Day one | Day two

SPRAWLING through dusty red desert, the ochre-coloured hills of the Larapinta Trail might have suited John Ford as a backdrop for his great Westerns, if he hadn't come across the American west's Monument Valley first. The road from Alice Springs is breathtaking. Wild horses graze on grass from recent rains. Wrecked cars are casualties of the dead-straight road's mesmerising dangers. Then, as I pass the boundary leading to Wallace Rockhole, an aboriginal settlement, a big blue sign by the road jolts me back to my journey's purpose: “Warning. Prescribed Area. No Liquor. No Pornography.”

My destination is Hermannsburg, a former mission. The Lutheran church founded it on the Finke River in 1877 in what was, and still is, one of Australia's most isolated frontiers. Now home to about 800 Aranda people, who hold title to the land, Hermannsburg is one of 73 aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory that are subject to one of the most dramatic and controversial federal-government takeovers Australia has seen.

Four years ago Nanette Rogers, a court prosecutor in Alice Springs, gave an explosive television interview. Her interview lifted the lid on a dark world of violence, sexual abuse and alcoholism in some of the territory's remote aboriginal communities. She told of two babies being raped. She spoke of a “malaise”, “entrenched violence”, and of aboriginal people being “overwhelmed time and time again by a fresh new tragedy”. Once a public defender, Ms Rogers said she became a prosecutor because she was “sick of acting for violent aboriginal men”.

Her words sparked a chain of events that has divided Australia ever since. In June 2007 the conservative government led by John Howard announced a “Northern Territory Emergency Response”, which became better known as “the intervention”. Legislation that had banned racial discrimination in the territory was suspended, troops were sent in, and alcohol and pornography were prohibited in the “prescribed communities”. Half of every welfare payment due to the communities' residents became subject to a kind of quarantine, obliging the state to “manage” their income.

Human-rights activists were outraged. They branded Mr Howard's action a return to the white paternalism that had prevailed in this territory 34 years ago, before aborigines won their battle for land rights. Indigenous people comprise about a quarter of the Northern Territory's population, compared with 2% in Australia as a whole. To those critics' dismay, the Labor government headed by Kevin Rudd has continued with the intervention. After almost three years in power, it has yet to fulfil its pledge to reinstate the anti-racial discrimination law (although legislation to do so is now before parliament).

Yet the territory's hidden horrors reflect a perplexing side of the indigenous Australians' long struggle for self-determination. Why should violence, as Nanette Rogers maintains, be so entrenched in parts of aboriginal society? Some trace it to the nomadic way of life they led thousands of years before white settlers pushed them off their lands. Others put it down to a burning resentment at that dispossession, and a void filled mainly by booze and drugs. As the intervention reaches its third year this month, Hermannsburg is a good place to start testing its results, especially among those it was designed to rescue: aboriginal women.

Tourists now swarm through the old mission's whitewashed buildings. Hermannsburg was the birthplace of Albert Namatjira, an Aranda tribesman whose brilliant landscape paintings of central Australia 60 years ago brought him fame (but not fortune). Bob Durnan, a white health worker here, opposed the intervention at first. Now he supports it. He has watched Hermannsburg's school attendance rate climb from 50% to 80% in just three years mainly, he reckons, because the community's women wanted change.

One of them joins us. Mildred Inkamala climbs down from a four-wheel-drive vehicle talking on her mobile phone. Ms Inkamala's own story makes her something of a charismatic figure. Trained by the Hermannsburg Lutherans, her father was a noted evangelist. Sixteen years ago she and her husband, Carl, went to Sydney to be cured of alcoholism. Both are now members of the MacDonnell Shire, the local government body covering their region. Resisting pressure from some of her own people, Ms Inkamala has worked as a court interpreter, translating between English and the Aranda language in murder trials against men.

She points out a bank of the Finke River where an 18-year-old youth, high from sniffing petrol, once raped and murdered a young girl (he is now in prison in Alice). Then she tells me she now supports the intervention, mainly because it has put an end to “humbugging”: men putting pressure on women to hand over money for alcohol, drugs and gambling. Instead, one half of their “income-managed” welfare payments are logged to a “Basics Card”, which they can use only to buy such items as fresh food and children's clothes. Ms Inkamala has her own perspective on the violence. “Our ancestors respected each other,” she says. “They looked after kids. Whitefellas' grog has made the change.”

Inevitably, bootleggers are still finding ways of smuggling grog in, despite the prohibition. With a paid job of her own, working for the Northern Territory's family agency, Ms Inkamala is not income-managed. Her friend Kathy Abbott from Wallace Rockhole, who receives a disability pension, is automatically managed. Is that fair? Ms Abbott says if the system helps women more vulnerable than her, she does not mind. I take a snapshot of Mildred, Carl and Kathy outside the old Lutheran Church, with healthy-looking children playing nearby. In some quarters at least, the intervention is being embraced as a fresh approach to stubborn problems. The big test will be where it goes next.

Day two

TODD MALL, the main street of Alice Springs, looks chillingly like a scene lifted from the film “Samson and Delilah”. Warwick Thornton, an aboriginal director, told the story of two aboriginal teenagers from a nearby settlement, one of them a chronic petrol-sniffer. They came to town in desperation. But the rich white tourists there, who sip coffee at open-air cafés while planning “culture tours” to aboriginal communities, ignore the stricken kids as their lives spiral ever-downwards. The movie scooped Australia's film awards and won a prize at Cannes last year.

The Samson and Delilah characters reflect many real lives. Marcia Langton, a feisty aboriginal activist, describes them all as being “trapped in a vast aboriginal reality show”. But since the film was made, there have been at least two positive changes. Petrol-sniffing, of the sort that has killed and incapacitated many indigenous youngsters like Samson, has been almost wiped out in the Northern Territory. All it took was the introduction of Opal, a non-sniffable form of unleaded petrol.

And at long last, the federal government has started committing significant funds to the rescue of 18 aboriginal settlements on the outer fringe of Alice Springs: the Town Camps.

In 1870 a man named Charles Todd built a repeater station here, to join two massive segments of Australia's first overland telegraph line. The town of Alice Springs, named for Todd's wife, sprang from the station. The camps followed, as Aranda people from the Western Desert region drifted in looking for work on the huge cattle stations (or ranches) that white settlers had staked out. By the time Bob Durnan, a white health worker, arrived in 1977, the cattle work had dried up. “The place was on fire,” he recalls. “Grog was everywhere. Alcohol had become their way of life, their god.”

Mr Durnan helped to found the Tangentyere (“working together”) Council, a body to oversee the camps and steer their young people towards jobs. Despite its good work the camps have deteriorated in the 33 years since, becoming a national disgrace. Their fluctuating population, between 2,500 and 3,500 residents at a given time, remains out of sight to most Australians. Hidden Valley, Little Sisters and other camps have turned into hell-holes of violence, drugs, broken families, sexual abuse and murder. The very existence of the camps is embarrassing, as it smacks awkwardly of segregation, the kind that was supposed to have ended.

Yet many people still choose to live there; the camps offer them a form of cultural affinity. Pam Lynch is one of them. Larapinta, her camp, has a stunningly peaceful vista taking in the red MacDonnell ranges. But I had been advised to steer clear of some of Larapinta's precincts. Outsiders are not always welcome.

Ms Lynch drives to and from a job in Alice each day. “This camp is home,” she tells me. “My uncle told me our dreaming tracks flow from the hills above it,” dreaming tracks—also called songlines—being an aborigine's spiritual connection to the contours of the actual land. Ms Lynch has just moved from her daughter's crowded house into a new one of her own. Hers is one of 85 the federal government has undertaken to build in the town camps. Under its “emergency response” programme, also called “the intervention”, the government plans to refurbish another 132 homes in these camps and to build more new homes scattered throughout the Northern Territory. It says a third of the construction jobs are supposed to go to indigenous workers. On my visit I see only young white workers, rushing to finish a house opposite Ms Lynch's.

Pam Lynch with her granddaughter, and a brand-new house

These projects have created bitter divisions within the Tangentyere Council. When John Howard's conservative government launched the intervention three years ago, it wanted to suspend the natives' title to land. The federal government would have assumed control under a 99-year lease. The council refused. Kevin Rudd's Labor government, which succeeded Mr Howard's, asked for a 40-year lease instead and doubled the money available to clean up the camps. Reluctantly, the council signed the deal.

William Tilmouth, the council's director, says the intervention should be should stopped. A handsome man with thick grey hair, Mr Tilmouth acknowledges that the drinking and violence in the camps is bad. His answer to these problems is to seek new ways of including indigenous people in the governance of their own society, through education and jobs, rather than taking over their lives once more. “The Northern Territory was built on alcohol,” he says. “Aboriginal people learned binge-drinking from non-aboriginal people.” “From a time,” he adds, “when men were men and cattle were frightened of them.”

William Tilmouth thinks enough's enough

This clash of cultures is no longer a simple matter of black versus white. The intervention has introduced a male-versus-female dynamic. Andrea Mason is head of the Alice-based Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council (known as NPY, thank you very much), which welcomes tribal women across the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. To critics who see the intervention, especially its policy of income-management, as an outright deprivation of civil rights, Ms Mason says that “women see it more as a way of taking back control over their finances and lives.”

The intervention is at a turning point as its third year draws to a close. Next month a “Stop the Intervention” rally is planned for Alice. Aborigines and their liberal white supporters once marched together to demand their rights. That demand has long been a flashpoint for Australia's racial grievances. This time the battle lines are not so easily drawn.