JENNIFER PINKERTON: It’s time to ban the booze and make our nature parks family friendly

IT’S 4.30pm on a sweaty Tuesday in December and I’m in the car park at Berry Springs Nature Reserve.

My toddler and partner will be here for a swim soon. But they’re taking longer than I expect. A lazy flow of cars starts to fill up spaces around me. I hear a ute scream closer, while biceps flex out its windows. The truck screeches to a halt and half a dozen blokes tumble out beside me. They’re drunk.

One guy pulls his shorts down past his knees and starts weeing. “Mate, there’s a woman there,” his friend urges. “Who cares? She probably likes it!” the bloke calls over his shoulder. I feel my skin start to bristle. I move around the other side of my car and consider driving away. But they’ll be off into the park for a swim soon. It’s all right. Or so I think.

After a few minutes, the weeing guy returns. This time he’s on his own. He staggers towards me. There’s no one around. Just him and I. Now I definitely feel unsafe. “Darlin’, can I have a lift in your car?”

Where do you want to go, I ask him? His eyes bulge and roll around in their sockets. He can barely stand up. “Casuarina,” he answers with a slur.

I tell him I live out here and I’m not headed to Darwin.

“But Caz is just down the road!” he says, now getting frustrated. “Nah,” I reply. I tell him it’s about 50km away. “Is this Buffalo Creek?” I try, but I can’t get him to understand where we are. To be honest, I just want him to leave. I don’t know yet whether he’s violent. He sways in my direction. Goose bumps erupt over my skin. I jump in the car and drive home rattled.

I’m all for personal freedoms, and the NT offers these in spades. But when individual freedoms start to impose on others’ rights, as well as leave a waste trail in their wake, I’d argue they’re no longer worthy of the term ‘freedoms’.

We as Territorians love to drink and smoke in national parks and nature reserves, such as Litchfield and Berry Springs. But the thing is, these places are what their name suggests. They’re parks. They’re full of kids and families and babies and friends, tourists and travellers and drop-ins. Would it be okay to smoke and smash beers in a playground? No. So why OK here? Other park goers have to breathe in the passive smoke this creates. And excessive drinking triggers a raft of antisocial behaviour. Then there’s the danger drinking poses to drinkers themselves. In 2015, 25-year-old Dylan Kreibke was drinking before he slipped or dived a distance of 8m into Florence Falls at Litchfield. He failed to surface. Once found, he was revived and flown to Darwin Royal Hospital. A year earlier, a 17-year-old girl suffered a similar fate. In a scene that was “littered with grog bottles” at Buley Rockhole, she nearly drowned and was placed in an induced coma. At the time, this was enough for then-Parks Minister, the CLP’s Bess Price, to consider a ban on alcohol in national parks. For a day. And then she changed her mind. You know. Personal freedoms and all that.

I wonder if the family of a Palmerston man, who died while drinking at Berry Springs in 2009, felt the same way?

These incidents might not stack up with enough might to conclude that drinking in parks is unsafe for all of us. But neither does the argument that our region’s most beautiful spaces should be filled with a riot of booze and smokes.

The answer may well be to allow these activities five or ten metres from the water. But not in the water. That just doesn’t make sense. And it encourages blokes such as the one I met in a sweaty car park to treat our parks like they’re bars. A place to go and get wasted. What a waste.

Jennifer Pinkerton is a concerned Territory mum