Don't Rubbish Our Town: "Anti-Social Behaviour" and Indigenous-Settler Forms of Belonging in Alice Springs, Central Australia

Many Australian indigenous-settler towns experience public disorder involving indigenous people. Through focussing on indigenous experiences, scholars mostly explain this in terms of structural inequality and divisions between the two categories of indigenous and non-indigenous. Based on field-research in Alice Springs, Central Australia, the article explores how the debate about "anti-social behaviour" mediates contested sets of values that do not map onto an indigenous/non-indigenous division. The author argues for an expansion of conceptual models and field approaches to account for the more complex patterns of diverging and converging interests in contemporary indigenous-settler towns. By foregrounding place-specific forms of belonging she reveals new forms of difference, as well as shared values, both within and across indigenous and non-indigenous segments of the town population.