REVIEW: Intervention in Aboriginal communities examined

Abstract

‘And there’ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on policies impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007, edited by Elisabeth Baehr and Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 354 pp.  ISBN 9781443898638

‘THE PAST is now with us; it never went away.’

The 2007 Intervention into the lives of Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory was a low point in the relationship between the Australian government and Indigenous people. As one of the Aboriginal authors in No Dancing, Warraimay historian Victoria Grieves puts it, the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), as the Intervention was officially known, ‘leaves no doubt about the relationship of Aboriginal people to the settler colonial state’ (p.  89).