'Intervention: Katherine, NT' (Julie Nimmo, 2008)

Abstract

Among the images that lingered for me after watching 'Intervention: Katherine, NT' were those of a man called Conway Bush-Blanasi talking to camera about his family. Gesturing to a picture on a household pin-board, he says that if he and his wife weren't good parents, their daughter wouldn't be succeeding at work and their other kids wouldn't be doing well at school. Things would be harder now that the Indigenous community employment scheme around Beswick, near Katherine, was being replaced with income quarantining as part of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response. In the documenting of a year's experience of the Intervention in the Katherine region, what is shared in this moment is the difficulty of contending with the ordinary.