Spun Dry: Mobility and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia

THIS CHAPTER PURSUES an ethnographic account of intra-Indigenous relations and jurisdictional contest in urban northern Australia. By exploring the relationship between Aboriginal community policing and emergent forms and figures of urban mobility and morbidity in Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory, I aim to better understand the ways that Indigenous Australians traverse both Australian law and urban space. Several related questions animate my concerns: How and where ought one look in order to observe law’s emergence? Might an expanded sense of what counts as law allow better understanding of its power and its limits vis-à-vis Indigenous Australians? And might attention