When tribal warfare like that which erupted in Wadeye in April last year leading to the death of a 33-year-old father of three kicks off, once upon a time he would have been in the thick of it.

But as he sits in front of the local police station today wearing the blue uniform of an NT Police Aboriginal liaison officer, those days are long behind him.

Now, he says “my job is engagement”, driving around the community of roughly 2700 people 400km southwest of Darwin telling today’s youth “you better stop doing this trouble, you have to change your life”.

For Mr Munar, a senior Rak Dirringarr Elder and law and culture man, it was missing out on community life and important cultural events that encouraged him to mend his ways

“I was a troublemaker before, I told them, now everything’s changed, my life,” he says.

“Every time I’d go to prison, people would pass away, like family, while I was in prison.”

The man who killed the young father named in court documents as KT, Ezekiel Narndu, was described as a quiet, shy and studious young man before he hurled the steel bar, spear-like and with “considerable force” that ended the other man’s life.

Narndu was found guilty of manslaughter by a Supreme Court jury and jailed for seven years last month.

But despite being “of exemplary character and a potential leader”, he too was caught up in the cycle of senseless violence that has plagued Wadeye for decades and Mr Munar says getting through to young men like Narndu — and himself before him — who these days only “sometimes” listen to their Elders, is as challenging as ever.

“When we put ceremony,” he says, “respect”.

“(But when) our men’s ceremony we stop, finish, and they get in more trouble, stop and they’re fighting,” he says.

“There was a lot of fighting because that young fella got hit by a rebar, there was big trouble, a big fight. It’s still going. A lot, everybody involved.”

Anthropologist Bill Ivory has been coming to Wadeye on and off since the late 1970s, working in various roles in the town he now calls home, including for governments and the Northern Land Council.

He says while the remote community’s infamous heavy metal gangs have “gone out of it a lot” since the days when Mr Munar was running amok on the other side of the thin blue line, the violence still “goes up and down”.

“There’s been times when it’s been a very peaceful community for quite a long time and then every now and then there’ll be a dispute,” he says.

“Sometimes the dispute is among family members, and sometimes it’ll start with family members and get bigger, sometimes there’s bigger issues and it might be clan groups involved, so it takes different forms.

“Probably the last few weeks, it’s mainly family arguments, people making noise, usually it’s at night time, a few minor injuries here and there I understand but it’s not like it was earlier on in the year when there was so called riots occurred, a lot of people involved in that.”

Dr Ivory says the trouble stretches back to colonisation when several clans, already sharing relatively close quarters with each other, suddenly also had white intruders on their doorsteps.

“When you look at the history of this place, the first missionaries came here in the 1930s and even in those early days — and there was probably only about 130 people living at the mission during the ‘30s — some of the people that were there recorded incidences of disputes occurring, and I think prior to that, prior to the missions coming, there had been incidents in the regions between Aboriginal people and prospectors, fishermen,” he says.

“People here are pretty defensive of their country and the clan estates here are quite small compared to other areas in Australia, you can walk from one border to the other border of a clan estate here sometimes in about three quarters of an hour to an hour.”

But with Western ways of living now well and truly here to stay and thousands of people from different backgrounds all sharing the small township and its facilities, Dr Ivory says many of the sparks that ignite the unrest are decidedly modern.

“Definitely overcrowding is a factor, there’s a household I was at before, I think there’s 25 people living there and it starts with a grandmother and then it might have her daughter and her husband and there’s all these offshoots and like any family, there’s family feuds and jealousy,” he says.

“And the cost of food is pretty high here because of various reasons, including freight costs and stuff like that and people sometimes bicker over access to food, essential items.

“Sometimes the disputes are triggered by young people, young girls and boys who are probably bored and probably looking for a bit of excitement so sometimes they’ll trigger the dispute, or keep it going.”

As if to prove the point, that night Wadeye would experience its first night in a week without any young people roaming the streets, fighting and creating a ruckus.

Instead, all eyes were on Darwin born rapper J-MILLA who returned to the community after his previous performance last November was credited with bringing peace to the troubled town.

The Mak Mak Marranunggu performer was greeted like the hero he clearly is to Wadeye’s youth when he touched down that morning and is obviously an inspiration to many.

But Dr Ivory says that’s all part of the problem.

When a visiting artist isn’t there to bring people together for constructive purposes, there’s nothing else to do but ruminate over those small differences that can turn into big brawls when left to fester.

Dr Ivory says while “J-MILLA and any other artist coming to town brings a bit of excitement”, something like that “probably occurs once every eight months if you’re lucky”.

“And there are very little social activities out here, there’s limited sporting activities, there’s limited social activities,” he says.

“When he comes to town, the lights of the concert, the sound, people absolutely love it, and not just kids, little kids, teenagers, old people, tonight you’ll see people in their 70s and 80s dancing to the rock music too, it’s all in.

“People here love music, like any Australian person, we love our music, and their music tastes range from rock ‘n’ roll, pop music, rap music, heavy metal, you name it, they love everything, they’re right into it.”

Dr Ivory says there also “needs to be a complete new look at infrastructure” in a town that lacks many of the normal facilities most people take for granted that help keep young people off the streets and out of jail.

“If you’re going to have a town, make it a town,” he says.

“The people here want things to be normalised as much as possible, they want their people to stay in the community here.

”The people here really want to have their people back here and unless there’s proper facilities like banking facilities and access to takeaways at night time, then a lot of people will drift into Darwin where you’ve got McDonald’s and shops open until midnight where you can buy food.”

Two ways forward, as Dr Ivory sees it, are ongoing negotiations for a township lease on behalf of local Traditional Owners and a renewed relationship with the Australian Defence Force, which he says dates back as far as World War II.

Dr Ivory says Wadeye locals signed up to conduct surveillance during the war and the town remains a key strategic location due to its proximity to the partially unmapped coastline.

“There was a radar station on a hill up here and the army have still got a lease on that hill, you can see the gun emplacements, so the army had a base here during the Second World War, they were embraced by the community, they were respected by the community and vice versa,” he says.

“In later years they had a Norforce contingent here of Aboriginal girls and boys that joined up — last week we had two Norforce officers come out here again and they want to start it up again.

“I think there’s really opportunities there because you could have some of the army guys coming in here, doing survival on Country courses for two or three weeks in conjunction with local people and maybe some of the young local people joining Norforce.”

From her home across the street from the town’s defunct swimming pool, which has sat dry and empty for years now, Kardu Diminin senior Elder Maraget Perdjert has a daily reminder of why her grandchildren’s generation has such idle hands.

“I don’t want to talk bad things about fighting, I just want to talk about the good things for my land, for my country,” she says.

“It’s really good that J-MILLA came back here for the concert a second time, everybody’s excited, last year they really enjoyed his concert and it’s really good to be here with us again.

“We would like to have more concerts out here, to keep it going to make Wadeye a better place for us, for our future for our kids.

“People from different clan groups get together and enjoy ourselves, that’s what we want, because we Kardu Diminin, we’re really happy for other clan groups to be here in our land, other elders to support us.”

Like Dr Ivory, Ms Perdjert wants to see Wadeye treated like a real town, with all the infrastructure and employment opportunities that come with it.

“A new pool, get it going for the kids, not just for the school kids, like a weekend, people can enjoy it,” she says.

“And we would like our young people to get a real job out here, not sitting at home doing nothing because future coming up.

“When my father was here he was a strong leader, a strong man and a strong voice and that’s what we want.

“For myself, I want people to be strong and stand on their two feet and do something for our young people because future coming up, so they can step up on their future and do something not just sitting around doing nothing.”

Ms Perdjert says she wants to see young people stay in community rather than stray off to Darwin “drinking too much, fighting too much” but “we need more jobs, real jobs for our young people to do”.

“We would like to take them out to the bush, show them hunting, fishing, like our ancestors used to do before,” she says.

“The older people go to the school and teach young ones to dance and sing and teach them how to find crabs, fishing, and teaching them how to make spears for fish and dilly bags.

“That’s a really good thing to teach young people and keep our culture strong and ceremonies strong and keep our language strong.”