Treasurer Delia Lawrie today contended that a letter written two years ago was proof of a deal last month between Opposition Leader Terry Mills and former Independent Alison Anderson to “lure” her to the Country Liberals.
Ms Anderson says the letter attached to Ms Lawrie’s release is authentic but it dates back to the last election, when the two major parties negotiated vigorously to get the numbers in Parliament.
A media release today from Ms Lawrie quotes Mr Mills as saying (on September 9): “There’s no deal.”
She adds: “Terry Mills has a lot of explaining to do, he needs to come out of hiding.”
Ms Anderson says the Country Liberals’ approach to her was no different to the ALP’s negotiations with Independent Gerry Wood, who made a comprehensive deal for his support of Territory Labor which formed the present minority government.
Ms Anderson says the letter circulated by Ms Lawrie today was extensively reported in the media two years ago.
The former Labor Member became an Independent and recently joined the Country Liberals.
She says Ms Lawrie’s media release is “pure fabrication”.
The Alice Springs News Online has asked Ms Lawrie for a comment and we will post it when it is to hand. – ERWIN CHLANDA
'Proof' of deal two years old, says Anderson
Young people 'on the fence' on curfew
By KIERAN FINNANE
If they were mayor for a day, they’d introduce an adult curfew – no, just kidding. In fact this group of young locals didn’t raise strong objections to a youth curfew. Asked to think about the pros and cons, they came up mostly with cons but certainly not howls of protest.
They were a dozen students from the town’s high schools – Centralian College, St Philip’s, OLSH and Yirara – involved in the Youth Desert Leadership Program. Yesterday’s workshop was hosted by Desert Knowledge Australia and the Alice Springs Town Council.
Some legitimate reasons for being out during curfew time were raised, such as early morning cycling training.
The main elements of the public debate were also put forward:
• children’s activities are their parents’ responsibility, not the government’s, nor the town’s;
• some young people don’t have safe homes, so the focus should be on that issue rather than a curfew;
• enforcing a curfew would be a waste of police time;
• a curfew would be a “violation of human rights” – this formulation made them all laugh.
The students were divided into three groups. Group One said they were “on the fence” on the curfew issue and pointed to some pros: if there were a curfew, there’d be a lot less young people on the streets, even though some would always be there. The reduction in numbers could help stop some of the problems, like fighting and rock-throwing, contributing to greater safety.
However, this group also thought Town Council CEO Rex Mooney, who was sitting at their table, had a point when he said a curfew would be hard to administer and that there are very few examples of functioning curfews in Australia.
This prompted a comment from Group Two that there may be other ways to deal with the problems, such as providing a place where young people can go, though the hours and style of operation of such a place was not detailed.
The overall impression was that the town is “pretty safe”, at night as well as in the day, though at night you needed to be “sensible”. Safety in Alice is much like that of towns anywhere, and some parts of town are safer than others. For example, the Golf Course Estate was considered to be safer than Northside. Lighting was seen as a factor in how safe an area is.
The council was also interested in this group’s views on what could make the CBD more attractive to young people.
Aerosol art was a suggestion from Group One. Group Two thought more art, not just aerosol and including sculpture, would help. Better buildings too, with more colour.
Public transport should operate for extended hours: it was pointed out that during the week public busses stop at 5.30pm, too early for young people pursuing activities after school. It was also said that there are “hardly any” busses on Saturday and none on Sundays.
There could be more entertainment. Group One noted the popularity of the ice-skating rink run over the last two summers but cancelled for this year – something like that would be good. Groups Two and Three had a more modest proposal: they wanted busking permits to be cheaper and easier to get.
Group Three wanted to see more markets in the mall and noted that night markets especially, with their line-up of local bands, attract young people.
This group also welcomed the proposed plans for redeveloping the mall, mentioning particularly that opening the northern end would bring more activity into the area.
Each group is working on a research project to present to the council. Group One is looking at the “negative graffiti” issue and whether the $100,000 a year being spent on cleaning it up could be put to better use, such as sanctioned graffiti art projects.
Group Two are working on promoting “cultural awareness”: “We do have a lot of culture in Alice Springs compared to other places.”
They are also proposing that a youth council be formed. This got Mayor Damien Ryan’s attention: he has been championing the idea since taking office but it has yet to get off the ground. He wanted to know how he should communicate his interest in the concept to local youth. They laughed: Facebook, of course! Old-fashioned approaches also had some support: posters at schools, visits to school assemblies.
Group Three want to petition the government to buy the vacant Melanka block to create a park that would become a hangout, including at night, with amphitheatre, events, art and sculpture.
Mayor Ryan pointed to the hefty price tag of that block and wanted them to think about an alternative venue. One suggestion was where the
old Mobil Palms service station used to be, another vacant lot, with the advantage of being near the existing youth service, Headspace.
Pictured above: Mayor Damien Ryan talks to youth leaders at yesterday’s workshop. From left they are Tyrell Swan, Russell Modlin (Yirara teacher), Naomi Ingamells and Rachel Dash.
Alice's Vinnies closing
The Vinnies shop in Alice Springs is closing and its future is unclear. Staff were told yesterday and a public announcement was made today.
Acting CEO Martha Swart says the board of the Society of St Vincent de Paul in the NT will work with an Alice Springs sub-committee to come up with a business plan for the future.
Ms Swart said only the shop is closing; the daily emergency relief program and food van will continue and Christmas hampers for the needy will be unaffected.
The reason for the shop closing is that the building requires extensive renovation. It leaks, it needs re-wiring, new air-conditioning: “We can’t have our staff and our customers working in a building like that,” she says. “It’s a valuable property but it will cost a lot to rebuild.”
It’s not clear where the money will come from. Ms Swart says the money raised by the shop goes immediately into the emergency relief program, which assists up to 120 people a month.
The possibility of the shop operating from other premises is one of the things the board and sub-committee will examine. Presumably funding of the relief program is another. – KIERAN FINNANE
'Collapse' of the construction sector, grog measures flawed
New statistics released by Treasury this week have highlighted the collapse of the construction sector in the Northern Territory, says Shadow Treasurer John Elferink. “Year-on-year, overall construction in 2011 fell by 8.9% in the Territory, the worst results in the country. “Worse still, comparing June quarters, residential building has dropped by almost one third in the last year, with new housing construction down 41.1%, which means the door has slammed shut in the last quarter,” says Mr Elferink. “On an annual basis, construction spending is now at its lowest level since the end of 2005. “Programs like the Government’s BuildBonus scheme has delivered a miniscule $10m in housing construction, less than 10% of the anticipated $150m it is meant to support. “In terms of houses built, that’s less than 20 homes out of a potential 325.” Meanwhile Shadow Alcohol Policy Minister Peter Styles says while there are 1576 people on the Banned Drinker Register, already 104 of those have breached their third Banning Alcohol and Treatment notice. Not one has been made to undertake alcohol rehabilitation. “This is one of the inherent flaws in the Government’s grog plan,” says Mr Styles. “Problem drinkers can continue to access alcohol, but they don’t have to undertake treatment for their addiction. “The Country Liberals policy mandates alcohol rehabilitation and leaves ordinary Territorians to buy alcohol without producing photo ID.” Mr Styles said the grog bans have resulted in increased humbugging and alcoholics seeking out other drugs, such as cannabis.
A 'happy, safe and well-supported' tribe
By KIERAN FINNANE
It’s been a big week for Bradshaw Primary School: on top of teacher-librarian Jo Sherrin’s national gong (see separate story), the school was a winner in the 2011 Northern Territory Smart Schools Awards for “Excellence in Student Inclusion and Wellbeing”.
The fact that the school applied for that category in the awards reflects its values: the first thing that principal Jill Tudor mentions is keeping children happy, safe and well-supported so that teaching and learning are the best they can be.
Then there are the school’s few guiding ‘e’ words:
• equity – children get what they need, rather than everyone getting the same;
• expectations – they’re high as with the right support every child can learn;
• effort – the harder you work, the smarter you get.
It’s Mrs Tudor’s third year at the helm at Bradshaw, but she credits former principal Ursula Balfour for putting in the “hard yards” to develop the inclusive culture that is the now hallmark of the school.
It has paid off: behind the smiling faces, and in the hands of “an incredibly strong team” are busy little minds learning well. Bradshaw keeps “rigorous, systematic” data to make its case and comparisons with like schools on the MySchool website shows it to be substantially ahead in most categories in the national literacy and numeracy assessments (NAPLAN).
How does the school transmit its values?
In multiple ways: every person counts and is made to feel welcome and respected. It starts with the bilingual (English and Arrernte) welcome sign at the front entrance, followed by the “director of first impressions” – Virginia Moore at the front desk. The whole school is a “tribe” (Tribes is the name of an educational philosophy developed by Jeanne Gibbs in USA), all working together towards the same end goal. That means the janitor, Cliff Alder, is involved in student learning alongside the teachers.
There’s a buddy system: every senior class is matched with a junior class and at whole school events big and little buddies do things with one another.
The school connects with the community – “real life learning”, as Mrs Tudor describes it. There was strong participation by Bradshaw students at this year’s Eisteddfod and the Wearable Arts Awards. Parents are welcome to take part in school life and that includes, of course, Aboriginal families, whose children make up more than half of the school population.
Social skills are taught explicitly: aspects of how we relate to one another are nominated each week for exploration in every class. This week, for example, students and teachers were talking about “tact”.
“This gives children a language so that they can think about their interactions,” explains Mrs Tudor.
Again, the school knows that this approach is paying off. A record is kept of children’s visits to the “Solutions Room”, where they work out their differences and “put things right”, with a teacher mediating if necessary. The data shows that the incidence of things like hitting is decreasing. Last year there may have been an instance of hitting every two days – already relatively minor for a school population of 390. This year that has been halved, says Mrs Tudor.
A visit to the Solutions Room is not seen as a punishment. Rather, “it’s a way of supporting them to learn from their mistakes” and sometimes children go there voluntarily.
Bradshaw School has been acknowledged this week, but it’s not alone in its striving, says Mrs Tudor: “There are many outstanding people in the Northern Territory, and it’s perhaps because we are isolated, that people make the extra effort.”
In fact, in the national awards where Mrs Sherrin won in the primary teacher category, there were three other NT finalists. Karen Blanchfield from Ross Park Primary in Alice Springs was a finalist in “Primary Principal of the Year”. In the Top End Tim Webb from Belyuen School was a finalist for the Minister’s Award for “Excellence in Teaching or Leadership in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education” and Judith O’Hearn from Palmerston Senior College was a finalist in “Secondary Teacher of the Year”.
Pictured: “Happy, safe, well-supported children” at work: Karen Stewart watches her students using their “One Laptop Per Child” computers to practice their spelling. Photo courtesy Bradshaw Primary School.
The subtle transmissions of home
By KIERAN FINNANE
Coming to this place has called up another for young artist and musician Claire Wieland. It’s not that she isn’t seeing and listening to this one – her Emu series and recording of local voices and songs are charming testimony that she is. But time spent in the western desert, volunteering in the women’s centre at Kintore, and then here in town where she has rented a studio at Watch This Space and mounted an exhibition in its gallery, have got her thinking about family and home.
The sense of those words for her stretches across the globe, to the native Switzerland of her father. She was born in Australia but the Swiss-German connection is strong, not so much through her direct experience as she has only been there a few times, and only once in young adulthood. It’s more a matter of cultural osmosis, for instance, through the kind of objects that were around her as she grew up.
A few of these form part of the exhibition: a milk pail of woven wood, made and given to her at birth by her Swiss grandfather; her mother’s handwritten cookbook; a rustic door-latch and drawer handles made by her father. A lifelong familiarity with the processes and products of individual fabrication has given her confidence to her own abilities to work with her hands. Proof is in the beautiful wooden utensils she has made – ladles, spoons, spatulas, each fashioned in harmony with the colour, grain and texture of the different timbers used.
The imagery in this show, titled Familien, reveal her to be a fine draughtswoman but in keeping with her desire to honor craft and tradition she has chosen to make lithographic prints (the stones used are part of the show). The lithographs transmit her subtle drawing style beautifully and have allowed her to compile some of the images in artist books, bound in “swag” (canvas). The books evoke a favourite childhood storybook of her father’s and are full of tenderness and a youthful idealism.
This feeling is also there in the sound installation: you hear her singing tentatively in German with her father; a woman teaching Arrernte at Centralian Middle School (Wieland has used Arrernte names for some of her Emu series); a woman met by chance at John Hayes Rockhole, singing with her daughter an old Italian lullaby she had learnt from her father.
Wieland is sitting the exhibition until it closes on October 27 (gallery hours Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, 11am-4pm, Saturday, 12-4pm). Watch out – she’ll soon have you yearning for simpler times, old melodies, the touch of natural materials, the sound of un-miked music, the images of childhood memory, the aura of parental love.
Pictured: Top right – Claire Wieland in the gallery. • Above left – her ‘family’ of hand-made objects. • Right – Her artist books of lithographic prints, edition of four in black and white, three in colour.
Safe spaces
By ESTELLE ROBERTS
Last night walking into a friend’s driveway we were stopped by a neighbor who had just scared off a man halfway through breaking into her house. His decision to intervene had spared us the possible consequences of walking into a house and surprising a thief. For whatever reasons, whether he’s a nosy neighbor or simply has a sense of social responsibility, he had prevented a potentially dangerous encounter.
I have been thinking a lot on safety and particularly the tenuous safety of women. Recently I (a female) travelled (alone) through southern Morocco, enjoying its beautifully rugged and prickly coastlines where the sun sinks itself into the Atlantic Ocean. But I also had some experiences that made me want to get on the next plane out of there. The constant staring and sleazy hassle made for some very crisped nerves that often inhibited my ability to really engage and appreciate the place.
I returned to Australia with a relief that is difficult to describe. I am not a patriotic type but I have to say I appreciate how relatively safe this place felt, how freely I could walk down the street, sit in a café and go about my day.
As a western woman I was a great curiosity for men in the small towns I visited, towns with high unemployment, little education and preconceived ideas about western women, stereotypes gleaned from MTV and Hollywood. It was an uncomfortable cultural shock for no other reason than the complete lack of respect that my gender afforded me. I felt extremely vulnerable and often times afraid for my safety.
I didn’t change my ticket, not even after the unnerving experience of being followed and hassled by a man in car as I walked along the footpath one afternoon. I am too stubborn and indignant or perhaps naïve to accept that I cannot walk down a street safely, free from intimidation because of an arbitrarily assigned gender.
On returning to Alice Springs I learnt that a women had been raped and bashed in town just round the corner from where I used to work, leaving a party that I too would have probably attended. It was horribly sobering to realize that the relief I felt returning to my familiar environment was misplaced if I thought I was any safer here than anywhere else.
From when we are little girls we are watched and sexualized and as a woman I navigate a sexist status quo that constantly objectifies me. How can sex discrimination supposedly be a distant memory when women can feel unsafe and can be raped and abused as a result of their gender?
I went to a party the other night where the door policy clearly stated that the venue was a safe space for sexual diversity and that any body infringing on the right to that respect would be asked to leave. Someone, who I am proud to say is my friend, deftly escorted a person who had violated that right to the door where they were made to leave by the bouncer.
I read a line somewhere, something like this: the road to social justice relies on people making small decisions every day to become involved in the lives of people around them. Those small decisions can have powerful consequences. I like the ring of this and I guess what I’ve been thinking about is that for safe places to exist we must actively define our spaces with respect and practice our social responsibility by looking out for each other.
Pictured above: Sunset off Morocco’s Atlantic coastline – beautiful, but hard to appreciate when you’re being hassled by local men with their stereotyped ideas of western women. Returning to Alice was a relief … at first.
After three decades in Territory schools she's the best teacher in the country
By KIERAN FINNANE
What does it take to be the best primary school teacher in Australia? To have a warm and vivid presence might be part of it. Add imagination, keenness, a strong sense of possibilities, interest in the world. Then let’s not forget experience, support from colleagues, and a school environment where everyone is pulling on the same string to keep kids happy and learning.
This teacher, Jo Sherrin, and this school, Bradshaw Primary, can be found in west-side Alice Springs. Last Friday at a ceremony in Melbourne Mrs Sherrin, one of two teacher-librarians at Bradshaw, was named the nation’s Primary School Teacher of the Year at the inaugural Australian Awards for Outstanding Teaching and School Leadership.
Back at school this week, she was looking forward to all the fuss dying down and getting on with the job. I met her in the company of the two Year Four students who had volunteered to be in our photo – Kaylana Hagan and Casey Lally. They showed me how they had learned to write with a nib pen and ink like students their age did in the 1930s. This was part of the work they’d done with Mrs Sherrin in first semester, using a teaching resource, The Hartley Project, she had developed with former colleague Anne Scherer, assisted by Sally Jeavons, funded by the Town Council and the National Trust (Alice Springs).
Hartley Street School was the first formally established school in Alice (lessons had been conducted in other locations before the dedicated building was erected in 1929 – it still stands today). The resource invites a present-day class to immerse themselves in this very different era.
Each child pulled out of a hat a name of one of the former students of the class of 1937. The resource kit provided them with a fact sheet about that student, as well as information about what life in the town was like for its settler and its original Arrernte populations. So began their ‘role play’ – Casey became a little Creed Lovegrove, Kaylana, a young Gwen Ah Chee. They could tell me about their brothers and sisters, their best friends: Casey/Creed’s was Murray Neck, Kaylana/Gwen’s, Nazmeena Mulladad.
They could recite the patriotic school pledge; recall the old-fashioned games they’d enjoyed – marbles, skipping, hopscotch, drop-the-hankie; and the classroom rules so different from today’s – strictly no talking, no being silly, no dirty hands, standing when an adult entered the room.
Mrs Sherrin had her role too: she was Miss Robb, principal and teacher; her powers included administering the cane.
Some families back then “lived in sheds”, said Casey, their toilet was out the back and his/Creed’s sister would be scared and get him to go with her.
Toilets were a bucket and men would come at night, Kaylana explained, to take away the full one, replace it with an empty one.
They had to mime activities for their classmates to guess. Kaylana had shown witchetty grub hunting; Casey, building a billycart.
After all that they had learned, which would they prefer, I asked them, to live in the 1930s or today?
Probably the 1930s, said Kaylana. She loves climbing trees and the idea of a small town where children were free to roam after school, meeting down at the river, climbing the wonderful trees, really appealed to her.
Casey could see advantages in both eras, perhaps coming down in favour of today because in the 1930s “they didn’t have much equipment to play with”.
It’s a way of teaching history that brings it alive, says Mrs Sherrin. That was clear: these Year Four children had great recall of the facts they’d learned, even after the long winter break, and they talked about them with a sparkle in their eyes, relishing the details.
The bell rang – some things don’t change – and Kaylana and Casey had to go. A troupe of Year Ones arrived.
“Come on in guys, do some browsing. It’s your lucky day – you can go to the non-fiction section or the picture book section …”
Within minutes and a half-dozen individual interactions, the children were settled at tables in groups of their choosing with their books. Among them was a “secret spy” (one of their peers) who would be writing down the names of “the champions” – the children who were “on task”.
“We want them to monitor their own behaviour,” explained Mrs Sherrin.
The emphasis is on agreements about expectations and expressing appreciation when expectations are met. The approach operates throughout the school. It’s based on an educational philosophy developed in the USA, called Tribes, which recognises the role schools must play today in developing students’ social skills: “It’s about building inclusion, making children feel connected, being part of a team.”
Bradshaw is not the only local school to use the “Tribes” approach. Mrs Sherrin first came across it when she was at Sadadeen Primary 10 years ago. She put it into practice at the 65 student school in Timber Creek where she was teaching last year. She had a combined class of Years 5, 6, 7, and 8 students. At the start of the year they were very disengaged – low self-esteem, low literacy and numeracy levels. By the end of the year, there had been a culture shift: buddy programs (older students leading young students) were in place across the school, a student representative council was created, the students were running a school disco, the self-monitoring approach was adopted in class.
“In every session students would be asking of themselves, had they done their personal best, and they were doing it really honestly.”
Mrs Sherrin has had a wide-ranging experience of Territory schooling, starting off nearly 30 years ago as a classroom teacher in Katherine. Her bush experience includes Lajamanu, Finke, Ampilatwatja, Mount Liebig and Timber Creek. She has loved teaching at bush schools and has built lifelong friendships with Aboriginal families as a result but she does not under-estimate the challenges – dealing with the isolation and with living in a very different culture.
“You have to build a relationship with people, be able to have fun, tap into Aboriginal people’s humour, so that they know this is a person who’s likes us and wants to help.
“And like [Aboriginal educator] Chris Sarra says, you have to find out what it is that your community really wants to do.
“It’s difficult but it’s rewarding if you can do it.”
Mrs Sherrin retrained in 2004, gaining a Graduate Diploma in Information Services to qualify as a teacher-librarian: “I didn’t want to get stagnant.”
She sees the library as a “vibrant learning zone” for all ages, much more than a place where you can read or borrow books. Her students get involved with wearable arts, drama, they receive visits from authors and illustrators, from figures in the community (former Diggers, local historian Jose Petrick), they make movies – in short any activity that will connect them with learning.
She wants it to be an exciting place, which they’ll feel is theirs and where they’ll be able to learn in the way that suits them: “They might be a visual learner, a body-smart learner.”
It must also draw in the wider community, so that children feel connected and proud about who they are and where they come from.
Her passion for children’s literature led Mrs Sherrin to get involved with the Children’s Literature in the Centre (CLIC) festival, the brainchild of another local teacher-librarian (recently retired), Ruth Jones. The festival brings into our region the kind of experience with authors and illustrators that children in the big cities can have. There have been two to date, starting in 2008, with the third scheduled for March next year. The first two each saw some 2000 students involved in their various workshops over a four-day program.
Apart from stimulating children’s (and parents’) interest in reading and writing, Mrs Sherrin hopes that the exposure could also inspire some future careers: “We’ve got quite a few talented young writers and artists – they too could become the brilliant authors and illustrators of tomorrow.”
The boon would be the more books for Territory children that reflect the people and places around them. Mrs Sherrin says the value of local content can’t be over-stated, especially in the bush context: “Books like the Barrumbi series by Leonie Norrington. I used them at Timber Creek – the kids loved them.”
People may think being a teacher-librarian is an “easy job” – just “reading stories”. Not so, says Mrs Sherrin, and her colleague, Ailsa Moyses, agrees. They speak of the importance of developing and maintaining the library’s collections: it doesn’t work as a learning place if its users can’t find the materials they’re interested in.
They also build on what is being done in the classrooms. For example, teachers across the school identified the need to develop students’ “inferential comprehension” skills, in other words, the ability to read between the lines, bringing their knowledge of the world to connect with the text. So the teacher-librarians introduced an online program that individual students can use, that quizzes and scores them on texts, allowing them to graduate from level to level at their own pace.
Teacher-librarians need a thorough knowledge of the curriculum and available resources, catering for both students and teachers, not just in literature, but science, maths, social sciences, the arts.
Mrs Sherrin loves the scope of the job, and above all being in contact with children across the whole school, from five years old to 12.
“But you have to have strong behavioural management skills and I couldn’t have developed mine without classroom practice.”
She remembers her first Grade 3/4 class in Katherine “swinging from the rafters” and thinking, “They didn’t tell me how to deal with this at college!” Years on the job have taught her that there’s no one rule.
“You have to develop your own ‘kit bag’ and you never stop borrowing ideas. You have to work out what suits you personally and there’s huge trial and error in the beginning.
“And different strategies work for different groups. My Year 7 boys at Timber Creek, for example, they needed energy release before they could sit down and work. So they’d go outside and shoot hoops for a while – they never abused it.
“A student with Asperger’s syndrome might need to work for short periods on the task at hand, with breaks doing their maths’ game or chess game in between, as long as they get there in the end.”
Why could the old style of classroom discipline and learning work for the Hartley Street School children in the 1930s and not today?
Mrs Sherrin looks back to her own childhood in country Victoria for the answer: “Society has changed. I didn’t know anyone whose parents were divorced, there were no blended families. They were all farmers and all their families were in Victoria – my parents had never been outside the state. There was a strong local support system.
“The Territory is very different from that, everyone comes from everywhere, there’s lots of blended families.”
The challenges for schools have perhaps never been so great; those like Mrs Sherrin who rise to meet them deserve our deepest appreciation.
Pictured: From top – Kaylana Hagan (left) and Casey Lally with teacher-librarian Jo Sherrin, who’s been named the Best Primary School Teacher in Australia. • Kalheel Galaminda practising ink-writing at Hartley Street School. • Bradshaw School congratulates Mrs Sherrin – this tribute is in the foyer. • Lucy McCullough in period dress learning to sew at Hartley Street School.
The facts the Amnesty fact finder didn't find
Naronda William Loy, 21, with her daughter Karlishia Raggatt, 1, speak with Amnesty International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty, at Mosquito Bore, Utopia, 8 October 2011. Photo courtesy Amnesty International.
By ERWIN CHLANDA
Rosalie Kunoth-Monks told Q&A’s national audience on Monday: “We live in absolute poverty.”
Do they? At the very least the residents of Utopia have income support in the form of Centrelink benefits.
Does “we” include her and her family? They have a three bedroom house with airconditioning, according to someone familiar with Utopia, 250 km north-east of Alice Springs. That person spoke with us after watching Q&A and on the condition of not being named.
Others might be sleeping rough, but sometimes it’s a choice: it’s great for accessing the shop, a factor of transport rather than accommodation.
Sometimes camping rough is a necessity due to sorry business.
No number of permanent houses will alleviate cultural expectations.
Some people have access to housing on nearby outstations.
A local artist living on a truck was one of the exhibits when Salil Shetty, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, called in on his one-day fact-finding mission. But the artist’s house on his nearby homeland was a fact not found by Mr Shetty because he wasn’t made aware if it, our source suggests.
If he had, perhaps his finding would not have been that “around 500 homeland communities are being left to wither as the Government starves them of essential services”.
Many people in the makeshift camps also have access to houses, says our source. Overcrowding is an issue, but it’s a moving target. Finances, family disputes, community events, and cultural obligations (such as sorry business) all make it impossible to provide a clear picture of true demographics and housing needs.
Other assets not on Mr Shetty’s itinerary were the recently upgraded power station, successful local clinic and the new multi-million dollar middle school.
“I’m sure he travelled on the newly sealed highway improving access between community administration, health clinic and the airstrip,” says our source.
Chief Minister Paul Henderson sang the school’s praises during Q&A – it’s fantastic, a middle and senior school, as good as anywhere, but kids need to go to school: “That’s is the challenge.” He made that point twice.
Getting kids to school – clearly – is the job of the parents, or in the Aboriginal context, the extended family. It’s not a job for the Government.
The government’s dollar figure is impressive, the school’s enrolment and attendance figures are not. These are freely available on the departmental website.
Blame cannot be laid at the feet of the teachers. For most remote teachers the day starts early. At Utopia teachers clock on before school as school bus drivers, collecting kids from many of the outstations of the sprawling community. Together the teachers cover hundreds of kilometers each day.
How many dozens of able-bodied people are around, most of them on the dole, who could be doing that job? How many parents help, our source asks.
Surely locals were offered the drivers’ jobs, but they probably found the dole more appealing, or very soon couldn’t or didn’t want to display the reliability and punctuality required.
Again, the transport factor is a major issue in this decentralised community. How much should the government and taxpayer subsidise vehicles, road improvement and transport costs associated with a community’s decision to decentralise into homelands? It’s a big question, says our source. There always seems to be fuel to get to a footy game or to an interstate rodeo, though!
On their bus run the teachers call at the parents’ door but they don’t go inside. If a kid isn’t ready they don’t get picked up. Sadly many don’t make it to school and what’s more, some are not even enrolled. “No jobs, why do they need mainstream education?” is a common attitude, our contact says.
Mrs Kunoth-Monks mentioned the support of The Jack Thompson Foundation. What they are doing is well documented on their web site.
One has to assume the program is as successful as reported. If we drove by today, how many local people would be working on these activities? Would it be just white staff or volunteers on the job?
Batchelor Institute and Charles Darwin University are just two RTOs providing courses to locals. Clinic staff coordinate a free locum style service.
Extensive staff travel facilitates great access to health services for the Utopia population. People living in “absolute poverty” in many parts of the world rarely experience that same level of service.
Is the reported health success of these homelands not due in part to the amazing dedication of health staff, our source asks.
No mention of lots of this on Q&A.
LETTERS: Young gun fires at turf club; farmer at the PM
Ok we all love young guns, it’s a day for the boys and girls of Alice Springs to evolve into ladies and gentleman with our frocks and suits, but 40 dollars a ticket that’s outrageous. It wasn’t that long ago it was only 15 dollars a ticket and everyone went, now barely anyone wants to go! It’s a great day for the community to band together and socialize. When the price went from 15 to 20 dollars a ticket the number of people who went dropped. Turf club what are you doing?? The demographic “young” guns is aimed at can’t afford to spend money there, if they used most their money to get in the gate Drop the price back to 20 dollars and you will be amazed how many people come along Ashley Ogden
Alice Springs
Hot debate in council over youth curfew, public stays away
By KIERAN FINNANE
One barometer of popular support did not augur well for Alderman Eli Melky’s youth curfew motion: the public gallery at last night’s council meeting was half empty. A few people from the youth sector had turned up and Acting Commander Michael White from the NT Police was also there. But the 1000 plus signatories of the petition circulated by Alds Melky and Samih Habib Bitar, who seconded his motion, had stayed away in droves.
Perhaps its defeat had been accepted as a fait accompli. Opponents of a youth curfew, who had signed a petition organised by high school student Gavin Henderson, were also absent. Mr Henderson himself, however, had followed through and gave a short presentation in support of his views. He had gathered 393 signatures, which he saw as “great support”. But decisions, he said, should be based on the evidence, not on what is popular. He had circulated three documents to aldermen – a report by the Youth Round Table, another by the South Australian Council of Social Services, and a third by the non-government youth sector in Alice Springs.
He claimed the evidence shows that crime does not decrease with the imposition of a curfew; rather it shifts to other places. A curfew would also cause unnecessary tension between youth and police: young people would feel targeted and would be reluctant to turn to police for help.
He also pointed out that there are local organisations and services responding to young people who are on the streets at night, mentioning Tangentyere Council, Congress, and the Youth Street Outreach Services.
He called on council to “invest in young people”, to provide better support to children, youth and family services and a sustainable program of events for young people.
Ald Bitar asked him if he would feel safe to walk home from the cinema at night. He said no, his parents would pick him up; if they couldn’t, he’d find a way to get home with a friend, but he wouldn’t walk home. Ald Bitar, appalled that a young man would not feel safe to walk home at night in Alice Springs, later cited this answer in support of his argument for a curfew.
The issues were hotly debated by aldermen. Supporters of the motion – Ald Murray Stewart in addition – spoke with feeling about the protection of children; having to control juvenile crime was their other core theme. Ald Melky admitted that a blanket curfew may not be seen as fair, but said that is the case with many of the rules young people must live by. He said there was “overwhelming evidence” of crime being committed by young people but did not produce that evidence in a form convincing to his colleagues.
Referring to the number of signatures on his petition, he said that was evidence of support for a curfew, although a decision should not come down to numbers: the support was enough to bring the issue to council’s attention.
Ald Sandy Taylor, who chaired the debate, said Ald Melky had made “broad sweeping statements” about youth crime but hadn’t provided hard data. She said she had looked for hard data but hadn’t been able to find any, but had noted a “trending down in the media” in the reporting of youth crime.
Mayor Damien Ryan said he didn’t consider media stories as evidence. He was concerned that young people were being seen as a threat, rater than as “valued members” of the community. He also noted the contradiction in the curfew supporters’ opposition to blanket restrictions of alcohol, yet acceptance of a blanket measure in regard to youth. He said Ald Melky did not give credit to the work done, for instance by police, citing the results of Operation Thresher.
Police had released the results of the operation for October 1-17 yesterday. With regard to youth their release said “38 Youth Conveyances” had been conducted (presumably “conveyances” means taking young people home or to a safe place.) They had also done 75 bailee checks.
Police Superintendent Michael Murphy said: “The main problems during the school holidays are usually anti-social behaviour and property crime, which is often caused by youth roaming the streets. This inevitably leads some young people into trouble, so an operation such as this helps to prevent the problems before they occur by proactive and targeted patrolling.”
The youth justice list yesterday was extensive, with 42 matters before the magistrates court. One young person had 13 property offences to answer to and two breaches of bail. Another had three property offences and four breaches of bail.
Ald Bitar said he felt sorry for the police having to “put up with the mess” but crime was “going up”, “politicians fail us” with “bandaid measures” and “half the town has left already”.
Ald Taylor said she wouldn’t consider the government’s $15.5m investment as a bandaid measure.
Deputy Mayor Liz Martin said no-one disputes that there are gaps in services for youth and that there are core issues that need to be addressed, with some young people not safe at home. She couldn’t support a blanket curfew, which could force young people to “the outskirts” where they may be more vulnerable. Council should support programs and activities to get children off the streets.
Ald John Rawnsley criticised the wording of the motion, particularly its failure to define what a legitimate reason for being on the streets would be, and what the boundaries of the area covered would be. He said a curfew would stretch police resources too far, taking them away from their core business.
He was upset about the way supporters of the motion had framed the debate in the media, suggesting that people who don’t support a curfew accept young people being out at night and being vulnerable. He said the presence of very young people on the street shows the need to improve child protection services.
Ald Brendan Heenan thought that kids would treat a curfew as a game. He wanted to know what the “KPIs” (key performance indicators) for youth organisations are and whether they are “performing to their charter”.
He said children being on the street at night is not a children’s problem, it’s a parents’ problem: parents need on-going counselling; children who can’t fit into a normal school need specialist teachers.
Ald Jane Clark was worried that council would be seen as “belligerent” by continually writing to the NT Government asking for the same action (the Tenth Council had written twice to the NT Government on the issue, with the government declining to support a curfew). She wanted to see council “take the front foot in the area of our expertise” – programs and services. She said media reports of youth crime were “exaggerated,” and “not backed up by the evidence”.
“Well said,” responded Ald Taylor, making clear her own strongly held views despite being in the chair. She said “a lot of us” would concur with Ald Clark’s position.
Ald Stewart argued that not supporting the motion would be “another example of demographical discrimination”. Council’s passing of its public places by-laws had shown that it would not accept such discrimination, that standards would be lifted “no matter who you are”.
He also said that a curfew would help white middle class families, backing up what they are trying to do at home. He cited the example of a 15 year old girl from “a good, middle-class white family” who had run away from home and was now “in the judicial system”, whose mother “in tears” had urged him to support a curfew.
Ald Taylor said accused Ald Stewart of “targeting Aboriginal youth in town”; Ald Stewart defended himself – “I said quite the reverse”.
The temperature was rising. Mayor Ryan only just stopped an expletive leaving his lips, suggesting to Ald Bitar that “this piece of ….” (the motion) was a bandaid solution.
Ald Melky referred to his work with two young Indigenous runners, the kind of opportunity he’d like to see given to every young person in town. He said while the curfew would apply to “all colours”, it was more likely that Indigenous kids would be in the streets as this is an Indigenous place.
Ald Rawnsley accused Alds Melky and Stewart of playing “the race card”. He again returned to how “badly written” the motion was. A rule needs to have a consequence if the rule is broken, he said, and the motion did not include a consequence.
Ald Clark said it was clear that the majority of aldermen supported a “more sophisticated approach” and urged that the motion be “put to bed”.
Ald Bitar returned to the crime theme: “People are being bashed because they are walking in the street”. He disputed that crime was decreasing (as suggested by preliminary figures on recorded assaults released by the NT Government yesterday): “Someone is playing with the figures.”
Ald Stewart defended himself from Ald Rawnlsey’s comment on the race card, referring to the strong Indigenous families he mixes with and his “100%” belief in the integration of all peoples.
Ald Melky said he would not apologise for not being more sophisticated, saying he had gone out of his way to be basic. He said everyone understands what a “legitimate reason” for being on the street would be; everyone understands “adult supervision”. His final comment was to challenge his critics “to speak two languages fluently” (Ald Melky is bilingual, speaking Arabic, the language of his native Lebanon, and English).
Ald Taylor concluded the debate by quoting from a 1993 review of curfews as a means to control crime: “Those most in need of social support are those most likely to be subject to a curfew and most likely to fail its conditions”.
The vote, by show of hands, was lost, with only Alds Melky, Bitar and Stewart in favour.
Pictured above: Young opponent of a curfew, Gavin Henderson, who organised a petition against the proposal, with supporters, counsellor and independent candidate for Greatorex at the next NT election, Phil Walcott, and Alderman Sandy Taylor, chair of council’s Corporate and Community Services committee. • Alderman Eli Melky, author of the motion, in the council chamber before the meeting.
'Hunted like dogs' by Intervention
Mrs Kunoth-Monks makes a point during the show, flanked by NT Chief Minister Paul Henderson (left) and moderator Tony Jones.
COMMENT by ERWIN CHLANDA
Last night’s Q&A on the ABC was hugely useful for understanding the popular national debate about Aboriginal issues: Its perverse uselessness, to be precise.
Rosalie Kunoth-Monks (pictured) commented on the Federal Intervention, costing millions of dollars, in the wake of the chilling “Little Children are Sacred” report into abuse and neglect. Recalling the arrival of the army, police and bureaucrats in her home town of Utopia, she said governments need to have a “diplomatic relationship” with Aboriginal people and “not to come out and hunt us like dogs”.
Moderator Tony Jones did not ask for an explanation nor elaboration.
It was a notable addition to Mrs Kunoth-Monks’ vocabulary: last week she accused Australia of “ethnic cleansing”.
Was the Darwin audience outraged? No way. It applauded. Profusely.
The tweets were ecstatic:-
Rosalie Kunoth-Monks was great on #qanda last night. So honoured to hear her speak at our women’s luncheon in Melb last week.
Aboriginal Australia should be allowed to control its own destiny. Protect Aboriginal homelands – simple. Stop the NT intervention.
It’s our national shame. Tragic irony in a town called Utopia. Paternalism – white folk thinking what’s best for black folk.
Close the Gap is failing because mainstream Australia is still consumed by selfishness and greed.
I’m sorry Rosalie.
Our country flag should be half mast after Rosalie’s story.
There is something utterly compelling about Rosalie. Love you, Rosie.
White Aussies need to do what we don’t do well … shut up and listen – and pay, that Tweeter could well have added, as the nation is spending $1.7b on Aboriginal housing.
Chief Minister Paul Henderson made a point of that during the show. Did he get applause? Not much.
Mrs Kunoth-Monks made no bones why she had invited Salil Shetty, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, to Utopia: to get global publicity.
Being from India he would understand poverty, opined Mrs Kunoth-Monks.
Has she ever explored how many hundreds of millions of Indians would consider as an extravagant windfall the unearned handouts to of welfare recipients in Australia, generation after generation? Nope.
Mr Shetty, one of a long list of instant experts on Aboriginal issues, obliged, and so did much of the media which can’t seem to get enough of this stuff.
Mr Henderson said his government provided a “fantastic school, middle and senior, as good as anywhere” to Utopia, but it’s no good for kids who don’t get sent to school, every day. It’s the water and the horse story. Mrs Kunoth-Monks made no comment.
According to the listing in the Federal Government’s MySchool Utopia has a population of 900. Mrs Kunoth-Monks’ estimate was 1200.
Just 95 children were enrolled in the Utopia school in 2010, operating in several communities.
That seems to be an extraordinarily low enrollment. And of that number, only 77% attended, that’s about 75 kids using a $4m school with a budget in 2009 of $3.3m. MySchool puts 92% of the kids into the bottom quarter of socio-economic advantage (ICSEA).
The NT Department of Education and Training figures (the school is listed as Arlparra High School) are worse. Enrolment benefited from the inclusion of outstation schools: 2009 – 107; 2010 – 158, 2011 – 121. But the attendance figures are 85.4%, 70.4% and 65.9%, respectively.
All this brings us to the elephant in the studio: Self-help. Any takers?
Mrs Kunoth-Monks said her people would like to get off the welfare cycle and stand on their own two feet, but she did not give any detail on what this would take.
So let’s repeat the questions we put to Mrs Kunoth-Monks on Monday.
Utopia has had a thriving art industry for a couple of decades.
Where did all that money go? Nearby TiTree is one of The Centre’s most prospective areas for horticulture. It had and still has major vineyards and other plantations.
There is plenty of water and cheap back-loading freight to Adelaide. How many of the unemployed in Ms Kunoth-Monks’ communities have worked or are working in these enterprises, constantly hampered by having to bring in labour from interstate, whilst being surrounded by hundreds on the dole?
How many plantations have been started by Ms Kunoth-Monks and the other local elders?
How many cattle are they running in this prime beef producing area? How many of the men are continuing the proud tradition of Aboriginal stockmen – as workers on surrounding cattle stations, or in their own enterprises, on the vast stretches of land given to them under landrights?
How come Aboriginal-owned cattle stations in Ms Kunoth-Monks’ neighborhood are leased out to white pastoralists?
Where is the citrus plantation that’s been on the drawing board at Utopia for the best part of two decades? Meanwhile Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said in Alice Springs this morning the Aboriginal people want “their kids go to school and get a decent education, having jobs for local people and tackling alcohol abuse are the priority issues for them in building a stronger future.
“People believe parents should be responsible for their children’s regular attendance at school.”
Alice takes the NT lead for violent drunks but at least there are fewer of them than last year
Recorded assaults in Alice Springs are down 13.2% for the period July to September this year, relative to the same period last year.
This is better than the NT wide figure (down 9.1%) but not as good as the decreases achieved in the Top End. In Darwin the assaults dropped by 15.9%; Palmerston, 16.5%; Katherine, 19.2%.
Alice’s drop is off a very high base relative to these centres. There were 401 recorded assaults in Alice for the period last year, scarcely lower than the total for Darwin (414), a city with three times the population.
This year Darwin experienced 348 in the period, and Alice, exactly the same number.
The NT Government, releasing the preliminary data today, is linking the decreases to the introduction of the Banned Drinkers Register.
Looking at the regional breakdown of people on the register, Alice Springs towers above the rest, with a total of 208 on the register at the end of September, compared to 98 in Darwin; 63 in Palmerston; Katherine, 73.
The decreases in alcohol-related assaults are generally higher than the decreases overall: Alice Springs, 17.5%, Darwin, 20.6%, Palmerston, 23.5%. Katherine is the exception, with the decrease being lower for alcohol-related assaults: 15.8%.
Tennant Creek’s overall decrease was only 5.8%, but its alcohol-related decrease was significantly higher: 19.5%.
Nhulunbuy experienced an increase (8.7%) in assaults (alcohol-related, 5.6%).
Comment: Ethnic cleansing … what next?
COMMENT by ERWIN CHLANDA
The instant expert proffering solutions after a one-day visit has long been a figure in the debate about Aboriginal “problems”.
But Indian man Salil Shetty, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, of which one has much higher expectations, doing a double act with Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, provided a new low point last week.
Her confident, dignified demeanor and tireless advocacy, as well as her profile as the actress who played Jedda in that celebrated movie, make Ms Kunoth-Monks (at left) a sought-after spokeswoman on Aboriginal causes. Her inclusion in the panel of tomorrow’s Q&A panel on ABC TV is unsurprising.
Trouble is, what she has to say, on too many occasions doesn’t bear close scrutiny. How does she muster the impertinence of saying, quoted by AAP, that Australia is practising ethnic cleansing? While the taxpayer is forking out $1b on Aboriginal housing in the NT, as we speak, Ms Kunoth-Monks suggests her country’s treatment of Aborigines is akin to Serb forces slaying more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim boys in Srebrenica. And Mr Shetty chimes in in agreement.
The claim that “around 500 homeland communities are being left to wither as the Government starves them of essential services” is all his own work. Yes, 500. What he and Ms Kunoth-Monks trotted out was the usual tripe. Lucky for them the media run by people in the state capitals 2000 kms away can’t get enough of it. As our current report and readers’ comments show, the outstation movement is a complex issue, after years of debate still undecided, but revolving largely around this question: If a small group of people want to settle in some remote place of their own land, what extent of services – if any – should the taxpayer be providing? In every case a school? A hospital? A police station? Sealed roads?
How many of these outstations have been built, equipped, trashed and abandoned? Ms Kunoth-Monks’ home region of Utopia has had a thriving art industry for a couple of decades. Where did all that money go? Nearby TiTree is one of The Centre’s most prospective areas for horticulture. It had and still has major vineyards and other plantations. There is plenty of water and cheap backloading freight to Adelaide. How many of the unemployed in Ms Kunoth-Monks’ communities have worked or are working in these enterprises, constantly hampered by having to bring in labour from interstate, whilst being surrounded by hundreds on the dole? How many plantations have been started by Ms Kunoth-Monks and the other local elders?
How many cattle are they running in this prime beef producing area? How many of the men are continuing the proud tradition of Aboriginal stockmen – as workers on surrounding cattle stations, or in their own enterprises, on the vast stretches of land given to them under landrights? How come Aboriginal-owned cattle stations in Ms Kunoth-Monks’ neighborhood are leased out to white pastoralists? Where is the citrus plantation that’s been on the drawing board at Utopia for the best part of two decades? Let’s see what Q&A makes of all this.
Peer (Pir) Mohammed: camel entrepreneur between continents
Tall Tales but True – a series courtesy the National Road Transport Hall of Fame in Alice Springs.
Like many of the “Afghan” camel men who came to Australia Peer Mohammed (Mahomet) claims to have fought for the British Army with the Amir’s contingent during the Boer War.
Peer (at right) left a wife and children behind in Peshawar, now Pakistan, and married again in Australia. He never saw his Afghan family again.
He was originally a goldsmith and jeweler before coming to Australia where he later married Ruby Stuart, the daughter of an Englishman and an indigenous woman. Peer Mohammed worked as a camel driver and importer and is recorded as having sold camels to Baricot in Afghanistan in 1902.
In 1882 he bought a string of laden camels through the MacDonnell Ranges into the tiny settlement of Stuart (now Alice Springs). This was just a decade after the opening of the Overland Telegraph Line and he recalled the completed line of wooden poles.
After returning to India for a period he came back to Alice Springs with his camel team again in 1885 and was shocked to find that white-ants and fires had taken their toll and the poles were being replaced by iron ones.
Peer returned to India in 1905 but by 1910 was living at West Camel Camp in Broken Hill, working as a camel driver for Basha Gul.
He returned to India again and in 1911 was resolutely refused re-entry into Australia; but he came back anyway.
He then operated a small mine at Sliding Rock in the Flinders Ranges, SA, but this was not as lucrative as he’d anticipated and he turned his attention back to driving camel teams.
Once motorised transport started to make inroads into servicing the freight needs of the cattle stations throughout the outback Peer Mohammed found work carrying railway sleepers for the east-west railways before finally retiring. Peer Mohammed died in Port Augusta in 1940 and is reported to have been destitute.
His son Gul (Gool) Muhammed also worked as a cameleer. Gul married Miriam Khan from Marree and went on to become one of the last cameleers to operate in the Alice Springs area.
Gul’s son, Sallay (Saleh) married an Australian woman, Iris, and went on to form a trucking company in Central Australia with his sons John and Noor.
In 1979 Saleh (at right) delivered four racing camels to King Khalid of Saudi Arabia as a gift from the Australian Government.
CBD revitalisation: consultation not over yet
In a process that began with the Planning for the Future forum in June 2008, the (hopefully) final consultation phase has arrived: the Town Council has put on display for public comment the proposed plans, although they have already selected the projects they want to implement with the $5m allocated by the NT Government.
Says Mayor Damien Ryan: “Because much of the plans involves public places we really wanted to get the whole community’s views on this. It’s an opportunity to literally help shape Alice Springs! So if you have some constructive comments on the plans, we’re eager to hear them.”
And if the public doesn’t like what they see or proposes something quite different, what then? Back to the drawing board? That seems unlikely, so why doesn’t council simply get on with it?
The plans can be viewed at the Civic Centre or via council’s website. For full details go to the connecting @lice site.
All submissions must be made in writing, addressed to the Alice Springs Town Council – Chief Executive Officer, PO Box 1071 Alice Springs, NT 0871 by COB Friday 11 November 2011.
UPDATE: Realistically, revitalisation works could begin in Todd Mall by the middle of next year, says Town Council CEO Rex Mooney. Responses from the public to the current consultation will be considered by Council possibly at its November 28 meeting and if not, on December 12.
Council’s decision to call for further public comment is in line with its public consultation policy, says Mr Mooney. He acknowledges that there has been consultation on the proposals but says when that happened Council had not yet indicated its priorities for implementation – that is, to open the northern end of Todd Mall to traffic and to develop the ‘biodiversity corridor’ in Parsons Street. (See Mike Gillam’s creative brief for Parsons Street, this issue.)
Action for Alice apologises for ‘racist’ ads on Imparja
Well known Indigenous singer and songwriter Warren H. Williams has settled a complaint against the Action for Alice Group for a series of advertisements ran last March by accepting their apology and the removal of the advertisements from broadcast and the internet. Shine Lawyers, in a media release, say they together with Human Rights and Cyber Racism expert George Newhouse launched the complaint against the Action for Alice Group and the local television station Imparja in the Australian Human Rights Commission in March. Mr Williams’ original complaint argued the advertisements were racist as they portrayed Aboriginals as criminals. “I am pleased that the Action for Alice Group has accepted that the advertisements were offensive to ordinary Aboriginals like me,” the release quotes Mr Williams. “The outcome we have negotiated means that the Action for Alice Group and Imparja have agreed not to publish or broadcast the advertisements ever again.”
Revealing the spirit of Parsons Street
By MIKE GILLAM
Extracts from the creative brief delivered by Mr Gillam to the design team in the CBD revitalisation process. The brief is to be used as a reference document for designers, architects and artists undertaking commissioned work in the future pedestrian zone.
Alice Springs has a poor record of delivering quality design, landscaping and art in the public domain. Too often, originality and quality are compromised by a political or ‘community arts’ agenda in favour of safe / vandal proof but ultimately forgettable public art. Equally damaging are the myriad small-scale actions of bureaucrats – referred to in urban design circles as “death by a thousand cuts”. In recent months roundabouts have been filled with concrete. And clay brick pavers are extending across the CBD giving the town an unfortunate uniformity and blurring, instead of highlighting the differences between retail, civic and heritage ‘precincts’.
This failure to draw on creative skills within our community must change if urban design and public art are going to truly benefit Alice Springs and make the town distinctive and ‘competitive’. In practical terms we live in an isolated regional centre, engaged in a daily bid to encourage locals to stay, newcomers to settle and tourists to visit. 
While we flippantly bestow the phrase ‘world class’ to all manner of projects, this standard will never be achieved if governments seek to control and micro manage artists and the content of public art projects. Small town committees and politics need to be set aside in favour of peer review and expert jury panels.
I was commissioned to provide creative direction for the eastern end of Parsons Street from the ‘ancient red gum’ to the Todd River, a distance of approximately 150 metres. While the expanded (7.8m) pedestrian zone proposed for the southern side of the street is the report’s focus, I am compelled to also mention the section of Parsons Street between the red gum and Hartley Street.
To my mind these ‘mirror’ sections of Parsons Street read as a definable and balanced entity with the red gum as a natural pivot point. The western portion has better amenity overall (focused on two heritage buildings) and enjoys greater use by residents. In time this pedestrian traffic is likely to flow into the eastern end of Parsons Street as amenity improves and purpose returns to the street. 
Public art and design projects of the scale envisaged for Parsons Street provide a rare, perhaps once in a generation opportunity to define our sense of identity and place. The dramatic natural environment is regarded as the common ground that binds us all together and this is crystallised in the biodiversity corridor.
I’ve also highlighted the critical importance of distant landmarks and the availability of winter sun. Too often these public assets are only valued and recognised, when they are lost to the streetscape: casualties of ‘progress’.
AIMS
• Develop a sublime refuge that protects and highlights the fundamentals of place and builds cross-cultural respect. Seek balance in the cultural order in preference to one culture being treated as an addendum of the other.
• Provide seamless integration between ground plane, aerial and subterranean spaces expressed through water harvesting, landscaping, furniture, educational aids and artworks to support storytellers, educators and parents.
• Acknowledge and highlight the authority of the natural landscape, the imperatives of biodiversity and the custodianship of sacred sites by Arrernte people. These elements link contemporary Alice Springs with the earliest human occupation, interpretation and responses to this landscape.
• Find the essence, the history and truth of this place but don’t overwhelm and burden the site with stories that are better told elsewhere. Highlight the existence of common ground and the community’s hopes for the future.
• Reinstate the diminished sightline that extends along Parsons Street and upgrade the pedestrian link to the Todd River in the east. By extension, enhance and highlight physical connections between Todd Mall and the Todd River.
• Infuse Parsons Street with spirit, beauty and purpose so that more LOCAL people return to the area and embattled retailers have reason to be optimistic about the future. Tourists conspicuously outnumber locals in the Mall especially in the afternoons. Many street savvy locals congregate in shopping centres, making brief forays into the mall to a bank or favourite shop.
• Reinstate the primacy of the local population and its everyday recreational and commercial needs. Reduce the predominance of tourist-focused venues by careful mixing of local / visitor facilities.
• Create a gentler egalitarian space where ‘parallel communities’ are encouraged to interact and hopefully overcome their ignorance and distrust of one another but where large groups are unable to assert dominance at the exclusion of the wider community. Carefully establish firm yet permeable boundaries between diverse users and user groups which provide both security and autonomy of use and shared / collective occupation.
TWO-WAY CULTURAL ORDER
• Song-lines and sacred sites unify the physical space including the furthest limits of the 9km east-west sightline, the pivotal ancient gum tree and Lhere Mparntwe, Todd River – the town’s spiritual heart and our destination on a pedestrian walkway that guides us through examples of regional landscaping, history, art, science and design. 
• Valuable and enduring partnerships between white and black were forged along the banks of the Todd River. The river is also the backdrop to catastrophic alcohol consumption, violence and despair that touches many families, especially but not only Aboriginal.
• Management of the river at almost every level and the quality of built and engineered structures that contact or intersect with it mostly faily to reflect its iconic importance as a sacred or natural landscape.
• We should highlight the presence of mountainous features to the west. At some 3.5 kms distance a low ridge is visible and behind this feature at 9 kms a distant bluff dominates the horizon; both are associated with journeys of the Arrernte creative ancestors.
• The ancient red gum equidistant between Hartley Street and Leichhardt Terrace has bi-cultural significance. This feature provides a connection to the fringing woodlands of the Todd River. Combined with the coolibah swamp on the eastern side of the river these ‘remnant’ trees provide a visual reference to the historical footprint of the river channel and floodplains.
• Parsons Street featured prominently in the early administration history of Stuart / Alice Springs and was named in honour of J. Langdon Parsons, a former Baptist Minister and SA Government Minister controlling the NT. He was Government Resident based in Darwin from 1884-90. He became government resident at a time when an uprising of Aborigines was feared and his appointment coincides with massacres of Aboriginal people during ‘punitive expeditions’. He was greatly affected by the brutality of this conflict and changes in his thinking are reflected in his advocacy, albeit unsuccessful, for the establishment of reserves for Aboriginal people and fair payment and conditions for Aborigines in employment.
• The Wallis Fogarty Store on the south-west corner of the mall was built in 1939 and has been nominated for heritage listing. Much of the original building frontage remains intact beneath the more recent sheet metal facade.
• The YHA Hostel located at the heritage-listed Pioneer Walk-in Theatre is a critical feature of the eastern end of Parsons Street. This location provides opportunities for projection onto surfaces in the street and originating from the old walk-in theatre. While the adjacent lane creates a problematic vehicle cross-over within the pedestrian zone, the lane-way walls could be readily modified for exhibition surfaces. Improvements in amenity such as shade and seating would entice backpackers into the public domain.
PUBLIC ART & DESIGN COMMISSIONS
• We need to find the key points of difference and integrity that will allow Alice Springs to shine nationally despite our small population and therefore, modest budgets.
• This is an opportunity to showcase our ingenuity, originality and resourcefulness, remembering that Parsons Street is a public space. From all artists and trades we need a generosity of spirit to help us illuminate the special qualities of the street and raise the morale of our community.
• Our collective sense of identity must prevail over artistic self-indulgence. We don’t need to be populist or banal but we must strike a chord with Alice Springs residents. Social development and bi-cultural collaboration are key issues. • Less is more. The first stage must establish a strong sense of identity while laying down quality foundations for the future growth of the site. Crucial elements should be delivered early and high standards maintained throughout.
• Projects should exhibit elegant design with a hint of frontier vernacular, combining whimsy, form and function, drawing upon some of our strengths as a creative community. Alice Springs sculptors and builders are especially accomplished in their under-stated use of recycled materials. We must avoid outback clichés and ‘moozeum’ humour.
• Within the constraints of public liability and engineering standards, off the shelf solutions to seating and street furniture must be avoided or at the very least, tempered, adapted or subverted to reflect regional design.
• As a rule of thumb we should avoid expensive materials and processes that are not practiced here. For instance, the large-scale use of bronze, a hallmark of public art and prosperity in major cities, represents an insufficient cost benefit to both the struggling arts sector and the impoverished public domain of Alice Springs. Alternatively, funding assistance to provide establishment of basic facilities for large-scale bronze or aluminium casting in Alice Springs could form part of future commissions on offer.
SOCIETY
Our primary audience is the local community. In the process of creating a beautiful, innovative and reflective public space we expect to project a strong regional identity that will attract and intrigue tourists. Increasingly, tourists are wary of contrived attractions, overtly presented for their consumption.
• We will reach people through their children, remembering that children need to be nurtured, encouraged and protected. Like adults they also need beauty and hope.
• This public thoroughfare will need to address day/night activity cycles, a multi-layered space for differing levels of use. For example, there could be a family recreation/early childhood discovery path, a street frontage for backpackers staying at the YHA, a thoroughfare to the river, access for police and security services at night.
• We can create social activity nodes with carefully designed and configured street furniture to support diverse social networking needs, future business potential and public safety within the street.
• Deteriorating amenity in the Mall and surrounds has contributed to anti social behaviour and long periods of vacancy for commercial properties. Through improved public amenity and re-opening of the northern end of the Mall to traffic, we will take the first steps to reverse the current trend of dwindling patronage, failing businesses and plummeting morale amongst Todd Mall and Parsons Street property owners and traders.
SCOPE OF THE BIODIVERSITY CORRIDOR (not in any particular order)
• Landscaping elements inspired by desert rivers and arid zone design, eg grouped ‘dancing’ trees – river red gums and some coolibahs – connected by a ragged line of trees, becoming the dominant sculptural forms in the pedestrian zone. Some formal street tree planting, particularly along the ANZ car-park edge (widely spaced river red gums) and on the south-east corner of Parsons St, would help to frame the street and reinforce the sightline.
• Riparian (riverside) plants selected for biological and cultural values. • Landscaping and design features to attract birds and butterflies, eg water points and ‘perching’ trees. For several months butterflies and moths ‘activate’ Capparis spinosa (native passionfruit). Hawk-moths are drawn to the spectacular white flowers that open at night and after sunrise the moths are replaced by clouds of butterflies. • Landscaping and design to highlight day / night cycles. For example, LED street lights could be used to project stencil shapes onto surfaces and create soft amenity lighting for walkways at night.
• Wind generator/sculpture and revolving information tower, which could be designed as an object of ‘exploration and play’.
• Light beam from setting sun passed through a simple prism to split wave-lengths (the last rays of light during mid winter bathe Parsons Street in spectacular light and spotlight red gums on the banks of the Todd River). • Early childhood discovery path, exploratory devices (old lenses and telescopes dismantled and reconfigured), cryptic and kinetic sculptures (avoiding literal representations of animals, powered by solar panels placed on a nearby verandah).
• Pavement treatment should be expressed simply through the use of widely spaced expansion joints to convey a bold abstract design.
• A covered walkway could use semi-transparent sheeting such as blue danpalon to ‘pull down’ the sky and provide a perfect ‘backdrop’ for textured organic elements set above and below.
• Sculptural fissure and water feature uniting elements of the pedestrian walkway – a narrow thread carrying the memories of this place, taking us from the ancient red gum on a walk of discovery to the river.
• Water could be integrated with soundscape media that could carry spoken language, incorporating water and water life-forms as part of a bi-lingual Arrernte-English alphabet.
• Projection surfaces could be created when new shade structures are designed. Limited potential exists on various building frontages and in the lane-way behind YHA, where potential outdoor gallery walls exist on both sides.
• Examples of historical and contemporary literature are another option that would work well as a ‘side-bar’ in this lane-way. Every feature from the pavement to sub-surface drains and overhead cables, every piece of nondescript infrastructure should be re-imagined and re-assembled to showcase arid zone innovation, elegance and beauty. Artistic and design briefs should maximize opportunities for designers and arts practitioners who live and reside in central Australia. This must be balanced by rigorous peer review and may also require pairing local artists with highly experienced ‘outsiders’ who can help with the development of ideas and artistic practice. Water harvesting would evoke and connect the visual, sensory, cultural, creative and scientific dimensions of this public space. Existing buildings and the covered walkway would be connected by a system of roof gutters. Storm-water would be captured, stored, filtered and then used for display and irrigating gardens. Substantial storm-water drains run underneath Parsons Street to the river and present obvious opportunities for this project.
THE PAVEMENT CRACK AS SYMBOL AND METAPHOR
A vision for the Parsons Street water feature 
Based on moulds taken from pavement cracks and dramatically up-scaled to form a simple linear sculpture and water feature, the proposed ‘fracture’ reads as a subtle uplift that changes and alternates in response to unseen forces. Opposing sides of the pavement are occasionally level but more often adopt a contrasting and alternating high-low position. Connecting some 40 metres of walkway elements, this narrow fracture line contracts and expands from a minimum diameter of just 12 mm to a maximum of 100mm.
Water emerges from a single source and enters the fracture, travelling down-slope through a series of small basins before disappearing and returning via a submersible pump to the starting point. At times the tendril of water is pumped to gain height and occasionally it disappears altogether and reappears further ‘down-stream’. A broad independent ‘channel’ hidden below the surface of the ground plane carries the flow of water that is visible through the narrow concrete fracture, not contained by it.
This subsurface channel would incorporate various major shifts in direction and be sufficiently deep and wide to ‘overlap’ the degrees of movement required by the pavement fracture directly above. This sculpture and water feature should not be branded with a single message but rather it will be up to those who use this place to decide what it means to them.
Over time different interpretations will be applied to this space. It may be helpful however to list some that occurred to me:-
• connection of the ground plane to an implied presence and force beneath the street;
• a human vein or viewed from the air, the arterial course of a desert river cutting across lowland plains;
• a dynamic rift in racial and community relationships that will ebb and flow over time. The fracture charts these possibilities. At times the two sides separate widely but occasionally they meet on level ground and the crack disappears for a while.
• the pulse of tears (a mixture of joy or sadness) coursing across a weathered landscape;
• in the manner of desert springs and seepages the fissure carries water through bare rock, delivering the constant moisture needed to sustain rare relict plants that provide a link with our pre-historical past.
• finally, the fissure celebrates the humble pavement crack, so often viewed as a failure of design; indicator of an invasive tree root, uplift, subsidence and fatigue; a feature that is more powerful and intriguing to small children (remember, jumping over the cracks) than adults. This simple, glistening, moving feature would unify the special features of the site and guide people along the biodiversity pathway and bi-lingual soundscape.
The fracture should not be presented with too much decoration or even a hint of contrivance. Hopefully it will evoke a mix of familiarity, intrigue and uncertainty among locals and visitors alike and some people may even believe it is a badly damaged pavement in need of repair. But it should not be gilt edged and architecturally transported beyond the humble under-stated character and form of a gigantic, zigzagging, rising and falling, pavement crack.
The fracture should be further accentuated with ‘sculptural’ plantings, primarily sedges and other fringing vegetation that allow close inspection of the fissure while preventing people from tripping over it. These linear plantings contained within a permeable substrate bed also act as eyelashes and catch some of the pavement dust and detritus that would otherwise enter the body of flowing water. Intermittent grates will provide regular pedestrian cross-overs and occasionally the fracture, water feature and fringe plantings will completely disappear from view returning the footpath to a normal walking surface.
The use of gradient, basins, shade and reduced surface evaporation will assist water conservation, minimize algal growth, optimize bird drinking points and ensure that the system is largely self cleaning. Deposits of sediment and leaves can be directed to basin features and mesh screens for ease of cleaning. As a linear and intermittent feature, the fracture could incorporate a diversity of artistic responses as opposed to a rigorously recurring ‘style’. The source point/s of water entering the fracture, basin features and the ‘end point’ of the water feature provide discreet opportunities for individual creative commissions. A section between the final two basins could be designed to incorporate children’s play features, for example, allowing them to float twigs down the stream.
Mr Gillam acknowledges custodian Doris Stuart for her support, encouragement and guidance.
Pictured: From top – •Native passion fruit (arrutnenge), fruiting stem and unopened flower – inspiration for contemporary lighting. • Night-flowering native passion fruit. • Magpie Lark (Teye-teye, Rteye-rteye – Eastern and Central Arrernte). These birds are frequent visitors at outdoor cafes around town. • Chrysalis of the caper white butterfly (irrarle), inspiration for LED lighting and decorative lantern building. • The humble pavement crack – magical to children who intuit its metaphoric potential – could be upscaled to form a water feature along the biodiversity corridor. •Parsons Street sightline, west-northwest (295 deg), with penetrating mid-winter setting sun. In the distance a mountain at 9km and mid-range feature at 3.5 km. These natural landmarks are associated with highly significant Arrernte song-lines and sacred sites. This critical sightline should be extended and reinstated east-southeast to the banks of Lhere Mparntwe, the Todd River. All photographs copyright MIKE GILLAM.
Amnesty rhetoric fails to show the way forward for homelands
ABOVE: Lenny Jones, 73, and Albert Bailey, 79, Chairperson of Urapuntja Health both from Soapy Bore, speak with Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty. Photo courtesy Amnesty International.
By KIERAN FINNANE
The one-day visit last Saturday by Secretary General of Amnesty International, Salil Shetty, to the Utopia homelands generated the usual round of headlines: conditions are “devastating”, comparable to those in the “Third World”, policies amount to “ethnic cleansing” (this last from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Utopia resident and Barkly Shire President).
What the so-called “fact finding mission” did not do was shed any light on the challenges facing governments and Aboriginal people about the future of the homelands at Utopia and elsewhere.
This was done incisively by the outgoing Northern Territory Coordinator General for Remote Services, Bob Beadman (at right), in his final report in May of this year. His few pages of analysis provide far more insight into the situation than all of Amnesty’s rhetoric, either in Mr Shetty’s pronouncements or Amnesty’s report, The Land Holds Us, released in August. Mr Beadman also recommends some immediate (catch-up) steps for governments to take. There’s no sign of the Northern Territory Government doing so.
Minister for Indigenous Development Malarndirri McCarthy declined to answer the questions put to her by the Alice Springs News (see below). Amnesty also declined to be interviewed by the Alice Springs News.
Mr Shetty claims in a release: “Despite 20 years of research which provides evidence of the benefits of living on traditional homelands, around 500 homeland communities are being left to wither as the Government starves them of essential services.”
We would have liked to ask Mr Shetty where these 500 communities are, how many had been vacated because residents chose live elsewhere, and does he expect the taxpayer to provide full services to deserted outstations?
Mr Beadman starts his analysis with a re-cap of the Australian Government’s policy guidelines when the homelands (or outstations) movement gained momentum in the early 1970s. The movement was encouraged because of expected benefits in health and harmony, but people needed to clearly understand, through detailed consultation, that “they would be leaving behind a range of services and facilities, most of which could not be replicated on a small homeland”.
Only basic facilities would be provided – access via road, airstrip or barge landing, water supply (in Central Australia comprising a bore, windmill and tank-stand), and basic shelters – “certainly not conventional housing”. “Avoidance of recurrent costs was the overriding objective,” says Mr Beadman.
This clarity was eroded over time. When the NT was granted self-government, the Australian Government retained responsibility for homelands. However, responsibility for essential services (water, power, sewerage, roads, airstrips, and barge landings) did transfer to the new NT Government – “leading to endless disputes about the status of a settlement”.
For example, asks Mr Beadman: “At what point does a rapidly growing homeland become a community? At various times we have had ‘homelands’ of many hundreds of people, yet, when it suited, a group of 120 people incorporated as a Community Government Council. Arlparra [in the Utopia homelands] today is a good example of such a transition from a resource centre to a town.”
Housing responsibility was transferred to the Aboriginal Development Commission in 1980, leading to more confusion and some conventional houses being built on homelands without power or water. This happened before it was clear to governments that people choosing to decentralise fully understood that they “would not be followed by government support with a full range of facilities,” says Mr Beadman.
He comments: “It amazes me even today that some people, mainly non-Aborigines, seem to think that the capacity of governments to replicate a full set of town facilities for every small pocket of population scattered far and wide through the bush, is limitless.” This is an apt description of Amnesty’s calls, which are un-costed, despite their years of ‘research’, and are framed in terms of the Australian Government needing to put in place a “comprehensive plan in place to ensure the sustainability of Aboriginal culture” – nothing less!
In 1990 ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) took over the functions of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal Development Commission. In 1996 it commenced a review of the homelands program, with the premise that there would be no funding for new homelands, and no new housing on existing homelands.
Somehow the review was never completed and the football was kicked back to the Federal department in 2005 when ATSIC was abolished. When responsibilities for homelands were transferred to the NT Government in July 2008, the review was still stalled.
Says Mr Beadman: “With the fragmentation of responsibilities came a relaxation of the original policy guidelines. Conventional houses, power supplies and recurrent costs crept in, distorting the differences between homelands and the bigger communities.”
The situation today is full of irony, says Mr Beadman: “If the Australian Government had transferred responsibility for municipal and essential services to the newly established Northern Territory Government in 1978, the annual cost of the program would have been factored into the baseline funding allocation to the new government and flowed, duly indexed, forever after.”
Instead, with the transfer of responsibility in 2008 came a limited funding package for three years, now extended to June 30, 2012. Mr Beadman says it was expected that this money ($20m p.a.) would be added to the local government reform pool, but the NT Government decided to maintain existing arrangements pending a review – the review that ATSIC had started in 1996, that has never been concluded.
“Arrangements were still frozen in a time warp.”
He had mentioned the review in his first report as Coordinator-General in November 2009 and had been advised it would be concluded by the end of that month.
He even attached to that report the list of consultations with homelands residents that had already taken place: as well as numerous locations in the Top End, 55 outstations and homelands in the Barkly Shire had been visited, including around Utopia; another 52 in the Central Desert Shire; and in MacDonnell Shire 143 had been visited.
“My understanding was that the review would identify once and for all which homelands are occupied (and which abandoned), how many people live there, how far out they are, access difficulties, proportion of the year they are occupied, details of all facilities at each place, and so on. “Then you could make rational decisions about how to put available funding to best effect. Residents were to be given choice about service providers, funding allocations would be transparent. You could also make rational decisions about regional transport.”
Transport could deliver (and return) populations scattered across homelands to the Growth Towns where there would be significant public facilities providing goods and services. Supporting homelands in this way could help relieve pressure on Growth Towns.
“The draft Outstations / Homelands Policy led people to believe that the government would work with each and every outstation and homeland settlement to prepare a Statement of Expectation of Service Delivery; provide transparency and choice in relation to their modest recurrent funding and service delivery options; and provide assistance for residents to move towards self-sufficiency.
It does not appear that this has occurred.” Mr Beadman describes the policy dilemma facing governments and Indigenous peoples as “terrible” . The question of whether homelands are viable has been dodged for 30 years, he says, “probably because of all the ethical and moral issues it throws up,” issues like these:
• Should government actually support the removal of kids from school when we know how essential education is, or the movement of adults away from the only prospects of a job?
• Can Indigenous people really expect the Australian taxpayer to support them for life?
• How many people have moved from welfare dependency to independence as a consequence of moving to a homeland?
• Are homelands self-sustainable without external support?
• Should governments continue to fund fixed improvements like housing on privately owned Aboriginal land? It doesn’t build things on a cattle station, for example.
• If not, is it really the intention of governments to pressure newly formed young families to move from homelands to Growth Towns with the lure of new housing?
• The failure to do the intensive work with outstations on self-sufficiency may not be the fault of the public servants alone. As mentioned, almost two years into Working Future we have not seen the Homelands / Outstations Policy finalised by the Northern Territory Government. Further, self-sufficiency and economic development will almost certainly require long-term, tradeable land tenure for residents and this appears beyond the policy mindsets of the Land Councils.
• There are dramatic financial crises looming too. CDEP is scheduled to wind up early in 2012 and the $20 million in Commonwealth funding for municipal services to homelands / outstations will cease in June 2012. It is likely that a number of Resource Centres will struggle to survive.
• The consequences could well be that people will vote with their feet, and the movement of people to Growth Towns, and the main towns on the bitumen, will accelerate, placing all of them under enormous pressure. If that happens, the social consequences will likely be tragic. Glimpses of such a future have been evident in all towns over the recent severe climatic period.
• The consequences will be tragic for the migratory Aboriginal people, AND the permanent residences of the towns. The original ATSIC rule of no new housing on Homelands has been reinforced by other government decisions to not provide new public housing unless the government can control the asset through having title to the land on which the house sits. Mr Beadman says he is unaware of any effort regarding leasing of housing precincts on homelands, where in any case it may face stronger resistance on the part of residents and Land Councils than it has in the Growth Towns. So, he concludes, “we have this set of policy teasers”:
• Nowhere else in Australia can a citizen reasonably expect the government to build a house for them on privately owned land.
• Yet in the past the government has done just that on homelands (indeed all Aboriginal Land) right throughout the Northern Territory.
• Without new housing on homelands (whether public or private) people may move to Growth Towns where the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) is building new houses (just as people are moving into Alice Springs because of delays in rolling out the SIHIP program in Growth Towns in the Centre).
• Are governments planning to divest the investment in housing in homelands, and leave whatever repairs and maintenance requirements that arise in harsh climates to the meagre resources of the residents without a clear transition and capacity building process?
• Publicly funded community housing cooperatives were vogue once, and might be a compromise solution for homelands. The logic behind the program, that it would relieve demand on public housing, would remain the same.
• Some more vexed questions: If homelands survive, how can we ensure children are educated (noting that it would be impossible to provide schools at every outstation)?
• One regularly hears stories about the stripping of abandoned outstation assets. Are the assets on abandoned outstations recoverable? If so, by whom? Have they been secured?
• The same questions arise when considering the future of Resource Centres.
• How will the mutual obligation tests for residents in receipt of welfare benefits be structured as these measures inevitably tighten in the future?
Mr Beadman says the unintended outcome of this mix is to accelerate the urban drift: “Take Central Australia for example. No new housing on outstations. No new housing (SIHIP) yet in Growth Towns in the Centre. But close to $100 million of housing and infrastructure improvements has been provided in Alice Springs town camps, as well as a Visitors Centre, and Transitory Housing.” So, what should governments do? Mr Beadman proposes four immediate steps:
1. The Northern Territory Government concludes, and publishes the outcomes of, its review into homelands / outstations.
2. The Northern Territory and Australian Governments provide certainty about onwards funding arrangements for the thousands of residents out there.
3. That a very clear policy about new housing, repairs and maintenance of existing housing, private housing support, and potential for home ownership be announced. For example, if there is to be no more public expenditure, and no move to lease that stock, is the government washing its hands of any further responsibility for housing on homelands?
4. Examine the feasibility of extending the community housing cooperative grant scheme to homelands.
The Alice Springs News Online asked Minister McCarthy to what extent the NT Government had made progress on these recommendations. No answer.
When Working Future was announced in May, 2009, it was noted that there was no Growth Town east of the Stuart Highway in the southern region and it was said that Arlparra would be funded to support the Utopia Homelands. We asked the Minister if that has occurred. No answer. We also asked if the Minister could point to any specific improvements in the Utopia homelands since the transfer of responsibility for homelands to the NT Government. No answer.
Meanwhile a spokesperson for the Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin provided answers to questions from Alice Springs News Online.
News: Amnesty International and activist Rosalie Kunoth-Monks are saying that “around 500 homeland communities [in the NT] are being left to wither as the Government starves them of essential services” and suggesting this is tantamount to ethnic cleansing.
Response: The Australian Government respects the rights of Indigenous Australians to live on their traditional lands and acknowledges the profound connection which many Aboriginal people have with their homelands.
The Government would oppose any suggestion that people should be required to move away from their homelands into larger centres.
The Australian Government provides funding to support people who live on homelands or visit regularly through a range of programs and financial assistance.
Under the National Indigenous Reform Agreement between the Commonwealth and all States and Territories, the priority for enhanced infrastructure support and service provision is given to the places where most people live and where secure land tenure exists. This also allows for services to provide outreach to smaller surrounding communities, including homelands and for people from those communities to access those services.
The Australian Government is responding to enormous need for improved housing, services and facilities across the Northern Territory by making an unprecedented investment of $1.7 billion on housing in remote communities in the Northern Territory through the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing.
However, decades of neglect and underinvestment by successive governments have left a backlog of housing need which cannot be fixed quickly.
Because of this, housing investment is currently focussed on larger Indigenous communities where more Indigenous people live and which are faced with poor housing and overcrowding.
Response: The Northern Territory Government took on responsibility for homelands in 2007.
The Australian Government has provided $80 million for provision of basic municipal and essential services to homelands in the Northern Territory over the past four years.
In addition, the Australian Government supports people who live on homelands or visit regularly through a range of programs, supports and financial assistance.
Future funding from July next year will be discussed with the Northern Territory Government.
China is waiting – what's keeping us?
PHOTOS: Below – Art dealer Sun Kongyang from Shanghai trying a grub. Below right – Jade Yang and Mr Sun with local artists Audrey Nampitjinpa and Doreen Nakamarra on a witchetty hunting trip in The Centre organised by tourism operator Steve Strike. Middle of page – Mr Strike at a planning session in China. Above – The Finke Desert Race promoted in China to lure visitors to The Centre.
By ERWIN CHLANDA
China has more than a million ‘dollar millionaires’; their number has swelled by 31% in 2010, according to Bloomberg; they’re within eight hours’ flying time and pretty well in the same time zone as us. That’s the good news. The bad news is we don’t have much of an idea of how to turn them into customers for our ailing tourism industry. Alice photographer Steve Strike is a five year veteran of the China trade, focussing on art and special tours. He says the only way to success in China is the hard, old-fashioned way: footslogging and nurturing personal relationships. “Don’t think you can sit in front of a computer, doing modeling and crunching data, and China will come to you. “It’s not going to happen. “Forget glossy posters of Ayers Rock and the Twelve Apostles in the Shanghai subway. “That’s not a call to action. It doesn’t tell people how to get here. “Get on a bomber, fly to China, make some contacts, face to face, develop trust and familiarity, and people will come to you. “The Chinese don’t like middlemen. “It might take five days to do a deal. “It’s a very old fashioned, cultural thing. “They want to deal with the operators direct, face to face, with people they have met and have a rapport with. “The Australian practice of hiring on 12 month contracts, confronting clients with new people all the time, that just doesn’t work there. “And you’ve got to do it all yourself. No-one is going to help you.” Mr Strike has little confidence in the ability of government promoters to have much of an impact. He has an office in the southern industrial city of Guangzhou. The rent is just $150 a month. He has an English speaking assistant for $100 a week. Hong Kong is just across the strait. The nation’s commercial “heartbeat” Shanghai – population 21 million – is not far. 
It’s the “can do” corner of the world. Mr Strike will soon be taking Mayor Damien Ryan and Finke Desert Race chief Antony Yoffa to China. This will be the next step to entice Chinese visitors to the race. An advance party has already been here, this year, and next it is planned to have two professional drivers from China taking part in the race, followed by a gaggle of spectators and media. Local film maker Simon Manzie made a five minute film clip of the Chinese at the race – and of the landscape around Alice. Mr Strike says Chinese want to do stuff, rather than gawk at things. A trip to the Finke race will probably be followed by an “extreme” 4WD excursion to the West MacDonnells. Driving on rough tracks through the empty wilderness of Central Australia is a fascinating adventure for people living in frantic cities with populations of 10 million plus. Says Mr Strike: “They’ve never done anything like it. “We took them to Palm Valley, the Finke was flowing, we raced the Widowmaker track just out of town – they loved it.” In a country of 1.3 billion (on a land mass only 35% bigger than Australia) it’s not hard to get a massive audience: The Finke clip was seen by 16 million people on the sports program of the Guangdong province TV station. The Chinese 4WD club Mr Strike is in touch with has a membership of 30,000. He applies the same strategies to his efforts in the art world. Developed over years, consolidated in lots of “banquets” in private rooms of restaurants, Mr Strike’s personal relationships are now bearing fruit. He has the contacts to artists here, and his Chinese opposite knows dealers as well as private buyers: “His A-list art buyers are all extremely wealthy. 
“They would spend $1m a year on art for their personal collections.” When a small group came to this year’s Desert Mob fair, the buying was followed by a bush trip with local artists Audrey Nampitjinpa and Doreen Nakamarra digging for witchetty grubs – and, of course, the visitors eating them. “They want to meet the artists, see their country, watch them paint, go hunting, have some bush tucker.” Mr Strike says the opportunities are breathtaking. Last fiscal year 57 million Chinese nationals went on an international holiday. It will be 64m this year. Yet the obstacles to that booming trade are severe – and all of our own making. To get from China to Alice Springs is a nightmare, says Mr Strike. With Qantas having a stranglehold on the allocation of routes and apparently not considering Darwin as suitable, there are no direct flights to the NT. Mr Strike usually travels via Manila which has direct flights to a string of cities in China. Air travel in China costs a fraction compared to flights within Australia , says Mr Strike. A ticket from Guangzhou to Beijing – a three hour flight – is $80. A ticket from Darwin to Alice Springs – a one hour 55 minute flight – is $617, the dearest sector in Australia. That’s if the Qantas flights aren’t booked out, usually by NT public servants or mine workers.
Meanwhile Tourism Minister, Malarndirri McCarthy, has announced EC3 Global as the successful tender “to assist with the development of a new tourism strategic plan for the Northern Territory”.
The firm’s first task will be to “work with Tourism NT to finalise a consultation plan to incorporate an exciting range of community consultations, which are due to be launched in November … including open regional workshops in Darwin, Nhulunbuy, Katherine, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs and Yulara; small working groups with key stakeholders; an online survey and public submission process, ‘big talk’ sessions in select Indigenous communities; and an expert tourism industry panel to market test the strategy.”
The new Five Year Tourism Strategic Plan is expected to be launched in early 2013, says Ms McCarthy.
There's more to a curfew than meets the eye
PHOTO: Aldermen John Rawnsley and Samih Habib Bitar at a “get to know you” evening with street kids in early 2009. Ald Habib Bitar is the seconder for the motion to be moved by Ald Melky at Monday’s council meeting: “That the Alice Springs Town Council request that the NTG invoke an emergency curfew measure and enforce a regulation to establish stronger control on the movement of males and females aged 16 years and younger, who are found on the streets of Alice Springs CBD and surrounding residential areas and are without a legitimate reason or adult supervision during the hours of 10:30pm and 6am. These emergency measures are to begin from 1st of December 2011.
By ERWIN CHLANDA
Ald Eli Melky will move his controversial motion for a youth curfew at Monday’s town council meeting. He says it’s no big deal, not a bid to change the world, just a logical move to round off the plethora of existing youth services. He believes there are 57 of them, counting government ones and NGOs, mostly working 9 to 5.
Now watch it all unravel. Ald Melky says while it appears there are hundreds of young people about at night, it’s just “30 to 40 kids who are holding the population to ransom”.
In a conversation with the Alice Springs News Online he suggests making it unlawful for them to be on the streets after 10pm will actually keep them indoors.
Our discussion soon turns to the question: Why should this new law make any difference to those 30 to 40 kids, given that breaking the law – pretty well with impunity – is a way of life for them?
News: It’s 10.01pm and a police patrol spots a 15-year-old.
Ald Melky: They would ask her if she has a lawful excuse to be in the streets. If she says I’ve just knocked off from Macca’s and I’m waiting for mum to pick me up, then there’d be no worries.
News: Let’s call her Jenny. She doesn’t have a lawful excuse. She gives the cops the finger. She’s known to the police for fighting with her mother and smoking dope.
Ald Melky: They take her to the police station. Loitering and insulting police are illegal but regarded as a low level offence.
News: What comes next?
Ald Melky: She’s asked where she wants be be taken. Home obviously is a first choice. News: She says no to home. She’s being abused there. Her parents are drunks. It’s now 10.30pm and she has nowhere to go.
Ald Melky: Then it’s time to bring in the youth services, including the Family and Children’s Services. They have experience, funding, infrastructure, staff. News: Do they work outside 9 to 5?
Ald Melky: Some do. They will take her to the Youth Hub [at the former ANZAC school]. The NT Government set it up for $20m and it has 26 beds.
News: It’s now 11.15pm. Jenny has had a hamburger at the Hub and is ready to join her mates outside. They have plans, breaking into a couple of licensed clubs. Should she be allowed to leave the Hub?
Ald Melky: Why should she want to leave? She is safe, well looked after. She’d stay the night.
News: She’s one of the “30 to 40 kids who are holding the population to ransom,” as you describe them. There’s all that booze at the Golf Club, the Gillen Club, the Memo. And getting it is a buzz. Hide and seek with the cops. Doesn’t get much better.
Ald Melky: She’s now in the system. The system will take care of her. She’ll be referred to services. That’s what they are funded for.
News: It’s now 11.30pm and Jenny is walking out the door. Should she be held against her will?
Ald Melky: We can’t put her in a prison environment of barbed wire.
News: So out she goes?
Ald Melky: The community has a duty of care to her. We have the infrastructure. We must make it work. I told my kids many times that they must be home by 10.30pm. And my parents told me. It’s the right thing.
News: Jenny hasn’t got a clue what the right thing is.
Ald Melky: Maybe the doors of the Hub need to be locked. Maybe they need to be re-inforced.
News: So we do hold her against her will? It’s 11.45pm now and she’s heading into harm’s way.
Ald Melky: The answer isn’t gaol, capsicum spray and handcuffs.
News: She goes?
Ald Melky: Why bother picking her up at midnight if we let her go now? The government is responsible. They have to go all the way, perhaps to adoption. Maybe the Hub needs to become her home – until she’s processed.
News: Against her will?
Ald Melky: The community must look after that child. And it’s against my will to be broken into.
Editor’s Notes:
Google in our archive our reports about a “youth curfew” dating back to 2003.
We do not think Ald Melky’s statement that the NT Government has spent $20m on the Youth Hub is correct – go to the NTG site. The Hub is not a safe house and does not have beds.
Alice Springs News Online put the following questions to the Department of Children and Families. We note they side-stepped most of our questions.
[1] Does the government have a position about [a youth curfew], one way or the other?
[2] We’re quoting an alderman suggesting that there are 30 to 40 children who are the main problem because they are committing crimes and are not under any competent care, supervision and control. Is that a fair assessment?
[3] How many kids are there in town not receiving proper care, supervision and control?
[4] What are the facilities in town at the moment for these kids (in 3 & 4) in terms of accommodation (numbers of beds, kids in foster arrangements, etc)? [5] Is a new 30 bed facility planned for the CDU campus?
[6] Is there a case for involuntary confinement of problem kids other than the police and court system?
[7] If so, how would it work? Are there any existing or planned facilities for this? [8] For example, when children are taken to safe houses can they be kept there against their will?
[9] At what age can children decline to be taken to a safe house?
[10] Is it the department’s experience that children or young people ever decline to be taken to a safe house?
[11] If so, how is this dealt with?
We got the following answers:
The Department of Children and Families (DCF) continues to work with other agencies and the Alice Springs Community Action Plan Group to support young people and provides a range of initiatives to address youth antisocial behaviour.
These initiatives include the establishment of the Alice Springs Youth Hub at the former ANZAC Hill school, extending and increasing operation hours of the Youth Street Outreach Service which now operates seven nights a week from 6pm to 3am and co-ordinating the Alice Springs School Holiday Activities Calendar.
As part of the Alice Springs Youth Action Plan the number of emergency accommodation places has increased with more than 20 extra beds provided by Anglicare and Tangentyere and DCF. DCF has provided $1.5 million for three Safe Houses in Alice Springs to ensure additional beds are available for children and young people at risk.
If initial efforts to engage a young person are not successful then formal care arrangements with DCF is an option.
On the road again
Outback roads and roadhouses have cast their spell on the alt-country rock band, Rustflower. After their Outback tour in 2008, they are taking the music “further and wider” with a “Big Country” tour – 13 gigs, 18 days, 4000 kms. Playing their own brand of infectious Aussie country rock, Rustflower tell the stories of the characters and land, mixing them with the rhythm of the road. They’re always open to a “guest” vocalist or tambourine player, creating an atmosphere where everyone is part of the night. They’re in the Alice area this week, performing at Ti Tree on Thursday, October 13, and then at the Glen Helen Resort on Friday, supported by Alice muso, Barry Skipsey – under the stars in the venue provided by nature. Rustflower’s Big Country Tour is supported by the Australian Government’s Contemporary Music Touring Program.
The A'vans are coming!
The A’vans are coming! Relax, they aren’t aliens.
They are members of the A’van Club of Australia which will be holding its AGM in The Alice in April next year. About 400 people towing 200 of the cute caravans (pictured) are expected, according to Ald Brendan Heenan.
Then in May the Honda Goldwing motorcycles club will descend in The Alice. A huge gathering – 5000 to 7000 people – will take place here in 2014 when the Ulysses Club for mature-aged bikers comes to town, says Ald Heenan.
Land Council boss joins Country Liberals
By ERWIN CHLANDA
Country Liberals in Alice Springs have accepted the application for membership by Central Land Council chairman Lindsay Bookie (pictured). Branch president David Koch says it is now being processed by the party’s secretariat. Mr Bookie’s surprise move – as the head of an organization usually thought to be close to Labor – comes in the wake of Alison Anderson’s joining the party.
The Member for MacDonnell, a former Labor pollie, was sitting as an independent prior to joining the CL.
Mr Bookie declined to comment.
Mr Koch says several other local Aborigines have joined the party or applied for membership. He says he’s known Mr Bookie for several years in connection with the Aboriginal leader’s successful tourism enterprise near Jervois, north-east of Alice Springs. Mr Koch – initially – and 4WD identity Jol Fleming have been running adventure tours in connection with Mr Bookie. Mr Koch says Mr Bookie has a strong view that Aboriginal people should be free to use their country for commercial enterprises of their choice.
Mr Bookie drew enthusiastic applause when he addressed a public meeting earlier this year discussing measures to curb anti-social behavior in Alice Springs.
Early start to summer crime spree?
The summer of crime is hitting businesses and residents already, and it’s only the first week of October, says Member for Braitling Adam Giles (pictured).
But police say Operation Thresher, a special initiative now in its second week and targeting anti-social behaviour and property crime over the school holidays, involves 32 police officers “dedicated to high profile and covert patrols of known hot spots in the town”.
Says Mr Giles: “Last night there were three break-ins of Alice Springs businesses, and during the day two homes were also ransacked. “Knowing one family who were the victims of a break in this week, I share their frustration and outrage about a decline in public order and personal responsibility that has swept Alice Springs due to the ineffective policies of the Henderson Labor Government.
“Relying on the police to mop up after the crimes have happened is not an acceptable response.
“Cleaning up and patching up seem to be the norm, yet what is needed is attacking the problems at the source and that starts with dealing strongly with the kids that are creating this chaos.
“Do parents not know where their kids are late at night – or do they just not care?”
Police say Operation Thresher “involves members from the Property Crime Reduction Unit, General Duties, Intelligence Unit, Dog Operations Unit, Mounted Unit and forensics crews.
“We are also liaising with other Government and non-Government agencies that engage with youth to ensure young people are monitored and provided with support services if required.”
Alice, working its power
On a crisp and beautifully serene late Febuary morning in 1988 a young couple ventured up a rocky climb on the outskirts of town. While both were fit, healthy and familiar with the land, theirs was a particular challenge, given that one was 36 weeks pregnant.
She was my mother on her way to the very top of the MacDonnell Ranges, on the eastern side of Emily Gap. Knowing that I was not far away, both she and my father wanted to fasten an image to my birth. That they certainly did! Within a few hours of reaching the peak my mother went into labour with your honest author.
Emily Gap for Arrernte people is the caterpillar increase place, and it is said that ayepe-arenye, the caterpillar, as with all Dreaming, “works its power whether you are aware of it or not” (I’m quoting my dad, Rod Moss, 2010). My parents were only told of Emily Gap’s connection to fertility after I was wrapped snugly in their arms, blissfully unaware of their purposeful symbology.
Personally, I like to think that the old caterpillar was calling me to her. Regardless of the larger forces at work, however, I have always felt that my soul is linked to the country around The Alice.
I remember going on beach holidays with my family, where most nights I would dream I was still in the desert. I would wake up disappointed when I realised I was not.
This is not to say that I didn’t love the ocean and waves. I frolicked freely in the blue with all the others. Still, when my mind was turned low and allowed to wander, a strong passion for my red home would take over.
Some of my first memories, as for many others who have grown up in this town, I’m sure, include watching the moon soar above the horizon on a full-lit night while sitting on the back of my mum’s bike, riding along the Larapinta Trail to Simpsons Gap. Or making slime and mud cakes at John Hayes Rockhole, shaded from the sun by that big gum that spreads like a bench over the top pool. That branch is perfect for jumping like a frog into the cool depths.
Another milestone, my first favourite café – Bar Doppio for me as a kid was like Mecca. Never had I had such thick chocolate cake, or baby-cinos!
In 2011 there are still so many of the old and now newer quirky places that for an adult provide enriching entertainment. For example, Cam’s Coffee Shop, next to Central Clini – the antics displayed there are always killer funny. From this one example to another on a totally different spectrum – the choir that has been performing out of doors, at Trephina, then Ormiston, during the annual festival – I feel like only Alice could pull it off.
Many opportunities have sprung from this place for me. Things like working for the ABC at 16, access to substantial grants, support and a mass volume of platforms are what make Alice unique compared to a metropolitan setting. It seems like most other towns of this size rarely have the chance to realise their potential.
So a few months ago, when I decided to move back to Melbourne, very few people, including myself, saw it coming. Surprisingly though, this was not a hard decision. Part of what has made it as easy as it is was the full realisation that Alice will always be here.
Some things change – Bar Doppio is now a trendy little place called Page 27. However, even with the aging of stones into sand and as the plants will eventually decay, I believe the force behind those significant places is perpetual.
Alice has a lot of heart. It is the centre after all. I’m glad that I’ll always know where it is, that it is safely tucked away far from the rest of Australia. But for now I’m excited to see what the other parts of the body entail.
So this will be my last blog for the Alice Springs News. Thank you to everyone who has followed my pieces and shared the journey with me. I am now sitting in my terrace house next to the train line in North Melbourne, thinking about what I’ll see when I step out onto Spencer Street, or wander to Flagstaff Gardens. It is all so new and enthralling! This city is a fresh canvas just waiting to be painted by my thought. If you would like to keep reading them, I will be writing a blog from next Thursday. Until then, have a wonderful week!
Pictured: That’s me getting a big cuddle from Denis Neil. His family’s friendship with my family is part of what will always keep me connected to Alice.
Will Alice Plaza businesses turn around?
By KIERAN FINNANE
Owners of the Alice Plaza would welcome the re-introduction of traffic to the northern end of Todd Mall. Their representative, Tony Bruno, says they have always believed that the mall was too long and that traffic and some convenient, short-term parking would help bring life back to the northern end.
If that were to happen, would the Plaza consider re-orienting its business towards the street?
“Anything’s possible,” says Mr Bruno. “If the landscape changes that could be looked at.”
Would it be possible to re-orient the food court to that side of the Plaza and introduce some outdoor eating options?
“Possibly”, says Mr Bruno, but due to the high infrastructure costs involved there would have to be “significant demand” for that to occur.
The former newsagency in the Plaza is now vacant. If someone proposed a cafe for that tenancy, could that be approved?
Mr Bruno says owners would consider all proposals but they would prefer something new and different to existing offerings at the Plaza.
Individual tenants could take the decision to open onto the street. Bev Ellis, who owns the Dymocks bookstore in the Plaza, says all the tenancies originally opened onto the mall, as well as internally. When she ran the bookstore in conjunction with the newsagency next door, she blocked off the newsagency’s door onto the mall because of security: more stock was going through that door, unpaid for, than was coming through the front register.
A few years ago she looked at putting in an entrance from the bookshop onto the mall, as the original one is not in a good position. This would have allowed her open when the Plaza was closed. However, the cost, then about $8000, to take out windows, rearrange shelving and so on was exorbitant: “I would have had to sell an awful lot of books to recoup that.”
Ms Ellis disagrees that the northern mall is “dead”, pointing to the “very active little restaurant” across the way, the Mixed Lollies boutique, the Todd Tavern’s al fresco area. The markets also transform the area and she stays open to trade on market days.
She has “no problem” with the re-introduction of traffic although doesn’t go so far as to welcome it.
Chris Neck, owner of Musicworld, says his business faces inwards because of the “continually unpleasant atmosphere” in the mall. The shop traded through two entrances, one external, one internal, for about seven years, and during that time had a dozen windows and doors broken, costing over $2000 to repair each time. The breakages were accompanied by theft and other damage. Once the windows were painted and covered in advertising, so that passers-by can’t see into the shop from outside, the breakages stopped.
If the area were livelier and safer, would it entice him to consider opening onto the street?
“Possibly,” he says, but “it’s not on the agenda at the present time. Let’s see what improvements are made first.”
His office looks onto the mall: he says it goes through periods, good and bad, although in summer, the problems are “constant”. He sees very few shoppers walking through the area, “largely because of anti-social behaviour”, and observes that there’s not much retail at that end of the mall. He says traffic activity would be “a big encouragement” for more retail focus. He “emphatically” expressed the need to open the mall to traffic when he was consulted on the issue 12 to 15 months ago.
“Malls were a fad of the early ’80s and most have been returned to full or part vehicular traffic because they simply didn’t work,” says Mr Neck.
UPDATE, posted October 7, 2011, 9.40am: Steve Thorne, of Design Urban Pty Ltd, who headed up the design team behind the proposals for revitalising Todd Mall, is “hugely encouraged” by the responses of Alice Plaza interests. “Unless there is a response from retailers and other businesses adjacent to the mall, it is not worth spending millions on bringing traffic back in.” Revitalisation can’t be done “half-heartedly”, he says. “There’s got to be a dramatic change in the environment. The mall has suffered ‘death by 1000 cuts’, through a lack of transparency, activity, vibrancy. “Without those things then what you get is the anti-social behaviour that people don’t want.”
While Mr Thorne’s role in the CBD project has finished for the time being, he has been engaged by the NT Government to chair its Urban Design Advisory Panel and will be keeping a watching brief on what happens in Alice.
Pictured: Top – Musicworld with its back turned to Todd Mall. At right – Could this lively frontage, inside the shopping centre, face the Mall? Below – When the Neck family business opened in October 1988 it opened onto the mall. Photo courtesy Chris Neck.
Sally Thomas new NT administrator
Former Supreme Court judge, Sally Thomas AM, has been appointed as the new administrator of the Northern Territory. She is the first woman to hold the role.
The NT Government nominated Ms Thomas for the position, and she was accordingly appointed by Governor-General Quentin Bryce today.
Ms Thomas replaces outgoing Administrator Mr Tom Pauling, who has served in the role since 2007.
Ms Thomas served on the bench at the Supreme Court from 1992 to 2009 and recently also served as Chancellor to Charles Darwin University.
Tourism slump a wake-up call for operators
Photo above: Local woman Doreen Nakamarra is hunting for witchetty grubs with tourist Jade Yang, from Shanghai. She was in a group with prominent Chinese art dealer, Sun Kongyang, in The Centre recently for the Desert Mob art fair, and hosted by tourism operator Steve Strike. Photo below: Brendan Heenan’s pancakes are a charming value-add as powered sites alone are no longer enough for tourists on the road.
By ERWIN CHLANDA
The tourism industry in Alice Springs has had two sharp consecutive drops in annual earnings. The total spend by visitors dropped 16% from $300m in calendar year 2009 to $252m in 2010, and 26% from $360m in financial year 2010 to $265m in 2011, according to figures from the Territory Government’s Tourism NT. The amounts are not adjusted for inflation. There was a sharp drop in visitor nights and a small rise in the spend per visitor (see graph).
The industry has been flat since at least 2004 with small peaks in 2006 and 2009. One major hotel says it sold 13,356 room nights since January, down from 14,552 for the same period last year and well below a five year average of of 15,241.
This equates to an occupancy rate for the current year of just 35%. A prominent tour company had 11,250 passengers this season, down from 12,150 last season, but well up on that company’s five year average of 9776. All other operators we contacted were tight-lipped.
The conventions business is also poor this year: there were just 23 events. The average number of people attending was around 80 (the capacity of the Convention Centre is 500), and the average length was 2.3 days. Peter Grigg, the CEO of the industry lobby Tourism Central Australia (TCA), says The Alice needs to come up with a brand new story for why people should visit. Some operators are failing to adjust to market needs and may not be offering what today’s tourist wants: “The product hasn’t changed and now is the perfect opportunity to critically look at what is being delivered and renew, refresh and re-invigorate to continue to capture a tourists imagination and dollar,” says Mr Grigg.
“The traveller today is more active, even retirees. “They are fitter, better researched, have more money. “They don’t want to sit on a bus and be shown a destination.
“They want to walk, feel, smell the place, get involved,” says Mr Grigg.
Visitors are well informed about the place even before they come and now they want to be put in touch “with the landscape, the culture, the people themselves”.
Mr Grigg says towns and regions far less known than Alice Springs are taking advantage of opportunities: Outback SA, for example, is having a boom year with Lake Eyre in flood as a magnet, and so is outback NSW with the big rivers flowing, and visitors enjoying the plant and bird life. Visitor numbers to Alice are 8% to 11% down, putting the town into much the same position as other remote centres which are 11% to 15% down. Mr Grigg says the town just can’t win a trick this year. The withdrawal of Tiger Airways came at the beginning of the season. The airline was bringing some 1400 people in and out of town per week.
The high Aussie dollar was a double whammy: international visitors have stayed away in droves and the Aussies have gone overseas for their holidays. As if to add insult to injury, now that the season is over the dollar has dropped sharply – too late for the industry in 2011. Mr Grigg says the industry’s need to adjust must extend to the drive market and the “grey nomads” in their caravans and motor homes – the most significant segment of the industry, although he doesn’t have any figures.
Many vehicles are fully equipped and neither need nor want caravan parks: they overnight at roadside parking spots or in the national parks where they pay $3 or $4 and all wayside stops are set up to cater for what have become long term “tenants”, exactly the opposite for what they were designed to do.
A powered site in caravan parks can cost as much as $38 a night: instead of staying a week they stay a couple of days and “bush camp” the rest of the time.
A powered site isn’t enough these days: visitors need to be enticed to a caravan park by other facilities – pools, playgrounds, entertainment.
“Luckily Alice Springs has a number of caravan parks that value add their product to entice customers into their property,” says Mr Grigg.
Brendan Heenan’s award winning MacDonnell Range Caravan Park is a great example, he says.
Getting useful data about the industry is a nightmare. Tourism NT provides year-by-year figures about spend, numbers and visitor nights, but seems to have no monthly or weekly data. The ABS has comprehensive quarterly statistics going back to 2003 but their problem is that in some years, backpacker hostels and caravan parks are included, in others they are not. This makes comparison difficult, as it is not apples with apples.
Tourism Central Australia generates no figures of its own, which makes a mystery of how it can function as a watchdog over the government’s Tourism NT – annual budget about $40m – and how it can evaluate its own promotions. By contrast, several hotels in Darwin feed their business information – such as revenue and rooms occupied – to STR Global which “tracks supply and demand data for the hotel industry and provides valuable market share analysis for all major international hotel chains and brands,” according to its website.
For a fee the participants can get extensive information, day by day if necessary, about how the industry is performing in a variety of markets, including their own, and get comparisons with earlier periods and indications of trends.
The data include REVPAR (revenue per available room) and ADR (the average rental income per occupied room in a given time period). A similar system, coordinated by Aurora Hotel manager Ron Thynne, was in use in Alice Springs at some time but no longer is. Another vexed question is promotion.
The National Road Transport Hall of Fame is one of Alice Springs’ three “big ones” which attract around 100,000 visitors a year, says Mr Grigg. The others are the Desert Park and the Overland Telegraph Station.
Yet the Hall relies just on a newsletter, its annual reunion and word of mouth for promotion, and runs hardly any paid advertising at all. And with the spread of online direct bookings, TCA’s visitor centre, used by some 120,000 people a year, may need to look for other revenue.
Mr Grigg says his research around the country has revealed that similar centres had to branch out into ventures including selling fuel through discount vouchers, wedding planner services, producing a local phone directory and the provision of local maps.
This week Tourism NT is seeking to get the NT tourism industry to provide timely information on visitation levels and a forward looking business outlook as part of its quarterly industry online poll.
