This is Alice Springs: Children of the Intervention

This town is a sad story, especially for black fellows, I guess for no Indigenus people. It's a beautiful town. Not in the landscape it's beautiful, but for us to live here as a local, it's a sad story.

This is Uncle Brian. He's an arunder man. This is his land, this is his town.

Well, we want to shoulders allis Springs in a different way, in a black fellow way, not just white fellow way. White fellow way. You call Alice Springs Alice. You know who's Alice. We don't know Alice. It's called umband.

We're sitting in a park. It's at the base of one of those age old Rockier scarments that surround this town. It's mid afternoon. Meet his Way as a children's play area, Empty swings, empty slides. With us is Damien, another arunder man. Goodness with him is his son by, tall and slender, eighteen years of age, dressed in a Nike hoodie too much for a Southerner and a warm Central Australian day, but suitable for a local.

Does my son bison bison the gae?

Yeah, it's a bit warmer up here than it is in Albourne.

Tell me about together. Uncle Brian, Damien, and Bison represent three generations of arunder men. Damien is in his thirties, looks like he's just jumped off the back of a steed. He's wearing a check shirt with the sleeves removed, jeans and boots, boots covered in dust, red dust. The town we're in now, the one his son Bison grew up in, has changed a lot since Damien was a kid.

Well, growing up here. From a young person, there's a good little town.

Yeah, I loved it.

I still love it today, but I think some of them the sweet part of Alice is no longer here. I think it's going a bit sour, to be honest.

What's it like living in Alice Springs? Pretty nice?

It looks good now, but night time it looks to him good like trenches.

Some vibes, you know.

So he thinks better stay stay in your home.

Yeah, it's too dangerous. We're not indigenous people like you and like me, being a local as d and a man, I don't feel safe ORGANI streets at night because I give a tack tooo.

That's sad.

You get one kid, walk up to your little twelve and I'll ask you for a cigarette, and you tell me you got nothing, He sings out for his mates. Yeah, all the little gangs and all that.

It's those gangs that have become infamous here and across the country. Kids roaming the streets looking for trouble and if they can't find it, making trouble. Things really kicked off earlier this year with what's been described as a riot in town. He started at the Todd Tavern not too far from where we are now, within Alice Springs, nowhere as far away. At this pub, the Todd glass was smashed, bricks were just pelted out it. People or running up and fly kicking.

They've taken twenty meter jumps and jumping in the glass trying to smash it.

A flying sidekick punches rocks and even bricks.

What a brick this is. When the headline started in cities and towns across Australia, we read about chaos and rampages. One newspaper described the kids here as tiny menaces stuck on a turnstile of trouble.

A couple of views, some of who look younger than ten years old, damage more than sixty cars.

They're hanging out the window honing through Alice Springs this resource. She was startled, according to police, by the children breaking into her home. She was then attacked and hit in the face with a rock by one.

Police were given extraordinary powers to arrest the violence to put an end to it.

An emergency situation has been declared in Alice Springs following a wave of violence in the Northern Territory town.

These curf ears for both adults and children and will be enforced from ten pm to six am between those who will back our police to enact this curfew and do what is needed to improve community safety in Alice Springs.

Like fly in and fly out workers, politicians arrived to blame one another for the carnage. The people of Alice Springs became political footballs in the process.

And you've got kids here tonight who are going to be sexually abused or families where domestic violence has now become a current occurrence.

Sending the riot Squad the eightyf whoever it takes to bring calm to our streets.

It came on the back of one of the most divisive debates in the country's history, the referendum on the Voice to Parliament. There was yet another time when Aboriginal people were spoken about more than we were spoken to. It's been twelve months since that debate and I've come here to the harder things Alice Springs ata to hear

Lately, as I there haven't been a lot of tourists traveling through due to some of the issues and Alice Springs people are a bit afraid.

Damien's offered to take us on a tour of the town. This is us driving around with him and Bison. The media reporting has been pretty full on Euck and that's had an effect on tourism.

Yeah, look, I think it's scared away a lot of even people with small businesses, lot of local people.

I have been here before and there's a noticeable change for starters. You can't buy a drink here to take away on Mondays and Tuesdays. The bars are empty. The thriving backpacker scene seems to have shrunk.

There's a main part of the CBD yeah, bring your shopping center. That's where most people come for their shopping.

And we passed the Todd Tavern opposite the footy ground. On the surface, the spread of a pub typical of a country town. In broad daylight, it's hard to picture it as a place of unrest and violence. A full loop. As we round the corner, we see the heart of justice within the town, a triangle of imposing buildings, the cop shop, the magistrates court, and the biggest building of all, the Supreme Court's.

A big Supreme court that just stands and I don't know what they're doing there.

That's the prime. The Supreme Court building is a big one.

It's it's really big, but I don't know if there's any purpose for them right now.

These buildings look dormant, but this hides the fact that more Aboriginal people are being sentenced to prison than ever before. There's been a twenty three percent increase in Indigenous incarceration in the past five years. Children age between fourteen and seventeen are incarcerated at a higher rate in the Northern Territory than anywhere else in the country.

But here's here's the big one, right right you got You've got nightclubs here, and we've got our young kids that are walking around up to our good and we've got half of our elders and our leaders in the nightclub and when they come out, they're seeing as just as bad as the young people. So you know, every weekend some of our leaders are acting like children.

Inside the only shopping center, the bottles are once again open, and there are lines out the front with police checking IDs before people enter. There are two lines with one copper each assigned to check where people live, to make sure they don't live somewhere where alcohol is forbidden. Middle aged white people are waved through. What did you see?

Please relate White fans walks throight and black fives can't that has one hundred question you did to get a six.

Back of beer?

There are plenty of black fellows on the street and they outnumber the White fellows. They're usually in groups just yarning up. It's on these streets you'll hear some of the oldest languages known to humanity, the true languages of the continent. Yet they're more foreign to us than Italian or French or even millennial. The wonder of that is really something for an outsider. But for Damien and Bison, their focus is on the problems here and now I

Do you think two thousand when the intervention came through. It was a big joke. It was a big shocking stuff for we were too shamed to say we were from Alice Springs.

This is something I heard again and again as I spoke to locals and Alice Springs. They still remember the army rolling into town, the announcements over town, camp PA's warning people to stay in their homes. They tell me about the confusion, the terror, about how the blunt force of the intervention affected every part of their lives, and how they're still dealing with the consequences all these years later. That's after the break.

Are we ready well, ladies and gentlemen, mister Bruff and I have called this new conference to announce a number of major measures to deal with what we can only describe as a national emergency in relation to the abuse of children in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.

Far away from Alice Springs in Canberra, John Howard stands in front of a pack of journalists. It's June two thousand and seven.

And we therefore believe that the action I'm about to outline is totally justified and warranted given our overarching responsibilities for the welfare of children throughout Australia.

This moment will change the course of life for generations of people in l Springs and surrounds. And it started with a report.

The Little Children of Sacred Report shun a light on the profound consequences of the breakdown of Aboriginal society. Most chilling of all was that child abuse was serious, widespread and often unreported.

In the shadows of the report made a series of recommendations around the government supporting and empowering Aboriginal people to address any abuse within their communities, but the government tossed that aside, instead using the allegations as a pretext to seizing control over the land, again stripping locals of any

Widespread alcohol restrictions were enforced, there were medical examinations for children under sixteen. School attendance was linked to family payments, and government business managers were imposed. The Commonwealth moved to take controlled townships through changes to the Land Act. Police numbers were increased, and most controversial of all, half of welfare payments were quarantined for buying food and other essentials.

The swiftness of the response, in all its clinical brutality, took Howard and its Indigenous Affairs Minister mel Braff forty eight hours was to draw up. We took everyone here by surprise, including the anti government. No one living in the communities up here knew what was going to happen. It was scary. Were the army invading? Were they here to take the children away? To lock up all the men?

Yes, I remember that when the army came here, it was pretty bad and they made an excuse to go to their communities, and they didn't care about whose place it was or anything.

We've driven out to the west side of town. We've graciously been invited into the home of Arnie pat Ansel Dodds. She's an artist and respected Arunda elder. Her family are from here, but we're here at the point of first contact. This is her land, this is her town. Hello and yeah, rub lined up the interview with aunt has her baby with her, trying to find a quiet spot for them while we record our conversationes.

Eight boys, three girls and it's a boxing match.

And how long have you been in Alice Springs itself?

I have worked very hard over the years to speak out for my people. But what's the government's been doing, especially the things about the kids. When you look at our history, the white men never came till later on, and we're the last place that they came to to put the telegraph line through from Adelaide to Darwin.

The telegraph station became a residential institution where Aboriginal children were taken when they were stolen from their families.

Both my parents were put in there and I didn't understand to lie was a bit older of all the things that happened to all the families around Australia, taking their children away and brainwashing them about their own history, not ours.

Arniepat went on to become a nurse and in the midst of her career won a native title claim with their people. Her personal and professional advancement and Hartford Native title victory made a thing. For a time things were improving, but the Intervention changed all that.

This younger generation is losing the plot and the government did this to them.

The government did this, Yeah, why do you think they were doing it.

It's just racism. It's an excuse to shut us down and a land and take over our communities and that our people didn't have any any rights anymore.

The Intervention didn't end with Howard rud and Gillard kept it in place, ironically rebranding it Stronger Futures. Arni Pat watched on as outside as imposed a set of rules that removed the ability for her people to control their own lives.

When you have people come into another town and they don't come from here, they don't know what to do, and then they have the police on their backs watching them all the time. But the younger generation just stuffed them will run amuck, and that's what they do.

In response, Anipat and other grandmothers established a group to patrol the streets of ALUs at night to look for and look after kids on the streets in fear they'd be picked up by the police or the army.

Well, we came together a few years ago, and we all came from here, this area, and we got together to fight for our rights to help these kids. We'd go out, especially at night, and go around the streets and talk to the kids and ask them what they're doing, because they'd walk around at night. But the worst thing was they'd be walking down the streets but they'd be thinking of smashing things, things like that.

How long was the Strong Grandmothers group together for?

Oh, for a while, about twenty years?

Yeah.

Wow, And a lot of us are in the eighties and nineties, and we're getting tired. We can't keep fighting. I still see kids walking around at night and playing up and the parents try to stop them, but it's not happening.

You have eight grandchildren of your own.

Eight grandsons and three granddaughters.

I see a photo of someone who graduated something up or something rather on the wall there. Yeah, Yeah, who's that?

Yeah yeah.

I am just collecting few things and start putting things away because I'm going to let's say.

That's my.

Tribe.

Only Pat spent decades trying to protect the children of Old Springs from the government and his intervention. But now she's leaving. Her paintings are leaning against cabinets and bookcases waiting to be packed. They depict the seven Arrander sisters being chased by a man, a story at the heart of the Arrander mythology. They'll go with it when she heads south.

Right.

For those that remain, there are remnants of the intervention all around. They are pillars of times passed which are still present today. The next day, Uncle Brian and Damian tact me to Charles Creek town camp to show me the remaining signs. So where are we?

We're Charles Creek, who not camp Little Blow missioned? There's where that under people need to live.

Charles Creek is one of twenty or so camps in and around the town that the government officially calls Alll Springs Community Living areas. Some of the camps, such as Charles Creek, are old missions. It was where oboriginal people were assigned patches of land when Europeans first settled here. People have called this place home for generations. The camp is fenced in a series of neatly kept homes at the base of another rocky escarpment. We've arrived just after

One of the presidents here of this block. So they want to come and check out some of them signs down here. A little bit of truth about what happens in outa Springs. Here people get treated, how's the rent.

Proven?

Your identification? Everywhere you going on that side of Jazz.

Damien remembers when a sign was put up on his block during the intervention.

And when I see it, because I got dyslection, I couldn't read it and I said, what does that mean? And someone was explaining it to me and I.

Was like what, Yeah, no, it's always been like that.

Some signs up there, they're just saying that we can't have any alcohol or any pornography or any other stuff written on there says that we can't have it.

And then there's another sign here. Do you want to Can anyone read this sign for me? You can read that it.

Is an offense to drink or bring alcohol into this community or give alcohol to anyone.

And again this has been planted in front of people's homes.

That's right.

Shame.

How can you decorate your house and look respectable when you've got these sitting before you even enter your house.

Do you think that people in the broader Australian community have any sort of understanding as to what's happening here?

No right, people look at Ali Springer as a bad town.

Charles Creek is one of the more pristine camps. They're tended to by a number of housing associations of various types of leases. They're not suburbs, they're not camps as weed know. What they are is places of segregation. A reminder of times before the intervention, when from the earliest days of European settlement, our original people and families were discouraged from living in the township. Uncle Brian is scathing about the state of the camp in which he leaves.

We living on Toba rubbish, don't even a proper house, you know. We're happy with the river red bit of power shower.

Majority of the time. This unstrings me because you don't have power, you don't have food. I be ringing him sometimes for power and for food, and that's just you know, linking up and supporting each other. But like I was saying, it's like we are all handicapped with this rent system with everything you know.

Lately.

To be honest, I come in here and visit my family, but I haven't really pulled up and looked at this. And today we really looked at it, and actually reading about it, I'm thinking this sort of yeah, I bring back a lot of lot of anger and a lot of distrust within the government and whatnot.

Where were you when you heard that the intervention was going to come through.

I was at loves Creek Station. I was working with Dame instead.

And what was the reaction of you and some of the other fellas well.

It was shocking and it was really sad for being indiganous men, you know. Yeah, to see Army's coming with guns and everything in it that freaked everybody out. Like to hear all these stories, like when the indiventions come through with mal Broth and all that. I would love to see Malbrock come back and say that it would be but you know, I've got a lot of things to put it on the table for him. If you're listening, mail Brock come back and meet Brian Young in other springs.

These men are proud fathers, grandfathers, and sons. The thought of harming their own flesh and blood is abhorrent to them. But the shame of being cast as drunks, drug users and head of philes still lingers. All these years later. The picture that was painted of Ourboriginal men here impacted mob right across the country. Now it's the next generation being impacted. I wanted to speak to some of the kids who brought me to all the springs, the kids

Today we're talking about I've got no life.

We've come to a place where kids can rehabilitate. It's called bush Mob, and it's motto is grog sniffing, drugs, crime, violence, no good where are we bush mob? And what's what's bush mob?

Bushamb is like drugs in that.

Called what's your favorite part of it?

Anything? I don't know anything.

What do you do?

Bus trip?

I like the bush chip, just going out into the bush.

Yeah tomorrow.

What are you going to be doing out there?

I'm swimming anything swimming?

Yeah? What being in juvenile?

It's so right peaceful. Yeah.

The facility is a bunch of demountables or donglers as they call them up here. I don't know why. It's the industrial part of town. Like many NGOs here. The organization is broke. The pool table has sticky tape down as center to fix a tear. A few kids are playing pool, the others sitting around. There's lots of banter and not much to do. Jock McGregor is bush moob CEO.

The kids we're seeing now are the kids? Are the kids?

So they're the guys who got marginalized when the intervention came in, who got shuffled to the side or put into a service or do and then left with little to no support. And then if you don't know how to look after yourself, how to look after kids, or if you we're getting what third fourth generation of welfare kids.

That's what happens.

Most of the kids here are Aboriginal and have either had brushes with the law or have been locked up. People can't walk in and kids can't walk out. It's harshly lit, with flickering fluorescent lights, giving everything a bluish tinge, but it's also an oasis. Kids will spend weeks to toxing, warned about the dangers of drugs and sniffing, and given time to think about their place in the world. You want to come in Avenana as well?

Okay, what the hell?

Hello? How are do you you?

Food?

And how long have you been in here?

I don't know?

Yeah?

For me?

For me, hell is here? Mm hmm, I do just like teasing the stuff and making.

Annoy longer, making them their money annoying, then't it. What do you want to do when you get out of here?

I don't know.

Free, I'll be free.

Yeah, he's going to be smoking diruction, nothing good like I'm half smoke.

Staff at bush Mob do their best, but the rap against it. It's run on a skeleton staff and therefore, in some circumstances can't provide enough support to the kids that are here. The social and political environment is no longer conducing for the soft touch of organizations like bush Mob.

Yeah, the kids come out fatter than they come in. That's the point.

We're not fixing the problems at home, Surf. Young fella's got drama with family at home. We can't fix that. We can't go out to the community or where are the young fella's from and have it so that everything's safe. But what we can do is make sure for the time that they're here, they're safe, they're fared, they're looked after.

I think it's getting better or worse.

Finally, Jock, I think it's getting worse.

In here. I feel the sense of frustration and hopelessness that permeates these walls as much as it does the streets of Alice Springs. Three generations of Aboriginal people have lived through it all. They are the children and grandchildren of the intervention. How many more generations are doomed to suffer the same fate.

So you think this podcast goes out to everyone, Is there anything that you want to tell people of Australia about what your life is like and what your hopes are that sort.

Of thing.

Laces cook sometimes make that.

DSA in the next episode. The one agency tasked more than any other to arrest the problem here, the coppers. We want to do any more want as we sit here now in twenty twenty four, just at the start of your journing in this role, would you say that the Northern Territory Police is a racist institution.

You see, once an Aboriginal person gets in the system, it's like glue.

You know, it's a vortex.

It's crazy shit.

No matter how will I dress, no matter how high I am as a position title, no matter what sort of car I drive, I'm still an Aboriginal person.