Alice Springs

Uterne mpepe

Uterne irrentyeleke rlke urnipele wernetyeke tharte-irreme arewampe anthurre ilemele rlke aretharrele.

Hot wind begins to blow from the north-west. We call that the bad wind, making people tired and irritable. It may bring rain clouds, thunder and lightning.

November 2005. I am employed as a Policy Officer for the Aboriginal Health Service in Alice Springs. My office is in a small, subdivided house, a converted butcher’s shopfront near the Gap, the slash in the MacDonnell Ranges that provides the main entrance to town. I enjoy working in this area, not only because it’s five minutes’ bike ride from home, but because it’s in the Bronx or Redfern part of Alice. It’s more down-to-earth than where I was before, in the public service offices near the Mall in the central business district – perhaps almost a little too down-to-earth at times. Now and again, there are splashes of broken glass across the footpath, including for a while the label of a vodka bottle crushed into the pavement. Sometimes there are trails of blood, tracing out stories of fights and assaults. And once a man lying in the middle of the road, a cordial bottle beside him filled with what looked like port.

A variety of flotsam often washes up overnight in the small yard outside my office. There might be disembowelled tawny port casks scudding about, the detritus of a botched attempt several years ago to restrict the town’s alcohol intake by banning cheap alcohol sold in glass flagons and large containers. Other familiar tumbleweeds include used condoms, a stubby holder from a local escort service featuring a smiling cat smoking a cigar, and gnawed vertebrae from a roo’s tail, a local delicacy.

Walking towards my office one morning, I feel something wet slap against my leg. I look down, and see a disposable nappy wrapping itself around my ankle like a giant kelp. A white plastic Huggies is one of those idiosyncratic markers of local poverty. To me, it suggests a young, quite possibly single, Aboriginal mother has been around. I think of what a friend once said when he came back from leave: as soon as he saw broken glass, he was reminded that we’re living in a tough town.

The building next door to my office houses the Aboriginal Men’s Health Centre. Women are not allowed to enter, partly for cultural reasons, but also because of the need for men to have space to work out their issues. Consequently, there’s a regular trickle of women to my door, wanting to contact someone in the Men’s Health Centre.

One day, a group of Aboriginal teenage girls troop into my office.

‘Are you looking for Steve?’ I ask.

Steve is a friend of mine who works next door. He and his partner are fostering a couple of teenage girls from Aboriginal communities, to help them attend high school in town. This arrangement invariably blows out to involve entertaining their circle of friends. On some weekends, Steve can be seen cooking sausages for a dozen Aboriginal kids at the local pool.

I say I’ll ring Steve for them. I ask the eldest girl, the group’s apparent spokesperson, who I should say is calling. She tells me her name shyly.

The four of them perch on an armchair in silence while I dial his number. They are all gorgeous. They have huge brown eyes, wide smiles and long, slender limbs. Although dressed in grubby sportswear topped off with rough-edged, home-styled haircuts, they possess a lanky, model-like quality. They are still at that androgynous stage between childhood and maturity. It’s not unusual to see girls their age around town, pushing strollers. I often do a double-take, uncertain whether I’m seeing a boy or a girl.

‘A delegation of young ladies is here for you,’ I tell Steve. He immediately knows who I’m talking about. I hand the phone over to the eldest girl. Lunch and tenpin bowling are promptly organised.

I wrote in the journal I was keeping at the time:

I can’t help wondering what will happen to these girls. One hopes for a happy ending, especially after the encouragement they’ve had to finish their education. So many Aboriginal teenagers end up pregnant out here, or worse, infertile from sexually transmitted diseases by their mid-twenties, or the victims of family violence. It seems the age of fourteen is crucial for teenagers of either sex, in terms of them completing enough school to find a pathway to employment.

A little less than three months later, the girl I’d handed the phone to was dead.

Summer. People squat by the sides of the highway that runs from the airport through the Gap into Alice. They wear the ragtag uniform of cheesecloth and sportswear of remote communities. Their hair is often matted or sticks out in rat’s tails. The distinctive tang of sweat mixed with kangaroo-cooked-over-a-campfire is embedded in their clothes. They drift along the banks of the Todd River, sometimes congregating near the liquor outlets in the lower part of Gap Road, the white-gum-lined boulevard that leads into town, before opening time. It’s like a constant tide of people, ebbing into town, more so over the past few months.

Christmas often brings people into Alice to catch up with family, but they usually leave to attend Law and Culture, the roving cycle of ceremony that takes place throughout central Australia during summer. It’s possible they’ve come here rather than journeying south to Port Augusta, their more usual destination, as the local council there has introduced bans on the consumption of alcohol over the Christmas period.

There have also been reports of more murders, assaults and rapes. The deaths have brought in people for sorry camps, where traditional mourning is conducted. The prison is said to have its highest population on record, with inmates sleeping on floors because of overcrowding. Many of the local services are understaffed, including the Emergency Department, as large numbers of the town’s expatriate workers – as the interstate professionals working in the local social justice industry are sometimes called – have joined the annual diaspora to the coast. Those who remain look forward guiltily to when the mob leaves town, when some of the pressure will be relieved.

It’s hot. The local rag boasts that Alice has just had nineteen consecutive days where the mercury exceeded 37.8 degrees Celsius, the old 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with the minimum temperature hovering above 23 degrees. If this is January, what will February be like? people ask. February is usually the most punishing month in central Australia. Things probably won’t get better until Anzac Day, traditionally when public servants in the Territory are said to have swapped their knee-high socks and shorts for trousers. According to environmental and global warming activist Tim Flannery, Alice will become uninhabitable by 2050, because of ever-increasing heat.

At the end of summer, Richard Lim, the Country Liberal Party member for Greatorex, announces that there’s been anarchy on the streets of Alice Springs: ‘We have had something like eight killings over the last six months – eight killings – multiple stabbings, robberies, rock-throwing, windscreen-smashing while people are driving their cars, and the list goes on and on and on.’ In April 2006 newly released statistics confirm that there have been six deaths involving Indigenous people within a six-month period. People fear visiting Alice Springs after Today Tonight, a current affairs program, claims that local residents are too scared to leave their homes. Some tourists ask whether it’s safe to go out at night: should they lock themselves inside their caravans to avoid being bashed? The Northern Territory Tourism Authority, concerned the bottom will fall out of the central Australian industry, rushes to assure potential holiday-makers that Alice is safe enough to visit. Some out-of-towners are more welcome than others.

Many people feel shaky: are things actually getting worse? Some long-time residents play down the latest media outbursts, saying that reports of increasing numbers of community people (the out-of-town mob are known as ‘community people’ or ‘bush people’, to distinguish them from the local Arrernte population) and escalating rates of violence are probably just a statistical fluctuation. It’s a bit like the controversy over the greenhouse phenomenon: some argue that we’re merely experiencing seasonal ripples. Others say it’s evidence that things are in sharp decline.

A youth worker who’s lived in Alice Springs for over a decade suggests to me this type of reporting is cyclical. ‘If you look back over the local papers, you’ll see the same beat-up occurs every year. It’s quiet during October, November, then over the summer there’s a build-up of tension, what with Christmas, the heat, more people in town, more drinking …’

The following summer, there is even more hysteria in the local media, with reports of youth gangs terrorising Alice. The mayor, Fran Kilgariff, blames most of the violence on groups of young Aboriginal people from outside communities. But this time there’s a new narrative twist. While the majority of violent incidents reported in the past have been black-on-black, there are now stories of black-on-white incidents, of assaults and muggings of tourists and locals. Packs of youths are said to roam the town’s centre, trampling on cars, slamming shopping trolleys into buildings and trees, and harassing restaurant guests.

Calls for law and order increase. Some concerned residents decide to take matters into their own hands, forming a vigilante group named Advance Alice, modelled on New York’s Guardian Angels. I receive brochures in the mail, reassuring me that the Territory will step up funding and recruitment for the police force – already the largest per capita in the country – along with an invitation to participate in a phone survey about how effectively the cops are doing their job. Kilgariff organises a community forum to coincide with a sitting of the Northern Territory parliament in Alice Springs. Locals picket the forum bearing placards saying, ‘Bring back mandatory sentencing’ – a policy of the former CLP government under which juveniles were automatically sentenced to imprisonment for certain petty crimes. It’s only once the violence starts to impact on the white population that it’s taken seriously.

I ask the youth worker what she thinks: is youth violence really on the rise?

‘I said to my partner, we’ve gotta develop a ten-year exit plan,’ she replies. They’ve just had a baby together. ‘The gang violence is getting out of hand and it’s not just Aboriginal kids who are involved. In ten years’ time it’s going to be something terrible.’

Steve told me the news. The fifteen year old who had been assaulted and left for dead near Centralian College was Kwementyaye Ryan, the eldest of the girls who visited my office and the one who’d seemed like their leader. She had been due to fly out with one of the younger girls to Melbourne, to go to boarding school. Kwementyaye had been enrolled at the local Catholic high school, but she hadn’t attended much lately. She’d been a petrol sniffer, and had been sent to Mt Theo outstation for rehabilitation, but, as with so many young sniffers, fell back under the influence of her peers once she returned to town.

According to Steve, Kwementyaye had had a haemorrhagic blood disorder that she ‘didn’t much understand’. She’d been admitted to hospital on Monday, 23 January 2006 but had become impatient while receiving treatment and left the ward at least twice, sometimes in the company of a cousin.

On Friday, 27 January, Kwementyaye left the hospital at about 10 am. Hospital staff did not report her absence to the police until twenty-four hours later, although her foster mother asked the night patrol to search for her that evening. It appears that Kwementyaye met some young people from the local gang scene in the Mall at about 8 pm. Afterwards, they went to the suburbs on the Eastside, where she met her husband, who was with another teenage girl. There was a fight, in which she was bashed severely and collapsed unconscious on Grevillea Drive near Centralian College, a secondary education institute. She had been walking in the direction of home, Hidden Valley town camp, one of the pockets of Aboriginal housing in Alice Springs.

Kwementyaye was seen lying outside Centralian College between 3 and 5.30 am. Three young men, aged from sixteen to nineteen, all ‘of Aboriginal appearance’, were seen in the area in the early hours of the morning. When they were later apprehended, they told police that Kwementyaye had been ‘out cold’ when they found her. They had carried her 10 metres from the roadside gutter where she was lying and had attempted to rape her out of view, behind a small mound. Discarding the condoms they’d used, the boys had left Kwementyaye, assuming she was sleeping. She’d lain near the entrance of Centralian College until 10.30 the following morning, when an employee rang for an ambulance.

There’s been a lot of gang stuff in town, Steve told me. Female-on-female violence has become common among teenage girls, with young women vying to become the best fighter. He associated this peer-related violence with a lack of parenting and cultural authority. It’s a something of a cultural aberration, he said.

Kwementyaye lay for up to ten hours on Grevillea Drive. This road runs past Centralian College and feeds into a major roundabout in the Eastside suburbs, a largely middle-class part of town. Although it was a Saturday morning when Kwementyaye was found, many – black and white – would have noticed the teenager lying beside the road in a white T-shirt and striped trackpants, perhaps as they returned from a meal the night before or ferried their children to sporting events the next morning. The three young men were seen clearly enough in the small hours of the morning for detailed descriptions to be provided to the police.

Early in 2006, there was a national media story about an Aboriginal woman who lay in a pool of her own vomit near a bus stop outside a busy Queensland university campus. Hordes of people would have passed her – staff, students, commuters – but no one stopped to ask if she needed help. Then, in a kind of postcolonial reworking of the Good Samaritan parable, a group of Asian students came to her rescue – five hours later.

The woman was Delmae Barton, a respected opera singer. News reports later suggested she’d had a stroke or diabetes attack. But as in the case of Kwementyaye, the assumption of many passers-by would have been: another drunken Aboriginal.

The sight of an Aboriginal person lying on the footpath or even in the middle of the road is common in central Australia. I’ve seen people outside the drive-in bottle shop near the Gap or across from Sean’s, the Irish pub. Often their countrymen or women are close by, calling from the sides of the road or trying to drag them away. Usually I pull up a bit later, and ring an ambulance. Riding alongside the river at dusk, I often see people lying across the bike path, but I don’t always stop, as I feel more vulnerable there than on a main road. I find myself beginning to start even at the sight of clothes on the pathway or hanging nearby in trees. Sometimes they look quite lifelike, as if their owner had suddenly left them like a ghost. Once I came across a woman standing in the middle of the river path, wearing only Cottontails, a bra rolled up under her breasts, rocking and dancing as if in a trance, arms stretched above her head. Another time, a large, topless woman careered round the corner near my local store, shaking a nulla nulla at a cowering man.

Driving home one evening, I saw what I thought was a garbage bag or a cardboard box or maybe some old clothes that had drifted out onto Gap Road. None of these are unlikely prospects in Alice Springs, and it was difficult to see in the waning light. But as I drew closer I realised that of course it was a person, an Aboriginal man.

I pulled up in a nearby parking bay, and walked towards him, though really I wanted to keep on driving. I was still uncertain of what to do in situations like these, despite having lived several years in Alice Springs, and I felt an almost physical fear about dealing with someone who might be totally off-their-face.

The man was lying on his side, eyes closed, like a baby sleeping.

I knelt down and said, ‘Can you get up? You’ve got to get up. There are cars coming and you’ll get run over.’

A man and a woman, presumably friends or relatives, appeared at the sidelines.

‘His leg’s broken, he can’t get up,’ the man said. There didn’t seem to be any injuries, as far as I could tell – no cuts or blood – though, to be honest, I was presuming he was drunk.

‘We’ve got to get him off the road,’ I said, trying to take command, whitefella-way. ‘The light’s terrible at this time of night; you can hardly see him. He’s just going to get run over.’

The man grabbed his prone friend by one arm, and dragged him off the road and into the parking bay. The woman started pacing up and down beside them, arms behind her back. She was wearing three-quarter length pants and flimsy sandshoes, with a beanie shoved down on her head and a fringe of splintery braids sticking out.

‘This one,’ she said, tapping my arm, ‘This one, he’s been …’

I didn’t quite catch what she said; it sounded like ‘drinking too much.’ You start jumping to these conclusions.

‘No, thinking too much,’ she said. ‘This one, he’s been thinking too much, because his brother died. His younger brother, he just died at Ernabella, only a few weeks ago.’

It seemed the young man had stumbled out onto the road, grief muddying his thoughts, without looking where he was going. Still, I was amazed by this tableau, that these people would spend so much time analysing things from the roadside