Pubdate: Sat, 24 Nov 2001
Source: Australian, The (Australia)
Copyright: 2001 News Limited
Contact:  http://www.theaustralian.com.au/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/35
Author: Paul Toohey

PETROL SNIFFING INQUIRY

The Town Ruled By Petrol Sniffers

THE South Australian town of Pukatja is under siege by petrol sniffers. Six 
of them have died in the past 18 months. Parents are frightened of their 
own children and authorities are powerless to act.

In the town of Pukatja, population 400, there are 60 petrol sniffers. They 
control the town and everyone is frightened. Pukatja, about 400 kilometres 
south-west of Alice Springs, was once known as Ernabella. It was also once 
called a "community" but the word no longer fits because there is no sense 
of community. Liquor is banned but there are drunks. Petrol sniffing is 
illegal but is now fully accepted as a part of life. Sniffers roam town, 
all day, cans stuck to their faces.

By widespread agreement, Pukatja has the most blatant petrol-sniffing 
problem ever seen on Aboriginal land anywhere in Australia. In other badly 
hit communities, such as Papunya in the Northern Territory, a similar-sized 
town, there are fewer sniffers and they keep more to themselves, holding 
fort in ruined houses on the outskirts of the community. In Pukatja, a 
shabby desert town of filthy tin houses and office buildings that look more 
like jail blocks, there is no such restraint. Petrol sniffers are in 
everybody's face, all the time.

In the past two months, Avgas, or aviation fuel, has replaced super and 
unleaded at the town's only service station. It is unpopular with car 
owners because it blows out engine gaskets, but it is widely held that 
Avgas cannot be sniffed because it makes people violently ill. A glance in 
the cans of Pukatja's petrol sniffers quickly dispels this notion. With no 
petrol available, all the children's tins have a few centimetres of dirty 
blue liquid - Avgas - swilling around the bottom. They will sniff it until 
the next shipment of the good stuff - super or unleaded - arrives through 
their back door.

Whether sniffers get any hit from Avgas is up for discussion. Sniffers can 
be seen running a lighter beneath tins or bottles, perhaps to activate 
fumes. Police suspect they also add a readily available household item to 
Avgas which may either increase the toxicity or make it possible to sniff 
the stuff without vomiting.

White people work behind iron doors or grilles because sniffers and drunks 
pull knives or star pickets when they don't get their way. They do not sit 
around having barbecues on desert nights, or mix with locals, either black 
or white, but lock themselves inside security-mesh homes and wait for 
morning to see last night's damage. White families invariably have guard dogs.

Joe Baty is leaving town because of petrol sniffers. Until several weeks 
ago he managed the Pukatja store, which also acts as a banking agency. "If 
a Centrelink cheque doesn't turn up, then it's our fault," Baty says. "It's 
a very dangerous situation. Nearly all of them carry knives or 
sharpened-down screwdrivers. I've been attacked on numerous occasions. I 
have altercations with petrol sniffers three to four times a week. Petrol 
sniffers run the place and the council's not strong enough to stop them. 
There's ten-year-old kids sniffing here, and no one will kick them in the 
arse. [Petrol sniffers] hold power in town. Nearly everyone's scared of them."

As for the Aboriginal population, the majority of whom are neither sniffers 
nor drunks, they have nowhere to hide. They are almost entirely 
welfare-dependent and find it hard to pack up and leave because their 
options are not appealing - perhaps another similarly ruined community 
further along the track, or to live with relatives in overcrowded camps in 
bigger towns. They have mostly given up hope and sit surrounded by the 
chaos, half-hoping for someone to airlift in an answer, but doubting it 
will arrive.

There is now a deeply cynical and widespread belief that until a white 
person is killed by a petrol sniffer, there will be no intervention by 
authorities. Joe Baty says he doesn't want to be that person.

The dozen or so communities of the Anangu-Pitjantjatjara Lands, a vast area 
of Aboriginal trust-held land in north-west South Australia, are deep in 
crisis. In Pukatja, petrol sniffers control the area outside the store, the 
council office, the homelands centre - the town's CBD. They have broken 
most of the windows in the church. Their parents, who are mostly 
church-influenced people, can accept broken windows. But when petrol 
sniffers have children, it suggests the sniffing culture has infiltrated 
well beyond superficial material damage.

Francie describes herself as a "dirty, no-good rotten petrol sniffer". She 
is 26. Her son, Shy, aged two or three, now lives in Mutitjulu, at Uluru, 
across the Northern Territory border. "They [her cousins] take him away for 
a little while, to grow him up," says Francie. Despite her petrol breath 
and wrecked eyes, she has a come-hither look for every boy and man.

"I had a little baby and when I had a little baby I was still sniffing." 
And the father? "Shhh," she whispers, referring to a part of her culture 
she has retained - that you are not supposed to mention the recently 
departed. "Father passed away."

The young father of Francie's child was found dead in Pukatja, with a 
petrol can at his side, six months ago. Since then, the boy's own father, a 
leader in the area named Kawaki Thompson, has instigated a successful 
campaign to invite the South Australian coroner to Pukatja to investigate 
his son's death, and those of four others in the past 18 months. Thompson 
insists that deaths such as his son's should not be described as 
"respiratory-related" on death certificates, as they have been, but be 
directly attributed to petrol sniffing. This, he hopes, will awaken 
authorities to the real statistics.

He also wants parents to stop talking of such deaths in "cultural terms", 
because he says it allows for all logic to disappear. What he means is that 
under traditional Aboriginal law, someone must be held responsible for a 
death. And someone will be found and punished, perhaps with a spearing or a 
belting, even if the real cause can be found in the bottom of a sniffer's 
petrol tin.

Francie's father, Gordon Ingkatji, is a church elder. Petrol sniffing has 
ruined his family and his town. "I read the Bible and I prayed," he says. 
"But I still I couldn't stop [them]." A week earlier, he says, Pukatja ran 
short of petrol to sniff. So Francie went with other sniffers to Fregon, a 
smaller but similarly sniffing-damaged town, 60km south, looking for fuel.

About this same time in Fregon, a petrol sniffer went to another sniffer's 
house in the north end of town, demanding to use a child's video game. He 
was told to go away. The visitor allegedly threw a can of petrol at the 
other's chest and face. Police are not sure of precise events, but believe 
the second sniffer might have been set alight. An old woman had to be 
dragged out of the burning house. The assaulted man, whose long-term 
sniffing history ruined his chance of recovery, spent weeks in intensive 
care in an Adelaide hospital and died without regaining consciousness.

There is no police presence on the Lands, apart from Aboriginal police 
aides. Inevitably, these men have petrol-sniffing children or relatives or, 
in the case of Pukatja police aide Pepai Carroll, become so hopelessly 
compromised they find it hard to work at all. Relatives use the powerful 
obligations inherent in the skin-family system to persuade aides not to 
prosecute their own; or families expect one police aide to deal with all 
the problems of a community.

Carroll wants parents to stand up. "This place can't live long," he says. 
"Mothers and fathers [have] got to do something. But they just sit there 
watching, thinking police should do everything. They got to do something. 
They don't care, you know. They should care about the kids, y'know. Some 
kids' mothers and fathers give money for marijuana and petrol. Some kids 
want $50 from their mother for marijuana or petrol. Here, it's $50 for a 
plastic cool drink bottle [of petrol]."

As for white police, they rarely have a presence at all. Police are scared 
of breaching the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Deaths in 
Custody, claims one Alice Springs man who works in Aboriginal health, and 
are "putting it all back on blackfellas. They say they are too frightened 
to lock anyone up in case he hangs himself."

A senior officer from Marla, the nearest major police station to the Lands, 
has heard this argument and concedes the perception is partly right. He 
says it is not desirable to hold people in custody when they are affected 
by a substance like petrol - and particularly pointless when the maximum 
penalty for sniffing under Pitjantjatjara Lands' by-laws is a $100 fine. He 
also argues that police cannot charge someone for possessing a universal 
commodity like fuel, and says proving someone is dealing petrol is near 
impossible.

It is now conventional wisdom that petrol, if not stolen from cars by the 
sniffers, is sold to children by greedy relatives or even given by parents 
in order to protect themselves from their children's violent demands. 
Parents must bear some responsibility but cannot wear it all. They need 
help. "We just have no answers. Not anymore," says Roger Kayipipi, town 
council vice-chairman at Fregon. "Parents can't do anything. Too hard, too 
big."

Yangkuyi, a mother from Pukatja, says: "Listen. I got a lot of petrol 
sniffers in my family. Daughter. Son. Nephew. I been to many meetings about 
petrol sniffing. Too many meetings."

Yangkuyi's son, Caspar, now trades on his scary face, rolling his eyes, 
pushy for cigarettes or anything else you might have going, intimidating 
black and white passersby with shadow-boxing that is followed by a pointed, 
deliberate stare. "What's wrong with petrol sniffers?" he demands. It is a 
difficult question to respond to without being insulting. But Caspar is not 
as scary as he thinks. He has got muscles but he's unsteady on his feet, 
and will topple if pushed. That is partly the sniffers' protection and 
allows them to terrorise with impunity: strike back at a petrol sniffer and 
you might kill him. Then you in turn become subject to the payback.

Colin Brown, an Aboriginal man from Port Augusta who has lived in Fregon 
for 20 years, describes his town as a death trap, a place from which 
Aboriginal and white law has fled. "This is a lawless place," he says. 
"This place is going to crumple and fall to pieces unless people stand up 
now. We've got to protect the kids."

Boredom is the key to petrol sniffing. There is nothing to do on the Lands 
after TV and DVD. Australian Rules football seems to be the one thing that 
can make the boys, at least, put down their cans. But the season runs only 
half the year and when, as has happened in Nyirripi, in the Northern 
Territory, a physically weak sniffer died on the ground, all kinds of 
payback hell can break loose.

Sniffers don't actually sniff. They inhale, mostly through a can held 
across the mouth and nose. They experience euphoria but sometimes 
hallucinate freely and report demonic visions. They veer between 
uncontrollable laughing and downers, and are often dangerous because they 
may fail to comprehend what they are actually seeing: friends can turn into 
imaginary enemies.

It is hard to say how long a hit lasts, because sniffers sniff all day. The 
physical effect is described by doctors as "similar to an electrical 
short", whereby fatty tissue on brain nerve-endings wastes away, causing 
the "wires" to flail about in the brain. Many sniffers eventually lose the 
ability to stand upright. Those who manage to cheat death are likely to 
find themselves wheelchair-bound and in full-time care.

The Ngaanyatjarra Council, representing remote communities in Western 
Australia, has identified 40 young people from its area either dead or 
permanently intellectually or physically disabled from petrol-sniffing in a 
15-year period. It also reports a prevalence of sexual violence and "an 
acutely high risk of exposure to HIV" among sniffers, who tend to have 
"multiple sexual partners with similarly poor sexual health".

/The Weekend Australian/ has reported previously on the case of a mother 
and father from Mutitjulu, the community alongside Uluru, who have two 
grown sons both wheelchair-bound from sniffing. This prompted the Prime 
Minister, John Howard, in April to make available $1 million for Northern 
Territory communities to urgently address the problem. Due to bureaucratic 
inertia, that money is yet to hit the ground in the north.

In the entire Pit Lands, there is one dedicated anti-petrol-sniffing youth 
worker, formerly based at Fregon and now at Amata, a community to the west 
of Pukatja. There is no other state or federal help. Though every community 
has a clinic, they usually treat sniffers only when they arrive on their 
last legs.

Kerry Gearman, a clerk at Pukatja's Anilalya Aboriginal Corporation, which 
can provide advances to people who are short of food, says it can be 
infuriating dealing with sniffers. "They come in nine times a day, asking 
for money. You tell them you've already given them some that very day. But 
they don't remember. And then they get angry."

Likewise, his wife, Bronwen King, also at the corporation, says it can be 
maddening dealing with federal agencies who arrive, sometimes in numbers, 
promising help is on the way. "There is a perception by Anangu [central 
Australian Aborigines] that we're not doing anything for them and, in some 
respects, they're right," King says.

In April this year, she adds, five federal public servants from Family and 
Community Services arrived in Pukatja offering money for a petrol-sniffing 
diversion program. The corporation's committee members doubted anything 
would come of it, but King encouraged them to persevere with a proposal. 
Eventually they were referred to another government department. "I don't 
know what happened, but we're still not being funded."

"Have a look at the state of the communities," says Peter Morrison, who has 
lived in Fregon for eight years and works as a community development 
officer for the homelands - the small outstations created to allow people 
to live with families away from town, on traditional lands. Violence and 
addiction are endemic - in the worst cases, he says there are 
"nine-year-old girls sniffing petrol and being pack-raped. That's the 
reality of the Lands. These communities haven't succeeded in one area.

"This is not a safe, healthy environment. If it was a group of whitefellas 
living like this, the communities would be shut down tomorrow. If it was 
white kids sniffing petrol, they'd bring in the army tomorrow. It's not as 
if people don't know about it. You think Anangu care about junkies in 
Melbourne? No. And people don't care about sniffers in the bush.''

Morrison came to the Lands for the same reason as many others - to 
participate in what he thought was a growing self-determination movement, 
and to immerse himself in Aboriginal culture. In recent times he's found 
himself living behind security mesh. His remarks are borne of a frustration 
that is now being articulated by central Australian whites and Aborigines 
alike. Cautious city-style political correctness is now years behind what 
is being said on the Lands by the people who live here.

The void created by the lack of established solutions means people are 
talking about drastic and doubtless politically unpopular measures: boot 
camps for young people, even bringing in a team like Norforce, a mostly 
Aboriginal-staffed army unit that is highly respected by Aboriginal elders 
and children.

"I have been kicking around this military option for a couple of years 
now," says Dr Craig San Roque, a psychologist who has worked with central 
Australian petrol sniffers for ten years. "And despite the possible 
repugnance for things military by soft-hearted advocates of reconciliation 
and indigenous welfare, the army actually has appeal to many indigenous 
people - they do not look upon the military as a threat."

San Roque advocates a coordinated approach in which state and federal 
governments put aside politics and different justice systems, with support 
from the army. "I'm not simply talking about sending the army in to sort 
them out," he says. "There are structural resources which the defence force 
has available, including communications, intelligence, strategic thinking, 
medical and health resources, and an organised group of people who will go 
generally where they are asked. They do not have a police function, they 
have access to the country and they are free from political party 
backstabbing." Besides that, they could provide security to communities.

"We want the work to come back," says Peter Nyiningu, a Pukatja elder and 
church minister. "Horses, cattle, fencing, gardens, welding. We used to be 
busy. But whitefellas are like a cloud. They come and go."

Nyiningu is referring, perhaps unintentionally, to the burn-out factor of 
white people on communities. Most outsiders admit they have a couple of 
good years in them working alongside Anangu. It is difficult to maintain 
enthusiasm, they say, when people are beset by inertia. Everyone can 
recount attending ten meetings in which strong words were spoken and 
community action was promised, but then nothing happened.

Whites who stay too long run the risk of becoming desensitised to the 
reality and end up ignoring it. Good people are becoming harder to find to 
work on communities, says Morrison.

Those working in the nation's few existing petrol-sniffing programs are 
already in clear breach of basic human rights and Australian law. At 
Yuendumu, in the Northern Territory, child sniffers are rounded up and 
taken to Mt Theo outstation, 60km from town. They are held, under no law, 
against their will. It puts those running the program in a difficult 
position. They run their show under community orders, because otherwise the 
children will sniff themselves to death.

But Mt Theo's overseers live in fear that such a child may get bitten by a 
snake and die. Or an out-of-control sniffer, who needs to be in a mental 
health facility, might kill another child. Then, the operation will come 
under scrutiny from a wider national community that has comprehensively 
failed to respond to the sniffing plight.

A new kind of terra nullius is being discussed, particularly on the Pit 
Lands: under this scenario, Aboriginal people survive, but the Aboriginal 
outback dies. Everyone leaves to live in Alice Springs, Port Augusta, 
Adelaide or Darwin, where life is relatively safe and services are 
available. Some, such as Michael Jagamara Nelson, the renowned artist from 
Papunya, have expressed such a view to /The Australian/ in recent times: 
that the lack of concerted attention to problems in communities is a 
deliberate attempt by state and federal governments to drive people off 
Aboriginal land into town centres where Aborigines will be less difficult, 
and less expensive, to manage.

But Morrison says the problem is not only about external ambivalence. He 
has attended numerous town meetings where health and education are never 
discussed. "Instead, people are grovelling about trying to get themselves a 
new [4WD] troop carrier."

Culture suffered at the hands of missionaries who built churches and got 
inside heads, but their work is now being reviewed in a kinder light - if 
not for the god they introduced, then for some of the things that came with 
them. "I've got no love for the Christians, but when they were here there 
were butcher shops, vegetable gardens and people's health was better. They 
had something," says Morrison. "Then the government came in and put nothing 
in its place."

Morrison admits he never expected to hear himself say such things. But he 
is in good company. No-one who lives or works on the Lands harbours 
illusions anymore. No-one who drives into any community can fail to see 
what is happening.

Nyiningu says the bigger communities such as Pukatja, Fregon, Indulkana and 
Amata have 10, maybe 15 years left before they become extinct. "There will 
be nothing here," he says. Nothing, except perhaps a petrol bowser for 
those passing through the empty Lands, standing there in mocking triumph.

*YOUR FEEDBACK*

I live and work in Adelaide and have for most of my life. I am also an 
Aboriginal person with strong traditional family connections to many 
families living on the AP lands. I have seen first hand, petrol sniffers 
wandering around on AP communties during past visits to these communities. 
Is there an answer?

For what it's worth, I believe many AP communities experiencing problems 
with petrol sniffers experience a kind of cultural suffocation. Petrol 
sniffers are slowly but surely suffocating and snuffing out the cultural 
vitality and cultural norms and traditional authority structures in their 
communities. They incite violence and inflict pain for purely selfish gain. 
They show no signs of letting up.

It's going to be a very difficult decision to make, but I believe part of 
the answer lies in a community deciding whether they wait for their 
community to be destroyed by the suffocators or they decide to concentrate 
on saving the cultural life while it can still be preserved. Not an easy 
choice, that's why many are balking at the decision. This is not action 
that a white fella is able to lead. It must come from Anangu. *Andrea Mason 
Adelaide, SA*