Araluen Centre Alice Springs

As with many post-colonial cities across the world, there are many stereotypes about life in Darwin, Alice Springs and other Territory towns, fuelled by misrepresentations and myths. If you believe the tabloids, life in the suburbs is getting more dangerous every day: neighbourhoods have changed, shopping malls are hazardous, walking to school is a risk, gangs prowl the streets at night, public melees and drunken sprawls cause shame and embarrassment. Some residents hearken back to a halcyon yesteryear, when the claim is times were better, assaults were insignificant, and houses could be left unlocked.

This symposium attempts to create the room for informed debate about what breeds this type of worry. Are such fears real or imaginary? How are they reproduced? Whose past is vanishing, whose freedoms are under threat?

Under the theme of ‘Emerging futures – shaping our Territory’, we will come together to discuss the issues that divide and unite us, cutting through to the real issues of living together. The aim is to develop a vision for a future of civic unity within diversity.
The symposium assumes that social cohesion in any place is not accidental.
It has to be carefully thought about and designed for.

Building on the previous symposia, with their explorations of sustainability and security, we will interrogate such questions as: are things as bad as the media and worried talk might have us believe? How are contests over the definition and rules for use of public space being resolved? What does the creation of secured and patrolled housing estates tell us about the preoccupations of suburban residents? Who is really at risk of violence, theft and injury in our towns? Are race relations deteriorating or is that a beat up as well? Where is that thing, “the community”? What works? What doesn’t?

Building on the previous symposia, with their explorations of sustainability and security, here we will explore:

• Scenario pasts and futures based on demographic, historical and ethnographic analyses
• Why it is so hard to name social issues accurately: can we afford not to?
• Violence, crime and street politics: myths, images, ideologies and realities
• Selling the Territory: the tourist image and whether we should care about it?
• Is it possible to redirect the social polarisation in our Territory cities into a new communal reality?
• The role of the media in creating forms of fear and hatred
• What is the world’s best thinking on socially just civic and social development?
• The kind of society we want to live and work in; how to protect our gains and what it would take to create more mature forms of living together in the future
• Offering realistic hope: where are the intervention points?