Oceania | Society | Oceania

No Wonderland: Alice’s Shameful Australian Aboriginal Camps

The conditions in and around Australia’s Aboriginal camps, such as the one where a 5-year-old girl was murdered in April, are shameful for one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

Alice Springs, or “Alice” as it is commonly known here in Australia, is situated in the country’s Red Center. For over 30,000 years, the Arrernte Aboriginal people have been custodians of this remote land – a land of red earth, awe-inspiring rock formations and ethereal skies. 

Alice, or Mparntwe in the Arrernte language, has profound, unhealed wounds, both ancient and recent. The most recent, and still painfully raw, is the murder in late April of a 5-year-old girl. An Aboriginal man by the name of Jefferson Lewis has been charged with her murder. 

In accordance with Aboriginal custom, under which the names of the dead are avoided out of respect, the family requested she be called Kumanjayi Little Baby. She was found dead after disappearing from the Aboriginal Old Timers Camp, one of the 18 Aboriginal camps on the fringes of Alice Springs. 

Kumanjayi Little Baby’s family were staying in a dilapidated house at the Old Timers Camp after traveling from their remote community in the Tanami Desert to Alice Springs to access medical care. Photos taken at the Old Timers Camp during the search for the girl showed a mattress on the floor where she had been put to bed before her disappearance. 

Police said Jefferson Lewis, the alleged killer of Kumanjayi Little Baby, was staying at the Old Timers Camp too. A May editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald hit the nail on the head about the tragedy, describing the camps as “gathering places for the powerless and the outcast, where the most vulnerable are easy prey, and protections are minimal.” 

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who is also the aunt of Kumanjayi Little Baby, said, “Too many [camps] have become environments where safety is not guaranteed, particularly for children.” She added that “for too long, there has been a reluctance to speak plainly about the conditions in and around town camps.”

The conditions in and around the Aboriginal camps, not only in Alice Springs but all over Australia, are shameful for one of the world’s wealthiest countries. After all, it is, as Australian writer and academic Donald Horne called it, the “Lucky Country.”

In this “Lucky Country,” Aboriginal people remain Australia’s unlucky first inhabitants. In remote regions, especially, they face hardships more often associated with poorer nations: poverty, health inequities, high incarceration rates, inadequate housing, violence – the dreadful list goes on. If there’s a place in Australia where the struggles faced by Aboriginal communities are most vividly felt, it must be the camps. 

In the bureaucratic banal parlance, the camps are called: “Alice Springs Community Living Areas.” In the camps, there is nothing that resembles community living; let’s be fair dinkum – using a traditional Aussie expression. 

According to a 2025 report by the Menzies School of Health Research, there are approximately 4,000 residents across the Alice Springs camps. Conditions at many camps are poor, with limited services and shared residences among extended family members. Overcrowding is chronic. The number of residents can almost double during major events like the football carnival and the Alice Springs Show, straining already stretched housing stock.

“Overcrowding and poor-quality housing are associated with poor health, educational and employment outcomes, and increased family violence,” concluded a 2022 report by the Australian National Audit Office. “The highest levels of overcrowding occur in remote areas of the Northern........

© The Diplomat