Alice Springs, or “Alice” as it is commonly known here in Australia, is situated in the country’s Red Center. For over 30,000 years, the Arrernte Aboriginal people have been custodians of this remote land – a land of red earth, awe-inspiring rock formations and ethereal skies.
Alice, or Mparntwe in the Arrernte language, has profound, unhealed wounds, both ancient and recent. The most recent, and still painfully raw, is the murder in late April of a 5-year-old girl. An Aboriginal man by the name of Jefferson Lewis has been charged with her murder.
In accordance with Aboriginal custom, under which the names of the dead are avoided out of respect, the family requested she be called Kumanjayi Little Baby. She was found dead after disappearing from the Aboriginal Old Timers Camp, one of the 18 Aboriginal camps on the fringes of Alice Springs.
Kumanjayi Little Baby’s family were staying in a dilapidated house at the Old Timers Camp after traveling from their remote community in the Tanami Desert to Alice Springs to access medical care. Photos taken at the Old Timers Camp during the search for the girl showed a mattress on the floor where she had been put to bed before her disappearance.
Police said Jefferson Lewis, the alleged killer of Kumanjayi Little Baby, was staying at the Old Timers Camp too. A May editorial in The Sydney Morning Herald hit the nail on the head about the tragedy, describing the camps as “gathering places for the powerless and the outcast, where the most vulnerable are easy prey, and protections are minimal.”
