All together now...

I was in Alice Springs a couple of weeks or so and witnessed episodes of what they're coyly referring to as 'anti-social behaviour'.
It was generally harmless - the odd drunk humbugging for money.
But I did watch a couple of kids (black and white;14 y.o?) wind themselves up to have a fight with a German tourist.
Lots of loud and bad language.
Windmilling arms.
Ostentatious taking off of shirts.
Preparing for a fight.
It looked ugly, but didn't go much further than that.
A few days before there'd been a 'riot'.
Self-appointed vigiliantes took to the streets, but overweight men with red faces don't scare pumped-up kids who can run a lot faster.
Not much.
A few days later there were a couple of fatal stabbings.
And then the Chief Minister was in town for a regional sittingCabinet meeting of our town council sized and grandiosely -named 'Parliament'.
She copped a fair amount of abuse from people who were 'scared to go out', 'sick and tired of violence' and 'waiting for something to be done'.
The something?
More police.
Less tolerance.
Laura Norder.
But they're not yet prepared to see Alice Springs become a dry town (no public drinking whatsoever).
That's bad for business.
It's about what you'd expect, really.
No-one's prepared to look at the whys and wherefores, though.
Like, why is it happening?
I got a clue sitting in restaurant one night.
There was party of white people across the room.
Lots of wine and loud voices.
One stood out: 'The thing you have to realise about Alice Springs is that nobody comes from here; we're all from somewhere else'.
It's bullshit, of course.
It's not even true of white people: several families have been around the Centre for a few generations now; and I have friends of middle age who were born there and whose parents were born there.
But it says a lot about how some - many - whites view blacks.
They're interlopers who don't belong in a whitefella tourist-fuelled economic wet dream that only exists in this arid, but long-peopled landscape, because their culture lives and tourists want to experience it before it too dies.
Forget about the Mparntwe people, the custodians of Yeperenye, the Caterpillar Dreaming.
Forget about the fact that you're as likely to hear Arrernte on the radio as you are English.
To the nouveau Alice Springs resident, they're invisible.
Marginalised.
And what is the last desperate resort of marginalised people?
All together now....