Longgrassing in Paradise

Book excerpt: Darwin longgrassers have been living large since the beginning. They come from all over the Territory to camp in the public spaces around town, to catch up with family and friends, attend health and legal matters, dodge the sorcerer, holiday and shop, and drink. Especially drink. And the whitefellas don’t like it. They think they’re noisy and dirty and rude. So, they try to move them on. For 150 years they’ve been trying to move them on. But the longgrassers won’t go. Yet beneath this running battle between the settled and the unsettling lurks a truth about colonisation that is almost Newtonian in style. This is a story of resilience and denial against outrageous odds, an underdog’s triumph of survival in the modern world, for a people who just won’t go away.