FEUDING gangs armed with spears and machetes have run amok at the biggest Aboriginal settlement in Australia, destroying homes and terrifying families hiding from the violence.

The regional government was drawing up plans yesterday to move women and children made homeless by a weekend of violence at the Northern Territory settlement of Port Keats (also known as Wadeye, its Aboriginal name) 260km (160 miles) southwest of Darwin. At least 28 homes have been destroyed in fighting between the Judas Priests and the Evil Warriors. About 300 men from each faction have been locked in confrontation. The fighting has overwhelmed police officers on the settlement, and reinforcements have been flown in from Darwin.

Unemployment in the settlement is 98 per cent, and education at the lone school comes to an end when children reach the age of 12. Established as a Roman Catholic mission for nomadic Aborigines, Port Keats is the largest remote Aboriginal settlement, with a population of about 2,500. Relations among its 20 Aboriginal clans have long been fractious.

The simmering tensions boiled over last weekend when gangs rampaged through the township, smashing and torching homes and terrorising residents, who cowered in cars or ran into the bush. This week fewer than 100 of the school’s 600 pupils have attended classes. “[The parents] are very scared to send their children to school. There are men throwing spears, stones, whatever they can get,” Michelle Pambur, who has allowed 60 people to live in tents in her back garden, said.

Tracker Tilmouth, a senior Aboriginal leader, said that the hopelessness of the male population lay at the heart of the violence. He said: “How do you tell young men that you have no future, you will have no job, there is nothing for you, just a 98 per cent unemployment rate?”

A study by the Australian National University suggested that, at any given time, 10 per cent of the men in the town who were younger than 30 were in custody. The researchers also determined that there were only 144 habitable homes, meaning an average of 16 people in each house.

The violence came less than a week after Crown prosecutors gave a graphic account of child sex abuse and murder within the remote Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory. Mal Brough, the Cabinet minister responsible for indigenous affairs, set up a national conference on Aboriginal violence. “We want a national approach to what is a national disgrace,” he said yesterday.

Keith Windschuttle, a prominent historian, advocated in The Australian that most remote Aboriginal settlements be starved of welfare funds to induce Aborigines to be assimilated into white, urban society.

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