After days of rain and mourning following the funeral of Kumanjayi Little Baby, the veil of grief over Alice Springs has eased, and the men of Red Dust Role Models, a non-profit mentoring organisation for Indigenous people, have organised an impromptu gathering in the foothills of the East MacDonnell ranges, on the Country of the Black Caterpillar dreaming, Tyape Utnerrengatye.
Community leaders and local men sought to give the masthead an understanding of the plight of men in Alice Springs and the wider central desert region, and the complexity of issues that lead to, but do not excuse, the extreme rates of domestic, family and sexual violence in the community.
Traditional owner Damien Kunoth arrived early with his son Byson. The men walked the land in the way of their ancestors, along songlines, acknowledging sacred sites and searching for bush banana (upali) and bush coconut (kandar), which were in abundance but past their best.
Kunoth spoke of the importance of young men getting out of town. “Too much poison is what we live today, in town where you are trapped by drugs, alcohol, police, courts and the system,” he said. “We have to get young people back on Country to take care of homelands, to be self-sufficient, to not rely on government.”
He described phones and social media as part of the problem. “To get a young fella out of town without a phone, that phone and him is going to be the problem, to get him in a car and get him on Country, he’s going [to] want to know what his friends are doing, what his girlfriend is doing,” he said.
The gathering took place amid a landscape of red, pink and yellow desert blooms and vivid green tussock grass after rain, with the glow of a campfire drawing the men back at the end of the day.