Matty Pollard, contracted to Winun Ngari Aboriginal Corporation, was sent to the community to weld and at the same time teach community youngsters how to maintain their buildings. Trouble is, he says, downing his welding torch, there's no one here to teach. Many of Kandiwal's young are away mustering, or working in other communities.

"The aim is to get the youth going, give them the right building tools," he says. "But the community is quite quiet."

Quiet enough, certainly, for its residents to have noticed the arrival of any information from the state or federal governments over potential remote community closures, especially if it came in the form of a visit from a politician. But then, laughs Kandiwal elder Patsy Goonak, "No one likes to come out on that road."

The slowly, sleepily functioning community of around 30 people has almost everything it needs bar a school building, says the 64-year-old, who talks as she sits on the top step of her niece's verandah, a tangled fishnet behind her. Remoteness is a form of protection, she argues.

"We don't want to be in town. It's better up this way, especially for the kids growing up. We're thinking of them, not us," she says, referring to the region's towns, Kununurra, Derby and Broome. Some say that Kimberley's dry community bylaws have had the effect of pushing the heaviest drinkers into towns where alcohol is still sold. And the only non-Perth community to have ever been closed by the WA government, Oombulgurri near Wyndham, saw its distraught, dismantled population – many of whom were victims of sexual abuse – relocate to Wyndham and Kununurra, adding to the towns' socio-economic pressures.

Patsy's family catches freshwater crocodiles and turtles by hand and fishes for bream. "We're fine out here," she says, despite what she sees as a loss of Aboriginal lore. "You have to keep traditional things, we will never break that."

Western Australia has 274 remote indigenous communities. Some receive no government funding because they are too small or too itinerant. Forty-six per cent of the Kimberley's population is Aboriginal and the Commonwealth's funding for Western Australia's Aboriginals in "crisis" was last year pegged at $11.3 million. As many as 150 communities faced possible government closure after Premier Colin Barnett's untenable communities comments in November – a moment of disingenuity that Grahame Searle is now busy redressing from his new Kununurra base as the head of WA's Regional Services Reform Unit.

"There are very few people who say what we are doing now is good enough, because it's not," says Searle, less than a week into his tenure in the eastern Kimberley regional base. He is critical of policies that have done a better job of obfuscating than bringing about change among the neediest communities but stresses that the government will neither be closing Aboriginal communities nor approaching "reform" from a merely money-saving perspective.

"Passive welfare is a bastard of a thing, it's counterproductive and it disempowers people," he says, explaining that the unit will go into all communities and question residents about aspirations and hopes, "starting with 'What are you prepared to do about it, will you commit to doing something? Let's talk about what you want for your kids.' It's not all the government's problem."

Viewing rural settlement as an improvement on urban living is not new – the Outstation movement saw repatriation of Aboriginals from towns to traditional, often remote, lands in the 1980s. Thirty years later and via a hastily recast argument that aims to shift focus from closure to reform, many would argue we have made no progress towards equality between Aboriginal and white Australians, remote or not.

WA Minister for Regional Development Terry Redman has over the past three months been on an odyssey through the area, visiting up to 40 communities in advance of a "redirection of resources, but no closures."

How that will play out remains a confusing picture. Two hundred services might be best replaced by a streamlined five services, he said, to prevent doubling up of resources and "unconditional" welfare, often granted without a system in place to monitor progress and outcomes.

Like the bone-rattling road to Kandiwal, few take the road to Marunbabidi, just over 500 kilometres from Derby.

The settlement of about 20 appears to have undergone an estimated $6.5 million overhaul five years ago, with a new water tower, office facilities, homes, around $24,000 worth of generators, a working shed, new tractor, top-of-the-range solar hot water systems and farm equipment that now lie abandoned. The office is trashed, correspondence – the latest dated 2010 – regarding grant applications strewn across the floor near a disconnected fax machine and dusty computer. According to a warning sign on nearby generators, power was disconnected in April 2014. Online, the community's commercial potential is sold as a wilderness camp, with applications for charity status said to be pending.

The people of Marunbabidi are nowhere to be seen. The evident vast expenditure in place to initially support their remote community is anything but. In the same way that Matty's attempts to train Kandiwal youngsters hit predictable pitfalls, Searle does not batter an eyelid upon hearing that Marunbabidi lies empty, a high-tech white elephant in astonishing seclusion. The WA government and local corporations are unable to confirm the funding it has received or how many communities like it lie semi-forgotten.

Not far from Kununurra, Edna O'Malley runs a tight ship at the Molly Springs (Wijilawarrim) reserve. A kitchen garden has tomatoes, beans, melons and squash growing and lawns are neat, sprinklers running as her grandchildren play, show off a school certificate and tease the puppies that keep appearing from her extended family's homes.

She, too, points to town as being no place to raise children, and claims she knows of 60 children from the town's reserve who have been sent to a hostel in Perth.

To her and those like Patsy, living on ancestral land, connected to its mores and away from town is a necessity. It is no "lifestyle choice" as ousted prime minister Tony Abbott last year declared of remote living.

"They want to shut down communities but they have horrible reserves in town," says the 55-year-old. "I grew up there. I miss my family, but when I go down there and see how my family is now, I don't like what I see – I got to call policemen three, four times for different family members having fights … The people that they're bullying are the children and the mothers and the grandmothers." There is no place, she adds, for a "big, tough man to fight out here".

Nor has Edna had a government visitor or any recent communication regarding changes to resourcing. Her compatriots in Bell Springs and Mud Springs tell her the same.

As well organised as they are, like many communities, Molly Springs and Kandiwal are not without their own problems, and the long reach of trauma and abuse lie close to the surface of daily life in the Kimberley. Marijuana is all too common,, and reports of domestic violence and sexual abuse are equally recurrent. Erstwhile winner of the area's clean communities award, Gibb River, has guards stationed outside a home and police present when we visit, such are the tensions in the community of about 100. The nearest police station to the Catholic mission is a five-hour drive away, in Derby.

Helen Morton, WA's Minister for Child Protection, and, with Redman, a co-leader of the state government's Remote Reform, has seen isolated communities work to protect children, the vulnerable and to shelter families from urban problems. She has also seen remoteness used as a tool to shield the most dangerous from the law in settlements where abuse, violence and poverty have been allowed to become a default for normality.

"It requires great strength of character, discipline, self-reliance and responsibility to live in a small, remote community," she says.

"The risk of adversity can be substantially greater. If there is violence, children don't have wide variety of options to go and seek safety. If there are alcohol and drugs, there's not much opportunity to avoid it in a small community."

Once a community's moral compass is wrecked, it takes, she says, 18 months minimum to "reset". In an environment where the Stolen Generation, their "lost generation" children, passive welfare and unintended consequences of well-intentioned policy jostle for sad mention alongside Commonwealth cuts to Indigenous funding, 18 months seems a precariously short time to "fix" a community.

Back at Molly Springs, Edna is fiercely determined to marry tradition with modernity and accuses government, time and time again, of missing opportunities.

"They want to close down a lot of communities because they say we are using too much government money," she says. "Yes, they are using too much government money on generators and things when we got a big hydro system nearby. This is the 21st Century, if the power line is only 15km from us, put us on it!"

At the heart of any reform must come a commitment from both sides of the equation, she suggests – and that means nurturing remote communities, their language and their lore.

"We need to get in line or we'll miss out on the quality of life of living in this century," Edna says. "But don't lose the value of being Aboriginal of Australia. You can't afford to lose that as well. We've got to be able to live two lives and two standards and deliver it well. If we can't, well, we're down on the bottom of the ladder once again."

We leave as the sun dips behind Mount Rob, the Milky Way a tangle in the skies above a quiet Molly Springs – and an even quieter Marunbabidi.

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