In short:
Arrernte leader William Tilmouth fears harmful narratives around Aboriginal communities in Alice Springs are preventing positive change.
He says governments should focus more on prevention, and less on punishment, in addressing issues in the troubled town.
What's next?
Mr Tilmouth is calling for governments to better listen to Aboriginal communities, as the NT election looms.
Scrolling through social media and reading the daily news headlines, William Tilmouth says he sees the same consistent stereotypes about his community.
In recent years, the Arrernte leader's community of Alice Springs has been in the national news for all the wrong reasons, as the region continues to be plagued by crime and antisocial behaviour.
"Sadly, the narrative that is portrayed to the broader community is one that is the stereotypes of yesteryear – that Aboriginal people are uncivilised, Aboriginal people are uneducated, unemployable, lazy, they're violence-loving people," he said.
"That narrative is what the mainstream media [portrays] at a national level — but Aboriginal people love their children, Aboriginal people love their families, Aboriginal people do want work, Aboriginal people do want purpose in life."
As debate rages on about solutions for an outback region in crisis, he worries the pleas of Aboriginal communities at the centre are being ignored.
And he believes governments can fall into operating based on those harmful stereotypes, leading to too much focus on "control" and "draconian" policies.
"That narrative gives them permission to bring in the Intervention, to bring in curfews, to bring in dry area legislation, to bring in kids off the street," he said.
"They don't work upstream to prevent, they work downstream in a crisis situation and ultimately, at the end of the day, it doesn't work.
"Governments have failed us. Let's be real."
'We didn't know what we were crying for'
Mr Tilmouth has been fighting for decades for his community to be heard.
It's a battle that started when he was just five years old and lost his own voice.
Loading...After his mother died, Mr Tilmouth and his two brothers were removed from their family in Alice Springs and taken to the Croker Island Mission, about 1,400 kilometres away in the NT's Top End.
He still remembers him and his brothers crying uncontrollably after they were taken.
"We cried because we didn't know what we were crying for," he said.
"We didn't have the words to articulate what we wanted, [but] we knew that we were missing something."
For years, the three brothers would struggle with an emptiness they could not name.
"I wished that at the time, the government got behind my father and supported us kids, so we could stay with him," Mr Tilmouth said.
"I wish they had allowed my aunties to take me and grow us up so we wouldn't have that vacuum in our lives."
Calls for community-led change, self-determination
At 18, Mr Tilmouth left the mission and made his way back to a home he barely remembered.
"Coming out of Croker Island I had nothing, I could not work out who I was," he said.
"Slowly but surely people recognised my name, recognised me, and said, 'you're from Alice Springs'."
In the years since, the Stolen Generations survivor has dedicated his life to preventing his trauma from being repeated.
He is the founding chair of Children's Ground, an organisation working to create transformational change for future generations of Aboriginal children in Central Australia.
Mr Tilmouth said this change must be community-led, and he has been calling consistently for self-determination for local communities.
"Having your voice and speaking up is a sign of you growing, you being empowered, you realising that 'yes I do have a voice, yes I do have solutions'," he said.
Young people unfairly being blamed
However, Mr Tilmouth argued recent policy measures in Alice Springs – including the youth curfew – showed governments weren't listening.
He said young people were being blamed for widespread issues in the outback town when the real problems ran much deeper.
Loading..."They don't see the other side of it, the homelessness, the lack of employment," he said.
"You can go to many houses, and you'll see five generations and the last one who had a job is the old stockman sitting out the back.
"Everyone else has never had the opportunity of full-time employment or to enjoy the benefits of this so-called lucky country."
Mr Tilmouth said there was a desperate need for systemic change, including for governments to stop running election campaigns on crime and punishment and to focus instead on prevention.
"Politicians think it's a sure way of getting re-elected," he said.
"A lot of money will be at the crisis-driven end, where you have the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, and the statistics are damning."
With an NT election just months away, Mr Tilmouth has one simple plea.
"All we ask is to listen to us and we can work this out with you," he said.
"How did we get here? From a lot of ignorance, a lot of bias, a lot of racism.
"We need to get rid of those, we need to start changing the narrative and looking at Aboriginal people in a different light and saying 'we're in the same boat, let's work together'."