But on Sunday the University of Wollongong Associate Professor, her husband, three kids and family dog, dragged along a trailer full of donated goods along for the 44-hour ride.

The plan when they arrive in Ngukurr, located on the banks of the Roper River, is to sell the clothes and goods to raise money to help fund a community newspaper.

It is the same community newspaper Prof Senior helped establish back in 1999. Now she is returning to the NT for six-weeks to make sure the new and improved Ngukurr News can be a powerful advocacy for its community.

‘’I worked with the newspaper in 1998 for four years. It was an incredibly popular enterprise,’’ she said.

‘’Unfortunately like most community newspapers throughout Australia, supports were taken away and it just couldn’t survive.

‘’But the Ngukurr people have always wanted their newspaper back.

‘’Last year with the support of UOW media lecturer Shawn Burns and students, we were able to to this.

‘’This is fantastic because the paper is quite a powerful information sharing tool and it is also quite a powerful advocacy tool because local people can write about stuff that is of concern to them and get it out to the broader NT community that way.’’

Three UOW students visited the community and learned first hand the challenges of running a newspaper in a remote community.

‘’Logistically speaking it is quite challenging,’’ Prof Senior said.

‘’We have difficulty get good internet connection. Mobile phone connection is intermittent at best, so trying to overcome all those difficulties and get a newspaper out every two weeks at the moment, is reasonably challenging.’’

That’s why Prof Senior and students returned this year to do further work with the local editors and reporters, Daphne Daniels and Angelina Joshua.

‘’UOW students Oliver Chaseling and Julie Hall will spend several weeks in the community, working to develop stories, photography skills and film making,’’ she said.

A medical anthropologist in UOW’s School of Health and Society, Prof Senior relationship with Ngukurr spans 20 years. She first arrived there in the late 1990s to work on the four-year South East Arnhem Land Collaborative Research Project.

‘’When I came back to Wollongong three years ago I restarted that collaboration between UOW and the community. It still operates on a shoestring, but the community is so happy to have the Ngukurr News back.’’