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'Chicken coop' village fights to shed despair

By Lindsay Murdoch

11 January 2006 - IT SOUNDS a nice place: Palmerston Indigenous Village, only 22 kilometres south of booming Darwin. But along a dirt track you will find a bush ghetto better known as "15-mile Camp".

Up to 90 people live here in "chicken coop" houses that should be condemned. "I've had enough all we want is the same standard of living as the rest of Australia," says Phillip Goodman, one of the community's leaders.

The "village" is one of 98 communities that have benefited from the Federal Government's new Shared Responsibility Agreements under which indigenous communities make promises in return for funding.

While the remote East Kimberley community of Mulan agreed to wash the faces of children twice a day in return for a petrol bowser, the leaders of the community outside Darwin first wanted a plan that could bring them hope amid their despair. The result is a document titled "Voice of the Village", which was funded under the SRA system with the Palmerston City Council. Palmerston is a new city built on Darwin's outskirts, with a population of 25,000.

"Now we have got something to work with," Mr Goodman says. "We are Aussies and we are fighters and now we know what to fight for."

Council workers wrote the report after a series of community meetings. It says the biggest concern for residents is the state of the government-built houses. They are as bad as anything you will find in Asia's worst slums.

Up to 20 family and extended family members live in what is known as Burrenjuck house, which has been built near a putrid, leaking toilet block. Raw sewage often runs into the house, which does not have walls, windows, cupboards, a stove, fans or bedrooms. Nobody mentions the smell or filth.

Margaret Burrenjuck, a mother of nine, is too shy to talk to a visitor. Asked if she wants better for her family, she simply replies: "Yes."

Somebody pushes forward her daughter Gerarda, about 16, who was born with Down syndrome. She stares at the bare concrete floor before pushing away and falling onto a blackened mattress.

Other families live in similar squalor in the chicken-coop houses, so-called because they are enclosed in wire mesh.

In one house, where more than 15 people live, the only cooking utensil is a small, dirty frying pan. Infections such as scabies and hookworm are common, particularly among children. Tyrone Robinson, 13, who recently had heart bypass surgery, shares a bare house with nine other people.

For years 15-Mile Camp has been known as a place for itinerant Aborigines. But some residents have lived here for more than two decades. And some may be there for decades more the houses are not earmarked for replacement until 2025.

Mr Goodman says problems are caused when police use the community as a dumping ground for drunks or substance abusers. Just after Christmas, a youth who arrived uninvited went on a rampage, throwing an axe and machete through the windscreens of cars on the nearby Stuart Highway.

"The police drop off people like that who we don't know," Mr Goodman says. "It causes us a lot of problems. We don't want hooligans dropped on us." The SRA report identifies many problems. It describes a shortage of resources for people who want to kick habits such as petrol sniffing. It acknowledges that residents have skills and talents but there are no programs to enhance them. It admits there is a lack of health services.

"We are determined to help ourselves but we need commitments from various government departments," Mr Goodman says.

The community is hoping for money from a three-year agreement worth $254 million that will for the first time combine federal and NT government indigenous housing resources. But there is a long queue.

The NT Government estimates it would cost more than $1 billion to deal with the chronic housing backlog, exacerbated by a baby boom in remote communities. All houses on Aboriginal land are publicly owned. But one in 16 in the NT are shanty houses made from tin and wooden boxes.

The Age Editorial

Out of sight, out of mind, Australia's abandoned citizens

12 January 2006 - Celebrity advocates for aid agencies have done much to win the support of Australians in the war against global poverty. A single image of an actor with a malnourished child does more than raise awareness of the plight of so many in the developing world; it elicits a generous response in the form of aid-agency sponsorship. Australians have also donated millions of dollars to aid projects in tsunami-ravaged countries. While such assistance is highly valued, there is no need to look so far from home for people who suffer from lack of housing, chronic ill health and premature death. The human suffering that is a feature of the world's poor countries is a shameful, largely hidden part of our own affluent country.

As The Age reported yesterday, Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory are living in conditions that are "as bad as anything you will find in Asia's worst slums". This is the assessment of The Age's Lindsay Murdoch, a veteran reporter of news from the developing world. He describes houses built near a putrid, leaking toilet block. He visited a family of 20 living in a place where "raw sewage often runs into the house, which does not have walls, windows, cupboards, a stove, fans or bedrooms. Nobody mentions the smell or filth."

These "houses" are publicly owned, mostly built by contractors with government money, yet many are made of scrap material and have wire mesh instead of walls.

Despite the confronting image evoked by his words, Murdoch says words alone cannot describe how bad the situation is. He has been in the slums of Kolkata, Bangkok and Jakarta, but the despair of communities in our north is the worst he has seen. Not only is there material deprivation but a desperation spawned by generations of neglect. Alcohol and drug abuse have taken their toll because people have had little opportunity of worthwhile employment, where racism and a lack of official understanding or respect for their culture have caused alienation and hopelessness.

Murdoch described one community, the bush ghetto known as "15-mile Camp", but he says this is not an isolated example. There are many places like this, among them Wadeye, which Prime Minister John Howard visited last year. With 2500 people, Wadeye has the biggest Aboriginal population in the Northern Territory and has been described as looking like a Third World refugee camp. Almost half the population is under 15. Most of these children have had no formal education and cannot speak English. A report by Professor John Taylor of the Australian National University found that, for every dollar spent educating an average child in the Northern Territory, just 26 cents is spent on each Wadeye child.

It must be hoped that the Prime Minister was shocked by what he saw. The visit strengthened his determination that communities break the cycle of welfare dependency and take more responsibility for their economic and social wellbeing. The most publicised outcome was the "no school, no pool" program that encouraged students to attend school in return for use of the local pool. But the school facilities were inadequate to cope with the extra numbers. Despite such problems, the Wadeye approach has merits. Ninety-eight communities, including the Palmerston Indigenous Village (the official name of the 15-mile Camp), now have Shared Responsibility Agreements, which allow individual communities, rather than bureaucrats, to determine priorities and take action in exchange for funding.

This is, however, only part of the solution. No community should be held to ransom for access to the basic health care and education that should be the right of all Australians. Before the 1996 election in which the Coalition came to government, Mr Howard placed great store on improving Aboriginal health and housing. It is to the eternal shame of all Australians that, 10 years later, so much of this urgent work remains to be done.

Source: The Age

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