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Aboriginal people comprise ~30% of the Northern Territory population, but make up well under 10% of the government bureaucracy designed to serve that population. This paper is based on PhD research into Aboriginal experiences of participating in this bureaucracy. Interviews were conducted in 2007 with 76 people of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander background who had worked in the Northern Territory Government since self-government in 1978. The process of recruiting interviewees revealed a high degree of career mobility between government and the Indigenous sector of publicly funded organisations which operates at arm’s length from government. This finding was quite pronounced in the desert centre of Alice Springs, at the periphery of the Northern Territory administration, where those who were encouraged as a livelihood option to build Aborigines’ numeric representation in government were unable to represent their people in more substantive ways without coming into tension either with the terms of their employment or with their communities. The paper explores the ways in which Aboriginal public servants sought substantively to represent others and the phenomenon whereby many who sought representative roles in the government of the desert were in orbit and thus neither inside nor outside but somewhere at the edges of government. The paper concludes by observing that the knowledge and experience of Aboriginal people who orbit at the edges of government may be made more accessible through collaborations with the Indigenous sector than solely through government employment.

This paper compares key aspects of governance structures for Indigenous populations in the United States and Australia. The paper focuses on policy coordination and administration, in particular the nodes of decision‐making in the two countries in relation to government contracting and accountability. The U.S. approach to funding Indigenous organizations stems from the 1975 Indian Self‐Determination and Education Act and its subsequent expansions. Through the development of contracting into permanent compacting via block grants, this approach builds established nodes of Indigenous government and facilitates whole‐of‐government coherence at the level of the American Indian tribe. The U.S. approach seems correlated with better performance and may lighten bureaucratic loads over the long term. The Australian model, on the other hand, seeks to create whole‐of‐government coherence through top‐down financial accountability in a way that hampers the development of Indigenous political capacity. The paper traces the development of these practices through time and illustrates how they contribute to the fragmentation rather than growth of Indigenous political capacities. It suggests ways the Australian model could be improved even in the absence of fundamental reform by drawing on the contracting‐to‐compacting framework of longstanding U.S. practices.

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