Jacinta Price faces backlash in Yuendumu over views on Indigenous culture

Head north-west from Alice Springs along the Tanami Road towards the desert. Go past spinifex plains, mulga scrub and low hills, and if you need fuel, there’s a lonely roadhouse at the two-hour mark. An hour further on, you’ll see the turn-off for Yuendumu, population 740.

The public housing is yellow, green, blue, purple. Some streets are red dirt. People drive 4WDs or old sedans, kids sometimes riding on adults’ laps while packs of “cheeky” dogs nip at mudflaps. There’s a school, a police station, an arts centre, a nursing home, two stores, a dustbowl AFL oval and a Baptist church shaped like a Toblerone.

Walk 10 minutes in any direction and you’re in the bush.

This is where Jacinta Nampijinpa Price remembers eating honey ants as a child on visits from Alice Springs. This is where she watched her aunties dance in ceremonies, their bare chests painted with ochre and goanna fat. “I have many happy early memories of times at Yuendumu,” the Northern Territory senator writes in her memoir. “But I was also acutely aware that Yuendumu had a dark side.”

Price has made much of the dark side. She describes the town her grandparents called home, and where her parents first met, as a brutal and backward place known “for all the worst reasons”.

Characterisations such as these have helped turn Price into a conservative star, a valuable party fundraiser who can pack out auditoriums. Sacked from the frontbench last week over her comments about Indian migration and her failure to back her leader, she has promised to speak out more on “the plight of those in remote communities”.

Her supporters say she will rise again. They describe her as a future prime minister.

But for Price to become leader, she would first need to win a seat in the lower house. That would mean confronting her deep unpopularity in remote Aboriginal communities, which she says she fights for every day. In her first term, the Warlpiri-Celtic senator did not spend time in a Warlpiri community for work. Elders reject her link between traditional law and violence.

At the same time, Price has campaigned for radical land rights changes and waged war on Aboriginal land councils, all without acknowledging her family’s fight over land, dreaming and royalties.

Now, a press release she issued last year has spiralled into a defamation trial – one she says could force her out of parliament. “Some would love nothing more than to see me lose this case,” Price told supporters in an email, seeking $320,000 in donations to her legal defence fund by the end of August.

As the subject line said, “They’d love me silent.”

No votes

Outside a house on the edge of Yuendumu, children crouch around an open fire. It’s winter and it’s been raining. Tommy Jangala Watson, who has lived here since 1969, sits on a bench under a tree, wearing a hat and a flannel shirt.

“She’s making a big trouble,” Watson says. “She’s gone too far.”

Watson speaks of tension that Price has created between Yapa and Kardiya – Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. “She didn’t talk to anybody here at Yuendumu, or my people, Warlpiri people,” he says, “Warlpiri people at Lajamanu, Warlpiri people at Willowra, at Nyirripi.”

Price, who was born in Darwin and has lived in Alice Springs since she was three years old, has crisscrossed the country since becoming a senator. Her travel schedule was especially intense during the Voice campaign. In the past three years, she has visited Hobart three times and the NSW agricultural city of Orange five times.

But she has made only one attempt to visit a Warlpiri community. In 2023, she travelled with a Sky News journalist to Yuendumu to seek comments about the Voice but says she was denied entry to the town by white staff members of the local Warlpiri media organisation.

Should she visit more? “No,” says elder Nancy Napurrurla Oldfield. “Because lots of people don’t like her. I just want her to be safe. People might do something.” She adds in a low voice that they might “do black magic”.

Growing up, Oldfield was close to Bess Nungarrayi Price, Jacinta’s mother. She likes Jacinta and supports her political career. But she doesn’t like the way Price describes Warlpiri culture. “She should help us,” Oldfield says, “not talk about her people, us Warlpiri mob.”

Yuendumu votes Labor, by thumping margins. At the May election, the remote polling team covering the town and surrounding areas recorded nearly 10 times as many votes for Labor as for Price’s Country Liberal Party in the NT Senate race.

Labor’s lead Senate candidate, Malarndirri McCarthy, received 19 votes personally. Price received none.

Over the years, she has argued that the results are skewed by election interference. Running for the seat of Lingiari in 2019, Price alleged she and her mother had been harangued and intimidated by a Labor booth worker.

“We wondered why the bush has voted for Labor all these years,” she said. “Well this is why – Indigenous people have been bullied, they’ve been intimidated, and I won’t stand for it.” Price alleged there had been “a lot of manipulation” at booths in the Voice referendum, in which nearly all remote Aboriginal communities in the NT voted Yes.

On election night this year, she told the ABC it should send a journalist to investigate. A spokeswoman for the Australian Electoral Commission said it had received no complaints from Price personally, while a complaint from the CLP lacked evidence and detail.

Price declined interview requests and did not respond to questions for this article.

One Yuendumu voter who supports Price is Theresa Napurrurla Ross, a cousin of Price’s mother. “Seeing a Yapa [Aboriginal] woman up there in power, in politics, makes me really proud,” Ross says. For the same reason, Ross supports other Aboriginal women in parliament, including Price’s Labor opponents.

“In Yapa culture, say Jacinta was based here, as a senator, someone says something wrong towards her, I’d come with a nulla nulla [fighting stick],” Ross says, with humour. Asked whether she agrees with Price’s political stances, she says she does not follow politics, “just normal news”.

The land and the dreaming

It could all be over soon, the senator warns. In October, Price is set to front Darwin’s federal court for a defamation trial.

“If it goes well for them – defamation cases can go either way, after all – they might even bankrupt me and cost me my seat,” she wrote in an email to supporters in July, alluding to the constitutional bar on MPs who are bankrupt or insolvent. “But I will not go down without a fight. I will never back down on my principles.”

An update to Price’s register of interests on Thursday, first reported by Open Politics, showed 761 donors gave $300 or more in just over a fortnight. Among the donors was Hancock Prospecting, the mining company of Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart.

The case turns on a press release Price sent last August. In it, she made a number of criticisms of Aboriginal land councils. But she opened with the claim that Central Land Council chief executive Les Turner had lost the confidence of most of his members “due to unprofessional conduct”.

Turner denies this and says Price seriously injured his reputation by not checking her facts. Price maintains she acted reasonably and in the public interest. But she has dropped her truth defence.

The CLC is the second largest land council in the Territory, covering an area larger than France. Last year, Price took on its chair, Warren Williams, using a Senate inquiry to obtain his police record. It revealed offences from as recently as 2015, including assault and contravening domestic violence orders.

“I regret things I did in the past,” Williams said in response, describing how he now tried to change other men’s behaviour through workshops.

Aboriginal land councils, which collect and redistribute money paid for land use such as mining, have been in Price’s sights for years.

“They are the most important organisations in the lives of our most marginalised and cannot be left to operate as they have been,” she has argued. She has called them opaque and unaccountable. She would like to see them broken up into smaller bodies. Both Price and former Greens senator Lidia Thorpe have called for greater scrutiny. Before the last election, the Coalition promised an inquiry.

For Price, land use is not simply a policy matter. It’s personal. In 2021, she said a lot of traditional owners – herself included – “have not had the opportunity to be able to access their own country for economic development opportunities”. She told a think-tank audience last year that the NT’s land rights legislation should be reformed, or even scrapped.

Throughout all of this, Price has stayed quiet on her family’s long-running dispute over land.

Unlike most politicians, she does not own property. She rents in the Alice Springs suburbs with her husband, Scottish-Australian musician Colin Lillie. Her register of financial interests includes only a few assets – a super fund and a savings account – plus a company and trust to deal with book royalties.

The section about shares contains a clue to the land fight. Price lists herself as “a traditional owner within the Janganpa Land Trust in accordance with the NT Land Rights Act 1976”.

There is no additional information online about a trust with that name. A spokeswoman for the CLC said it “never comments on the situations of individual traditional owners”.

Price wrote in 2018 of a janganpa (possum) dreaming she inherited from her mother. “The dreaming stories tell us of how places came into being and explore what it means to be human in a vast, harsh landscape,” she said. “This is how we are connected to our country forever.”

Bess Price has identified herself as a traditional owner of a janganpa site in the hills south of Yuendumu. Owners of the hills have received money for the extraction of gravel for road building. In 2017, Bess staged a protest with other family members, accusing the land council of failing to consult her over the use of her land.

Others say that’s not her country.

“She’s not from there,” says Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, a prominent Yuendumu spokesman. “That doesn’t belong to her.” He argues that Bess’ claim is invalid because her father was not Warlpiri but Arrernte, a separate nation to the south.

According to Theresa Ross, that’s “just talk”. She’s heard it many times before. The hills belong to her mother as well as Bess and Jacinta, Ross says, putting the dispute down to “jealousy” that brewed after Bess entered politics. “That’s why they started saying that Bess and my mum wasn’t traditional owners.”

The dispute has had a personal cost for Nancy Oldfield, who was once a good friend of Bess. Oldfield explains that she is a “servant” of the hills, a kurdungurlu. It is her role to preserve dreaming knowledge and conduct ceremony in partnership with the kirda, or owners. Personally, she wanted Bess to be able to claim the dreaming. And she says Jacinta could possibly be counted as a kurdungurlu.

But her relatives disagree. “My family don’t want to share dreaming with [the Prices],” she says. “The owners complain, ‘[Bess] shouldn’t be getting money’.” When Oldfield visits Alice Springs these days, she’s less likely to call in on Bess “because of this”.

Disputes like these are fairly common. Less common is for one side to include an influential politician criticising their land council in parliament.

The senator has also used her position as a politician to advocate for between $8 million and $12 million in funding for a new boarding facility at an Alice Springs school where her mother worked as an assistant principal.

Price was “choking back tears” when she first secured the election promise from the Morrison government, saying it would help get children off the streets at night. In opposition, she pushed Labor to match it.

When Labor did not immediately back the funding, Price and other members of the opposition pursued the issue repeatedly, including in parliament. Labor senator Tony Sheldon suggested in a Senate estimates hearing this year that “there be a declaration if there is still an existing conflict of interest regarding this line of questioning”.

Price did not mention her mother worked at the school. Asked about the connection at a press conference in Alice Springs in 2023, she said: “That’s just the nature of being an Indigenous person in the Territory [who has] family and kin right across the Northern Territory”.

Bess Price did not respond to questions for this article.

Promised marriages

Standing before the blue curtain backdrop of the National Press Club, a “Vote No” badge pinned to her lapel, Price spoke of traditional Aboriginal culture.

It was September 2023, the month before the Voice referendum. Price, a fierce critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, had just told her audience that colonisation had no ongoing negative impact – a comment that outraged many Indigenous leaders.

Price went on to speak of her family in remote communities “who live very close to traditional culture” and experience some of the highest rates of violence in the country. “They experience that,” she said, “not because of the effects of colonisation but because it’s expected that young girls are married off to older husbands in arranged marriages.”

In her memoir, published this year, Price describes these “promised marriages” as a means of exploitation encouraged by traditional law. She recounts stories of girls from her mother’s generation who had been beaten or raped after being forced into promised marriages, some of them as young as 10. She details the case of her mother’s 14-year-old cousin, who disappeared in 1982 after resisting a violent promised husband. (Price’s grandparents and her mother defied their arrangements to marry who they wished.)

In 2018, Price called the practice “very prevalent”. In her book she writes of her belief that it continues in the Territory today.

This week, the NT News reported a major story about a 28-year-old man from an unnamed remote community, jailed for raping a 13-year-old girl he met as part of a “family arrangement” facilitated by her relatives. The court accepted that the man did not know the girl’s age until her family told him, after she fell pregnant. Justice Peter Barr said while the relationship “did not breach Aboriginal customary law”, that would have no bearing on sentencing.

None of the Warlpiri people interviewed by this masthead last month said they were aware of coercive promised marriages in Yuendumu. Two Price relatives – Oldfield and Ross – say the expectation of marrying a promised partner died out long ago. Danilda White, 24, says neither she nor anyone she knows has faced pressure to follow through on the commitments, which still form part of ceremony.

“These days, these promises are purely ritual,” says Associate Professor Yasmine Musharbash, an Australian National University anthropologist who has visited Yuendumu since the ’90s. “Everybody has a promised partner but hardly anybody ever marries them today.”

In 2015, Price’s mother, then a Northern Territory minister, said: “When young women do have promised husbands, they still choose who they want to be with.”

Fighting domestic violence is the cause that has defined the careers of both mother and daughter. “My mother was one of the first in our community to speak out,” Price writes in Matters of the Heart. “She has bravely refused to be silenced.”

Price’s parents met in Yuendumu in the mid-1970s. Her father, Dave, who grew up in a large, white, working-class family in Newcastle, had taken up a job in town as a teacher. He was married, unhappily. So was Bess, a teacher’s aide at the school who had become a mother at 14. (Her first child, Linawu, died of leukemia.)

Bess’ husband, a teenager himself, liked to drink. “And with the bottle came regular beatings for my mum,” Price writes. “She still bears the scars of being burned with a firestick and sliced with a boomerang.” Her uncles eventually gave the husband “a flogging”, but waited far too long, according to Price. “Cultural law dictated that there was little they could do.”

In 2018, she tweeted: “Where culture is strongest is where violence is highest.” The same year, thousands signed a petition titled “As an Aboriginal Person Jacinta and Bess Price DO NOT represent me or speak on my behalf”.

Trisha Morton-Thomas, an Anmatyerr woman living in Alice Springs, supported the petition. In her experience, those who are strongly connected to culture are quietly taking care of their families and communities, while those who have lost connection are more likely to fall into drugs and alcohol.

“She highlights the issues, but the emphasis is always on how bad Aboriginal people are and how bad Aboriginal culture is, particularly men,” Morton-Thomas, a film-maker and producer, says of Price. She finds the senator’s language “quite destructive”.

According to Dr Chay Brown, an Australian National University researcher specialising in domestic, family and sexual violence, there is no evidence that traditional culture contributes to the problem. “Colonisation creates the context in which violence against Aboriginal women occurs,” Brown says. “Any prior experience of violence or trauma makes someone more likely to be re-victimised or to begin to use violence.”

Working closely with prevention services in Alice Springs, where she lives, Brown says: “I haven’t seen much engagement from Senator Price with the DV sector”.

As opposition spokeswoman for Indigenous Australians, Price led the push for a royal commission into the abuse of Indigenous children. According to the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), a not-for-profit focused on Indigenous children, her campaign was harmful and based on no evidence.

“The impact of this campaign on our children and our communities was horrific because people believed it, and it shaped the way they saw us,” says chief executive Catherine Liddle, an Arrernte/Luritja woman. Liddle says SNAICC engages with all the major political parties. But every request to meet with Price has been “rejected or ignored”.

‘She don’t know the laws’

Before her maiden speech, Price’s relatives conducted a hare-wallaby dreaming ceremony in a parliament courtyard. Her great-great aunt gave her a fighting stick. “My aunty and grandmother insisted that I also don the traditional feather headdress that we wore at women’s ceremonies,” she writes in her memoir.

But Warlpiri elders say Price does not take part in ceremony, in which knowledge of traditional law is shared. They question how she can confidently blame violence against women on culture when she does not participate in it.

“She’s been betraying her own people, damaging their reputation,” says Wanta Pawu, a professor at Melbourne University’s Indigenous Knowledge Institute, based in Lajamanu.

“She’s not a cultural woman,” says Robin Japanangka Granites. “She don’t know the laws.”

Along with other Warlpiri men, Granites helps repatriate cultural objects from overseas collections. During the inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker, who was shot dead by a police officer in Yuendumu in 2019, he helped translate proceedings into Warlpiri.

But Granites has a complicated relationship with the Price family. His brother, now deceased, was Bess Price’s first husband, whom she accused of serious domestic violence. (Granites denies his brother was violent but says he struggled with alcohol abuse.)

In the 2010s, Granites worked for Bess in her electorate office. But after his own record of domestic violence was raised in parliament by a Price opponent, she sacked him. When asked about this, he says he realised in his early 20s “I have been doing something very bad”, then turned his life around. “It wasn’t a cultural issue at all, it was to do with me being on the grog.”

His good friend, Scott McConnell, is a white former politician who grew up in Warlpiri communities including Yuendumu. He won his seat from Bess Price in the 2016 election but later resigned from Labor, citing frustration over Indigenous policy.

McConnell is adamant: “People who say that Warlpiri culture is fundamentally violent are wrong, their opinion is not informed by fact.” He attributes domestic abuse to social problems and inequalities for which both sides of politics bear responsibility. They add up to “an absence of hope”.

Travelling back from Yuendumu, you see a piece of graffiti on the back of a road sign: Yapa Lives Matter. On one level, the senator would agree. But she would never use those words.

Read day one of our Jacinta Nampijinpa Price series, The senator, the ex-PM and the lobby group: Price’s crusade to remake the Liberals , here.