From
1913 the Commonwealth Government, through its Northern Territory
Administration, applied a policy of control and segregation of
Aboriginal people. Curfews, concentration camps and enslavement as
domestic servants kept Aboriginal people off the street of Darwin
from dusk to dawn while their mixed race children were confined in
the notorious Kahlin Compound. Vai Stanton told how the old tribal
women would come up to the fence and call the little children over.
When the little children came over, ‘the old women would hold their
little hands through the wire and tell them who they were, who their
mothers were, where they’d come from, what their skin was, what
their totem and dreaming was’ (Gilbert 1978:5-25).

By
the time a cyclone destroyed most of the Kahlin Compound. in 1937,
plans had already been made to build a new hospital on the old
Compound site. Mr White, the Assistant Chief Protector of Aborigines
had recommended a property of 369 acres known as the ‘Eight Mile’
or ‘Wilson’s’ next to the Ludmilla Creek that would make a
suitable site because it was beside the sea where Aborigines could
fish or travel by canoe and also ‘close to centres of totemic and
ceremonial significance.’ However, the surviving Larrakia people
expressed concern because they had heard that they were to be moved a
long distance from the sea and away from their places of work (Wells
1995a:26).

The
Chief Surveyor reported that there were 50 to 60 acres of good
cultivable soil on the property, about 200 acres were gravely and
stony, and the balance was poor. Some land in the reserve was thought
to have been used earlier for rice production by Chinese, who were
known to have grown the crop at various swamp sites around Darwin.
The surveyor reported that property was heavily wooded and carrying
abundant supplies of both firewood and building timber, with white
cedar trees scattered through the jungle growth. He also noted that
there was a plentiful supply of good gravel and a large deposit of
pure shell which could be used to manufacture lime for building
purposes. The property had belonged to Isaac Daniels who died in
1919. The property was then inherited by George McKeddie and William
Grant who sold the land to L B Wilson in 1929. With the Crown Land at
Ludmilla Creek added to the newly created reserve it had an area of
743 acres [300 hectares] (Henderson 1984; Wells 1995a:27).

Dr
Cook, the Chief Protector of Aborigines and Chief Medical Officer in
Darwin believed the new reserve would help control the spread of
unauthorised Aboriginal camps around Darwin. He claimed that ‘these
camps exist at the present time owing to [the Government’s]
inability to patrol the locality effectively. With the stricter
supervision which must follow [the creation of Bagot Reserve] these
camps will disappear and aboriginals now in the vicinity of Darwin
will be concentrated under supervision.’ He also maintained that
without control, the scattered camps ‘would be a menace to troops
resident on the proposed aerodrome’ (C. E. Cook to Administrator,
29 February 1937).

Other
Darwin politicians were worried that the new Aboriginal reserve was
to be too close to the new RAAF Base, although the Bagot Reserve land
was purchased in April 1937, four days before the RAAF Base proposal.
Politicians debated in federal Parliament, ‘the reserve is too near
the aerodrome where three or four hundred of our young men are to be
trained for the Air Force…we should not set such a temptation in
the way of our young men… The natives and half castes should be
accommodated many miles away from Darwin and not close to the centre
of town’ (Stone 1974:182)

Cook’s
plans for Bagot included an administration section and industrial
block, a hospital and clinic, a residential section, bakery, dining
rooms and kitchen and a school to cater for up to sixty pupils. There
were separate living quarters for single males and females and
married couples. In addition there were barracks to house twenty
‘native police,’ a laundry and other service buildings
(Administrator’s Report 1937:27).

The
Bagot Administrator’s house was designed by government architect, B
C G Burnett who made a significant contribution to Darwin’s
architecture from 1937. The impressive louvred building on concrete
pillars was built on Bagot Road, near the reserve gate, in
around1938. Until it was demolished in recent years, the house was
the only remaining modified Type B in Darwin. Many people still
remember the building as the home of the last superintendent, Les
Wilson.

The
living area, sports fields and gardens were cleared and construction
done completed by Aborigines from the Kahlin Compound, until all
residents were transferred to Bagot by May 1938. After the children
from the Kahlin Home were moved in 1939, the senior girls were placed
as far away from the newly-established RAAF Base as possible while
the junior children were billeted in dormitory style barracks
fronting Bagot Road (Wells 1995a:27). However, accommodating the
half-caste children on the reserve was against the government policy
to keep them away from Aborigines (Cummings 1990:38). For this
purpose, a fence was erected to separate the Compound from the Home
(Wells 1990:80). Samantha Wells quotes a visiting missionary who
wrote:

Our house was situated
between the half-caste community on one side and the native quarter
on the other...They were packed into these huts like sardines. You
would be surprised at the number these of people these huts could
hold. Most of the huts have a door but no window…There were two
separate schools at the compound, one for the half-caste children and
the other for the native children (Rotuman nd 7-8).

By
the 1938-9 wet season the Bagot Reserve was established enough to
plant rice on about four acres, presumably in the area still known as
the ‘ricefields’ (or ‘Chinese ricefields’) beside Dick Ward
Drive just to the south west of Totem Road.

The
transfer of Aboriginal people to Bagot was not fully implemented
before an expansion of the military presence at Darwin at the start
of World War II. Then in August 1940 the buildings at Bagot were
handed over to the Army to be used as a hospital and military camp.
The Aboriginal residents were evacuated to a number of places,
including Berrimah and Belyuen, at that time known as Delissaville.
By October there were only a ‘few aged and infirm aboriginals,
rationed and living in houses along the beach frontage of the Bagot
Reserve.’ These people were to be removed as soon as a site on the
West Arm could be prepared. (E. W. P. Chinnery to Administrator, 4
October 1940). After the bombing of Darwin in February 1942,
Aborigines were moved to ‘control camps’ down the track as far as
Mataranka. Others were trained by the Army in units for coastal
surveillance or worked as domestics.

After
World War II the Native Affairs Branch resumed control of Bagot for
training and labour programs, designed to achieve eventual Aboriginal
integration with the general community, but the reserve showed the
effects of five years of military occupation. An officer of the
Native Affairs Branch complained that ‘most of the arable land …
had been ruined by the activities of the Army and the A.W.C., who
have removed vast quantities of gravel from the area. In point of
fact the greater proportion of the Reserve is a desolate waste and
one huge gravel pit.’ The Superintendent of Bagot, Mr V. J. White,
wrote that the runways and roads associated with the RAAF base had
been built with the gravel excavated from Bagot (Letter to Acting
Director, Native Affairs Branch, 23 November 1945).

In
1946 Mr White chose the old RAAF camp at Berrimah, although ‘in a
state of disrepair,’ as the most suitable location for the
Aboriginal people returning to Darwin (Wells 1995b:280). During this
time, Bagot was occupied by ‘half-castes’ until ‘full-bloods’
were moved back from Berrimah until 1948. By that time the Retta
Dixon Home had been gazetted on 17 December 1947 after the Home for
half-caste children was transferred to a new site at the corner of
the reserve. The girls’ dormitories on the reserve then became a
central food store for the supply of remote Aboriginal settlements.

According
to Barbara Cummings (1990:84), the new girls’ dormitory was
‘continually being assailed by lonely males from Bagot Reserve.
They would peep through the fibro louvres at night or climb some
considerable distance to get into the dormitory itself.’ Barbara
Cummings says the missionaries had indoctrinated the children with a
fear of Aboriginal people on the reserve. She writes: ‘Many of
these people were our countrymen, our grandmothers, cousins, brothers
and sisters, some of whom came into the Home to work in the laundry
or to chop wood. They were our kin and yet we were prevented from
even talking to them.’

The
historian Krimhilde Henderson (1984) believed that ‘the leasing of
land to the Aborigines Inland Mission (AIM) for the construction of
the Retta Dixon Home in 1948 marked the beginning of the process of
carving up Bagot Reserve.’ The first resumptions were relatively
minor, with twenty acres [8 hectares] excised for the AIM and eleven
more resumed in 1959 for the construction of Bagot Road. The real
threat came when suburbs were becoming established on the ‘empty
bush land’ of the Reserve.

Under
the heading, ‘Darwin: town of discontent,’ a southern newspaper
reported on a series of strikes by Aboriginal workers in 1951 (Argus
March 9). One leader of the strike, Lawrence, was sentenced to three
months and another, Fred Nadpur, was banished to the desert community
of Haasts Bluff. The paper commented, ‘Until a few months ago many
aborigines were living in virtual squalor and in relative deprivation
in the Berrimah compound [where the strikes began], a few miles from
Darwin. Happily, Berrimah is passing and the new Bagot Road compound
is a sign of a new mind and a new will in administration.’ By
strictly enforcing an entry permit system on the reserves, the
administration hoped that Aboriginal people could be controlled and
isolated from the union organisers blamed for stirring up the
strikes.

In
1953 after the passing of the NT Welfare Ordinance, full-blood
Aboriginal people were declared to be wards of the state, with their
names recorded in the ‘stud book,’ as the Register of Wards was
known. The Director of Welfare became the guardian of all wards whose
lives were paternalistically controlled. In Darwin they were expected
to live at Bagot to be trained in line with the new assimilation
policy. The federal government wrote, ‘As they progress towards
assimilation, it is our intention that they should live in and with
the rest f the community and that there should be no “native”
quarter in Darwin’ (cited in Woodward 1974:36). As part of their
training the residents raised pigs and poultry and planted market
gardens and tropical orchards at Bagot.

During
the 1950s and for much of the 1960s approximately 250 people lived at
Bagot until the population stabilised to between 300 and 350,
although the numbers rose to as many as 400 when visitors were in
town (Woodward 1974:56; Bauman 2006:131-2). Some families whose
fathers worked outside the reserve lived in ‘model homes’ and
were photographed dining around their neatly set kitchen table to
demonstrate their progress from ‘transitional housing’ to an
ability to live as a suburban nuclear family. Other men and women
lived in the single quarters, receiving a small ‘training
allowance’ and eating in the communal dining room. Children
attended school on the reserve and participated in interschool
activities and eisteddfods. A preschool and health clinic was also
established. Sports teams represented the reserve in basketball,
football and many other sports. Open days were held annually. In
the early sixties, the Wanderers
Football Club team was known as the ‘Bagot Reserve’ side. Later
in the 1960s the Reserve gained recognition through the work of its
pottery students who were trained in the community pottery shed.
Community-run
night patrols confiscated any alcohol that might be smuggled onto the
reserve, despite it being illegal for wards to consume alcohol prior
to 1964.

Meanwhile,
after
Darwin was declared a town in 1959 there was increasing pressure from
politicians to move the Bagot Reserve. In
that year the Mayor of Darwin, Mr J. Lyons, was quoted as saying:
‘The way Darwin is growing leaving Bagot where it is would be like
putting it in Smith Street. What a furore that would cause. It is
high time Bagot was moved’ (NT
News, 2
January 1959). Another prominent local politician stated in the NT
Legislative Council, ‘to put the natives further into the bush
would be in their own interests,’ adding, ‘The town of Darwin is
extending and we do require places within easy access to the city
where people can live’ (Hansard, 13 January 1959).

A
memorandum suggested the ‘scrubland and swamps [on the reserve]
provide the seclusion ideal for drinking and gambling orgies and
other forms of anti-social behaviour. The very nature of the land
prevents adequate supervision by authority’ (quoted in Wells
1995b:225). Knowing the use of the bushland as an initiation area and
burial grounds, as well as fishing and recreation, Julie Wells
(1995b:226) notes: ‘The activities which the Branch describes as
"anti-social" and for which Aborigines used the bushlands
would have been portrayed quite differently by the Aboriginal
protagonists.’ Others observed that it is hard for non-Aborigines
to see the mangroves and tidal flats as useful areas. ‘Aborigines
find a lot of food in these areas. This is still true today. Often
the only fresh food available to them is what they can hunt or
gather’ (Brandl 1983). In 1982, a North East Arnhem Lander from
Naymil/Datiway clan group living at Bagot, said that a Gunabibi
ceremony site behind Bagot was used during the 1950s and although no
longer active is still out of bounds to all women and children
(AS.81/147, in Cooper 1985).

In
1961 the Administrator, Roger Nott, wrote to Canberra suggesting that
most of Bagot Reserve should be revoked to provide land for a
suburban subdivision; however, Nott proposed that some land be
retained ‘for the immediate and future needs’ of the Aboriginal
settlement.’ His letter set out his reasons:

Because the Government
has a considerable capital investment at Bagot and having regard to
the fact that a large group of people now regard this area as home,
many of whom will not move from the settlement into the normal
community, I do not think that we could justify movement of the
settlement to an area outside the Darwin town area even if a suitable
place could be found. Moreover large numbers of the natives from
Bagot now undertake employment in the Darwin area and with the
Settlement situated as it is, these persons can travel to and from
their jobs by normal transport. If the settlement were moved further
out of Darwin, quite obviously special arrangements as presently
apply at Amoonguna, would have to be made to transport these persons
to and from Darwin each day.

In these circumstances I
think we should consider retaining the present built up area of the
settlement, including the garden area, and should provide a small
green belt around this area to give opportunity for possible future
development and to provide some insulation from the proposed housing
sub-divisions. If this were done, the area of the Reserve would then
be approximately 84 acres [34 hectares] which, in my view, would be
sufficient for the immediate and future needs of this settlement
(cited in Woodward 1974:56).

A
report by Judge Woodward (1974:55) documented the debate over the
future of Bagot as recorded in internal government correspondence
from the 1960s. Woodward (1974:55) believed ‘it is worth setting
out the history [of Bagot] in some detail, since it illustrates the
way in which Aboriginal interests can be lost sight of when other
requirements become pressing.’ Woodward (1974:62) noted that the
alienation of the Bagot land ‘highlights the strength of the
Aboriginal case for more land in the township of Darwin.’

The
federal Minister, Sir Paul Hasluck replied: ‘I
could not justify cutting up some hundreds of acres of the Bagot
reserve for housing, if in thirty years’ time the only land left
for the next generation of aborigines was to be a long way out in the
paddocks that nobody else wanted… I suggest that we have to look at
the proposal for the future development and use of the reserve for
aborigines and not simply a proposal for taking away some of it’
(Woodward 1974:57). Hasluck believed that the reserve was set aside
for Aborigines and if land was lost there had to be some form of
compensation. However by December, 1962, he wrote: ‘I have approved
the excision of part of Bagot Reserve in successive stages so as to
provide blocks for building purposes on the condition that one in
three of these blocks is kept for the purpose of housing aborigines.
Our policy against segregation would require that one block in three
was set aside throughout the whole sub-division and not in any one
section of it. If there are 120 blocks of land, 40 blocks of land
have to be kept for aborigines.’

By
1964, Hasluck was no longer the Minister for the Interior. The new
minister, Mr C E Barnes, issued a statement which said:

Since
its establishment, Bagot had served a very useful purpose, providing
a home for Aborigines working in Darwin, and acting as a transit
centre for those coming to the city for medical attention or special
occasions.

For
these people the Reserve had had its own hospital, school and other
facilities. There was currently a programme for improvement of the
buildings and facilities, and for the construction of individual
homes where Aboriginal people could gain experience of normal home
life under some guidance and be fitted to become fully responsible
tenants in the general community…For this reason, and in keeping
with its overall assimilation policy, the government had arranged
with the Northern Territory Housing Commission that houses for
Aborigines should be dispersed throughout new Darwin suburbs and that
at least one house for each three blocks in the Bagot subdivision
will be made available for Aborigines.

In
other words, the houses for Aboriginal families were to be provided
scattered anywhere around Darwin and not the one in three of the new
Ludmilla sub-division houses as originally promised - in compensation
for the reduction of the reserve from 300 hectares to 23 hectares,
surrounded on three sides by a new suburb. Woodward (1974:62) notes
that ‘none of the three conditions was…observed. In fact few of
the blocks were retained for Aborigines…’ Wells (1995b:229)
suggests that the failure was partly because ‘Aborigines at Bagot
repeatedly made clear by their actions that they were not
particularly interested in moving into Darwin away from kin and
friends. As
Judge Woodward (1974:62) continued, ‘It is difficult to see how it
was ensured “that Aborigines would benefit from the sub-division.”
The simple truth of the matter was that the scattered integration of
Aborigines was not what they wanted. They lost a large area of useful
land and have nothing to show for it.’
Woodward (1974:62) concluded, ‘It also shows that the general
Darwin community owes some land to Aborigines on the basis of past
understandings.’

On
June 9^th
the NT
News
reported: ‘NEW LOOK FOR BAGOT - TO HAVE JUST ON 400 HOMES.’ The
article continued:

The residential
subdivision to be created around and to include most of Bagot Welfare
Reserve will contain 367 residential sites. The breaking up of Bagot
Reserve – a major bone of contention in the NT Legislative Council
and elsewhere for a number of years – was announced by the Minister
for Territories, Mr Barnes, last week…the new subdivision will
probably be called Ludmilla after the nearby creek.

As
a token gesture, the streets of Ludmilla were given names of
Aboriginal identities like the painter Mawalan, the dancer Mosec, the
resistance fighter Nemarluk and the strike leader Nadpur. Harney
Street was named after the Native Affairs patrol officer and author,
Bill Harney. Even the mounted policeman, Tas Fitzer, got a mention.

In
the early 1960s Bagot provided leadership for the Northern Territory
Council for Aboriginal Rights (NTCAR) with guidance from Darwin
unionist working on the waterfront. Partly as a result of the
protests of NTCAR, in 1964 Aborigines were given full rights as
citizens instead of being classed as wards of the state. Frank Hardy
in his book The
Unlucky Australians
describes a meeting held at Rapid Creek to revive NTCAR in 1966, led
by Davis and Dexter Daniels, Phillip and Clancy Roberts and Robert
Tudawali. Others came from Bagot in a union bus or walked to the
meeting (Hardy 1968:39). Hardy writes that visiting Bagot was ‘a
humiliating experience for whites and the Aborigines they want to
visit.’ He had to wait at the gate under a sign ‘BAGOT ABORIGINAL
RESERVE. UNAUTHORISED ENTRY FORBIDDEN,’ while someone passed on a
message. Until the mid 1970s, Aborigines on all NT Aboriginal
Reserves remained under the control of the Director of Welfare Mr
Harry Giese, assisted by conservative settlement councils. Respected
author and journalist, Stewart Harris (1994:xi), described in his
diary a visit to the Bagot office in 1975:

Inside, there is a white
man – blue shorts and long white stockings…I was saying Davis had
brought me to learn what’s been happening at Bagot. Then the white
bloke, who has a bloody officious manner, asks me why I want this
information. Have I got a permit? Or I will have to leave…The white
bloke gets my application form for the council. If I don’t go he
will get the police. He is the executive officer. It is the first
time I have had any problems on a reserve anywhere. Davis and I go…Is
this place really ‘freer’ than it was a year ago?

When
the land rights movement began in Darwin in 1971, activists were
barred from the reserve. Bill Ryan told the NT
News
(20 October 1972) that ‘an application to hold meetings at Bagot
Reserve had been refused.’ He added, ‘At previous meetings at
Bagot there has always been someone from Welfare or a European
listening and the people haven’t been able to speak freely.’ Ryan
also called for the resignation of the Reverend Lloyd Kent as
secretary of the Bagot Social Club. Rev Kent replied that ‘members
of the Bagot Council were quite competent to make up their own minds
and had declared their opinions firmly. They had voted against
completely opening up the reserve to other people and looked to Bagot
as a place to which they could retreat from outside pressures’ (NT
News 24
October 1972).

Activists
collecting signature for a petition for land rights to be sent to the
Queen were also asked to leave the reserve. Bill Day says in his
book, Bunji:
‘Bagot people willingly signed as collectors passed from door to
door. Out of step, their council wrote a blunt letter to the
organisers warning that anyone without a permit would be prosecuted
if seen on the reserve again’ (Day 1994:37). Similarly, when
organisers booked an Aboriginal band, ‘The Reflections,’ to play
in the Bagot Hall, they first had to cut a padlock and chain barring
their entry before the dance could begin (Day 1994:56).

Despite
the lack of support by their representatives, Bagot people joined
sit-down protests on the crosswalk at the gate to block traffic on
Bagot Road on three occasions in 1971 and again in 1973 when a
national land rights conference was held on the reserve. Several of
the southern activists stayed on at the reserve after the conference,
leading to increased tension in times of rapid change. On one
occasion, the President of the Bagot Council, Mr George Woodruff,
said he had asked the superintendent, Mr Les Wilson, to get the
police (NT
News 27
June 1973). A meeting of the council had been called following
protests about the food served at the Bagot kitchen. At the meeting
Mr Ray McHenry, Director of Aboriginal Affairs, who had replaced Mr
Giese, told the Bagot Council that they could ‘take over the
services if they wanted to.’ The NT
News
the next day had a bold headline on the front page saying, ‘BLACKS
TOLD BAGOT YOURS’ (NT
News 27
June 1973).

Instead
of a small ‘training allowance’, residents were now entitled to
Social Security payments. The dining rooms were closed and alcohol
became more freely available on the reserve. Children were sent to a
special class at Ludmilla Primary School. In June 1973, the
Aboriginal Land Rights Commission held a hearing at Bagot after a
similar meeting at Kulaluk. The first report of the Commissioner,
Judge Woodward, listed the Bagot demands:

The regular residents at
the Bagot Reserve at Darwin have made it plain to me that their only
concern is to obtain title to the Reserve so that hey can develop it
as an attractive and useful community living area. They foresee a
mixture of houses and flats, including high-rise flats, with special
provision for old-age pensioners. In due time they would expect to
see the surrounding fence come down and all residents making use of
outside schools, hospitals and other public facilities (Woodward
1973:25-30).

An
alternative plan to combine the surrounding suburb of Ludmilla into
an Aboriginal Trust, paying rent to Bagot was proposed by a local
resident.

Meanwhile
the Kulaluk group was making a claim to the land revoked from the
original reserve in 1964, from Ludmilla Creek to the old Bagot burial
ground at the end of Totem Road. To make a point, Fred Fogarty from
the Gwalwa Daraniki coalition of fringe dwellers nailed large signs
to trees along Bagot Road and Totem Road stating: ‘Aboriginal land
claim - Under negotiation with the Aboriginal Land Rights
Commission.’ Unfortunately, the Bagot Aboriginal Council did not to
present a case to Woodward for the return of the land lost ten years
earlier. Despite the lack of interest by the Bagot Council, the
Aboriginal residents continued to use the nearby creek, mangroves and
vacant land for fishing, food gathering and recreation as they had
done when the area was part of the greater reserve. The Interim
Aboriginal Land Commissioner, Dick Ward, later recommended that the
land taken from Bagot under false pretences should be included in the
proposed Kulaluk lease ‘for Aboriginal community use.’ This area
of unoccupied land bounded by Ludmilla Creek, Totem Road, Bagot Road
and Fitzer Drive, excluding the old Retta Dixon Home, was granted to
the Gwalwa Daraniki Association in August 1979.

By
1981, illegal ‘itinerants’camps’ were again a problem in
Darwin. The Darwin Mayor had campaigned on a promise ‘to relocate
illegal Aboriginal camps’ to Bagot Reserve or Kulaluk’ (Wells
1995a:72) and plans were made for two government-sponsored camps to
accommodate up to forty ‘transient’ Aborigines on the Kulaluk
lease under the airport flight path (NT
News
October 14, 1981). The accommodation was later planned for the old
Ludmilla dump site, where Minmarama Aboriginal Village now stands (NT
News
March 19, March 30, 1983).

After
Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Day in 1974, the evacuation of residents
and the destruction of facilities caused severe dislocation at Bagot.
Checkpoints were set up on the highway at Noonamah to prevent anyone
returning to Darwin without a permit and guarantees that they had
accommodation (Bunji
April 1975). While the evacuees were down south, the wartime
windowless concrete bunker houses at Bagot were bulldozed. In 1975
Kevin Gilbert (1977:25) asked Vai Stanton, ‘Do you think they will
use the excuse of the cyclone to exclude Aborigines from the Darwin
area?’ Vai’s reply expressed some of the anxiety felt at the
time: ‘If they can change the people, send them away from Bagot or
Kulaluk or Fishcamp or the Brinken sit-down area [of Knuckeys
Lagoon], the people will be further displaced.’

New
homes were built as Bagot was re-established, until in the late 1970s
the reserve was vested in Aboriginal custodians to become a
self-governing community for permanent residents and visitors to
Darwin. By 1978, vacation activities were being held for Bagot
children as part of the Vacation Care program. A children’s
activity area and camp on ‘Bagot Beach’ on the Kulaluk lease also
proved to be popular. Later
the Youth Diversionary Activities projects group began the ‘Bagot
Community Garden’ meeting twice a week, near the old pre-school.
The gardening sessions were open to the public who entered through
the gate at the end of Cardo Ct, Ludmilla. A CDEP program ensured
that the unemployed residents could be usefully occupied and Bagot
settled into steady routine after the upheavals of the previous
decades.

In
2007, the Federal Government Emergency Response, known as the
‘Intervention’ again introduced uncertainty and change through an
imposed government policy. When the federal Indigenous Affairs
Minister Mal Brough visited Bagot in October 2007 he condemned the NT
Government for tolerating the conditions at Bagot. Mr Brough told the
media, ‘There is no street lighting, substandard and overcrowded
housing and residents are left to cope with problems of blow-ins.’
At a meeting in the community hall, he informed residents that if
re-elected the Howard government would convert the 23-hectare
community into a ‘normal suburb’ (NT
News
29 October, 2007; Sydney
Morning Herald 29
October 2007, p.6).

Under
the federal government proposal, a private developer would build 150
houses, a medical centre, shops and other facilities. Some areas
would be set aside for Aboriginal people. Present
tenants would
have the opportunity to buy their own houses, provided they could
finance a debt of up to $50,000 for improvements. Tenants
who continued renting would make their payments to Northern Territory
Housing instead of the Aboriginal controlled housing corporation,
guaranteeing that their rents would rise substantially. Not
surprisingly, Brough was heckled by shocked and angry residents.

Fortunately
there was a change of government in late 2007, but the uncertainty
remained. After the election, a huge sign appeared at the Bagot front
gate stating in big letters ‘WARNING - PRESCRIBED AREA - NO LIQUOR
- NO PORNOGRAPHY’ and warning of heavy penalties. The sign adds
that enquiries are to be directed to ‘The Australian Government’s
Emergence Response Hotline.’ No assistance has been offered to
enforce these regulations. The newspaper reported that Bagot had been
labelled a ‘town camp’, subject to alcohol and pornography
restrictions. The same paper announced that more than $200 million
had been cut from the NT Intervention program. A Bagot Community
spokesperson said, ‘They’re taking back the money they promised
us to begin with. They want to keep us on a shoestring budget living
in town camps. Another 50 houses are needed here.’ He said,
‘There’s probably about 50 families and couples waiting for
houses. They’re currently living with other families.’ The
newspaper added that 500 residents shared 41 functioning houses. (The
Australian,
14 May, 2005). So it is that the wheel has turned for the Bagot
Community, leaving the long suffering Bagot Community under-funded,
controlled by government decree and uncertain of their future.

Bauman, T 2006
Aboriginal
Darwin:
a guide
to exploring important sites of the past and present
Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Brandl, M 1983
Aboriginal
groups of the Darwin area, focussing on Darwin town.
Darwin: Aboriginal Sacred Sites Authority.

Cooper, D 1985 A
permanent gradualism: a compilation of media reports and documents
concerning the history of Kulaluk.
Report to the Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority, Darwin.

Cummings, B 1990 Take
This Child: from Kahlin Compound to the Retta Dixon Children's Home.
Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

Day, B 1994 Bunji:
a story of the Gwalwa Daraniki Movement.
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