-time residents nod when Brian answers matter-of-factly that all kids wouldbe in the pool, except on hot afternoons when the water had become a health hazardand the pool had to close, to everybody. The long-timers explain that football gamesincluded ‘anyfella, as long as he could kick a ball’, because the population was smalland a main difficulty could be to get enough players for a tournament. They addthat an A-level team in the 1970s was brought into town on the back of a truckfrom the nearby Aboriginal Amoonguna community and was sponsored for yearsby a local non-indigenous plumber. Kevin nods and grins when Brian describeshow most of them played barefoot and were great kickers.‘The main segregation was probably between blue and white collar workers’, Brian

reflects. The two groups were accommodated on separate blocks in the town centrewhen they first arrived for work in town and even though they shared a food hall,they were served at different times. This segregation also structured sports, withblue-collar teams at times made up by men rounded up along the main street onSunday mornings, while white-collar teams were sponsored and their clubs were pri-vately owned and run. ‘I wouldn’t say that all people were equal’, Brian sums up, butAboriginal or not, ‘people knew their place’ in town. I raise my eyebrows in a questionto Kevin and he raises his thumb in agreement.

To Know One’s Place

The library event points to several aspects of how people from their multiple sociallocations relate to town space and understand relations in Alice Springs in shared,partly overlapping, and contested ways. In the process they assert certain ways ofbelonging and knowing one’s place, which may also make others present feel out ofplace. It is clear by the way the long-time locals talk knowingly about town areas,events, and named non-indigenous and Aboriginal people that they don’t considerthe racially informed questions highly relevant. In less explicit ways, AboriginalKevin partly validates this. The women asking look a bit uncomfortable.Theorists of space and place stress the effort required to invest a location with

meaning, and thus transforming space into a known place (Casey 1993; Lefebvre1991; Tuan 1977). As Appadurai points out, residence in itself is not enough; ittakes hard and regular work to produce and maintain a sense of place (1996, 179).In towns, the place-making work involves the design and building of houses, roads,and other physical features, as well as making particular forms of attachments to thebuilt environment and to the people using it. Ethnographic research in refugee andmigration studies (for example, Turton 2005) and multi-ethnic urban settings (forexample, Wise and Velayutham 2009) show in particular detail how people attach

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meaning to a place through a variety of home-making practices, such as organising andusing a place according to familiar categories and sets of values. People’s sense ofbelonging is also crafted through place-specific acts of self-identification, and identifi-cation by others; where they eat, shop, work, and relax; the things they tell themselvesand others about who they are and who they are not; how they identify with particulargroupings and not others; and their own and others’ perceptions of what it means to bepart of a particular grouping (Yuval-Davis 2006, 202).

Belonging is thus not only about origin or membership in a group or community; italso takes into account the feelings and practice such memberships generate and whatpeople aspire and long to become, which orient their day-to-day actions, and how theyevaluate themselves and others in particular places (Bell 1999, 1). The sets of valuesunderpinning such judgements will be associated with a person’s multiple sociallocations. The importance of social locations and differentiation for intersecting andchanging patterns of stratification and identity formation has long been the subjectfor social research and theory. It is worth noting, too, that a person’s set of values israrely coherent or consistently applied, and aspects of differentiation will be mobilisedas more or less important, and structure actions and experience to a greater or lesserextent, from one setting to the next. As experience, narrative, and practice in theseways are socially and culturally elaborated and ‘inscribed’ in place in mutually consti-tuting ways, ‘space’ is transformed into meaningful ‘place’ (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga2003, 13–18).

Attending to such both fluid and historically conditioned aspects of belonging, wecan note how Brian, Kevin, and others at the library talk assert a shared, mainlymale, experiential knowledge of the town from cutting the grass on the footballfields, sweating it out on the sports grounds, and washing off the dirt in the townpool with often familiar non-indigenous and Aboriginal persons. The more recent resi-dent and visiting women’s questions instead indicate non-place-specific understand-ings shaped in globally circulating indigenous rights discourses. The question aboutaccess to the pool is especially loaded with Aboriginal rights sentiments in Australia,and with perceptions of bad race relations in regional towns. A seminal event in thenational indigenous rights movement was the 1965 ‘Freedom Ride’ with activistsfrom Sydney driving to inland towns, showing a broader public that racial discrimi-nation was rife in regional New South Wales. A widely broadcast Freedom Ridemoment was a confrontation at the Moree town pool where segregation betweenAboriginal and other users was enforced.

Many long-time Aboriginal and non-indigenous residents tell me it was different inAlice Springs. They are also aware that their experience of engaging in a variety of wayswith a diverse range of indigenous and non-indigenous people in town is often ignoredwhen more recently arrived, or politically active and high-profile, people emphasiseracial conflict and inequality as defining features of the town and its settler history.Soon after the library event I asked Pete, a middle-aged Aboriginal man, how hewould have answered the questions about Aboriginal participation in sports andaccess to the town pool in the past. He belongs to an Arrernte town family and

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grew up in streets with Aboriginal, Afghan, Greek, Italian, English, and Irish neigh-bours. Both Pete and members of those other families tell me they were all ‘more orless poor’ and those with more helped others who went through hard times, regardlessof skin colour. ‘It wasn’t like that, we weren’t “Aboriginal” back then’, Pete said withwinking double-fingers at ‘Aboriginal’. ‘It was only after, you know, the Aboriginal flagand all that anger we knew we was Aboriginal’, he said tongue-in-cheek before beingserious again. ‘Sure, we were different, but everyone knew their place. And everyonewas welcome at our place—white, black, poor or rich—as long as they showedrespect for my mother.’A defining factor for how Pete and his neighbours formed attachments to each other

and the town was work. Like his father, many siblings, and friends, Pete has workedmost of his life, with non-indigenous and indigenous people. The evidence of theirwork and residential history not least sits in the built environment. When I drive intown with Pete he often points and comments that this or that cousin or friendplanted those now big council trees or how he mixed and poured the concrete forthat path. His stories resonate strongly with what I hear from long-residing non-indi-genous men with similar trade-based work experiences and low academic education.Physical, economic, and social aspects of their sense of belonging become inseparablein the way these Aboriginal and non-indigenous men narrate and identify with townspace. That is, the labour in the company of other men becomes inscribed in particularbuildings, and so do relations among them and the indigenous and non-indigenousmen and women who have lived and worked in these buildings over the years.These residents share knowledge of their place in town in similar inhabiting and cul-tural terms as those quoted at the top of the article; by feeling responsible and proudfor the work they have invested in it over time; by responding to it through layers ofgood and bad memories of personal relations and work; by caring about how it is usedand cared for, or not, by others.Some areas of town, however, are historically marked or widely perceived in binary

terms of ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘White’. Jackson notes how ‘it is inevitable that many peoplewill always categorize themselves as black and white, colonizer and colonized, tra-ditional and modern’ (1998, 101). Such categorisation is also applied to places, andthe most often referred to in such terms in Alice Springs are the town camps andthe golf course area. I proceed to explore, as Jackson goes on to suggest, ‘the complexityof lived experience’ such categorisations mask, in order to problematise understand-ings of division and difference between ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘White’ in town.

Town Camps

Alice Springs town centre is surrounded by expanding suburbs with house pricespeaking around $1 million in the golf course and rural areas while 70–80% ofhouses and units sell for less than half that amount. Public housing is integratedinto most suburbs and many tenants are Aboriginal. About 20% of Aboriginal townresidents, or around 1,000 people, live in Aboriginal community living areas, the

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nineteen so called ‘town camps’.7 They consist of houses on leases held by Aboriginalhousing associations and serviced by the Aboriginal Tangentyere Council since the1980s. Some camps have a longer history as sites where Aboriginal locals and visitorsstayed outside the then fairly small town area. The town camps are thus administra-tively, legally, and residentially Aboriginal, and previous research discusses particularforms of indigenous practice, sociality, and resistance generated in these settings(Collmann 1988; Coughlan 1997).

Today, several town camps are no longer outside the town but adjacent to, or sur-rounded by, other residential areas. I have spent time in most town camps and eachone is different in its size, layout of houses, and the mix of people’s backgrounds intown and the larger region. Some consist of only a few houses occupied by multiplegenerations of the same extended family, while in others, clusters of houses arespread out over a larger area and residents in different clusters may speak differentlanguages and not have much to do with each other.

There are also differences in lifestyle and standards between households within theone town camp. I visit an Arrernte friend now and then in one of the mid-sizedcamps and during the decade I’ve known him and his wife they have both workedin various part- and full-time jobs for indigenous organisations and in the publicservice, with periods of unemployment. They are thus part of the almost 20% oftown camp residents aged 15–65 who are in the workforce. My friends drive theirchildren to school every day and keep the house and yard relatively clean. In con-trast, the house next door is in disrepair and the yard full of burnt car wrecks,food waste, soiled mattresses, and empty bottles and cans. I have visited thishouse many times, too, for work with custodians of a southern Arrernte area. Iusually find a number of drunken and dishevelled men and women inside and inthe yard, and toddlers and school-age children who are obviously neglected. Thetenants are Arrernte locals, and other occupants come and go from the WesternArrernte community of Ntaria (Hermannsburg), an hour west of town. An Arrerntewoman in the house has children with a now-deceased Warlpiri man and his rela-tives also often stay when they visit town, sometimes for months. When I havecome at night it has been drunken mayhem at this house, while my friend’sfamily next door cook dinner, watch television, and turn off the lights when theygo to bed.

Every time I spend time at a town camp house I also observe a constant traffic ofnon-indigenous people of diverse ethnic backgrounds, as well as indigenous peoplewho live elsewhere in town. Some are relatives or friends of residents, others cometo carry out a range of services and jobs; school bus drivers, trades people, police offi-cers, social workers, lawyers, emergency service workers, health professionals, youthworkers, and more. Many of these men and women become familiar to the residentsand depending on the reason for their visit and the time of day or night, they may bewelcomed and sit down for a chat and a cup of tea, simply carry out a task and leave, orthey may be avoided or challenged.

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The interactions in, and relations to, the town camps are thus of many differentkinds, based on what aspects of people’s social locations and attachments areenacted and emphasised. Conditions and motivations shaping understandings andexperiences of non-indigenous professionals who choose a career working with indi-genous people and matters have been discussed by other researchers (Kowal 2008,2010; Lea 2008). They note a desire among many non-indigenous professionals tounderstand indigenous people, cultural practices, and values, and to be acceptedinto indigenous people’s personal lives and communities. I find this yearningcommon also among indigenous people from settings where pre-colonial forms oflife have changed to a greater extent than in, for instance, remote Central Australia.The longing to form attachments to place and people in the way indigenous peopleare perceived to belong can be understood as part of the broader discourses of particu-lar kinds of difference between indigenous and non-indigenous life worlds referred toin the Introduction. When indigenous people fail to live up to the often deeply per-sonal, existential, and complex expectations shaping such yearning, it can create dis-appointment and dilemmas, and also explanations that further reinforce views ofunsurmountable cultural difference and racial division.A majority of residents in Alice Springs, however, and many people who come and

go in the town camps every day, do not work with, and are not specifically interestedin, indigenous people and matters. Overall employment in town is mainly driven bytourism and the public sector, and the largest economic contributors are propertyand business services, manufacturing, and health and community services(DHLGRS 2010). Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, engineers, and other tradesmenI talk to, for instance, have detailed insights into the varied and changing material con-ditions in which people live in the town camps from talking with occupants andobserving activities over time, as they carry out their work. They tend to talk abouttown camps in a similar non-generalised way to other houses, people, and townareas they work in; some persons are difficult to deal with, others are friendly, or indif-ferent, and ‘electrical work is electrical work anywhere’, as Bert put it, an electricianwith 20 years’ experience in town.Of English-Dutch heritage, Bert grew up in Bundaberg in Queensland where he

married an Alice Springs-born nurse. They moved to her hometown because of themany jobs available. They live in a small brick house with a pretty front yard, whilethe backyard is full of electrical equipment and discarded whitegoods. The house istypical for the plain government standard built in the 1960s and 1970s, and realestate in the neighbourhood is relatively cheap. Their next door neighbour is Andy,an Aboriginal man who teaches building and construction courses, and his non-indi-genous wife who is an HR administrator. These two low-income couples told me theyhave a ‘friendly war’ over the best kept yards and the loser buys the beer for their nextbarbecue evening.Bert told me that town camp houses may be a bit more ‘messy’ and the wear and tear

of things electrical in some houses higher than in many other houses in town. Hedidn’t think this was strange considering the number of visitors who used some of

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the houses and who didn’t seem to know how to use appliances, or didn’t feel respon-sible for keeping them in good working order. He didn’t associate this with beingAboriginal, ‘just look at bloody Andy!’ said Bert, who usually had to buy the beerfor their get-togethers. He though it was about ‘lifestyle’ and lack of education, andfound similar conditions in houses where many Sudanese refugees lived.

Taxis come and go in the town camps all the time as many people living on welfarecan’t afford a car. I find that some drivers and residents become familiar with eachother. For instance, I was visiting Albert, an Aboriginal town camp resident aged inhis late 40s, when a taxi drove up to the gate. Al introduced me to his ‘businesspartner’ Eric and they told me how he had helped a very drunk Al out of the taxione cold night almost five years ago. He got Al into the house and down on a mattress,put a blanket over him and asked if he was alright before he left. This gesture of kind-ness moved Al and since then he always asked for Eric when catching a taxi. When Ericchanged jobs for a while, he continued to come by and at times bought some of Al’spaintings. He took them to the church he attends, where the art was sold to raise fundsfor various community programs.

When Eric had left, I was curious about what Al knew about him and it turned out to bea great deal. He came from a small town in South Australia where he quit school to trainwith a car mechanic. He soon quit this, too, went north, and worked at cattle stations forseveral years until he injured his back in a cattle yard and was flown to the Alice Springshospital. This is where he met his future wife and they have now raised two sons and adaughter in town. As Al toldme this, he weaved in bits and pieces of his own aborted train-ing as an assistant teacher at the indigenous Batchelor College and how he worked at cattlestations as a ‘youngfella’ until coming back to town for health reasons.

When I tracked Eric down for my current research, he confirmed Al’s story, and healso knew a great deal about Al. ‘I just kind of enjoyed his company, it was easy, youknow, we talked footy, horses, told stories for a laugh, and listened to old country(music)’, he said. Eric has Dutch-Scottish heritage and grew up with an alcoholicfather who never held down a job for long. When his mother passed away frombreast cancer, Eric couldn’t wait to get away. He told me he basically grew up to bea man at the cattle stations where he learnt ‘all I know’ from Aboriginal stockworkers. That night in his taxi, the drunken Al had carried on about breaking inhorses on cattle stations, which is why Eric didn’t let him off by the fence. ‘Youdon’t leave a drunken horseman out in the freezing cold’, he chuckled.

Al passed away from a heart condition the year before I talked to Eric, who told mehe went to the funeral and missed the man. I asked if Al had been to his house and methis family. Eric said he brought it up but Al usually responded in a joking manner,which Eric took to mean he was uncomfortable. On the other hand, he had onlybeen inside Al’s house that one time he put Al to bed drunk, and even if he saidhello to Al’s family when he saw them in town, he had never talked much to them.‘I guess us blokes were just blokes, and knew our place the rest of the time’, he saidmatter-of-factly. I asked where he socialised with other ‘blokes’. He thought about itand concluded that they didn’t spend much time in each other’s homes, either.

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This is one example of the mundane kinds of relations among town camp and otherresidents that I hear about mainly from non-indigenous and indigenous people, whoidentify with sets of values and interests associated with occupations and skills in ruraland trade-based industries, and lower academic education. Many attend church regu-larly, are interested in team sports, and a main focus for their daily activities is theirclose and extended families. Few of the non-indigenous men and women in thissegment of the town population make a big deal out of, or expect something particularfrom, interactions and relations with indigenous persons, don’t follow debates on indi-genous matters much, don’t claim to know ‘indigenous people’, and rarely generaliseabout indigenous people, or town camps, in terms of racial or cultural difference. Inmost of the above, they differ substantially from higher educated professionals com-mitted to work in the Indigenous sector, as explored more in relation to the golfcourse area.

The Golf Course Area

In a reversed racially informed fashion to the town camps, certain town residents referto the Desert Springs area—in local vernacular the ‘golf course area’—as a ‘whiteenclave’. The area was the first larger subdivision developed by private investors inthe 1980s and some members of long-residing non-indigenous families invested inhomes here, many of them self-employed or running small and medium-sized townbusinesses in retail, food and hospitality, transport, construction, and trade-basedsectors. On my visits to Alice Springs in the 1990s, the area was talked about as the‘rich American’ area and the US-Australian Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap south oftown did build some houses and units for staff here.As I visit homes and talk to Desert Springs residents about their life and neighbours

today, I find a similar variety of single, shared, couples without and with children, andmulti-generational family households as in other town suburbs. I also find a similarmix of long-time and more recently arrived residents of diverse ethnic backgroundsand skin colour, including indigenous people. Two main differences to most, butnot all, other residential areas is the lack of public housing and the more expensivereal estate, also for rather unremarkable units and houses. People here thereforetend to earn good incomes, have accumulated wealth, or are retired with substantialnest eggs. It is thus more an expensive enclave than a ‘white’ one.In conversations with residents and from observations in the golf course area, I

find many overlapping themes in how they relate to social and material aspects ofthe town, to that of the townspeople in lower socio-economic locations describedin relation to the library talk and the town camps. One such theme is an emphasison function instead of form and style in how they organise their homes and lives.I find few artistic decorations or theme-styled furniture or colour schemes in thesehomes, but often a large sofa in front of a big television screen, a plain dinnertable, and standard outdoor furniture, most of which come from the same two fur-niture stores in town. One difference is that many of the Desert Springs homes where

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all adults work long hours and weeks in their own small businesses or high-paid pos-itions, have more expensive time-saving features, such as robotic vacuum cleaners,multifunctional electric baby rocker/seats, and a range of electric food-makingappliances.

Many people in these two different socio-economic segments of the town popu-lation also share a relatively low level of academic education, and an everyday ethicin which social worth is evaluated in terms of people’s efforts and own work toprovide for their family, and their efforts to contribute to the good of the wholetown community. David and Helen, for instance, are in their mid-50s and haveraised three daughters in town. David was born and grew up in a local Catholicfamily. His parents arrived from South Australia in the 1940s and worked in theirown trucking business and part-owned shops and sports facilities. They were alsoactive in many community clubs and charitable groups and his father was involvedin town authorities and political circles. David has continued such an intensivelyengaged life in town, and built, bought, and sold houses in other areas of townbefore his family made Desert Springs home. He told me ‘I always put my hand up’for activities that can advance local interests and improve and expand facilities forarts, sports, health, business opportunities, and involvement in town governance.He and many others who participate in a range of not-for-profit, fund raising, andsponsoring activities to increase the social and material quality of the town evaluatesuch voluntary work and efforts very high, as it demonstrates a commitment to thetown and its future.

The lives of these people in lower and higher socio-economic segments, not onlyresiding in Desert Springs and including both indigenous and non-indigenouspeople, can be described as class journeys. They often talk about their home andlife in terms of work and effort to achieve their aspirations, which change asthey adapt to current circumstances of employment, health, and family situations.They often get impatient when I ask for their views on race relations, indigenouspeople, and related issues in town. These are rare topics of conversation atfamily dinners and other day-to-day social occasions I see them in, too. Theyoften dismiss abstract or generalised notions of ‘indigenous rights’, ‘disadvantage’,or ‘inequality’ and instead tend to make judgements based on direct experiencesof what people do, and especially to what extent people’s actions and behaviourdemonstrate effort to contribute to the whole town community; both in howthey care for keeping the built environment pleasant and safe, and how theyshow respect for the interests and property of other people in town. They ofcourse recognise the fact that a person is indigenous, and some of them are indi-genous, but this doesn’t seem to determine a fixed understanding of all indigenouspeople in general or abstract terms.

In most of the above, they differ less from each other than from many higher edu-cated non-indigenous and indigenous town residents, and in particular, those com-mitted to work in the Indigenous sector. It is precisely in such quarters that the golfcourse area is still referred to as a ‘white enclave’. In conversations, many of these

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residents also make disapproving gestures or dismissive comments to emphasise theirdislike of the area. When I ask them to elaborate, they usually describe house frontsdecorated with majestic pillars, large houses in modernistic architectural design, andwell-watered green lawns with non-native plants.‘It shows you exactly what’s wrong in this town, and Australia as a whole’, said Dave,

a non-indigenous teacher who came to Central Australia in the 1970s. He and his wifecontinue to work with Aboriginal people in remote places and in town, and have livedin one of the town’s oldest residential areas for years. In their overgrown backyard withnative plants and trees growing in no particular order around a comfortable set ofrustic outdoor furniture, he went on to state that whitefellas first robbed blackfellasof their country and then built their wealth and ‘tasteless palaces’ from earningmoney from the blackfella misery they caused. I challenged him to name whoexactly in town he was talking about. We came up with several non-indigenous resi-dents and some indigenous men and women who earn high salaries and consultancyfees in the Indigenous sector, and who live in expensive real estate. Some have valuableAboriginal art collections and many own more property in town and elsewhere in Aus-tralia. We laughed when we realised that none of them lived in the golf course area butin old, gentrified neighbourhoods such as the one we sat in. Dave also agreed that mostresidents in his neighbourhood were non-indigenous, there is no public housing, andhouse prices are often similar to houses in Desert Springs. He explained that it was ‘aworking-class street’ when they bought into the area.I had similar conversations with Janice, of English-Italian-Greek ancestry from

Melbourne, where her father was a printer and her mother a home-maker. Janiceand her partner have worked in indigenous education and project management for15 years and live in an older area. Their front yard is wildly bushy, while the insideis renovated with an extended living area with polished floorboards and a latest-model kitchen opening up to a backyard and small pool. Most furniture and materialsmatch in style and colours with walls and floors, and exotic and artistic objects areplaced for visual impact. They wanted a ‘Melbourne feel’, she said, and manyobjects were bought there. Janice told me that the golf course area is the one townarea she doesn’t know, visit, or like much. She thought it was rather tacky and imper-sonal and explained that she didn’t have much in common with ‘materialistic people’.Her main concerns in relation to the town were the ongoing discrimination againstalready disadvantaged Aboriginal people, the lack of recognition of the value of Abori-ginal people’s knowledge and sacred sites in town, and environmental sustainability.Janice’s intellectual stance is somewhat destabilised by the practical fact that I have

picked her up at houses in Desert Springs in the past, and I have run into Dave andothers in this segment of townspeople in this area over the years. When I remindedJanice of this she seemed surprised. After giving it some more thought she couldname more than one set of friends she and her partner do socialise with there. Reflect-ing further, we realised that she simply didn’t associate her friends or her own move-ments in town with her views of who belonged in the socio-material environment ofDesert Springs. The narratives of self, others, and town space that emerge in

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conversations with Janie, Dave, and others with specialised careers in the Indigenoussector are thus in some aspects similar to the ‘mostly middle-class, left-wing’ non-indi-genous professionals described by Kowal in an indigenous research institute (2008,340). In Alice Springs, they also include indigenous professionals. These networks oftownspeople identify to a large extent with anti-racist and anti-establishment senti-ments, and seek to dissociate from the neo-colonial and neo-liberal capitalist valuesthey attach to the material and social quality of Desert Springs.

In his explorations of the functions of taste as markers of class, Bourdieu notes how‘[t]aste classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classi-fications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautifuland the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their positions in the objectiveclassifications is expressed or betrayed’ (Bourdieu 1984, 6).

It resonates well with the ways segments of professionals in the Indigenous sectortend to distinguish themselves and their older, renovated homes from the more man-icured and modern street-fronts exhibited in Desert Springs, and the socially conser-vative values they attach to residences and residents there.

Conclusion

With the introductory walk through Alice Springs town centre I suggested that by payingattention to day-to-day activities and interactions in and with the built environment associally productive, we may capture a greater range of aspects shaping relations, socialdifferentiation, and ways of identifying than many previous studies of indigenous andnon-indigenous regional towns and urban areas. As I have looked closer at how indigen-ous and non-indigenous people emphasise shared, overlapping, and dissimilar experi-ence, values, and knowledge in the way they come to know their own and othersplace in Alice Springs, I have indicated how class-related taste, as Bourdieu suggests,‘functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place’, guiding the occupantsof a given place in social space’ (2004, 499). I have emphasised how a focus on the ‘givenplace’ itself can also tell us a great deal about how people orient themselves socially andculturally in their daily activities, and how and where they feel they belong or not withparticular others. In the process, aspects of their multiple social locations are put intoplay in ways that may reinforce, but also often exceed, pre-existing patterns, perceptions,and expectations of what kinds of difference are the most significant in a town with indi-genous and non-indigenous people.

To not lose sight of the historically conditioned inequalities associated with the cat-egorisation of ‘indigenous’ and ‘non-indigenous’ which underpins the physical, politi-cal, and legal structure of the Aboriginal town camps and perceptions of the golf coursearea as a ‘white enclave’, it becomes useful to make the analytical distinction betweenthe everyday forms of belonging I have outlined, and identity politics; what Yuval-Davis discusses as ‘the politics of belonging’ (2006, 204). She observes that it isusually when the more fluid, everyday aspects of belonging are challenged or threa-tened that we move into the territory of the politics of belonging; specific identity

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projects, where selected aspects of social locations and identification are fixed in orderto construct and maintain boundaries around particular populations, for specific pol-itical and ideological purposes. An extensive literature shows how the reproduction ofsuch boundaries between forms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ tend to serve the interests of thedominant, and how the definition of such boundaries will also always be contestedby those who struggle for recognition in their own particular terms of distinction(for example, Brah 1992; Calhoun 1995; Cornell and Hartmann 1998; Sider 2006).The material and social conditions of the town camps have long been part of such

struggles. The mapping of racial discrimination and entrenched structural inequalityonto the town camps is also frequently used to justify and legitimise vested class and pol-itical interests, as individuals promote their own power positions within and outsideindigenous organisations and groups based in Alice Springs. It is part of the politicsof identity, too, that persons who assert forms of indigenous belonging in terms ofthe inequalities associated with the town camps may not reside in them, and may nothave experienced such inequalities or disadvantage personally (Platt 2011, 207). As indi-cated earlier, 80% of Alice Springs’ indigenous town residents do not live in town camps.They are public and private tenants in other town areas and some are paying off theirhomes. They partly come to know the town through their work and by living with neigh-bours of diverse ethnic backgrounds and socio-economic circumstances. Some of theseindigenous people have never been in a town camp but may still refer to town camp fea-tures when they describe what motivates them in their work in the Indigenous sector,and how they identify more broadly as indigenous Australians.Similar to how the conflation of racial division, disadvantage, and inequality is

mapped onto town camps to advocate for indigenous rights and identity, the golfcourse area comes to stand for powerful forces in the dominant society that continueto ignore such rights and take for granted the superiority of non-indigenous Anglo-Australian culture. Hence, on the level of the politics of belonging, the structures ofthe town camps and perceptions of Desert Springs as a ‘white enclave’ are reproducedas manifestations of broader national and global discourses of particular forms ofdifference, structural inequality, and division between indigenous and non-indigenousdomains and categories of people.I have instead focused on people’s day-to-day lives to explore how, on the level of

everyday notions of belonging, residents come to know their place in the way theyrelate to a greater range of people and material aspects of the whole town, as well aswith places and people they know beyond the town. In the process, more forms ofdifference emerge as equally or more important for shaping experience than indigen-ous and non-indigenous difference. Especially the golf course area in many ways standsas a physical manifestation of old class differences in town that have become moreobvious and deepened in new ways. Today, this class-based division doesn’t line upin any straightforward fashion with a division between indigenous and non-indigenouspeople in a town where indigenous employees earn the same salaries as other employ-ees in positions requiring similar skills, level of education, and experience. Class mobi-lity over time, and sets of values associated with lower academic education and higher

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skills in trade-based occupations, also blurs lines between lower and higher socio-economic segments of indigenous and non-indigenous townspeople. Persistent per-ceptions of Desert Springs as a ‘white enclave’ become problematic, too, whenlocally born and more recently arrived indigenous residents with higher incomeshave rented and bought homes here, while others, much like Dave and Janice,prefer other neighbourhoods for reasons other than affordability.

Anthropologists are increasingly addressing problems with essentialising collectiveidentities by approaching taken-for-granted socio-cultural entities as uncertain, situa-tional, and fractured while also positioned in historical patterns of inequality and hier-archies of power in society (for example, Cohen 2000; Werbner 1997). Interculturaland intersubjective dimensions of co-existence have also been emphasised in concep-tualisation of cultural change and social transformations in Australian indigenous lives(for example, Hinkson and Smith 2005; Merlan 2005; Sullivan 2005). Others arguethat such perspectives obscure structural inequality and distinctive indigenous lifeworlds, leaving non-indigenous ‘mainstream’ values and practice as the default pos-ition (Morphy and Morphy 2013).

Resonating with my previous research with Aboriginal men in Central Australia(Ottosson 2009, 2010, 2012), this article begins from a recognition that peoplenever take on sets of practices, meanings, and values wholly. We accommodate,resist, adopt, and rework the new with the existing partially and unevenly over time.We act and behave in ways we think are expected and pay off in different situations,relations, and places, to achieve certain outcomes, which may or may not be achievedin the way we imagined or intended. People also compartmentalise meanings attachedto practices, places, and objects to a certain extent and in various ways. The existingalways already involves such partial and uneven mediations and transformations ofwhat came before. If we accept the irrecoverable nature of these processes, we recog-nise that distinctive values and practices, be they defined as indigenous or any otherkind, evolve and are lost forever. As Kuper notes (2003), it may be difficult to evendistinguish something indigenous from non-indigenous because such definitionshave been, and will always be, aspects of inter-relational and intersubjective phenom-ena and processes, whether we talk in terms of history, identity, or culture.

Alice Springs is not a given, either, as an iconic outback town or a centre for Abori-ginal culture or disadvantage. Rather, the town is constantly brought into beingthrough people’s social practice in the built environment, in which they articulatebroader, local, and personal sets of values, and inscribe shared interests as well associal conflict and divisions. In this crafting of meaningful ways of belonging, partlyenduring and partly new forms of division, differentiation, mutual interests, andways of identifying are generated, further changing the conditions for co-existenceand intersubjectivity.

Acknowledgements

I thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

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Funding

Most of the research for the article is funded by an Australia Research Council Discov-ery grant (DP120100960).

Notes

[1] I use ‘Aboriginal’ for mainland people, ‘indigenous’ for the Australian indigenous populationmore generally, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and ‘non-indigenous’for people and matters of other heritage. I use capitalised ‘I’ in ‘Indigenous sector’, denotingthe range of government and non-government services, organisations, and other activities andentities specifically targeting and specialising in work with indigenous people and issues.

[2] Apart from Beckett’s study in the 1950s (2005), it was mainly from the 1970s anthropologistspaid serious attention to indigenous lives in Australian urban settings, both in southernregions considered ‘detraditionalised’ (such as Gale 1973; Gale and Wundersitz 1982; Youngand Fisk 1982; Keen 1988; Morris 1989; Cowlishaw 2004), and in northern and central Australiawhere ancestral practices and values continue to shape life (such as Sansom 1980; Heppell andWigley 1981; Collmann 1988; Loveday and Webb 1989; Merlan 1998).

[3] Unless other sources are stated, the statistical data in the article are from the Australian Bureau ofStatistics 1996, 2001, 2006 and 2011 national Census for the Local Government Area of AliceSprings.

[4] In Australia, 2.5% of the total population identified as indigenous in 2011.[5] Taylor (2009) estimates this population to about 15,000 people.[6] I don’t use people’s real names in the article.[7] The 2011 Census reports a total of 908 residents in the town camps, and 152 visitors. Adjusted by

the stated 16.7% rate of undercount of Aboriginal people the population would be 1060. A seriesof household surveys by Tangentyere Council in 2005 counted between 710 and 1100 residentsbut suggested an estimated total population, including visitors, of close to 1600 (Foster et al.2005).

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