'Only whitefella take that road': Culture seen through the intervention at Yuendumu

This essay is based on my experiences of the Northern Territory Emergency response (NTER) Intervention at Yuendumu, a Walpiri community, in particulr, and on observations from spending time more widely in Cnetral Australia since the Intervention. I was in Yuendumu on 21 June 2007, when the NTER, or, as it is called at Yuendumu, 'the Intervention' was first announced. At the time, I was undertaking research into metaphors of Walpiri fears, expressed in stories I collected like the one about kurdaitcha driving black Toyotas and staying at Lake Sarah Hotel in Alice Springs. A year or so into the intervention, I noticed how these everyday fear stories had changed and now no longer focussed on Walpiri peple and their mythologies as much, but instead began to increasingly draw in non-Indigenous people and the rumoured threats they constitute. Such stories now included the suggestion that 'at night, whitefellas douse blackfellas who camp in the creek bed in Alice Springs with petrol and set them on fire', as well as many references to the Ku Klux Klan (or KKK) supposedly being active in Central Australia (again), and so on.