Photo: Louis Tipungwuti is a Tiwi Islands man. He’s been living in the long grass for about six months. (ABC Radio Darwin: Jesse Thompson) In September, an Indigenous man in Darwin was handed a fine for begging alms, failing to comply with a loitering notice and using a musical instrument in a public place. The $450 fine (and $150 levy) he was ordered to pay was piled onto the several thousand dollars he already owed the Northern Territory Government. The causes for the other debts are unknown, but court records show numerous interactions with the Fines Recovery Unit. The incident was one of many daily interactions between Darwin’s public institutions — police, council rangers, frontline health staff, shelters — and the sprawling, highly visible population of Indigenous visitors who live in the city’s streets, parks and bushland — locally known as long grassers. Two worlds in one city, overlapping […]