August 1:
“…houses and buildings look like gaols…”
There are about 300-350 Aborigines living hereabouts.
A miserable, dirty, dusty place, full of petrol sniffers (about 30 or so), illicit grog, some drugs (emanating from the Mintabie opal fields not so far away), violence – you name it, we’ve got it. The nearest police station is, roughly, about 20 km away. It is hot, dry, unpainted, smelly and miserable. Yucky country.
I have been surprised to find that a large percentage of the residents are not full-blooded Aborigines, but part-bloods. I have been informed that the part-Aboriginals do not even belong here. They have come from Port Augusta, Alice Springs, and elsewhere to set up residence so they can “cash in” on the vast sums of money being poured into Aboriginal affairs by the government. The part-Aboriginals are more vocal than the full-bloods, I notice. They seem to control the council and most of the important, well-paid jobs around the place.
This place was once a mission, I’m told. But all the missionaries are long gone. The church has been trashed. A rusted steel cross still stands, leaning slightly, on a hill over-looking the “town,” if you can call it that. All the houses and buildings look like gaols. Many of the doors are steel-plated. The windows are barred. Everything is padlocked, even the petrol bowsers.
The kids addicted to petrol sniffing hang around in groups, their heads usually covered by a blanket, making them look like monks. They clutch bottles or tins of petrol close to their faces. Their eyes are slightly glazed. They look like wild things. Slightly mad. Certainly brain damaged. Most are teenagers or younger. Outside the clinic, I even saw a mother soothing her crying baby with a can of petrol held to the child’s face. What hope have the kids?
Back in the missionary times, many of the Aborigines were given Biblical names, such as Lazarus, Adam, Eve, Ruth, Barnabas, Lucifer, Mary, even Judas. Not very flattering.
The town council has as its president or chairman an elderly full-blood Pitjantjatjara bloke who looks like a ruined stockman. I will call him Pop. This old chap had one of his sons die as a teenaged petrol sniffer and he buried him in a bush grave up on a nearby hill. Yet this same man, a leader of his community, is whispered to supply the kids with the petrol they crave, charging the boys $50 for a coke bottle full. The girls supply him with sex as payment. He comes to me every week with a broken windscreen on his chairman’s Toyota. When his tribal wife suspects him of having been playing around with the young sniffer girls, which she says he does on a regular basis, she smashes his windscreen with rocks. Then he comes to me asking for a new windscreen because, as he says, “them sniffer kids done it.” But his wife confided to me the truth.
Another trick of old Pop is to sell his spare wheel and tyre at the pub-store on the highway. This is when he exhausts his money supply, his “sit-down money,” as they call it – money paid by the government for doing nothing. He always says “some bugger pinched it.” But he sell the wheels off to white blokes for a few dollars, then comes back to me to pay for a replacement from administrative funds. He really takes me for a bloody fool. He shouldn’t judge everyone by the government.
