In the days immediately after the declaration of a national emergency in the Northern Territory, five of Labor's so-called "Bush MLAs" hit the dusty roads of central and northern Australia to gauge the response to the Federal Government's plan.
Already, a split was emerging. In a confidential internal report in July prepared for the Northern Territory Labor Government and obtained by the Herald, there emerged subtle differences in the reports of the Arafura MP Marion Scrymgour and the McDonnell MP Alison Anderson.
While the summary concluded that linking land and permit issues with child protection issues had sparked "fear, social disruption and damage to Aboriginal individuals and communities", and that it was "imperative that the Commonwealth drop the nexus" between the two issues, Anderson's contributions repeatedly reflected a positivity that was absent from the final account.
She visited the celebrated artists' community of Papunya, 240 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, on June 30, and reported that the meeting of 70 people was "largely welcoming of the Commonwealth initiative", despite concerns about a lack of information, land and permit issues and health checks.
In Areyonga the next day, she said the people were "supportive of intervention if it helped kids and issues such as housing". In Wallace Rockhole on July 2, they were "generally welcoming of possibilities of increased resources through [the federal] intervention".
Scrymgour's reports contained no such optimism. They were more detailed and almost entirely negative.
On July 3 in Gunbalanya, she reported one person's fear that "there are vultures waiting out there for the end of the permit system", another's threat to take legal action over compulsory health checks, and a concern that they "could be devastating and permanent" for children.
In Maningrida on July 4, she reported "very strong condemnation from all sources particularly focused on statements … against land take over and permit abolition".
Those early differences were writ large this week on a national stage as Scrymgour ventured to the sandstone surrounds of Sydney University and used the annual Charles Perkins Oration to fire a verbal cannonball back into the Territory. She described the intervention as the "Black kids' Tampa", as the second stage of the 1911 policy of removing children, as "a circus" and as "a deliberate, savage attack on the sanctity of Aboriginal family life".
Anderson shot back, accusing her colleague of knowing nothing about living among the poverty and abuse in remote communities and calling the intervention a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity".
"My people need real protection, not motherhood statements from urbanised saviours," she told The Australian. "I live my law and culture and I will represent my people regardless of what's fashionable. My people need the help and want the help from this intervention."
The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, and the Prime Minister, John Howard, called for Scrymgour to resign and for the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, to clarify his party's position on the intervention.
Rudd said she was "wrong" but the Northern Territory Chief Minister, Clare Martin, backed her, saying that the views in Anderson's central Australian electorate differed from those in Scrymgour's Top End seat.
Anderson went to ground.
Meanwhile, a group of traditional owners from Maningrida in northern Arnhem Land were filing a High Court writ in Melbourne, challenging the abolition of the permit system and the compulsory acquisition of their land.
In the wash-up, the only thing that was clear was that neither latitude nor political party nor urbanity were determinants of who supports the intervention and who does not. It is far more complicated than that.
The fiery spat between two former allies did more than expose the precariousness of Labor's support for the intervention, which is being held together with bits of political sticky tape and string in the lead-up to next month's election.
It also saw indigenous leaders being increasingly marshalled - by the media, at least - into two loose camps. Anderson was promptly lumped in with figures such as Cape York's Noel Pearson, the land rights activist Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Professor Marcia Langton of Melbourne University, who have all expressed some support for the intervention. The Perth magistrate Sue Gordon has been its chief supporter, on account of her role as co-chair of the national emergency response taskforce.
Viewed through the two-camps prism, Scrymgour has now joined the opposing tent, which includes Mick and Patrick Dodson; the Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma; the former ATSIC heads Lowitja O'Donoghue and Pat Turner; the chief of Combined Aboriginal Organisations, Olga Havnen; and the Northern Territory and NSW Aboriginal land councils.
The "two camps" view, although overly simplistic, is not altogether inaccurate.
On the ABC's Difference of Opinion last week, Gordon was isolated by her fellow panellists Havnen, Calma and O'Donoghue and an audience heavily skewed against the intervention. Some openly scoffed at Gordon's statements.
Langton, who is chair of Pearson's Cape York Institute and Melbourne's foundation chair in indigenous studies, calls it a "cleavage". She compares the two sides to nursing sisters exercising triage in a casualty department.
"If you've got an emergency on your hands and you've got a nursing sister deciding who needs beds, then the most needy or urgent and life-threatening situations go first," Langton says. "But if you were one of the [intervention] naysayers, then they wouldn't. The children wouldn't get a look in. The people who can't look after themselves come very low down the priority list for these people."
Asked if the cleavage is between the pragmatists and the idealists, between those who are willing to compromise on certain principles to achieve a result and those who are not, she objects to the terminology.
"I'd like to think that Alison Anderson, Galarrwuy Yunupingu and I are the idealists. We are the people who want the ideal, which is healthy families, people living in safety. "I can't see how they are defending any grand principle except the right to shoot their mouths off and I'm getting a bit sick of it."
Gordon does not like to hear talk of camps. "I just think people are passionate about Aboriginal affairs and some have an understanding and some have no understanding and they are following what they are reading and what they are hearing," she says. "In some cases, hate [of Howard] is blocking people as to why they are opposing it. Politicians in the NT are running around really confusing people on the ground. People are being abused, in a sense."
But Yunupingu sounded pragmatic when he told the ABC last month: "I simply have come to realisation that this is the only way to enter into arrangement between a government who has the money and the service ability to run a community and the land owners."
Yunupingu's adviser, Sean Bowden, says the lifelong land rights campaigner's objective has always been to "mould the intervention so it's effective" and provide guidelines to the Government. "Galarrwuy is trying to maximise the opportunities for his people," he says. "There's $1.3 billion that's never been there before. Let's get people into houses, jobs, schools; let's not look a gift horse in the mouth."
His position is not so far from that of the Central Land Council's chairman, David Ross, who particularly opposes the erosion of land rights but also abhors the Government's response to criticism. "The Federal Government and Mal Brough in particular has been very good at portraying anyone who may speak against a specific measure of the intervention as someone who is opposing the whole intervention and by implication standing in the way of the protection of at-risk children," Ross says.
"Individuals and organisations should be able to oppose specific changes without being branded by the Government as just trying to protect ill-gotten gains or being accused of shielding child abusers."
Langton notes: "There are so many contradictions, contortions and distortions in the debate, it's no wonder the public are confused."
To lump the nation's Aboriginal leaders into two neat camps, of course, risks repeating an ancient mistake. There are more than 200 indigenous nations in Australia and almost as many views - as Gordon pointed out on the ABC, as if to protect herself from the combined force of Calma, Havnen and O'Donoghue.
No one, for example, opposes the injection of police and health professionals into Northern Territory communities, although some say the health checks, which are reaching two in three children, are ineffective or too short-term.
Calma does not oppose the intervention per se, but is appalled at any suspension of human rights instruments to achieve it, particularly those designed to protect children.
"Consistent with Article 2 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child," he says, "[it] must be done 'without discrimination of any kind, irrespective of the child's race'."
Scrymgour opposes welfare quarantining and alcohol bans only when they are adopted with a "one size fits all" approach. She is "absolutely opposed" to the abolition of the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), a type of Aboriginal work-for-the-dole scheme, and the permit system, the acquisition of lands, the repeal of the Racial Discrimination Act and the loss of the right to appeal against administrative decisions.
Havnen's stated views are similar to Scrymgour's, as are Turner's and those of the Northern Territory and NSW land councils. Bev Manton, chairwoman of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, sees flaws even in the police presence because it is not sustainable. She is in lockstep with Ross, who also sees problems with most measures, including welfare quarantining, which contains "no allowance under the intervention for educating people in ways of better managing their income".
Yunupingu, although a supporter, also remains an opponent of abolishing the permit system and compulsorily acquiring Aboriginal land, says Bowden - but he hopes further negotiation can make these measures palatable.
Even Langton, who calls Brough "brave - crazy brave, perhaps - but courageous, nevertheless", accuses the Government of being unprepared for the post-CDEP environment and treating the work of the Cape York Institute like a menu. "They have said, 'We like this entree but not the others, this dessert but not the tiramisu'. But you can't pick and choose from this menu," she says.
Pearson and Langton accuse Brough of failing to consult adequately with traditional owners, which they say might have won broad support for the intervention, and of what Langton calls a "failure to build into his intervention the principle of Aboriginal responsibility, especially in welfare reform, as described repeatedly in Noel Pearson's work … If this fundamental principle is ignored, the future of the intervention will fail".
As for Gordon, who wrote a West Australian Government report on child sexual abuse in that state, she agrees in part with Langton and Pearson. But she is the most reluctant to criticise any aspect of the most radical changes to indigenous policy since the 1967 referendum. In fact, she says she cannot discuss policy matters because of the federal election campaign.
"If you have an emergency you can't actually go out and have meetings. In some ways I agree with Marcia [that more consultation would have helped] but how long would this discussion be and would it hold things up?"