Aboriginal peoples and issues - an abstraction for most Australians.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

The words of Martin Luther King quoted by

Bev Manton, Chairperson, NSW Aboriginal Lands Council,

9 July 2007

In all the trials besetting Aboriginal Australians, Miss Eagle believes that the majority of Australians are of good will and want wrongs to be rectified and great strides to be made in bringing Aboriginal people into the same situation of the majority of mainstream Australians.

Miss Eagle also believes that most Australians are ignorant of how and where Aboriginal people live. They are not attuned to what Aboriginal people themselves are saying, what has been done, what has not been done. In short, Miss Eagle has come to the firm conclusion that, for most Australians, Aboriginal people are an abstract issue. Issues affecting them are somewhere out there in the ether. There is little recognition in reality that Aboriginal people are PLU - People Like Us; that we should obey the Christian commandment and love them in the same way that we love ourselves.

Here is a report on one Australian, the distinguished Fiona Stanley, who clearly finds the plight of Aboriginal people to be real - no abstract, not somewhere out in the ether.

Oh, that more could feel this way: that more Australians could be better informed and more active in listening to and working with Aboriginal people to demand greater accountability by governments and bureaucrats in spending our taxpayer dollars to provide citzens' entitlements to ALL citizens.

Aboriginal alcohol reforms: you would never ever know if you never ever go

In all the brouhaha of John Howard's and Mal Brough's military intervention in the Northern Territory on the pretext of protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse, there has been one clear hallmark - lack of consultation with Aboriginal communities.

There is glib talk about banning alcohol in Aboriginal communities in complete ignorance - or taking for granted the complete and utter ignorance of white Australia - of the reality: that a significant proportion of Aboriginal communities are dry and that Aboriginal communities - particularly older Aboriginal women in communities - have worked hard and spoken loud and long to get control over alcohol frequently in the face of feigned deafness on the part of the white powers that be.

The Tennant Creek story is very different. This is the mainstream town that closed the pubs at the behest of a powerful Aboriginal community. It is documented by the 2007 Miles Franklin Award winner, Alexis Wright, in her book Grog War which was commissioned by the Julalikari Council.

To-day, on The World Today on ABC's Radio National, there is the report of an investigation by the National Drug Research Institute - including Dr Tanya Chikritzhs and fellow researcher Professor Dennis Gray from Perth's Curtin University - which has found that, ten years on, there are positive statistics demonstrating the impact of what Tennant Creek did more than a decade ago. Transcript available here.

How good it is to hear Tennant Creek being recognised; their work being justified and verified; and the public statement of indigenous instigation of alcohol reform.

If you only listened to Howard and Brough, you would never ever know if you never ever go!

Turn off the grog tap - and then what?

Former Territorian with a wealth of experience in alcohol and its relation to public health Peter d’Abbs - who is now Associate Professor, School of Public Health, Tropical Medicine and Rehabilitation Sciences at the Cairns campus of James Cook University - said yesterday in Crikey:

Only time will tell whether the Commonwealth’s moves to cut off alcohol supplies to Aboriginal communities in the NT will restore order. In the meantime, they have exposed another, equally important need -- for better programs and more $$ to reduce demand for alcohol among Indigenous drinkers.

It isn’t surprising that governments generally have much less to say about this. There are no quick fixes, no comparable options to sending in the troops. So what are the needs, and the options?

First, the needs – and let’s begin by laying one misconception to rest. Banning alcohol in communities will not fill the streets with hundreds of deranged alcoholics tortured by withdrawal symptoms. Much Aboriginal binge drinking is opportunistic, and some of the heaviest drinkers periodically go for long periods without a drop.

The real needs are for services to help those drinkers who choose to set out on the long journey to sobriety. A few make it more or less on their own. Some come to sobriety through Christianity. But for many drinkers, trapped in cultures saturated in booze, the road out has to be just that – a road out.

But where to? A few remote communities have their own outstations where drinkers can at least dry out and enjoy some sort of cultural recharging. Most, however, will head for one of the Aboriginal-controlled rehabilitation centres scattered around the country. Some of these offer outpatient services, most are residential. Their hardworking counselors are unlikely to be highly trained, and clients probably won’t be offered the range of therapeutic interventions (including pharmacological therapies) available in more ‘mainstream’ services.
Aboriginal alcohol rehabilitation centres are the unwanted child of alcohol and other drug services. Most of their funding comes from the Commonwealth, which has been trying to back out of the role, but no state/territory government is willing to step in. So the Commonwealth is stuck with them, but lacks the expertise to embark on the kind of long-term capacity building they so badly need.

What would this entail? First, a Commonwealth/State cost-shared program is required to fund and support Aboriginal-controlled rehabilitation. The Commonwealth should use its fiscal power to make the States/Territories pay their share. The program should pursue five objectives:

• Combine evidence-based best practice with cultural acceptability;


• Enhance, through workforce development, the clinical skills, management capacity and directors’ skills of Aboriginal-controlled services;


• Break down the current walls between Aboriginal-controlled and mainstream AOD (alcohol and other drug) services


• Strengthen links between Indigenous alcohol treatment services and mental health services;
  
• Foster after-care services in communities, in order to provide support to ex-treatment clients on their return. At present these are conspicuously absent.

None of these measures are easy or cheap. Nor do they obviate the need for diversion and other preventive measures. But simply turning off the taps is not enough.

Fitzroy women don't want grog: whitefella vacillates

Michael Byrt's mural in Redfern, Sydney featuring Aboriginal children

The majority of Aboriginal society is willing to come to terms with alcohol - but mainstream Australian society doesn't want to talk about it.

In major centres across the island continent, there is extraordinary access to alcohol. In spite of the abuse of alcohol in white dominated society causing great suffering - road trauma and deaths; illness, hospitalization, and deaths; child abuse and deaths; domestic violence and deaths - we refuse to talk about it.

We refuse to consider limiting the extraordinary opening hours of alcohol retailing outlets. In fact, time and again Australians have been told that an increase in the availability of alcohol at extraordinary times through retailing outlets (and I mean not just outlets attached to food retailing outlets but pubs, clubs, and nightclubs etc) will lead to more civilized drinking practices - just like Europe. Mmmm...!

But in Aboriginal communities the majority of women - particularly the grandmothers - are quite clear about what needs to be done in about the availability of alcohol. Now the women of Fitzroy Crossing have added their voices.

Not that all women are stone-cold sober but the brunt of picking up the pieces goes to women, particularly older women, the grandmothers.

But whitefellas can be relied upon not to be reliable on this issue. Police may well be supportive - but those reliant on public opinion like politicians seldom are. Whitefellas vacillate in the same way Brough did recently at Santa Teresa when there appeared to be some move away from the previous public statements by the Howard Government that alcohol would not be available at Aboriginal communities.

Of course, the topic of ready availability at all hours in mainstream communities doesn't get a guernsey - with the exception of Tennant Creek.

Tennant Creek liquor laws half-hearted?

The Grog Book. Strengthening Indigenous Community Action on Alcohol. Revised Edition. Department of Health and Ageing, Canberra 2005. Available from http://www.alcohol.gov.au, or phone 1800 020 103 ext. 8654.

Miss Eagle has received the following comment with regard to the post on the Night Patrol at Tennant Creek:

I've driven through, and stopped overnight in, Tennant Creek in each of the last two years but wasn't aware of the night patrol. I did note that some types of alcohol, eg fortified wine, are not on sale. This seems to be a half hearted way of approaching the problem, though it's better than nothing.

Miss E started to respond in the comments but the response was a bit long and deserved a better exposure than being tucked away in the comments.

Believe Miss Eagle when she says there was nothing half-hearted in Tennant Creek's approach to the liquor problem.

Miss E can understand someone calling the respoonse half-hearted but, from her viewpoint, the only whole hearted response would be to ban liquor for blackfellas and whitefellas alike. But this would cause an uproar among the whitefellas (as the Tennant Creek laws did - an effigy in someone's front yard) and lead to an even greater outbreak of grog smuggling by both blackfella and whitefella alike.

Two things: we live in a democracy and places like Tennant Creek have to live on a daily basis with Aboriginal people and their culture. Such a situation is unknown to the majority of Australians living on the urban fringes in a white dominated culture. Aboriginal culture is not some nice abstract thing which includes eating kangaroo and doing dot paintings. Living with Aboriginal people of significant numbers (half TC's population is black and approx. half of those are traditional Aboriginal people) means that their culture impacts on whitefella culture. The two cultures have to acknowledge each other and live together on a daily basis.

One of the factors which should be acknowledged with drinking in the Aboriginal culture is that the right to drink is tied up in a very real and historic way with Aboriginal civil rights -predominantly because of the experience of Albert Namatjira.

So in Tennant Creek not only whitefellas were unimpressed with the new liquor laws. A number of Aboriginal drinkers were unimpressed as well. One Aboriginal man said to Miss Eagle that, each pay day, he gave his pay to his wife and kept out his drinking money. Why should he not be able to drink as he pleased? All Miss Eagle could say was to get together the people who thought like he did and have their say. This voice, as far as Miss E could tell, was never heard.

The publicans of Tennant Creek fought the introduction of the new liquor laws through the court in a quite protracted case. They lost. Always remember vested whitefella interest and the way it markets its product. Never forget - as whitefellas do when comdemning blackfellas for drinking - the whitefellas who will do anything to get grog to blackfellas for profit.

Miss Eagle remembers years ago the publican in Burketown in the Gulf country who was such a thoughtful person that he sold a very, very rough red to the blackfellas in plastic flagons so that they would not cut themselves. Then there was the shop in Mount Isa just around the corner from the Mount Isa High School which met customer demand in a thoughtful way as well by selling methylated spirits ready mixed with Orchy (orange juice) which could be purchased chilled straight from the refrigerator and then taken the 50 meters or so across to the bed of the Leichhardt River to drink with friends while doing a spot of gambling. Mental note: Must talk about gambling which is an even worse problem than grog and no one ever mentions it or does anything about it.

With the mention of methylated spirits, Miss Eagle must refer to the campaign conducted for many years by Tony McGrady, former Mayor of Mount Isa and Speaker of the Queensland Parliament, to have methylated spirits made unpalatable for drinking. He did succeed - eventually. Let's ask ourselves why such a simple matter took so long? How many blackfellas' brains turned to jelly while whitefellas looked the other way and could not make a simple administrative decision in a matter which did not affect their well-being or profit?

The laws that were introduced in Tennant Creek were not iron clad. How could they be? But thanks to the nous and organisation of Julalikari Council, Tennant Creek - black and white - went on a journey which no mainstream community had been on before in this nation and no one has had the guts to follow since.

Now, contrary to public opinion, the drinking blackfella has always known how to get the most alcoholic bang for his buck. That's why the popular purchase was always a five litre cask of moselle. The sale of this was banned. But, of course, there were substitutes - Fruity Lexia, port and sherry.

Another problem developed with the consumption of port and sherry: the littering of streets with broken glass. Hardly a street corner was exempt. The problem had never been quite so evident with the casks. So the Tennant Creek Town Council applied for and received funding from the Northern Territory Government to pay for a ute and two men to keep the streets clean. The Northern Territory has a wine cask levy which makes such things possible. However - and isn't there always a 'however' - TC's wily General Manager of the time used to divert the two men and the ute to other tasks so that the original purpose of the funding was frequently unfulfilled.

Get the message! We complain about blackfellas - from ATSIC to drunks on the street - but where do they learn their lessons, what examples are set for ethical behaviour in the white community?

But back to half-heartedness. There was great co-operation to make the new laws work. Antipathy to the laws - with the exception of the publicans - in a public way soon subsided. The NT Liquor Commission and the Police were on side. Pubs which did the wrong thing were shut down - albeit temporarily. The Shaft at the Tennant Creek Hotel (otherwise known as The Swan) was caught by the Liquor Commission serving grog to drunken blackfellas. The owners were taken to Court and were forced to close all their outlets for three days - including their popular Steakhouse restaurant. The Goldfields was closed on a couple of occasions because of the raucous behaviour of drunken blackfellas.

Word to Miss Eagle is that the laws have fallen into disrepair because they were constructed around Thursday as the uniform Social Security benefit pay day. The government began to stagger paydays for different benefits and Thursday - the one day when public bars and bottleshops were closed - no longer has the same significance.

Now there is one little thing the Howard Government could do, without uproar, by administrative fiat - go back to a uniform pay day and get the NT to close public bars across the NT every Thursday.

Tennant Creek, Night Patrol, and Thirsty Thursday

Logo: Julalikari Council,

Tennant Creek, Northern Territory

So you, dear Reader, are a bit non-plussed about Mal Brough's apparent about face on grog access for Aboriginal communities? Get a dose of reality on the whole Shock and Awe Campaign.

Howard and Brough are strutting the national stage as if they are the only ones with ideas, the only ones to think of solutions. No, they are not. But they are part of the problem - the problem that has cut funding for Aboriginal initiatives, refused to listen to Aboriginal people making their needs known, failing to fund their reasonable and justifiable proposals.

Aboriginal people - particularly the women and, of them, the grandmothers - have strong views about alcohol and access to it. Most Aboriginal people, in spite of white views to the contrary, do not drink. Survey after survey outlines this. Some believe that alcohol and the way whitefellas make money out of blackfellas by selling it to them legally or illegally is nothing less than genocide.

This means that Aboriginal people, as a generality, are highly motivated to do something about alcohol usage and access. Tennant Creek, arguably, has been the place of the most creative attempts to combat grog and its effects. The Aboriginal community in Tennant Creek established the very first Night Patrol in Australia. The Night Patrol - largely staffed by women - drives around at night and picks up alcohol affected people. The violent, obstreperous ones are left for the police who take them to the local watch-house. The others are either taken home or to the shelter/drying out place.

Night Patrols have been established in numerous Aboriginal communities. They are a success story of Aboriginal Australia. For more information on the Night Patrol experience in Tennant Creek please read here and here.

But the Tennant Creek story does not begin and end with the Night Patrol. With the idea that was to become known as Thirsty Thursday, Julalikari Council - the energetic, creative, and involved Aboriginal organisation in Tennant Creek - suggested closing down the liquor outlets for one day to make the significant point of the impact no grog could have on Aboriginal communities. Read this description of Julalikari's radical proposal and its implementation by a former resident of Tennant Creek, Paul Cockrem.

Julalikari Council commissioned Miles Franklin Award winner, Alexis Wright, to document the history of the closure of the Tennant Creek pub's and the changes to licensing laws in Tennant published in Grog War.

It was good to hear Peter Dabbs on The World To-day this afternoon. Peter used to be in the Northern Territory with the Menzies School of Health. He was part of the team from Menzies who surveyed the residents of Tennant Creek as we tried one set of liquor laws for three months and another set of laws for another three months. Go here for a number of publications by Menzies relating to alcohol and Aboriginal communities. Peter Dabbs co-authored a report on the Tennant experience - d’Abbs P, Togni S, Crundall I. The Tennant Creek Liquor Licensing Trial, August 1995 – February 1996 : An Evaluation. Darwin: Menzies School of Health Research, 1996. Purchase price: AU$16:50 - which can be purchased from Menzies.

Woolworths, Safeway, Liquor and Fuel - but not food

Miss Eagle has sent the following email to Liz in Victorian Regional Office of Safeway (the name used by Woolworths in Victoria). It is self-explanatory. If you, dear Reader, agree with Miss E, please feel free to write to Woolworths in your state. If you are writing in Victoria, please send to ejamieson@woolworths.com.au.

This afternoon, I was in the Safeway store at Burwood Highway, Ferntree Gully (not the Mountain Gate store). I was stunned to see an advertisement stating, that if customers purchased $60 of goods from Safeway Liquor, they would receive a 20c a litre discount on fuel.

I am amazed at the ethics of such a campaign. I have been told by Kerry in the Area 5 office that this was part of a national campaign organised by the Marketing Division of Woolworths.

The campaign has certainly not been well thought through. It sends very mixed messages to the community:

1. Alcohol is more valuable than food because it attracts a larger discount on fuel at the bowser.
2. $60 worth of alcohol far outweighs in value at the bowser any amount large or small spent on food.
3. The campaign links alcohol to driving in an encouraging way - in more or less the same way that large car parks at suburban hotels encourage a drink and drive mentality.
4. Woolworths, whose income is derived - in the main - from families, encourages a significant slice of the family budget to be devoted to alcohol.
5. The campaign seeks to encourage a significant amount of spending on alcohol which is the root cause of violence and road deaths in our society and ties the name of Woolworths/Safeway to it.

I would ask you to immediately withdraw this marketing campaign from all Woolworths and Safeway stores and to refrain from any similar type of marketing in the future.

I also wish to complain about the way complaints are handled within Woolworths and Safeway.

I am told that the Woolworths system means that someone in the local regional office will email someone in Sydney but that the system does not allow for me to be cc'd. So I have no way of knowing the accuracy of material forwarded to the responsible person regarding my complaint. I have rung the corporate office in Sydney who referred me back to the local regional office. Sydney refused to give me the name of the person with responsibility for the campaign. I then asked for the title, the phone number and the email of the person responsible for the marketing campaign. This too was refused. There is clearly no way for the customer to be in direct contact with the person with corporate responsibility. I am told that the matter will take two business days and I am familiar with the time limit that Woolworths sets itself to respond.

I fear that the manner in which Woolworths deals with complaints means that the complaint will not be acted upon in a positive manner leading to the withdrawal of the campaign and that Woolworths will go on its merry way regardless.

Yours sincerely,

[Name supplied] [address supplied]
Email: [supplied]
Phone: [supplied]
Blogs: Oz Tucker at http://oztucker.blogspot.com/
The Trad Pad at http://tradpad.blogspot.com/
The Eagle's Nest at http://eaglesplace.blogspot.com

We'll wait to see what - if anything - happens.