Huddled around a campfire in a community deemed unworthy of inclusion on Australia’s official maps, Aboriginal elder Dick Brown reflects on a vote that ended the practice of counting his people among Australia’s flora and fauna.
“We thought that it would change for the better,” Brown says without rancour when asked about the 40th anniversary of a landmark vote that recognised Aborigines as full Australian citizens for the first time.
He was speaking from one of the impoverished ghettos surrounding Alice Springs where most of the town’s Aboriginal population lives.
The guide books handed to tourists flocking to the “red centre” and maps around the town do not show the sites where indigenous communities are settled, marking them as either blank or parkland.
As Sunday’s anniversary of the referendum approaches, indigenous activists say the omission is a telling indication of the problems they still face.
“I think they’d like us to disappear as well, then we wouldn’t be a problem for them,” says William Tilmouth, head of the Tangentyere Council, which manages the Aboriginal communities known as “town camps”.
Camps
There are huge social problems among the 3Â 000 Aborigines in the camps here, with high rates of alcoholism and domestic violence and, until recently, an epidemic of petrol sniffing among youths.
There are 18 officially recognised camps, some of them just 1,5km from the centre of Alice Springs, with another two unofficial sites made up of tin sheds known as humpies.
At one camp here, a group of people sit in a circle mourning a woman stabbed to death in a domestic dispute the previous week. At another, a woman recently died when she was run over after falling asleep on the road.
Tilmouth says that up to 30 people are sometimes crammed into a single house when visitors from outback communities come into the camps, often staying for three months at a time.
The road to a camp called Little Sisters, just south of Alice, has no sign indicating there is a settlement nearby, although authorities have erected a “landfill” notice pointing to the town dump that lies down the same track.
Car wrecks and beer cans litter the ground at Hoppy’s camp, on the banks of the dry Charles River, as residents gather around an open fire to ward off the chill of the approaching desert night. Camp elder Brown says conditions have improved since a number of petrol sniffers were taken away for rehabilitation.
“It was worse with the sniffers,” he says. “When they’re sniffing they can’t hear you because their brain is finished.”
Brown (58) is partially paralysed down one side after a stroke, but prefers to stay in the camp rather than in hospital so he can be with his extended family.
“They’re a big mob; they make me mad sometimes,” he says as children play with dogs in the ochre dirt around the campfire.
‘Separate worlds’
Tilmouth says black and white communities in Alice Springs exist in mutually distrustful “separate worlds” that seldom cross paths, even though Aboriginal art is a mainstay of the town’s white-dominated tourism industry.
But in 1967, more than 90% of Australians voted to erase clauses in the Constitution that discriminated against Aborigines, the country’s largest referendum majority to date. The referendum gave full citizenship to Aborigines and included them in the national census for the first time, ending the previous practice of counting them as wildlife along with kangaroos and koalas.
The vote followed a civil rights campaign inspired by the work of black United States leaders such as Martin Luther King, including “freedom rides” on buses to highlight the problems in remote Aboriginal communities.
“People had a conscience; people had treated indigenous people pretty badly and I think their conscience got pricked and they wanted to go about doing things differently,” Tilmouth says.
However, official statistics show little improvement in the plight of Aborigines, who first settled in Australia about 50Â 000 years ago and lived a nomadic existence until European colonists arrived in the late 18th century.
Aborigines number 470Â 000, or about 2,3% of Australia’s 20-million people, yet they form 25% of the prison population. Rates of indigenous infant mortality and coronary heart disease are three times those of non-indigenous Australians.
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) says Aborigines are dying more than 17 years earlier than the rest of the population because of “institutionalised racism” in the health system.
The gap in life expectancy is a national disgrace and the government needs to show a greater commitment to Aboriginal health, the country’s top body for doctors says.
A University of New South Wales report recently found that the health of Aborigines lagged 100 years behind other Australians, with life expectancy for indigenous males as low as 33 years in parts of New South Wales state.
Improving life
Differing views on how to improve conditions for Aborigines has seen the Alice Springs town camps become an ideological battleground in recent months.
The conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard has offered Aus$70-million to bring infrastructure in the camp to the same level as the town’s white suburbs. However, it is conditional on Aborigines handing control of their housing to the Northern Territory government, which is expected to take a tough approach to tenants.
Federal indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough has adopted a policy called shared responsibility, which aims to end Aboriginal welfare dependency by offering “a hand up, not a hand out” to struggling indigenous communities.
Brough says Aborigines need to accept the same responsibility as non-indigenous Australians for their homes. “In other words, yes, the simple answer is eviction, repairing and maintenance, or repair of damage that you do or your guests do in your house,” he says. “[It] will be your responsibility. We have to get away from having two different standards.”
Aborigines in the camps have resisted the move, saying they want to retain control of their homes and labelling the government’s policies a return to paternalistic practices of the past.
“We shouldn’t have to sign over our land to get basic services that other suburbs get,” Tilmouth says.
Rosemary Miller, a resident of Morris Soak camp, has a succinct response to the government programme. “Tell them to leave our land alone,” she says. “We’ve already had enough taken away from us.”
In the country’s centre, there are signs of hope amid the grinding poverty of the camps, particularly at the Yarrenyty-Arltere Learning Centre in the Larapinta Valley camp, south of Alice.
Surrounded by wire fencing with signs attached that read “No drunks near the school” and “No sniffers”, the centre is filled with Aboriginal youths producing traditional paintings, taking classes and shooting hoops on the basketball court.
Coordinator Leonie Sheedy says the problems at Larapinta were among the worst of all the camps, but they improved dramatically after the centre was established six years ago.
“It’s helped establish a long-term outlook,” she says. “It’s strength is that it’s owned by the people that come here and it helps the wider community.”
Tilmouth says he believes reconciliation between black and white Australians is possible, but the experiences of the past 40 years show it will be a slow and gradual process. “It’s going to be a long road,” he says. — AFP