No Wonderland: Alice’s Shameful Australian Aboriginal Camps

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 Territory.”

Residents report delays regarding repairs and maintenance. When infrastructure breaks down – bore water lines, roofing, essential utilities – residents often struggle to get timely fixes because it is genuinely unclear which agency is responsible.

The governance of the camps is fragmented. Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation, comprising 15 housing associations, manages the town camps and is responsible for their social and infrastructure services.

Residents say the flow of money and the division of responsibilities are opaque and frustrating. “Current governance arrangements in the Indigenous housing system are complex and poorly coordinated,” said a 2026 study by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute.

Ken Marchingo, chief executive of Community Housing Central Australia (CHCA), stated that there were too many points of intersection in camp management and that a single responsible organization could clarify accountability.

Many residents and advocates argue that the 2007 “Intervention” has worsened conditions. The 2007 Northern Territory Intervention, officially known as the Northern Territory National Emergency Response, has been criticized for overriding self-determination and for imposing discriminatory, top-down control.

Local organizations, including Tangentyere Council and Community Housing Central Australia, have spent more than a decade developing a proposal to return management of the town camps to the community. They argued that community control would provide clearer accountability and more responsive services.

Many of the camps rely heavily on one-off government grants to get by, and changes to their governance were recommended as far back as 2017. Executive director of township leasing, Pennie Weadon, said her team had repeatedly recommended to the Northern Territory government ways to improve economic opportunities in the camps.

The camps were established in the 1880s, with the arrival of Europeans in Central Australia. Located across the plains and on the outskirts of Alice Springs, they were set up in response to racist policies that banned Aboriginal people, displaced from their lands, from entering the town itself. Between 1928 and 1964, the whole of Alice Springs was a prohibited area for Aboriginal people between sunset and sunrise.

“The town campers, or fringe dwellers as these people were called, were regarded as a problem for the township and much time,” wrote researchers Michael Heppell and Julian J. Wigley in their 1981 monograph about the establishment and development of Alice’s camps. “For decades, Aborigines in Alice Springs were little more than creatures of the authorities, being pushed here and there to suit the whims of some particular administrator or petty official.”

“Welcome to rainy Alice,” the receptionist at my hotel in Alice Springs greeted me. After a steady and unexpected spell of rain, the red earth of Australia’s Red Center is now covered by green grass. It is not the welcome green grass, though. It is buffelgrass, one of the gravest environmental threats to Australia’s arid rangelands.

The flowers at the entrance to the Old Timers Camp – where Kumanjayi Little Baby was abducted last April – have withered. The scars of her murder remain fresh, though. Her solitude on a floor sleeping mattress in the Old Timers Camp and her subsequent murder have once again awakened Australians’ consciousness. No wonderland in the Aboriginal town camps of Alice Springs – just sorrow. And intolerable shame.