The Anmatjere region sits astride the Stuart Highway about 200km north of Alice Springs. The name derives from the region’s Aboriginal language, which is still widely spoken among the predominantly Aboriginal population of 1,000 or more people.^[1] European settlement in the area dates back to the 1870s, when a repeater station on the Overland Telegraph Line was established at Ti Tree well. Pastoralism followed in the early years of the twentieth century, with most land then being leased to settlers for pastoral purposes. In later years, some small horticultural blocks were also developed by settlers, along with a roadhouse or two. The only town in the region is Ti Tree, gazetted in 1980, straddling the Stuart Highway on a five mile square (ca. 64km²) parcel of land, which was formerly the old telegraph reserve.

In the late 1970s, the Ti Tree Station pastoral lease surrounding the town was acquired for Aboriginal people by the Commonwealth’s Aboriginal Land Fund Commission. In the early 1980s, a successful land claim converted this lease to Aboriginal freehold, as the Ahakeye Land Trust. While this might suggest that the region fared quite well in the early years of the Commonwealth’s land rights system for Aboriginal people in the NT, this was not the predominant perception among local Aboriginal people. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a movement developed among Aboriginal people in Anmatjere for a breakaway regional land council, separate from the larger Central Land Council based in Alice Springs. The Commonwealth Minister for Aboriginal Affairs was not convinced that the requirements for such a breakaway land council had been met, and did not support the move (Morton 1994). However, the NT Government, through its local government Minister, saw the opportunity to support a regional local government in the area, and thus the ACGC emerged.

At self-government in 1978, the NT had just four local governments in its major urban centres. During the 1980s, the NT Government encouraged the development of local governments in smaller urban centres and outlying areas, under the Community Government provisions of its Local Government Act (Coburn 1982; Phegan 1989). At first, as one commentator of the time noted, the approach was ‘laissez fare’ and the pattern that began to emerge was of small, single-settlement local government incorporations (Wolfe 1989). However, in time, the NT Government became more directive and promoted the idea of larger, regional, multi-settlement incorporations. The first of these to emerge was Yugul Mangi Community Government Council in southeast Arnhem Land in 1988, which brought together eight non-contiguous parcels of land and their associated discrete Aboriginal communities.^[2] The second, in 1993, was ACGC, which was proudly proclaimed by the local government Minister in the Legislative Assembly of the Northern Territory (LANT) as the twentieth community government council (LANT 1993a: 8583). The Minister also noted in the Assembly a month later that the ACGC’s first meeting had been held and that Eric Panangka had been elected as chair (LANT 1993b: 8854). As well as being prominent in the movement for a breakaway land council, Panangka had been a Country Liberal Party (CLP) candidate for the Legislative Assembly seat of Stuart in the 1991 elections. So, there were clearly quite close and amiable connections between the CLP Government of the time and the emerging ACGC.

In its 1993 incarnation, ACGC brought together nine wards containing discrete Aboriginal communities. Three of these wards were the Ahakeye Land Trust, divided into western, central and eastern portions, each of which had one significant discrete Aboriginal settlement on it. Around this large central block of incorporated land were six other wards on much smaller land parcels. These were Aboriginal living area excisions from surrounding pastoral leases, measured in hectares rather than square miles (see Fig. 11.1). As well as having very different land bases, these nine wards also had very different population bases, with some settlements having over 200 residents and some less than 50. However, in a classic federal move, each of the wards was given an equal representation of two potential members on the council, irrespective of its population size. Another interesting constitutional provision was that a quorum for council meetings required a member to be present from every ward that currently had members. Like the ward representation rule, this very high quorum rule indicated a guarded regional federalism that had considerable respect for the autonomy of its constituent parts.

This original ACGC in 1993 was an all-Aboriginal affair. Settler interests in the region, such as pastoralists, roadhouse residents, horticulturalists and Ti Tree town residents, were all left outside the scheme, on about 90 per cent of the region’s land area, covered by nine or 10 pastoral leases and other non-Aboriginal land tenures. However, the NT Government’s intention from the outset was at least to bring the residents and land area of Ti Tree town into the scheme. The move to do this in 1995 met with considerable resistance from the existing organisational guardian of the town, the Ti Tree Progress Association. In previous years, under the dominance of settler interests, this organisation had developed town facilities like a park and an airstrip. Now, these assets were to become the responsibility of ACGC, and Ti Tree town residents were being asked to throw in their lot as one additional ward, with two members, within a predominantly Aboriginal local government. The one concession to Ti Tree’s rather different status as a small open roadside town, rather than a discrete Aboriginal settlement, was the residence requirements for voting or standing for office. In this ward, the requirements were to be just three months before the closure of the rolls, rather than one year in the previous three years as in the other wards. This reflected the fact that many people from elsewhere moved through Ti Tree in quite short periods of time as public sector employees at the school, the health clinic, the police station or in ACGC.

At the time the Ti Tree town ward was included in ACGC in 1995, there was some controversy over who was on the electoral roll for the ward. The Labor member for Stuart, and Opposition Leader in the NT Legislative Assembly, suggested that some Aboriginal town residents who had supported the inclusion might have been improperly removed from the roll, which only had 27 eligible voters on it. Controversy was also aroused by the fact that the Council Clerk of the ACGC was nominating to be an elected member for the Ti Tree town ward, which the Opposition Leader saw as a significant conflict of interest (LANT 1995a: 4680, 1995b: 4796).^[3]

Clearly, the early years of ACGC were quite contested and difficult. One source of this contestation was the attempt to mix Indigenous and settler town interests. Another, however, was the multi-settlement nature of the Indigenous regionalism. This required council members to travel into town once a month for meetings from settlements which were, in two cases, up to 150km away, and in five cases, 50km away (see Fig. 11.1). Council members pushed for vehicles to enable them to get to meetings and to attend to constituency matters in between times. The inaugural Council Clerk responded to this pressure by leasing a number of vehicles for the use of members under standard public sector arrangements. This worked well until the three year term of these leases was looming, and the vehicles had done far more kilometres and were in far worse condition than the terms of the leases allowed. Due to lease penalties that would need to be paid, in late 1996 and early 1997, ACGC was facing a financial overrun of some $150,000. The Council Clerk chose, at that time, to vacate his position, leaving the problem of bringing in the vehicles and dealing with the financial overrun to his deputy and successor.

Elsewhere, I have written about how this first Council Clerk is, in fact, well remembered and how it is difficult to judge his vehicle leasing arrangements entirely adversely (Sanders 2006a). At one level, leasing vehicles was innovative and entrepreneurial management, at another, somewhat naïve and un-strategic, at least in the longer term. At base, the episode illustrated a problem of small scale organisation that I have labeled ‘isolated managerialism’, and which the NT Government’s push towards larger, regional local governments was, at least partly, intended to overcome (Sanders 2005, 2006a). At this point, therefore, I will briefly turn back to the NT Government and its promotion of larger, regional, multi-settlement local governments before returning to pick up the story of ACGC in later years.