When Asta Hill drives into Alice Springs after swimming in one of the waterholes that dot the red centre, she is still struck by the shades of blue and purple in the Macdonnell Ranges that wet the brushtrokes of Albert Namatjira.

“There is a reason that many of the most prolific artists in the world are from this Country – we have such an incredibly beautiful palette that they can work with,” Hill says.

In September, the criminal defence lawyer and human rights advocate became the first Greens-backed mayor of Mparntwe/Alice Springs, where she grew up and is now raising two young children.

Entering the fold of the town, Hill describes a gritty and raw place, alive with an energy that drew her home almost a decade ago after stints studying and working elsewhere – including as a legal intern at The Hague and postgraduate law student in New York.

The town is a meeting place for Arrernte and other First Nations people from across the Northern Territory, she says, and home to settler descendants as well as growing multicultural communities, who now make up about one-third of its population.

“It truly is the most beautiful place to live,” Hill says.

“We have this panoply of languages, cultures and traditions … and we’re all living together in really close proximity to one another.”

‘It truly is the most beautiful place to live,’ says new mayor Asta Hill of the town she grew up in. Photograph: Rhett Hammerton/The GuardianDiffusing the ‘crime panic’

For a town of fewer than 30,000 people, Alice exerts a disproportionately powerful hold over the Australian psyche.

But the portrait Hill paints jars with that splashed on to screens across the country last year when the Territory government declared an emergency and enforced a youth curfew.

This was an Alice of dysfunction and dystopia, depicted in footage of cars being pelted with rocks, stores ransacked, streets roamed at night by young, predominately Indigenous kids and stalked by white vigilantes. An Alice that became a national flashpoint to which the prime minister was drawn to announce alcohol restrictions. An Alice where the previous mayor called on the army or federal police to intervene.

“I think, by and large, portrayals of our town really distort the reality,” Hill says.

“That is really disempowering, and I say that as a person who is extremely privileged and doesn’t bear the brunt of the policy decisions that often flow from those distorted portrayals.”

Bear the brunt she may not, but the 37-year-old has spent a career dealing with the fallout of crime and punishment. For the better part of the last decade, Hill worked in Legal Aid NT, including years in Indigenous outreach, and as a criminal lawyer at the Central Australian Women’s Legal Service. She has skin in the game.

“I want – alongside this town and all of its beautiful diversity – to take back some power in writing the story of this town and telling the story of this town,” she says.

“That was really the motivation for me in running for mayor.”

In the election on 23 August, Hill scored the highest primary vote of seven candidates, and edged out her main rival, an independent formerly of the Country Liberal party and Palmer United party, with 50.3% of the vote after preference-counting was completed on 5 September.

The Greens party, historically, hasn’t ran community safety campaigns and I sought to change that

Asta Hill

Beyond a slogan of “changing the story” of Alice Springs, Hill’s first campaign priority was to stop young Aboriginal people being “used to platform political agendas” and instead to make “young people feel safe and welcomed in public spaces”.

So it is perhaps easy to interpret her election as a repudiation of the CLP Territory government’s tough-on-crime agenda – a crackdown that has included lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 10, reintroducing spit hoods and pushed the holding capacity of prisons to breaking point in a place that has one of the highest incarceration rates on Earth.

But Hill acknowledges that the “vast majority of people” she met on the campaign trail “expressed concerns about community safety”.

“The Greens party, historically, hasn’t ran community safety campaigns and I sought to change that … I felt compelled to show leadership in the way that we talk about that issue, and to embed fundamental human rights into that conversation, as well as evidenced-based solutions to community safety concerns.”

There is a big difference, Hill says, between “meeting communities where they are at, hearing them, validating their concerns – and, on the other hand, fuelling a crime panic”.

“So I was going into people’s homes and connecting with their experience, but offering something different – and I really think that resonated with a lot of people.”

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‘A place of opportunity’

The former Charles Darwin University pro-vice-chancellor Don Zoellner says focusing on crime is not enough to explain Hill’s election. An Alice Springs resident for almost 35 years until retiring to Adelaide a few weeks ago, the former high school principal and public policy analyst reckons the town’s voters have a clear distinction between the tiers of government. They know the town council “is not going to solve the crime problem”.

Zoellner believes Hill’s election reflects in part the town’s “quite dramatically” changing demographics. In the heyday of the CLP during the 1980s and 90s, he says, the town’s economy was run by small business, the owners of which formed the bedrock of conservative politics. Today, he says, Alice is a regional centre for health and community service providers, often tertiary-educated people and more inclined towards progressive politics.

[Asta’s election] just reflects how bloody-mindedly independent Alice Springs is

Don Zoellner

“Most of us old farts are leaving or dying,” he says. “There is a new generation of younger people coming in, who see this town as a place of opportunity.”

But Zoellner also sees continuity in Hill. The town has a long history of backing independent politicians who champion its identity.

Hill’s local bona fides are unquestioned – she gave birth to her first child in her own childhood house, and now lives just around the corner. Most people who have spent significant time in the town have an Asta Hill connection – Zoellner’s daughter went to school with her.

“Asta’s election may look a bit way out there, in suggesting a big change in the place, but in another way, it just reflects how bloody-mindedly independent Alice Springs is,” Zoellner says.

“In that way, it is not surprising that someone who was advocating for the town, as Asta did [was successful].”

Zoellner’s former CDU colleague, Alice Springs-based emeritus professor Rolf Gerritsen, says Hill also brought the “formidable organisation” of the Greens to bear.

“They are really the only party [in town] that is organised on a grassroots basis,” he says.

Hill says she wants to address Alice Springs’ childcare shortages and make ‘young people feel safe and welcomed in public spaces’. Photograph: Rhett Hammerton/The Guardian

Hill ran in the 2024 Territory election for the Alice Springs-based seat of Braitling, where she came a comfortable second after winning 38.8% of the primary vote. That effort flowed seamlessly into Hill’s bid for local council.

“In the last two territory elections, and in the last mayoral election, I have only been door-knocked by Green canvassers,” Gerritsen says.

Yet while reaping the benefit of the party affiliation, and repeatedly saying she wholeheartedly believed in and was proud of the Greens’ policy, Hill stressed her independence throughout her bid for mayor.

Asked at the candidates’ debate by the outgoing mayor what her policy was on holding citizenship ceremonies on 26 January, Hill said it was “premature” to answer as she needed to have a “conversation” with the community first. But if she needed to compromise or deviate from Greens policy, she would, she said.

When all candidates were asked for their one big idea to change the town, it was Hill’s response that struck a nerve. She would “deal with our chronic childcare shortages”, Hill said, outlining her own experience.

“She’s a shrewd Green,” Gerritsen says.

Because while Alice Springs might “embody the Australian fantasy of the frontier”, its residents want a local politician to address problems of the day-to-day.

Like most Australians, he says, they “live in suburbs and whinge about potholes”.