Australia's The Bulletin is reporting that feuding gangs armed with spears and machetes - and named after such heavy metal bands and albums as Judas Priest, Cowboys From Hell and Fear Factory - have run amok at the biggest Aboriginal settlement in Australia, destroying homes and terrifying families hiding from the violence.

On October 23, 2002, after a policeman shot dead a Judas Priest gang member in Port Keats, the JPs - who that day had been fighting the Evil Warriors [photo] - turned savagely on anyone with links to the Warriors. A Port Keats woman by the name of Margaret Rose Perdjert felt their wrath due to her marriage to Eugenio Kurungaiyi, the deputy commander of the Evil Warriors.

"They [Judas Priest members] smashed my house, all my property, everything. They trashed my washing machine, my deep freezer, DVD and video machine, TV, table, chairs, everything," she says. "They burned my clothes, mattresses, blankets. I was there."

The Evil Warriors align themselves musically to the heavy metal bands PANTERA, ICED EARTH and TESTAMENT. Outcrops of graffiti across the Top End testify that PANTERA's "Cowboys From Hell" album is regarded as a seminal work. ICED EARTH has albums called "The Dark Saga", "Dark Genesis" and "Burnt Offerings". TESTAMENT album titles include "Demonic" and "Signs of Chaos", all of it suggesting the gangs rejoice in concepts forbidden and reviled by the church.

The Judas Priest boys take their name from the leather-and-chain British band. METALLICA, the band that screams against injustice over studiously disjointed machine-gun bursts of sound, is also rated highly by JP. Both groups reject the other's music as crap.

Beneath the two dominant gangs are sub-gangs with names like the Lica (from METALLICA) Warriors, Mad Warriors, Fear Factory, Big T (taken from the band TESTAMENT), the German Punks, the White Lions and the Cowboys From Hell - a small group of young boys from just up the road at Palumpa. They are variously aligned to the two main groups.

Read more at The Bulletin.