KEY POINTS:
Yuendumu is a story of the Outback. Just after World War II, Government officials brought Aboriginal Warlpiri speakers from The Granites, arid country to the north of Alice Springs, to a settlement close to the Tanami Highway in the red heart of Australia.
There they were joined by others who had moved west from the equally harsh Bullocky Soak, and the town of Yuendumu was born, about 300km northwest of the Alice. In 1978 the town and large tracts of the Tanami Desert were handed back to the people.
But a decade ago alcohol was killing the community. The response was tough and uncompromising. The older women of Yuendumu cut nulla nullas (heavy staffs) from the desert mulga and formed a night patrol that rounded up drunks or those with alcohol, and marched them to the lock-up.
When the grannies pounded the dirt with their nulla nullas the ground shook. Nobody messed with the night patrol. Within months the results began to emerge: incidents of drunkenness, assaults, domestic violence and other ills of alcohol began to fall; health standards climbed.
Prime Minister John Howard is now following the grannies of Yuendumu on a scale unmatched in Australian history. He has invoked constitutional powers to wrest control of much of the Northern Territory from its elected government, and is sending in federal police and Army troops to break down the cycle of alcohol, drugs and violence decimating remote Aboriginal settlements.
His immediate aim is to end the appalling sexual abuse of indigenous children, chronicled in sickening detail in the report of an NT inquiry. But to have any hope of success, Howard's invasion will also have to address acute social failings that will tie down hundreds of police, military, medical, social and community workers - possibly for decades - at a cost that has yet to be calculated, but which is likely to run into the billions.
"Put simply, the cumulative effects of poor health, alcohol, drug abuse, pornography, unemployment, poor education and housing, and general disempowerment lead inexorably to family and other violence and then on to sexual abuse of men and women and, finally, of children," the report, Little Children Are Sacred, said.
Treasurer Peter Costello has no doubts about the cost.
"Bear in mind this - that even today the Commonwealth is spending billions on Aboriginal welfare and this will be in addition to that. So we are looking at very large sums of money."
This is more than a moral crusade. It is an essential investment in basic human values that is long overdue, and an equally significant economic imperative. Simply, Australia cannot afford to fail.
But the means by which Howard intends ending the despair of indigenous Australia have deeply unsettling implications. Within a month, federal lawyers will have drafted legislation allowing Canberra to do what it wishes in the NT, overriding the elected territorial government.
The package of measures is also draconian and disturbing for human rights advocates. While Howard argues nothing matters but the safety and welfare of children, a raft of indigenous, legal, human rights, professional, social and community organisations fear his package may ultimately do more harm than good.
Measures include bans on alcohol and pornography on Aboriginal land, the end to Aborigines' rights to control access to their land, federal control of their communities, the "quarantining" of 50 per cent of welfare payments to ensure all is not spent on alcohol and drugs, welfare payments tied to attendance of children at school, school lunches compulsorily funded by parents, and medical examinations for every indigenous child under 16.
At the heart of Howard's crusade is a tragedy that existed long before Australia's second-longest serving prime minister entered politics, and for decades before the 1967 referendum that finally gave Aborigines constitutional recognition.
Mission stations, policies of assimilation, official neglect and abuse, and the "Stolen Generation" of children taken from families drove indigenous Australia into a Third World despair from which it has yet to emerge.
The nation's 455,000 Aborigines hover at the bottom of an appalling table. Their average life expectancy is 20 years less than other Australians, lower than Bangladesh and Nigeria.
Spending on indigenous primary health care falls short of requirements by between A$350 million ($385 million) and A$500 million a year, despite much higher rates of cancer, angina and heart attacks, strokes, lung and respiratory tract diseases, and pneumonia. Diabetes is almost 10 times more prevalent than in other Australians; they are seven times more likely to suffer violence; and far more likely to commit suicide or intentionally harm themselves.
Housing is a continuing crisis. Some estimates place the cost of building sufficient homes for Aborigines in the NT alone at more than A$1 billion. Health, medical, education and social services are inadequate. Safe water supplies remain a problem for many remote communities.
Largely hidden from the view of most Australians, Aborigines have never won a powerful political voice. Despite landmarks such as the Mabo decision that finally allowed claims for native title and the huge reconciliation march across Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2000, Aborigines play no real part in deciding how other Australians vote.
In the remote vastness of Australia's Outback, the tragedy has been devastating the innocent and most vulnerable: indigenous children. And while the appallingly graphic report finally spurred Howard to action, it was far from the first. Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia each conducted inquiries, all following the death of a child. After the WA inquiry, which led to the closure of a fringe community near Perth, the State Government unsuccessfully sought similar, national, measures from Howard.
A New South Wales inquiry into the incidence of child sexual assault in Aboriginal communities and the effectiveness of state responses found "endemic and intergenerational" abuse. It also reported that responses were frequently seen as ineffective, culturally inappropriate or inconsistent, and met with mistrust.
In the NT, the secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Care produced a report outlining child abuse and spoke to Howard seeking action four years ago.
Last year, the Australian Medical Association's then-NT president, paediatrician Dr Paul Bauert, urged Canberra to send in the Army to protect the children of the remote community of Wadeye, a former Roman Catholic mission at the mouth of the Fitzmaurice River, west of Darwin, and one of the catalysts for the Little Children Are Sacred report.
Critics have attacked Howard for not acting on these reports - he has in turn assailed the states for not doing the same - and have questioned his decision to move in such a dramatic manner as his government trails in the polls.
But the horrific nature of Little Children Are Sacred genuinely galvanised the Prime Minister and his Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, a former Army officer who was working hard to find new solutions well before the report appeared.
Among examples cited:
* Incest and violent rape, at times under claims of cultural right despite strong traditional "skin" laws outlawing such abuse and frequently invoking the death penalty.
* Prostitution by girls as young as 12, at times in exchange for taxi rides, alcohol or drugs, or for non-Aboriginal mining company employees who supplied parents with booze in exchange for their daughters.
* Organised prostitution of teenagers from remote communities in Darwin.
* Rape of children - some still babies - by other children, who also organised pornographic video showings and encouraged each other to have multiple sex partners.
A key finding by successive studies is widespread abhorrence of child sex abuse in Aboriginal communities. But they have also found that former traditional laws and mores have broken down, and that with endemic alcohol and drug addiction, neglect is as much a crime as abuse.
Institutionally, policies have failed. Dr Peter Shergold, head of the Prime Minister's Department and a member of the task force overseeing Howard's intervention, told a human rights inquiry that too much of his work had been "for the very best of motives and the very worst of outcomes". Further, he said, hundreds of his colleagues had contributed to the sad state of affairs, "at first unwittingly and then, too often, silently and despairingly".
The question now is whether Howard's intervention is a magnified version of past mistakes. Key among his measures is the assumption of control over Aboriginal communities on five-year leases, and the abolition of their right to control access to their land under a long-established permit system. Both go to the heart of indigenous relationship with the land - a fundamental tenet of Aboriginal spirituality and life and, more pragmatically, a control on those who may enter with evil intent.
Canberra had already intervened in the ownership of Aboriginal communities, moving two years ago to introduce 99-year leases managed by government rather than traditional owners, and to remove barriers blocking non-Aboriginal interests from long-term investment.
The aim was to end "protectionism" and introduce competition in a microcosm of the economic reform that has swept across Australia for the past two decades, and to force the people of tiny "unviable" communities to move to larger centres.
Howard's new measures to remove control of access go much further, allowing unrestricted entry to lands in which many people barely speak English and, according to Alice Springs-based Central Land Council director David Ross, potentially creating a "free-for-all peddling of alcohol, marijuana and pornography, or further sexual or physical abuse of children".
Other measures, including the mandatory physical examination of all indigenous children under 16, have alarmed a population with personal memories of the Stolen Generation and an abiding fear of a new assault on family and tribal structures.
The media has been flooded with reports of mothers and children fleeing to the bush from the township of Mutitjulu near Uluru (Ayers Rock), among the first towns to be targeted by Howard's intervention.
Its leaders said in a statement they would welcome real support, but were jaded by Howard's declaration of emergency there two years ago.
Since then, they said, the community had been without a doctor, there were fewer health workers, youth and health programmes had been cut, a dialysis machine funded by a private foundation had been refused and pleas for alcohol counselling and rehabilitation had been ignored.
And while there has been universal acclaim for the ambitions of Howard's intervention, many have qualified their support with warnings against the form it has taken. Rex Wild QC, one of the authors of Little Children Are Sacred, attacked Howard's "gunship" mentality. Others, including a coalition of indigenous groups, federal and NT human rights commissioners, and medical, doctors' and nurses' organisations, warned that human decency could be crushed by an ill-considered response.
But Howard remains determined. Beside him is Noel Pearson, a respected Aboriginal activist whose tough-love proposals for his tribal lands on Cape York Peninsula provided the model for intervention in the Northern Territory.
"The people who are nay-saying any type of intervention are people whose children, like my own, sleep safe at night," he told ABC television.
