The Little Sisters town camp, on the southern outskirts of Alice Springs, is a small cluster of about 20 houses on one circular bitumen road. It’s early noon on a bright weekday when we visit with Warlpiri woman Bess Nungarrayi Price and all is quiet, save for a clutch of barefoot school-age kids playing in the grass. Sun bounces off the tin roofs of the simple painted block-work houses, dogs wander about, car wrecks scatter the yards – it’s not much different from the 16 other town camps dotted around Alice Springs except for one thing. What’s all that rubbish over there? Litter is scattered around most of the houses, so nothing new there. But that long mountain of rubbish we can see about 200m from where we stand is the Alice Springs tip, a dumping ground for the region’s waste. “That’s not good, is it,’’ says Ms Price, a former Northern Territory MP, as we stare at the exposed slopes of rubbish. “It wasn’t always like this.”
Little Sisters is not the worst of the town camps, but you look at all of these small settlements and wonder where the millions in government grants are going. The federal opposition is leading calls for greater scrutiny of funding to bodies that manage these houses. Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation, which is funded to provide municipal and essential services, repairs and maintenance, along with social services, to the Alice Springs camps, received $27m in recurring government grants, according to its 2025 financial report. Employee costs were the highest expenditure, coming in at $24m. The organisation listed 278 employees and said it had received a further $18m from other sources. “How is all that money being used to actually benefit the community? I can’t find that out,’’ says South Australian Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, who was born and raised in Alice Springs.
A mum in the Little Sisters town camp, who wants to be known as Brenda, doesn’t know anything about the funding arrangements but she’s upset about the region’s rubbish landing in full view of her front yard. She says when she moved here a decade ago residents couldn’t see it but in the past year she’d watched the mountain of garbage bags, furniture and scrap metal move closer. The smell and dust that carry on the wind are sometimes so bad they have to stay inside, the 24-year-old says. “It’s not right, we don’t want it right there near us,’’ she says. It’s hard to think of anywhere else in this country where it would be acceptable to pile the region’s waste so close to a small suburb, which is what this simple town camp – officially recognised in 1978 – essentially is. But the sharp edges of surprise are soon dulled after a few days talking with people about life in parts of Alice Springs.
The Northern Territory’s 43 town camps have come into national focus recently following the alleged murder of five-year-old Kumanjayi Little Baby, who was taken from her bed in the Old Timers camp, 2km south of Little Sisters, late on the night of April 25. Her body was found in the dry sandy creek bed of the Todd River five days later, a lonely spot accessed via a potholed dirt road and a walk-through waist-high Buffel grass that lines the banks. Birds sing, grand river gums, bent and twisted, await the next downpour. Footprints and tyre marks in the riverbed are the only signs that something happened here. The country was shocked by the crime and appalled at images of the town camp and home where Kumanjayi Little Baby was allegedly abducted by Jefferson Lewis, 47, who has been charged with her murder. Eight empty bourbon bottles lined a ledge of the home in the supposedly dry camp. The stained and ripped bare mattress where the little girl was put to sleep was propped against a wall; another mattress was wedged on the floor in the laundry.
Garbage and old household goods had been dumped on the ground outside, where dogs wandered in and out. This level of squalor is not present in every house in every town camp, but it was an indication of how bad things can get. The media was invited into the house where Kumanjayi Little Baby disappeared by Robin Granites, her grandfather according to Warlpiri custom. He’s been a rock since she went missing – politely dealing with the media, comforting family, speaking at a vigil in Alice Springs. Along with the girl’s mother, brother and wider community, he’s clearly devastated by the loss. Mr Granites has lived in town camps and says the general conditions upset him; he wants the nation to see the reality of life here. They are no place for children, he says. “They are a dangerous place, the town camps.” Opinions over the future of the small settlements are divided among people in Alice, many who did not wish to speak publicly while the sorry business period of mourning was ongoing. Some wanted them torn down and new housing built in towns, while others have deep connections and a permanent home they don’t wish to leave.
The camps were established back in the 1970s when Indigenous people were prohibited from living within towns, while others began as a base for people from remote communities to use while visiting urban centres for health and other services. Now the camps around Alice Springs have more than 1000 permanent residents that swell as visitors come and go, sometimes leading to severe overcrowding. The words “town camp” suggest temporary and basic accommodation such as the old-fashioned tin humpy but most of the houses in Little Sisters, for example, have air-conditioning units and screens on the windows. Other camps are clear of rubbish and have pot plants on their verandas, while some are decrepit. White Gate, east of Alice Springs, is largely made up of tin shanties and mattresses in shipping containers. One man we spoke to there said he had been looking for work as a carpenter but hadn’t been able to secure any employment at all.
From the outside, many of the town camps look no better nor worse than some streets we’ve seen in NSW regional towns marked by the charred shells of homes and burnt-out cars. Senator Liddle says town camps are not just a Territory issue; similar places exist across the country. “They’re just not called town camps in other places,’’ she says. In Wagga Wagga in NSW, an Aboriginal woman who had been living in a basic tent without proper sanitation on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River lost her newborn during labour. The mother and the baby’s twin were rushed to hospital. The territory town camps are home to multigenerational groups and often different language groups: Little Sisters has Arrernte, Warlpiri, Luritja and Pitjantjatjara speakers and on the last Census night had 102 people living here; more than half were women. The median weekly income was $725 and the weekly rent $90. There’s a tiny community centre at the camp where Centrelink visits and other gatherings are held, and a little garden where Brenda takes her two kids to water the tomato bushes. They don’t have trouble here and they all get along, she says.
Insiders who spoke to the media present say the focus of any inquiry should extend from town camps to public housing and some remote communities as well. A tradie involved in renovating public housing in Alice Springs says people would be appalled at the state they are commonly left in; full biohazard decontamination gear is often required to deal with human faeces on floors and walls, cockroaches and mice, syringes and dirty nappies left among the piles of rubbish. “We have to use special undercoat paint to stop human faeces marks coming back through paint,’’ he says, adding that about 70 to 80 per cent of the houses he worked on were in such a state, and that conditions had generally worsened in the past two years. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the daughter of Bess Price and a former deputy mayor of Alice Springs who was raised in the town and is related to Kumanjayi Little Baby, says an inquiry is needed into the state of town camps and public housing. It’s not an issue of building more houses, she says, but unpicking the money trail to demand greater safety and accountability.
“There’s lots of things an inquiry could look into. Maybe we need to consider building gated communities for the safety of women and children,’’ she says. The Northern Territory government is responsible for funding the camps’ infrastructure and housing and says it has provided $116m in recent years. Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation manages the town camps around Alice Springs and is responsible for routine clean-ups, waste disposal, landscaping and “general environmental hygiene activities.” It also runs social and safety community programs. Senators Price and Liddle have singled out Tangentyere in their calls for full public scrutiny, pointing out the last annual report published on its website was in 2018. The group’s 2025 financial report, not published on its website, says it received $27m in recurring grants compared with $28min 2024. Employee costs were the highest expenditure, coming in at $24m, a $2.2m increase on the previous year.
Attempts by the media to contact the organisation were unsuccessful. The National Indigenous Australians Agency, which leads commonwealth programs for Aboriginal communities, said in a statement that Tangentyere had met all its reporting requirements and that financial reporting was available through the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations and the Australian Charities and Not for Profits Commission. A spokesperson said Tangentyere received funding to deliver a range of services, including skills training and job opportunities, child and youth activities and community safety and wellbeing programs, including night and youth patrols. The council was expected to receive $13.5m in NIAA grant funding for the 2025-26 financial year. Senator Liddle says she had tried, and failed, to get a detailed breakdown of expenditure and project outcomes. “The problem is that all the money goes in there for programs but if you look at their reporting of outcomes, it is rubbish. It’s all glossy pictures,” she says.
“They are supposed to be there for the community but then don’t provide any information to the community on what they are doing. The money just keeps pouring in and nothing comes out.” NT Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro called for a full performance audit of federally funded programs in 2024 after an outbreak of violence in Alice Springs, but it’s understood this never occurred. It’s likely an independent review ordered by NT Child Protection Minister Robyn Cahill this week will take in housing and living conditions children are exposed to. The scope of the review, and the expert leadings it, will be announced shortly. “We need to get to the bottom of what’s broken and what needs to change,” Cahill says. “This review is about the whole system – the culture, the resources, the practices, the laws.” Senator Liddle says town camps are a relic of the past. “They are relics of the last century, those places. The most pathetic thing that I’ve ever seen, which is common, is people raking up leaves in front of their houses in town camps, and nobody comes to collect the rubbish, so it just gets scattered again,” she says. Brenda looks to the giant tip near her front yard in disgust. There is rubbish around our feet as we chat. The last thing she needs is any more of it.
Source: Compiled by APN from media reports
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