As discussed earlier, the nature of the research method was effectively relationship building. We were given a new research task after reporting back from the previous research task at each council meeting. In this way we were being monitored and judgements made as to the ongoing value of the research relationship. This also meant that, perhaps even more than otherwise, we had to be alert to negotiating the diverse interests within and between the ACGC, the township and the NT Government. Within this highly politicised context of research, ensuring that the ‘facts spoke for themselves’ was crucial. The three reports to the council were exactly that: ‘reportage’. They were factual and evidence based with very little interpretive analysis. We were careful to avoid alienating any of our research constituency.

For instance, within the all-Aboriginal ACGC there was a range of views about the Creek Camp. There were councillors who were also Creek Camp residents, one of whom sought only basic reticulated services in the camp—not housing—while the other sought a house within the township. The diverse population profile of the Creek Camp also suggested the need for us to observe a cautious approach. As the majority of the residents were highly mobile—many were regular part time residents from Nturiya, 17km to the west, while other ‘residents’ were long term visitors from Warlpiri settlements further to the northwest—there was concern that development of the place might make it more attractive for these visitors and change the camp’s quiet environment. Thus, there were not only different views about the extent of development that should occur, but there was also a view among some within the council that only those people who worked should be given access to a house.

An approach driven by a straightforward advocacy for equality in mainstream housing and servicing was not appropriate in this context. Nevertheless, balancing an approach that advocates a ‘human rights’ agenda, which speaks of the rights to basic services, such as running water and sturdy shelter, with the multiple Aboriginal agendas and the agendas of government, has been an especially challenging aspect of the research. Attempts to try to ‘get to the bottom’ of why the all-Aboriginal council has not brought greater pressure to bear on the NT Government for even minimum servicing of the camp has uncovered not only the multiple views (some of which are canvassed above), but a guarded and uneasy history with their potential advocacy body (the CLC) and a deeper history of a violent colonial frontier.^[9] A daily reminder of this ‘frontier’ is the apparently entrenched ‘moral geography’ of the Ti Tree township (Rowse 1998: 9), with the Stuart Highway acting as the divide between the camp and the more formal residential dwellings. The Ti Tree town is the centralised focus of services within ready reach of the non-Aboriginal population contrasting with the surrounding dispersed Aboriginal population, which is without clinics, schools, or stores. This has been discussed at length elsewhere in terms of the regional colonial history and the subsequent spatialising of social relations (see Holcombe and Sanders 2007a) as Ti Tree became an enclave for settler interests surrounded by Aboriginal land. The point to reiterate here is the consequent embeddedness of this structure of Ti Tree as the centralised service centre and the gradual depletion of resources from the neighbouring settlements from whence many of the part-time Creek Camp residents have come.^[10]

Arriving at this research balance of local historical depth, ethnographic insight and the intersections with NT bureaucratic agency has only been possible with an inter-disciplinary approach to the ‘Creek Camp issue’. Sanders’ method of dealing with the bureaucrats and the ACGC CEO has been to strategically uncover the options for development and then lay out the impediments to this development from within the same structures in a clinical objectivist approach that leaves little room for subjective dismissal (see especially Sanders and Holcombe 2007: 80–2, 84–6). My anthropological approach has been to interrogate the evolution of power relations between the Aboriginal people and the NT Government, and identify both impediments to and spaces for Aboriginal agency in an attempt to grapple with the cultural dimensions of choice in the ‘Creek Camp issue’. To achieve this we combined quantitative and qualitative approaches in our discussions with people. Whilst I found it constraining to remain within the bounds of a questionnaire, such standardisation was essential in ensuring a comparative and systematic approach to data generation. It was equally important, however, to range beyond the questionnaires to ensure that the local contexts were grounded in an understanding of genealogical connections between Creek Camp residents, their customary attachments and other biographical details, to paint a fuller picture.