Indigenous Rough Sleeping in Darwin,Australia: ‘Out of Place’ in an Urban Setting

Introduction

One of the most frustrating aspects of recent work by geographers on homelessness is the tendency to proceed as though the problems of homelessness—and responses to those problems—are implicitly everywhere the same: or, more accurately, perhaps, the same as in New York City or Los Angeles (DeVerteuil et al., 2009, p. 655).

Developing and implementing interventions to people living in public places of urban centres is a policy and practice problem that has existed for as long as the modern city. The problem is manifest in debates about what constitutes the aetiology or premise underpinning homelessness. For example, is it a housing supply and access problem, a health problem, an economic, social or cultural problem, or a problem of an inadequate or fragmented service provision system? Embedded within these debates are questions about the extent to which individuals are afforded agency or are viewed as victims of structural forces. Understanding how to respond to people living in public places is complicated. Responses—or a lack of action—involve fundamental value and moral questions about human rights, self-determination, coercion, utilisation of public spaces, and access to amenity.

As DeVerteuil et al. (2009) observe, however, the policy, practice and theoretical questions—and the geographical research literature and public discourse surrounding them—have a tendency to represent homelessness through a prism that generalises the reality in New York City, Los Angeles or perhaps London. This discourse conveys an impression that the nature of homelessness and responses to it are largely similar across post-industrialised cities. This is not the case. Rather, factors such as geography, a city’s affluence, values, cultural groupings, norms, and political and institutional arrangements, all have profound influence on how homelessness is experienced and addressed.

Following DeVerteuil et al. (2009), this article examines homelessness and policy and practice in Australia’s northernmost capital city, Darwin. The article aims to demonstrate the influence of culture in how homelessness is experienced and addressed. The analysis of the unique features of homelessness in Darwin provides one empirical account to add to international understandings that extend beyond the homogenising of homelessness. With a specific focus on Australian and Indigenous social and geographical contexts, the article identifies cultural practices such as mobility and perceptions of Indigenous people as ‘out of place’ in urban settings. These local factors are considered in light of, and contrasted with, contemporary international perceptions of homelessness as a form of social exclusion among marginalised populations who require welfare and housing.

Located within an international paradigm that seeks to highlight local processes, the article addresses three questions. First, how do living in public places of Darwin and responding to the problem differ from the way street homelessness is presented and addressed in Australian and international literature? Secondly, how do cultural practices and perceptions of Indigenous people shape rough sleeping and its responses? Finally, what are the implications of culture, including cultural practices and assumptions of cultural norms, for international comparative research on homelessness?

Australian Indigenous people are estimated to constitute between 95 and 99 per cent of Darwin’s rough sleeping population. Indigenous people are unanimously recognised as Australia’s most socially and economically marginalised, promoting government efforts to ‘close the gap’ on Indigenous disadvantage in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality and education (Council of Australian Governments, 2011). The specific focus on Australian Indigenous people provides a case study that has international relevance in examining the role of cultural practices, especially among cultural groups that are marginalised, and how minority cultural groups and their assumed normative values are positioned in urban society.

Rough Sleeping: A Policy and Practice Typology

In post-industrialised states, people living in public places are defined as homeless; they are referred to as ‘rough sleepers’, ‘street homeless’ and the ‘unsheltered’. Responses have varied over time and across place, and are mediated by, and a product of, the way the ‘problem’ is understood. Responses fall into three dominant non-mutually exclusive types.

First, while people have inhabited urban public places throughout modern history, it is only since the late 19th century that this has commonly been framed as homelessness. In the High Middle Ages, poverty was idealised and residing in and travelling around public places could be constructed in spiritual terms (Kyle, 2005). As a spiritual endeavour free from the attachment of worldly possessions, what is now thought of as homelessness, was responded to as part of the Christian ethic of giving alms to support a spiritual way of life. St Francis’ teachings that “beggars were holy, and that the holy should live as beggars” are cited to illustrate the prevailing custom at the time (Kyle, 2005, pp. 67–68). Elements of this spiritual-based response are still evident in contemporary society. In Hindu India, for instance, the holy Sadhu lives freely wandering public places reliant on the giving of alms.

The second response is premised on assumptions about what constitutes the proper meaning of place (Cresswell, 1996). It encompasses the marginalisation of the poor from the public realm because they are not consumers or because their presence undermines the image of an attractive city (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008). Such problematisations underpin responses to people living in public places of a coercive, reactive and short-term nature stemming from priorities to control urban public places. From the forced workhouses of the 19th century (Kyle, 2005), to ‘streets sweeps’ in the late 20th century (Stoner, 1995), interventions have been directed towards achieving public order rather than meeting the needs of people experiencing homelessness. Strategies that situate homelessness as a form of ‘antisocial behaviour’ reflect this approach and are exemplified in a contemporary UK example, where in 2010, Leeds Police arrested persistent rough sleepers under the Vagrancy Act (BBC, 2010).

In the US context, Mitchell (1997) and Amster (2003) have argued that city criminal legislation has intentionally aimed to ‘annihilate’ and ‘exterminate’ people who are homeless and their use of public place. In the UK and Europe, Tosi (2007) demonstrates that local authorities have taken a much less coercive line than in the US. Nevertheless, he explains that people who are homeless or those engaging in street activities in Europe and the UK, such as street drinking and begging (see Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010), are disproportionately affected by criminal legislation, even if they are not the specific target (Tosi, 2007). In Australia, likewise, Walsh and Taylor (2007) have found that young people and Indigenous people are disproportionately subject to forced removal from, and legislation that criminalises their use of, public places.

In contrast, the third broad type of response is embedded within a framing of homelessness as extreme social exclusion and dislocation from society. At both national and local levels, Europe, the UK, North America and Australia have released plans and policies and have implemented social programmes aimed at dramatically reducing the incidences of homelessness (Australian Government, 2008; Benjaminsen et al., 2009; Calgary Homeless Foundation, 2011; European Parliament, 2011). Parsell et al. (2013) argue that, internationally, this represents a move away from merely managing homelessness, towards meeting measurable and targeted reductions. A key focus is directed towards those individuals deemed to be most vulnerable and this is often taken to be synonymous with living in public places.

Contemporary strategies focus, at least in espoused intent, on the delivery of housing/accommodation and social welfare. People sleeping rough continue to be the recipients of the activist state—assertive outreach and housing/accommodation approaches are used to persuade people to move off the streets (Parsell, 2011a, 2011b; Randall and Brown, 2002). Instead of focusing on ‘antisocial behaviour’ the rational for the intervention is often couched in positive socially inclusive and participatory citizenship terms (Calandrino, 2010).

Thus, as opposed to practices of accepting homelessness and supporting people in public places with charity, or draconian methods of criminalising or moving the ‘problem’ on, in many countries people living in public places are now the subject of welfare and housing-type interventions based on their high vulnerability and status as hardest to reach (Jones and Pleace, 2010; Phillips and Parsell, 2012).

While this contemporary focus represents a progression from coercive practices, the positive policy intent is difficult to achieve in practice (Parsell et al., 2013). Further, Johnsen and Fitzpatrick (2010) illustrate the complex mix of both sanitising public space and elements of coercive compassion in the UK. DeVerteuil et al.’s (2009) analysis of international programmes suggests a similar view, whereby coercive strategies are but one of the many approaches adopted to respond to rough sleeping. Further, the coercive principles or policy language are not always reflective of how programmes are operationalised in practice (Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010).

The threefold typology of rough sleeping responses should thus be considered cautiously, as they are not always mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, international policy intent is increasingly geared towards social-welfare-type responses that centre on the provision of housing and resources to assist people sleeping rough to exit homelessness and to achieve social inclusion.

After outlining the methodological approach adopted and introducing a context to Darwin, the article demonstrates the distinctiveness of rough sleeping in Darwin. We argue that, in contrast to dominant themes about social exclusion and welfare responses evident in international literature, cultural Indigenous practices and cultural assumptions are central to understanding some of the distinctiveness evident in Darwin. Using Darwin as an international case study, the article highlights the infrequently recognised role that culture plays in street homelessness. Cultural analyses of homelessness are becoming increasingly important. Homelessness among cultural groups and homelessness as a result of migration/forced mobility within the European Union, for instance, are politically and socially significant. The problem is addressed and exacerbated by discriminatory policy directed towards racial and cultural groups.

Methodology

This article is based on two phases of fieldwork conducted in November 2010 and March 2012. The first phase formed one case study in nation-wide research examining assertive outreach programmes (Phillips and Parsell, 2012). The second phase was independently initiated to extend the data and to fill gaps from the first phase. In total, this article is based on fieldwork that involved participant observations, qualitative interviews and document analysis. Publicly accessible homelessness and housing policy documents (Northern Territory Government, n.d., 2009a, 2009b) were subject to qualitative thematic analysis to identify how homelessness was represented and portrayed, and to scrutinise the features, characteristics and aims of street outreach.

Participant observations focused on overt observations of the delivery of services to people who reside in public places. Observations were conducted in a community centre providing food, in an intoxicated persons’ facility used almost exclusively by people sleeping rough, and in vehicles and public places with street outreach workers as they patrolled and delivered services. Over a two-week period in 2010 and 2012, approximately 60 hours of observations were conducted. Informed by questions about the potentially coercive nature of street outreach (Fitzpatrick and Jones, 2005) and the extent to which it is client directed (Phillips and Parsell, 2012), the first author and a research assistant conducted observations focused on how outreach workers approached people in public places, their interactions with service users and the nature of the services delivered. Observations served to inform questions for qualitative interviews and to triangulate and contextualise other data.

As is recognised in ethnographic literature, participant observations consisted of more than detached observations (Gobo, 2008). The first author engaged in numerous informal conversations with outreach and support workers about service provision and rough sleeping. The article is informed by the empirical material gleaned through observations and informal conversations.

The article is also based on empirical material generated from 32 semi-structured qualitative interviews. Eighteen qualitative interviews were with service provider stakeholders, consisting of six government workers with statutory responsibility for housing and homelessness, and twelve people employed in various not-for-profit and Indigenous organisations responsible for delivering rough sleeping services. These services represent key government and Indigenous community organisations operating in the homelessness field, including the organisation that represents Darwin’s traditional Indigenous owners. Interview participants were purposefully recruited for their knowledge of policy and practice dimensions of housing, street outreach and rough sleeping.

In March 2012, the first author interviewed 14 people who were sleeping rough. Interviews were semi-structured, enabling participant autonomy and scope to guide the discussion. Within this flexibility, the interviews were structured around an interview guide that sought to identify whether people saw themselves as homeless; what they identified as their needs, aspirations and plans; and their views on services they received, would like to receive and services they would like to avoid. Interview participants were recruited using convenient sampling method, whereby the first author travelled around public places and visited a community centre and invited people to be formally interviewed. The sampling method adopted means that no claims of statistical representativeness can be made. Nevertheless, efforts were made to recruit people representing diversity in terms of gender (three females), age (range 25–49 years), one non-Indigenous person (who slept rough with his Indigenous wife), and people sleeping in geographically distinct areas of Darwin. In terms of the latter, people sleep rough in Darwin locations based largely on the location of their home communities throughout the Northern Territory. Thus by sampling people sleeping in different Darwin locations, the interview participants came from different cultural and geographical groupings, including people from nearby Islands, remote Islands, and desert areas of the Northern Territory.

Subject to informed consent, interviews were audio recorded and analysed thematically. The observations and informal conversations were recorded in a fieldwork journal and subject to thematic analysis. The research project received university ethical clearance and on-going strategies were employed to ensure that people residing in public places knew of the researcher’s intentions and that they all had reasonable opportunities to not participate.

Darwin

Darwin is the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory, located on the Timor Sea in the far northern tropics. The Northern Territory has a large sparely populated land mass of 1 349 129 square kilometres, with a population density of 0.2 people per square kilometre (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011a). Darwin’s population of 127 500 people constitutes more than half of the Northern Territory population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011a). Australia’s Indigenous people comprise 2.5 per cent of the national population, whereas Indigenous people are 10.5 per cent of Darwin’s population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011b) and almost one-third of the Northern Territory population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007).

Darwin is the financial centre of the Northern Territory’s burgeoning economy, which is based on the extraction of natural resources, such as gas, oil, iron ore and uranium. Tourism is another major component of the economy in large part due to having two World Heritage listed sites: Kakadu National Park and Uluru.

Despite global economic downturns, in 2012 Darwin’s median house prices continued to increase and Darwin was recorded as having the most expensive housing of any Australian capital city except Sydney (Australian Property Monitors, 2012). In addition to issues of affordability, much housing for Indigenous people in both Darwin and across the Northern Territory is sub-standard and often overcrowded (ABC News, 2011; Northern Territory Government, 2009a).

As already noted, Australian government policy to ‘close the gap’ on Indigenous disadvantage recognises that Indigenous people are the nation’s most economically and socially marginalised. Compared with the non-Indigenous Australians, Indigenous people are more likely to experience poor health and unemployment, and not to complete formal education. In remote Indigenous communities, the unemployment rate is 51 per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010) compared with approximately 5 per cent nationally. Indigenous people also have a life expectancy of between 9 and 12 years lower than non-Indigenous Australians and Indigenous children under five die at around three times the rate of non-Indigenous children (Council of Australian Governments, 2011). In the Northern Territory, Indigenous people comprise 82 per cent of the prison population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011c).

Rough Sleeping in Darwin

Responding to Rough Sleeping

The nature and extent of rough sleeping in Darwin, together with perceptions of Indigenous people as choosing homelessness for cultural reasons, shape local policy and practice. The Northern Territory government policy description was articulated by government stakeholders who said that addressing the public’s concern with rough sleeping as antisocial behaviour was imperative. Antisocial behaviour refers to people sleeping rough who are consuming alcohol, overtly intoxicated or engaging in violence. The Northern Territory government espouses a zero tolerance to antisocial behaviour (Northern Territory Government, n.d.). In keeping with this policy emphasis on public safety, the primary response is policing, complemented by a number of related outreach strategies. These responses are primarily threefold: temporarily moving people on; returning people to their home communities—referred to as ‘return to country’; and health and welfare services. These do not represent a unified or coherent model. Instead, government, non-government and community service providers have different objectives which underpin different approaches adopted in front-line service delivery.

Short-term, move-on strategies are the primary means used to respond to people living in Darwin’s public places. These responses are enacted by the police and also by community organisations funded by government. Government policy officers explained that short-term responses to move rough sleepers from public places sit within a whole government public safety model. From this model, rough sleeping is perceived to be a danger to the wider community with police and the Department of Justice thus assuming a central role. Short-term outreach strategies consist of outreach workers patrolling public places and offering assistance to people in the long grass. If they do not seek transport and are not overtly deemed to be exhibiting antisocial behaviour (i.e. alcohol- and violence-related), outreach workers simply leave them alone. Indeed, while the model of outreach is funded to respond to antisocial behaviour as part of a public safety model—thus potentially a coercive and not service user directed intervention—outreach workers articulated the importance of not pressuring people to accept transport or to be moved on without their consent. One outreach worker stated

If we know that they don’t want us coming up to them or that they don’t want transport we don’t even bother them. We don’t humbug them (street outreach worker).

‘Humbug’ is a term used in Darwin to mean harassing. Stakeholders involved in the delivery of outreach distanced themselves from harassing and coercive practices. One senior worker involved in street outreach noted a dilemma that trying to work in the interests of people in the long grass presented

We move Aboriginal people around from one temporary spot to another. And then later on we move them on again. We move them on ’cause of the public’s concern of Aboriginal people being in public. But there is nowhere to move them to (senior street outreach worker).

In situations where people sleeping rough are exhibiting antisocial behaviour (and outreach workers are responding to public complaint), short-term responses are more proactive and often directed towards encouraging people to move on. Consistent with the rationale presented in policy documents (Northern Territory Government, 2009b), a government stakeholder stated that outreach directed towards intoxicated people in the long grass is an important diversionary strategy to mitigate criminal offending. Street outreach workers strongly encourage people deemed to be exhibiting antisocial behaviour to accept transport, for example, to the public intoxication unit. When offers of transport are not accepted, police intervene and forcibly remove people, invariably into police custody. Thus more proactive and assertive street outreach by welfare service providers is justified on the basis of preventing intrusive police action.

There are two further types of outreach response: return to country and positive engagement. Return to country is premised on the view that people in the long grass are temporary visitors and, as one government policy interview participant noted, return to country assumes that sometimes people in the long grass remain in Darwin longer than intended. Return to country aims to assist people to return to their remote home communities. Similar to short-term move-on strategies within Darwin, return to country is service user directed. The strategy involves outreach workers identifying people in the long grass who desire to exit Darwin and then a range of other government and government-funded agencies organising the financial, identification and transport means to facilitate exit.

In addition to short-term move-on and return to country, positive engagement is an emerging response. Not-for-profit organisations provide limited health and welfare street outreach as a counter to the perceived problematic nature of the dominant punitive and coercive move on strategies. For instance

We provide the happy face; normally they get harassment from government (service provider).

Twenty-seven people have died in the long grass in the past six months … It’s really important to have an uplifting engagement with people in the long grass (service provider).

The health and welfare outreach is modest. Despite the reported high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder attributed to experiences of violence, conflict, the impacts of colonisation and the need to be on constant guard in the long grass (Holmes and McRae-Williams, 2009), there is little in the way of clinical or multidisciplinary health services provided. Similarly, the health and welfare outreach does not have an allocation of housing or even crisis accommodation. Instead, in addition to hygiene and harm minimisation, the health and welfare outreach endeavours to provide a positive relationship and engagement with people who are otherwise marginalised from mainstream services and experience frequent police intervention. Indeed, it is the constant police intervention that motivates some people living in the long grass to hide themselves further in more concealed and inaccessible areas

They hide away further in the bush to get away from the police. This means that we can’t find them to help them, and they are more excluded and vulnerable (service provider).

In this context, the stakeholder explained that an important element of the health and welfare response was community engagement. Through arts activities and the display of art work, for instance, community engagement attempts to counter stereotypes of people in the long grass.

The 14 people interviewed who lived in the long grass spoke positively about street outreach and largely corroborated the suggestion that efforts to intervene were initiated by public alcohol consumption, intoxication and violence. First, they felt that the outreach services were friendly and that they appreciated how outreach workers drove past their camps and checked on their wellbeing. Similarly, four people spoke positively about the public intoxication unit—which was widely referred to as the ‘spin dry’, by virtue of being ‘thrown out’ the morning after one had recovered from intoxication. These four people appreciated the ‘spin dry’ as a place to have a warm shower, a clean bed and some good food. Three other people spoke about the positive benefits to being admitted to hospital. None of the people interviewed had ever utilised the return to country programme, but three individuals expressed a desire to seek assistance to return to their home communities to attend a funeral.

When asked directly about their perspectives on available services, none of the 14 individuals indicated that they ever felt pressured by outreach workers to be moved on or to return to country. Conversely, each of them described police intervention as problematic.

Public alcohol consumption is prohibited in Darwin. People living in the long grass described a constant process of police moving them on or pouring their alcohol onto the ground

What do they [police] do? (Researcher).

Spill your grog—spill your grog and walk away and laugh, or either spill your grog and lock you up (45-year-old non-Indigenous male).

Do they ever move you away? (Researcher).

Oh of course yeah. (45-year-old non-Indigenous male)

Where do they tell you to move? (Researcher)

Just move, just get away, move somewhere, three parts of the trouble is caused through police harassment (45-year-old non-Indigenous male).

When you’ve been drinking they [police] tell you to move on. They spill our grog then we go buy more—pretty stupid isn’t it (Indigenous male aged between 40 and 50 years).

The police spill our grog, they [police] say do you understand you waste your money. They should let us to drink, when they come and spill our grog we go and buy it again (44-year-old Indigenous male).

‘Grog’ is a vernacular for alcohol. Tipping alcohol out was unanimously perceived as both futile in addressing the problem and unnecessary

I don’t know why they shifting us out, and just don’t know why they got a problem—we don’t fight. Me and my man, we don’t fight. We sit, we quiet and we drink, we’re alright (44-year-old Indigenous woman)

You’re not allowed to drink here, where else are we going to drink? What’s wrong with one or two sitting down having a couple of drinks under a shady tree? No fighting no anything going on, just enjoying yourself (49-year-old Indigenous male).

A government policy officer working in the area of housing and homelessness argued that the Darwin public sees rough sleeping as antisocial behaviour among “itinerant Aboriginals with home in remote communities outside the Darwin area”. This interview participant explained that the ‘move-on’ policy direction is informed by the public sentiment.

Discussion

The case study underscores how the interaction of poverty, inadequate housing, legislation and the disadvantages of remote Indigenous communities, together with perceptions of Indigenous homelessness as culturally normative but similarly ‘out of place’ in urban settings, contributes to an estimated 2 per cent of the city’s population living in what is accepted as the ‘long grass’. Assumptions about cultural mobility, mainstream societal practices and Indigenous people’s expectations inform structural and institutionally organised forces that create, accept and stigmatise Darwin’s rough sleeping population.

Service provider stakeholders unambiguously drew on notions of Indigenous cultural mobility into Darwin to make sense of rough sleeping in the city. The relevance of cultural mobility notwithstanding, Indigenous interviewees did not travel to Darwin to sleep rough. Each of them articulated their homelessness in terms of their agency and capacity to make choices. Birdsall-Jones et al. (2010) explained similarly voluntary practices in terms of Indigenous peoples’ resistance to non-Indigenous practices. For people interviewed in this study, homelessness was consequential to other objectives, such as accessing services, realising autonomy and avoiding violent home communities.

Silent in most of the interviews with policy officers and service providers was a consideration of poverty, meaningful employment and access to and the supply of affordable housing. Balanced against some positive descriptions of rough sleeping, people living in the long grass expressed views that housing in Darwin was unattainable. Their initial preferences to sleep rough could be seen in terms that Elster (1982) refers to as ‘adaptive preferences’. They did not see secure housing as a conceivable outcome. There is no cause-and-effect relationship between culture and behaviour, but culture provides a frame to “understand better how people respond to poverty” (Small et al., 2010, p. 9). A cultural response for Indigenous people in Northern Australia normalises sleeping rough in public places of urban centres. This cultural response, similar to what Wilson (2009) illustrated with reference to African Americans living in urban poverty, is fostered by racism in Australia that creates an inequitable distribution of resources and non-existent or inadequate housing for Indigenous people. State-sanctioned views about race and culture can be further gleaned through the implementation of the NTER. Through an act of parliament, the NTER initially excluded the operation of the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act so that Indigenous people could be exclusively targeted and subject to restriction on welfare ‘entitlements’ and alcohol consumption.

It is not possible to determine the balance of cultural or structural influences (Wilson, 2009) and their role in creating pull factors out of remote Indigenous communities and pushing people into Darwin. It is, however, accepted poverty and discriminatory legislation that leads to a shared outlook and mode of behaviour that manifests in rough sleeping in urban places. Sleeping rough in urban places can thus be seen as a cultural response mediated by institutional racism and poverty that deny resources to do otherwise.

Community and public policy perceptions about Indigenous people and their culture, what they need and broader norms about the organisation of the public realm are significant to the manner in which rough sleeping in Darwin is addressed. Central to this are prescriptions of what activities constitute antisocial behaviour, but more implicitly, romanticised assumptions about Indigenous people as remote inhabitants with traditional lifestyles and out of place in the urban environment. The salience of formal policy that prescribes ‘move-on’ responses to rough sleeping as a form of antisocial behaviour is unequivocal and ubiquitous. It should be noted, however, that outreach service providers identified with principles and philosophies that positioned people sleeping rough, not as antisocial, but instead as marginalised with inadequate access to resources to do otherwise.

It is not satisfactory to think of the dominant short-term ‘move-on’ responses in Darwin through a lens that simplifies the issue as exclusively antisocial behaviour. In the same manner that Johnsen and Fitzpatrick (2010) demonstrated that Anti-Social Behaviour Orders in the UK are not used indiscriminately, but are rather targeted towards those who cause harm, interventions towards people sleeping rough in Darwin are often initiated on the basis of public alcohol consumption, intoxication and violence.

Cresswell’s (1996) influential work has demonstrated how the acceptability of a behaviour, or its unacceptability, is linked to place. He implicates place in the determination of an activity as either deviant or normal. Parsell (2011a) used Cresswell to demonstrate the implications that living in public places—and displaying ‘deviant’ behaviours—have for the publically ascribed identities of people who are homeless. Without a place of one’s own to conceal private behaviour, the public display of private or out of place behaviours “signifies and reifies their difference” as the problematic other (Parsell, 2011a, p. 457). Cloke et al. (2000) similarly argued that, in the purified space of rural England, homeless people are constructed as either invisible or, when acknowledged, out of place.

Further to the positioning of out of place in the urban environment vis-a-vis the public display of antisocial behaviour, idealistic stereotypes of Indigenous people as traditional inhabitants of remote locations, living self-sufficient lifestyles as they did prior to European colonisation, support their ‘othering’ in the urban public realm. As Trigger (2008) comments, Australian Indigenous people are assumed to have close and static relationships with all that is native and their relationship to their ‘traditional’ country is taken to say something about their inherent identities. These assumptions influence policy and practice in Darwin. The return to country policy assists many people to leave Darwin’s long grass. No empirical material obtained in this study identified return to country as anything other than user directed and it is highly probable that this strategy plays an important role in assisting people sleeping rough who wish to exit Darwin and return to their home communities. The return to country policy, however, is premised on normative assumptions that Indigenous people living in the long grass have homes elsewhere and they should be assisted and encouraged to return to their remote communities and exit the urban environment.

In response to practices of cultural mobility within a context of inadequate secure housing and temporary accommodation, a senior executive in an Indigenous organisation noted a proposal to construct six supported shelter facilities in Darwin. This proposal was put forward as a solution to better meet the needs of persecuted people sleeping rough and to respond to the public’s concern over Indigenous people residing in urban public places.

Conclusion

Following DeVerteuil et al.’s (2009) remarks on the necessity of research examining how homelessness, policy and practice responses differ across social, political, cultural and geographical contexts, this article has explored the uniqueness of the Darwin and Australian Indigenous context. Commencing with an identification of the extent and prevalence of the problem, it has shown that cultural mobility practices, together with ideas about the acceptability of homelessness among Indigenous people and conversely their positioning as ‘out of place’ in the urban environment, are unique compared with the existing body of literature.

Similarly, it was shown that government policy that intervenes into the lives of a cultural group creates a range of push and pull factors that contribute to the incidence of rough sleeping. In addition to cultural mobility practices, it is institutionalised racism that normalises such inequitable distribution of resources and the enactment of legislation exclusively towards a cultural group that underpin rough sleeping.

Policy documents and government informants afforded cultural practices much more explanatory power than racism and poverty when framing the disproportionate incidence of rough sleeping among Indigenous Australians. Darwin contrasts with Australian and other international contemporary policy because the public safety model is not premised on rough sleeping as a form of social exclusion that requires care and welfare intervention. The provision of secure housing is notably absent from all responses to rough sleeping in Darwin. Interventions are not tied to objectives of permanently reducing the rate of homelessness, and broader health, wellbeing and participatory outcomes rarely feature in discourses on the problem solutions.