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Story Publication logo September 23, 2024

The View From Yuendumu: What an Australian Outlier Tells Us About Political Representation

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Australia has 90% voter turnout. But many Aboriginal communities vote at much lower rates. Exploring that gap reveals issues as well as a potential path forward.



Audio courtesy of WBEZ Chicago

When you ask people in Melbourne, Sydney or Australia’s national capital Canberra if they vote, it’s almost always an enthusiastic, “Yes.”

Thanks to the nation’s century-old tradition of mandatory voting, 9 out of 10 eligible voters cast ballots each election season, far above the 50% average in the United States since 1924.

But head deep into the country’s interior to a remote town like Yuendumu (pop. 740) and you hear a very different story.

“Never voted,” says one man.

“To me, voting isn’t the right way to do things,” says another.

“I’m a free man,” says a third. “I’m not in the system.”


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Yuendumu sits on the edge of the Tanami Desert more than a thousand miles from Adelaide, the nearest major city. To get there from the Central Australian hub of Alice Springs (pop. 28,000), you drive three hours through a tableau of red dirt and rock, mountains and cattle ranches on an unimproved road that narrows to one lane for much of the ride.

It’s a wide-open, beautiful landscape that feels a bit like Utah or Arizona and conjures what Americans think of as the Australian Outback. Aussies call it “the bush.”

“It’s very rugged country,” says local journalist Daniel Burdon. “Lots of rolling sandhills. It’s also prone to wild flooding and bushfires on pretty much an annual basis.”

In June, I made the drive to Yuendumu to learn more about why people who live there, most of them Indigenous Australians from the Warlpiri tribe, vote at such low rates.

In the 2020 territory election, for example, day-of turnout was only 28%, according to the Northern Territory Electoral Commission.

Western
Australia

Northern
Territory

South
Australia

Queensland
New South
Wales

ACT
Victoria

Melbourne
Sydney
Brisbane
Adelaide
Perth
Yuendumu
Alice Springs

Great
Australian
Bight

Australia

Map courtesy of WBEZ Chicago

Many challenges to voting in remote communities

Ahead of the trip, politicians, local leaders and experts in Alice Springs laid out some of the factors at play, many of them related to the vast distances to cover in Central Australia.

Yuendumu and towns even further “out bush” are extremely remote. Australia is roughly the size of the continental U.S. but only has around 27 million people, most of them along the coast. The Northern Territory, home to Alice Springs and Yuendumu, is bigger than Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota combined. But it only has about 250,000 people.

In this environment, it’s difficult for politicians and poll workers to reach potential voters, though to their credit, the national and territory electoral commissions do take extraordinary steps to hold elections.

Most people in the territory who live outside a handful of larger towns are Aboriginal, and they speak languages from 20-plus language groups, including Pitjantjatjara, Arrernte and Warlpiri, which is spoken in Yuendumu. English is many people’s second or third tongue, so language barriers can be a problem.

Poverty rates are high in remote Australia, and in democracies around the world, lower-income people tend to vote at lower rates.

Then there’s what’s known as the “mobility” of Aboriginal people. Indigenous Australians are proud to say that their cultures are the most ancient on the planet, going back tens of thousands of years, and those cultures relied on traveling through the bush, not staying in one place.

To this day, many Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory regularly move from place to place to visit family and friends, hunt and forage, take part in cultural practices and seek healthcare and other services that are not available in their remote towns.

Distance, language, poverty and mobility all contribute to lower voter turnout, but the story that elders told me as we sat on a traditional Warlpiri songline, or dreaming track, in the desert outside of Yuendumu cut much, much deeper.

Australia’s colonial past is present in Yuendumu

My guide in Yuendumu is Warlpiri elder Ned Hargraves. He says that Kardiya — white or non-Indigenous people — “play lots of games, tricky ones,” and that no government official or politician has ever explained to Yapa — Indigenous people — how voting could benefit them.

“I’m putting myself in a position that I’m in white man’s system. I’m in white man’s system so that I can be dragged around,” he says. “But I shouldn’t be doing that.”

It’s a sentiment I heard elsewhere in Yuendumu as well as from Indigenous people in Alice Springs and Melbourne.

“Back in the days before the English arrived here, we understood democracy,” says Maxwell Vincent, an Aboriginal man from Western Australia living in Melbourne. “Not just my people, but Africans and North American Indians and South American Indians and the Polynesians.”

In the mid-1500s, European colonists and conquistadors were already spreading through present-day North America, decimating Indigenous populations with disease and appropriating their lands. In Australia, however, “first contact,” when Captain James Cook landed on the Eastern seaboard, was in 1770, so that same vicious cycle didn’t begin to play out until centuries later.

In fact, some Indigenous people in the Northern Territory were still living as they always had well into the 20th century, and for the Warlpiri, colonial aggression is recent history, not a distant memory.


Image courtesy of Maddison Whitford/WBEZ. Australia.

In 1928, a few generations ago, a territory police constable and his men killed between 31 and 200 Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people not far from Yuendumu in what is now known as the Coniston massacre, a horrific event that’s left its mark on the tribe’s collective psyche.

Speaking on the 90th anniversary in 2018, Aboriginal man Dwayne Ross, one of the traditional owners of the land where the murders took place, choked up when thinking about what was lost.

“We can feel it in our heart,” he said. “It’s really important, the sentences we are speaking of those survivors. Because they are not gone, they are here and their story is still alive.”

In the decades after Coniston, the Australian government launched a widespread effort to get the Aboriginal peoples of Central Australia, nomads for millennia, to settle in place and assimilate. The Native Affairs Branch established Yuendumu as part of that project in 1946.

In her award-winning book Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth And History On A Central Australian Pastoral Station, historian Shannyn Palmer explores the impact Australian government policies have had on Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory since the mid-20th century.

“Settler colonialism in Australia has bequeathed us with a set of laws, systems and institutions designed to affirm white settler superiority and privilege,” Palmer writes.

Some of the men I spoke with in Yuendumu feel that today. Warlpiri elder Otto Sims, for example, says he has no interest in voting and wants nothing to do with the government.

“My jurisdiction is tribal law. Not the other law, the Crown law,” he says. “I used to have a passport. I destroyed it. I destroyed my birth certificate, so I’m unbranded.”

Sims also says he doesn’t accept Centrelink, a government service that provides social security and other payments to Australians.

“I’m a tribal man,” he adds. “I’m out of the matrix.”

‘Kardiya’ and ‘Yapa’ have divergent worldviews

For our interview on voting, Warlpiri elder Ned Hargraves takes me to Juka Juka, a sacred site a 30-minute drive on rutted dirt roads into the desert outside Yuendumu.

Juka Juka is a node on a traditional songline or dreaming track, a pathway in the tribe’s oral map and history of the world. It’s a place that connects past and present in the Warlpiri cosmology, the jukurrpa, sometimes translated as “the dreaming” or “dreamtime.”

“It’s our metaphor. It’s our worldview,” says Karl Hampton of the Warlpiri Project. “That’s the way Warlpiri and a lot of Aboriginal information is carried on through here, these parts of Australia.”

The site where we sit down to talk is part of a rain dreaming songline. The jagged sandstone jutting up from the desert scrubland represents lightning, while other boulders and rocks are raindrops.

Warlpiri society is organized around five core pillars: country, law, language, ceremony and a kinship system based on so-called “skin groups,” and folks in the skin group that Ned Hargraves is part of are the traditional owners of the rain dreaming.

“This jukurrpa belongs to me,” says Hargraves. “And I can tell you what it means.”

But he adds that just as Kardiya look at Juka Juka and cannot see the deep layers of meaning and the collective memory embedded in the land, Yapa look at ballot papers and the whole concept of voting and don’t see any value.

“It doesn’t mean anything to us,” he says.

As a Warlpiri, Hargraves says he’s obliged to follow the rules of the skin group system, which determines everything from who can marry whom to who someone is required to care for to how people should relate to the land.

But as for voting: “It’s not Yapa way. It’s not Indigenous way.”

“To me, it’s unfair,” he says of Australia’s mandatory voting system. “If I don’t want to vote, I don’t have to vote.”

A vision for self-government in Aboriginal Australia

The federal, territory and local governments have not delivered for places like Yuendumu, a town of dirt roads, subpar housing stock and few resources.

And for more than a century, white settlers, ranchers, government officials, missionaries and anthropologists have taken more than they’ve given in this region.

That taking is in some cases quite literal. Over the years, thousands of Warlpiri cultural artifacts have ended up in museums and private collections in Melbourne, Sydney, Berlin, even Chicago.

Since 2019, the Warlpiri Project has been working to bring those objects and ancestors home.

It’s the first step in a three-part process, says Karl Hampton, that could render low voting rates moot: first cultural repatriation, then nation-building, and finally, true self-government.

“It’s the traditional Aboriginal governance that we talk about with the Warlpiri Project,” he says. “You can’t necessarily enshrine that in whitefella legislation, but it should be formally recognized.”

What Hampton is working to create is effectively a fourth tier of government, one built from a tribal constitution based on Warlpiri skin groups, beliefs and codes of conduct.

As is, the Northern Territory is what Hampton calls “constitutionally vulnerable.” As one of the country’s two territories, it doesn’t have the same checks, balances or clout that Australia’s six states have, and faraway officials, not local leaders, are running the show.

“Voices in bush communities are not being heard,” Hampton says. “Decisions are made in Alice Springs or Darwin or Canberra, and they’re not the real representation of people out here.”

One such decision came in 2008 when the territory government reduced the number of local councils from 59 to 17, creating so-called “regional councils” to oversee huge areas, a move some Warlpiri view as just more top-down government disconnected from the ground.

“It’s not working the way we want,” says Hargraves. “It’s not properly set up.”

Hampton is in the process of establishing what he calls a Yuendumu cultural authority where skin groups will choose community leaders who can broker a treaty with the government.

“The next step is to negotiate with the territory and Commonwealth government around what part of the self-governance can this new corporation take on,” Hampton says. “And having them acknowledge that that system is now recognized by their system.”

If that were to come to pass, it would be a major paradigm shift for the Warlpiri people.

What’s at stake for the people of Yuendumu

Much like many Native American groups in the U.S., Aboriginal people in Australia are imprisoned at a disproportionate rate and face a higher threat of police violence.

It’s a fact keenly felt in Yuendumu, where in 2019, a white police officer shot and killed a 19-year-old Warlpiri man, known, for cultural reasons since his death, as Kumanjayi Walker.

Constable Zachary Rolfe was acquitted in 2022 despite body cam footage showing him shooting Walker twice after Walker was already on the ground.

Ever since, the community has waged a “Justice For Walker” campaign over what they say was a gross miscarriage of the law, and signs outside town read “Yapa Lives Matter.”

When I arrived in Yuendumu in June nearly five years after the police killing, the incident was fresh on the mind of Ned Hargraves.

“We’re living every day in trauma,” he says. “There is no justice for Yapa … You know? When will a Black man get his justice?”

For Karl Hampton, taking governing power back through a Yuendumu cultural authority is a way to ensure rights and opportunities for present and future generations.

He’s talked with folks from the Navajo Nation to learn how they set up their own police force and court system based on tribal law. He’s visited the Ngāi Tahu, the largest Maori tribe in New Zealand, which has its own justice panels, sentencing and judges.

“That’s such a big area for us,” he says. “Very similar with other First Nations groups.”

Hampton hopes the Warlpiri Project and a Yuendumu cultural authority can help address high imprisonment rates, racism with police and the court system, but also services like housing and employment, so even without voting in federal or territory elections, there will be a clear avenue for Warlpiri to improve their lives on their own terms through self-government.

“That’s my hope for the future,” he says.

Reporter: Dan Tucker is executive producer of WBEZ’s daily talk show “Reset.” He traveled to Australia in June and produced this project with support from the Pulitzer Center as a Richard C. Longworth Media Fellow.
Democracy Solutions Project: This story is part of a collaboration of WBEZ, the Sun-Times and the University of Chicago’s Center for Effective Government examining critical issues facing our democracy in the run-up to November’s election.

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