It's dark in Wadeye and a police wagon trails the streets.
It's the calmest it's been in weeks, but officers quickly come across trouble.
A group is gathered around a young man who says someone has broken his teeth and his jaw.
"I have to go to the hospital," Raymond Madigan says, as a police officer approaches and takes out a torch to inspect the bruises on his face.
"Too much violence here," another man in the group says.
It's been just a few months since this community came together in unity for the first time in years, vowing peace and an end to the decades-long conflict — with many hoping the fighting that killed a father-of-three in 2022 would be the last of it.
But after a spell of relative calm, the streets of Wadeye — one of the largest Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory – have once again become a battle zone.
"We're struggling," Raymond says.
"The community here, we've got nothing," another man in the group, Ted Jimarin, says.
"There's still a lot of problems in Wadeye."
Since the beginning of December, Kardu Diminin traditional owner Margaret Perdjert says there's been fighting and unrest outside her home on the main street of town.
"People are frightened to go out," she says.
"It wasn't a good Christmas for my family and other people around the community … people [were] just walking around with machete knives, burning cars."
Since December, police say multiple people have been injured in Wadeye and more than 30 offenders have been arrested.
On December 19, a man was hit in the arm with an arrow during a fight involving 40 people.
Police say vehicles have been rammed and pelted with rocks, smashing through windows, and officers have been assaulted.
In an escalation earlier this month, the high fences that cage in the police compound were smashed down by a car and an officer's home was ransacked.
In a bid to restore order, the NT's most elite policing squad, the Territory Response Group, was called in.
But even so, unrest sparked again over the weekend.
Police say they responded to fighting involving 300 people, and on Saturday a 26-year-old man was allegedly struck with a window louvre.
An 18-year-old female was struck in the chest with an "unknown object" on Sunday, and at around 3am on Monday morning, another male, aged 19, was allegedly struck with an arrow in his upper leg.
Why is this still happening?
The last time Wadeye was in major conflict was almost two years ago, when a father-of-three was killed by a metal bar that speared through his skull.
Dozens of homes were burnt in riots, and hundreds of families fled on foot into the bushes, carrying their babies and bedding. They stayed there for months.
When leaders gathered to put young people through a traditional initiation ceremony – the first in years – many hoped it was the end of the bad blood and the start of new beginnings.
For as long as anyone in the community can remember, through multiple government regimes, unrest has flared up for weeks at a time in Wadeye.
Scenes of hundreds of men taking to the streets with weapons have made headlines almost annually in recent years.
In a 2002 riot, an 18-year-old was shot dead by police.
But ask anyone in the community why fighting keeps getting out of hand, and no one the ABC asked could single out the one trigger.
Margaret says alcohol is a big problem.
"Lots of grog in the community, you know, sitting around drinking [and people] start arguing and fighting, that's how it starts ... like a family fight or [partners] fighting together," she says.
She says, "different gangsters come into this violence and get involved with other families".
Black market rum being sold for $500 a bottle
Stephen Bunduck, a traditional owner and mediator who speaks several local languages, says this particular bout of fighting in Wadeye began in December between a "married couple".
The fighting is often made worse by misunderstandings, he says, in a place where there are more than 20 different clan groups and almost as many dialects.
Alcohol is banned in Wadeye, but Stephen says bottles of rum are smuggled in and sold for exorbitant prices, and he wants that to change.
"$500 for one full litre, 700 [millilitres] for $300. We don't need that anymore," he says.
"We're wasting a lot of money.
"It happens a lot, that's why we need a club around here in our community."
Traditional owners and leaders are pushing to open a community-run social club in Wadeye — where only mid-strength beer will be sold — in a bid to reduce road deaths, black market alcohol sales, and people leaving to drink in centres such as Darwin.
"We need to be able to sit and have a yarn with family," Stephen says, adding that when Wadeye had a social club in the past, he remembers "things were good".
For generations, Wadeye has been trying to overcome serious disadvantage
Joe Martin-Jard, the chief executive of the Northern Land Council, says "there's never been an easy silver bullet" fix to the long history of unrest in Wadeye.
But he says if he had to single out one catalyst, it's "people living on top of each other".
Wadeye was founded as a Christian mission in the 1930s and clan groups from surrounding areas — some of which had been in regular conflict for centuries — were pulled in to live together.
There's never been enough housing, Joe says, and because there have been various attempts to return people to their country to live on homelands, there has been a history of underinvestment.
"The government never really invested in health, education and other social services," he says.
Community members speak of up to 30 people living in houses in various states of repair.
They also talk about hunger — staples are expensive to buy, with milk costing $10 for a 2L carton in the only shop and a box of cereal costing almost $20.
These issues and more are what Senior Sergeant Erica Gibson, an NT cop with decades of experience, who returned to Wadeye last year to rebuild frayed relationships, says significantly adds to the tensions.
"All of those things combined with the heat, lack of rain — all of those things contribute," she says.
Last year, more than 120 homes that were in varying states of damage following the rioting in 2022 were all repaired to a tune of $10.5 million, and 16 new homes are in the midst of being built.
'Nothing is going to be fixed overnight'
As the sun sets in the community, large groups of children emerge with sticks, bows and arrows and take over the main street.
When the town pool — which sat empty for five years until just a few months ago — closes for the day, there is little else for kids to do.
At one of the sports ovals, a different group of children throws broken shoes and water bottles at each other for fun.
They say they don't venture near the pool.
“There’s too much fighting up there ... [with] bow and arrows, and axe and machetes,” one of the children says.
At the Wadeye Men's Shed, Norman Dumoo — who knows firsthand how easy it can be to get off track — says the change needs to start young.
He's leading a new youth diversion program in Wadeye for boys aged 10 to 17, which aims "to keep them busy".
He's on the fence about restarting a social club.
While he remembers drinking in moderation in the 80s, he worries that any alcohol can be destructive.
For Margaret, there is hope in the new year.
"It’s a different year, 2024, to sit down and start doing something ... to get strong boys, strong culture and ceremony and connecting back to our people," she says.
While fighting continues, Senior Sergeant Erica Gibson says police have set up checkpoints to search cars coming into the community, and have seized weapons and destroyed "significant quantities" of alcohol.
Just over a week ago, police were tipped off to a bottle of rum and two balloons of drugs heading into the community on a plane.
While Erica has assembled a force of culturally-fluent cops, who know people by name and high-five kids on the street, she says nothing is going to be fixed overnight.
"It's not up to one agency to resolve the issue, it has to be community-led and community-driven … it will take time," she says.