Alice through the Looking Glass: Marginalisation in the Aboriginal Town Camps of Alice Springs
D Drakakis-Smith
Additional contact information
D Drakakis-Smith: Department of Human Geography, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2600, Australia
Environment and Planning A, 1980, vol. 12, issue 4, 427-448
Abstract:
This paper was written immediately following an extensive period of fieldwork in the small Australian town of Alice Springs. It was deliberately written before most of the statistical results of various surveys were available in order to crystallise the less quantifiable impressions and features of the Aboriginal position in the town around a conceptual framework of societal relations. The few studies of urban Aborigines to date have been more descriptive than analytical. To this end, and based upon my own previous field experiences, I have borrowed from contemporary Third World studies the notions of marginality and marginalisation, and assessed the situation in Alice Springs in these terms. The reasons for this particular choice of concepts was partly because of the location of Alice Springs in ‘colonial’ Australia but primarily because of the etymological and philosophical links with the prevailing opinion of most Aborigines in Alice Springs as fringe dwellers—people on the margins of the town and its society. There have been few attempts to examine the position of Aborigines in contemporary Australia in conceptual terms and this effort will undoubtedly have many shortcomings. However, its purpose is not to be definitive but rather to stimulate further investigation and discussion.
Date: 1980
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a120427 (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:12:y:1980:i:4:p:427-448
DOI: 10.1068/a120427
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().