Alice Springs, a town in the centre of Australia.
The Australian
12:00AM February 19, 2011
Destroyed In Alice
Alice Springs is in deeper trouble than is widely understood. For many locals, driven to despair by the township's drug and alcohol-fuelled violence, the only way is out.
IT'S 10pm, the witching hour in the heart of Alice Springs, the time when trouble really starts. KFC has closed its doors, the lights from the 24-hour shop over the crossroads gleam, the cars cruise by with menace, the crowds of bush Aboriginal boys and girls, teenagers and younger, grow thick.
There they are, in the deep shadows of back alleys, parks and vacant blocks, mobiles shining in their hands as they plan their moves, and dodge and weave between the security patrols, the little ineffectual posses of youth workers from different agencies and the police vans drifting up and down the streets.
Here's the action, at the streetlights where Stott and Todd meet: the pick-up point for grog, ganja, adventure, sex and any combination of all these.
What can you see here -- for it is a theatre of a kind, where the tragicomedy of Aboriginal Central Australia is played out each night before the helpless eyes of the authorities?
You can see boys and girls as young as 10 years old marauding about at midnight, with their slightly older brothers and sisters, who are walking at speed, drinking from their hidden alcohol containers: you see cars laden with illegal grog stopping to pick up teenage girls and whisk them off; here's the madam, with her girls for sale, and that's one of the African gang cars, driving by and checking out the talent, and choosing the girls they like.
At the KFC carpark, as if in the front-row stalls, old bush men from the desert communities pull up: "Just looking," they say, and grin, and mingle. Things are tense: a security car pulls into a building site. Seventy teenagers, some with their knife-blades open, converge on the lone guard: he flees.
Police drive slow: "Go home," they call out, "Don't you have a home to go to?", but the crowds just laugh, and melt away and reform in the shadows down the block.
The desert boys wait at the traffic lights: if an incautious couple of backpackers are dumb enough to walk that way, it's harassment, menace, taunts and chase.
A few steps across the council lawns the sandy riverbed stretches, and the drinking camps of the western desert communities: Papunya people, and Kintore families, the dependents of the great desert artists, fighting and shouting abuse at each other all through the night.
Head further in that direction, and you reach the dark suburban street where cars pull up all through the small hours for this is one of the bootleg alcohol outlets that keep the drink flowing long after the plethora of take-away bottle-shops have been obliged to close their doors at 9pm.
Ten bucks for a bottle of cheap white.
At least four such operations run these days in Alice Springs, under the eyes of unknowing police, operated by local Aboriginal purveyors who onsell to fringe camp-dwellers at high markup.
Drift towards the range-line and the Gap, and you find a tree-mantled verge outside the Royal Flying Doctor Service Cafe: its grass is littered with silvered wine-cask linings.
Why? This is the sniffers' secret paradise, the tranquil hide-out where some 30 solvent abusers gather most nights. They spray the contents of underarm deodorants into the cask-skins, and inhale their way into another world, then Alice Springs Town Council workers come in the morning to clean up the evidence.
This in a town, and region, where publicly funded anti-sniffing program managers love to boast of their success. But degradation, desolation and suffering are always a step ahead.
Alice Springs is a township fast spiralling out of control. All the elements for turmoil are present: deep, cold fury among the mainstream population, a reckless gloom among the young bush people loitering here, vast demand for marijuana and a limitless supply, bad, reactive politics, a lack of new ideas, a need for drastic measures and a refusal even to debate the reforms that might have a chance.
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North Korea, Germany, China, France, Spain, Mexico, Portugal, Belarus, Italy, Sweden ETC wouldn't have a clue.
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