In the history of Aboriginal Australia, there is nothing all that new about a convoy of uninvited guests trekking across country to seek a new start.

Aboriginal groups have been known to flout jurisdictional boundaries – whether those erected by other Aboriginal groups across tens of thousands of years, or those more arbitrarily decided by imperial powers and settler governments in the recent post-contact period – for generations too many to count.

Matters became a little more complex as the settlers of the Australian colonies began to dominate the continent, and live up to their names and ‘settle’ (albeit in a rather piecemeal fashion). Jurisdictions grew in number, becoming complicated and sometimes downright contradicting legal-political inventions for Indigenous peoples to weave through. Out of necessity, however, many still tried.

With the Federation of the colonies in 1901 came the gradual standardisation of a complex layered system of government across the new nation-state, rolled out over the top of an intricate honeycomb of Indigenous governments, and a diminishing number of mobile polities, as though they were never even there to begin with. Officially, it would not be until 1967 that the Commonwealth came to identify this population, and accept responsibility for its maintenance.

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It is my hope that the recent 1,800km journey of over 100 Walpiri people, from their ancestral homeland in Yuendumu to the city lights of Adelaide, is seen in continuity and not at variation with the rich conjunctures of Australia’s past. If not, I have no doubt that the Federal Government, along with South Australia and the Northern Territory, can only formulate bad approaches to deal with the ‘problem’ that now comes before them.

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