Aurukun: the fight for the children
Burned out cars, teachers attacked with machetes – the Queensland town of Aurukun feels like a war zone. Yet Susan Chenery finds hope burns bright among the women and children of a community in crisis.
IN THE STILL of the morning, stray dogs lie in the dust. People drift along the red dirt roads. Women sway in flowered dresses past burned out cars as they walk children to school. By 9am, the heat is rising. Those who congregate at the heavily fortified cafe seem to be aimlessly looking for something or somebody. When there is no job, there is no point in rushing. Watchful police cars are constantly present. Houses here have high wire mesh fences, often topped with razor wire. Welcome to Aurukun; a place that even the council website describes as one of the most disadvantaged communities in the country. A fevered parallel universe of feuding, frustration and the sound of smashing glass. A remote town of 1400 people on the Cape York Peninsula that frequently achieves national notoriety because of its civil unrest, most recently when its headmaster was carjacked by teenagers with machetes and the school’s 25 teachers were evacuated.
A group of mothers, grandmothers, aunties and sisters decided they had had enough. The Wik Women’s Group sent out a fiery statement saying a small number of 10- to 15-year-old children were “controlling the Queensland government like puppets”.
Criticising the “incompetence of police, who have been unable to pull into line a handful of troublemakers”, the women said that “solving a problem with 15 disengaged youths by disengaging another 300 children is a recipe for disaster”.
They might live in a ghetto surrounded by gambling, drinking and violence, but they know that early intervention with the children is the only way for the future. For them, it was critical that the school did not close and set these children back.
In its isolation, clinging to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Aurukun is a place that runs on rumours. Newspapers are not delivered here. During the wet season, when the roads are flooded, it is marooned, cut off. Rumours can become malignant and explode into violence.
Down at the tiny courthouse, barefoot families wait with sons and brothers for the seemingly inevitable appointment with the law. Walking the same streets, day after day, with nothing to do, can lead to this.
“Hatred and anger is a disease and it is chewing our young people up,” admits the Mayor, Dereck Walpo.
Last November, the unrest erupted into fighting in the street after a young woman hanged herself. Two clans were clashing in a deeply divided community of five clan groups. Then it turned deadly. At 7.15pm on November 21, police responded to reports that a gun had been discharged. On arrival, the police car was attacked by shotgun pellets and rocks. Two hours later, a 30-year-old man died after being hit by a car. He was the grandson of the land rights pioneer John Koowarta. His grandmother, Martha, is one of the
Wik Women’s Group. Russell Woolla, 43, is currently in custody in Cairns awaiting trial on murder charges. It was the tragic culmination of a feud with a long history.
By Christmas, Phyllis Yunkaporta, had started writing her letters to the government calling for law and order.
“No one was at peace,” she says, now sitting under the mango tree outside Martha’s house, where the women meet. “It was just some misunderstanding with family members and then it got serious. They were fighting in the street with sticks and stones and knives. People were brandishing weapons.”
She was asking for zero tolerance. “The police have to start arresting people on the spot. If they did their job properly, arresting people there and then, it wouldn’t have got into peoples’ heads that fighting was the way to go.”
In May, she was bashed on the head outside the supermarket by a woman from another clan as a reprisal for speaking out.
Even as the community grieved after the November riots and the loud music that customarily pours from the houses stopped out of respect for the families in sorrow, the tensions simmered.
By May, Aurukun was back in the news. “Village of the Damned” trumpeted a Brisbane Courier-Mail headline that offended just about everybody. For better or worse, this is the homeland of the people who live there. Unlike the white people who fly in and out, they cannot leave easily.
On May 16, footage emerged of women trading fierce fisticuffs in the street. Police were heavily criticised for watching, but not intervening.
Yet, says Vivien Bull, Director of Community Services of Aurukun Shire Council, “we were standing right here and the police were being advised by the community, don’t step in. It was being done the traditional way. It has all got rules that are too complicated to even explain.”
When youths tried to break into the homes of two female teachers and the police did not immediately respond, the school’s principal, Scott Fatnowna, intervened. He was assaulted with an axe handle and his car was stolen.
The teachers were evacuated to Cairns for a week. Yet on May 21, as Mr Fatnowna and his wife were returning home after dinner at another teacher’s house, they were attacked by kids carrying machetes and knives, who took the government car on a joyride until it got bogged in mud outside town. The three arrested were 15 and 16 years old, but the police reported children as young as six being out on the streets in the early hours of the morning.
Four days later, all 25 of the school’s teachers were evacuated. Lawlessness, it seemed, had prevailed.
It is always the children who suffer in the systemic breakdown of a society. For some of them, school is the only place they are fed and looked after. A Murdoch University study into Aurukun school students found that three-quarters suffered disability and one-quarter suffered depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
“These children carry a heavy burden – mental impairment of alcohol syndrome, violence in the family and violence in the street,” says Noel Pearson, founder of the Cape York Partnership, an indigenous organisation with a social reform agenda.
Jenny Kawangka, 30, is a mother of six, three of whom are at the school, and who works for Cape York Employment. “As a mother, I have been very disappointed because it is twice now that they closed the school without having the consideration to let the parents know. What kind of message are they sending to the kids who go to school every day? The disappointment I saw on my son’s face was heartbreaking. In the future, they might say, if the school can turn its back on us, then we can do the same thing as well. I have to remind my kids that school is still important.”
Her 11-year-old son is in the accelerated learning group and, she says, “his confidence has improved because of his good education. The school is the heart of Aurukun, the main resource here for us. When my kids are at school, I know they are safe.”
The school is currently being run by an acting principal with three staff flown in to teach distance education. They are supported by the indigenous community teacher aids. In an email to The Weekly, the Queensland Department of Education said that it was reviewing the situation and the safety measures for teachers.
By midday in Aurukun, the heat is enervating, sticky. There is lethargy in the slow-moving day. You can’t see the underlying tension, but it is there.
A council vehicle has just had its windows smashed in broad daylight in the main street. Two weeks ago, three cars were smashed up in the council car park. The council’s damages bills are massive. Cars have to be locked into the high-security police compound at night. The week before, health workers had been attacked while they were out in the community.
While The Weekly is visiting, the technicians installing CCTV are threatened with a kitchen knife. One of them, Tyson Swarbrick, has been in Aurukun for two months. “They wanted our car.” He didn’t hand over the keys. “Sometimes, you are just in the way. There is trouble at home, the husband has taken all the money and the mother can’t feed the children, so they take it out on the cars.”
Yet he voices all the contradictions of Aurukun when he says, “The locals have made us spears and taken us spear fishing and turtle hunting at their own private beaches. When you get immersed in what they are doing, it is a beautiful thing.”
In all the factions, all the apportioning of blame in all the conversations The Weekly had in Aurukun, one common thread emerged. That the death of love begins at home. Says Keri Tamwoy, a mother of six and mediator with the Aurukun Justice Group, “I do believe parents are the first teachers of their children. If parents are not engaging with their children in a positive way on a daily basis, then they are creating disengaged children.”
The problems in Aurukun are generational. Living in chaos is not the new normal for this town.
IT ALL BEGAN when the Presbyterian missionaries transferred authority over to an elected council in the late 1970s. The community shattered and nosedived into hell when a canteen opened in 1985 and began selling alcohol. Men who were once warriors and hunters became drunks.
“When I was growing up, I hardly saw violence in the community,” says Keri. “I never saw a man become physically violent towards his partner. It was only when alcohol was introduced that led to violence.”
Pastor Herbert Yunkaporta says that the initiation into adulthood changed.
“When you were 18, you were encouraged to go into the pub and have a few beers.” He describes the two decades that followed as Aurukun’s “darkest years, where all hell broke loose. Violence, rape, you name it. It was broken. People lost themselves mentally, emotionally and physically, they were spiritually lost.”
Aurukun was recorded as having one of the highest murder rates in the
“The school is the heart of Aurukun, the main resource here for us.”
world, with record numbers of suicide, sexual abuse and domestic violence. It was a place of fighting, drinking and funerals. Alcohol was banned in 2007, but several generations had been damaged while no one was thinking about the children or the future. These once bruised and vulnerable children are the parents now. Their children’s problems are inherited.
Young men still define themselves by fighting for their clan. Crime has become part of the culture; doing time at Cleveland Youth Detention Centre in Townsville is still a rite of passage.
“It has got pool tables, video games, TV and three meals a day,” says Mayor Walpo. “That is where they want to go.”
They go in as skinny boys and come out as men. Stealing a car, says Bernie McCarthy, the Chief Executive Officer of Aurukun Shire Council, “has a bit of prestige to it. ‘Here I am, I don’t give a shit if I go to jail. I am going to drive around.’ They get praised for it, for crying out loud. People are clapping and cheering.”
It’s when the sly groggers come in that trouble is most likely to flare up. Mayor Walpo calls them “spineless jellyfish” who live off the community’s poverty. On the black market, a cask of wine is $250 and a bottle of rum $300. And then there is no money for food for the kids and they don’t go to school.
Barbara Bandicootcha, 41, a land rights consultant, says that when her daughters tried to take the keys from a nephew who had stolen an $80,000 vehicle, they asked him why he was doing it. “He just broke down into tears and said, ‘I do this because Mummy doesn’t love us, Mum doesn’t care’.
“I am not defending what the young people have done,” Barbara says, “but there are underlying issues, neglect and smashing things up to get attention. Not everyone had a good upbringing.”
Mayor Walpo says “the senior people in each family [have] to stand up and be accountable and be responsible with their family’s wrongdoing. If they see a family member get drunk and go looking for a fight, they have to take that person away and deal with it before it escalates and they all get involved. Instead of kids watching and seeing domestic violence as a way of life and community unrest as normal. It is not normal. Talk it through or walk away from it. Don’t take the law into your own hands.”
Down in the courthouse, under the strip lighting, a succession of tall, thin, rangy, handsome young men are appearing in the dock, their chiselled faces resigned and impassive. All that wasted potential.
“I should have walked out into the bush,” says one 24-year-old, who is there for smashing car windows.
It would be easy to write Aurukun off as a blasted landscape that is beyond redemption. Yet Pastor Herbert Yunkaporta, who runs groups to restore men and women to the “rights and responsibilities” they lost during the decades when drink nearly destroyed them, disagrees. “I say with great confidence that there is hope.”
There is laughter and resilience in these descendants of great land rights campaigners. It is, as Vivien Bull says, “a really rich tapestry of a community. You have to celebrate and cherish the small wins.” These Aboriginal people remain resolutely Aboriginal and themselves. Vivien knows this from employing people for whom family and clan transcend all other preoccupations, including work.
There are plans for tourism and development. The Aurukun wetlands are bigger than Kakadu. There are 60 new houses, a new refurbished sports centre with a gym. A library that is being transformed into an Indigenous Knowledge Centre, talented artists at the art centre. The council is working on employment opportunities to train people to break free of the welfare cycle. “But it has got to be a two-way street,” says Mayor Walpo. “We need to support the people who are delivering services and meet them halfway.”
The Wik women are determined to get this generation right. They are starting a walking bus to get the children to school and a homework centre for after school.
“We want peace and reform,” says Phyllis Yunkaporta. They are not going to shut up, no matter who tries to intimidate them. “We still have our culture, we can do that part of it at home, and children can grow up with a balanced life. We want them to hang on to their identity.”
As the sun sets spectacularly on the Watson River, old people and small children are fishing. Smoke from fires to cook the fish drifts in the still red evening. And here is the peace and simplicity of thousands of years.
“It is a rich tapestry of a community. You have to cherish the small wins.”