ON THE RIGHT TRACK

It is so easy to despair about the problems in Aboriginal communities, writes Debra Jopson, that we forget to celebrate their successes.

How do you reform a petrol sniffer who wanders around his desert community with a knife in his back pocket that sends the message: "Touch my can and I'll kill you"?

What do you do to protect frail, vulnerable women living in a rural NSW village without working public phones or cars, threatened by domestic violence and rock-throwing juveniles? How can anyone give an Aboriginal man taken from his family as a child an understanding of indigenous culture and a hope of remaking his identity?

Amid Aboriginal affairs, a corner of politics richer in rhetoric than most, these are not rhetorical questions, but the practical conundrums constantly confronting indigenous communities.

The Cape York leader Noel Pearson has said the problems his communities are dealing with include "outrageous grog addiction and the large and growing drug problem among our youth", along with phenomenal violence and the "inter-generational transmission of the debilitating effects of the social passivity which our passive economy has induced".

When Pearson spoke against "passive welfare" in the Cape York communities - saying that there had been three murders within a month in one area of fewer than 1,000 people, and "... we don't know what to do" - he no doubt hoped the people in the cities would share his despair.

There is much to despair over. The issues which loom large in indigenous people's personal lives and compound their disadvantage have been tackled in a disjointed, nationwide experiment with a breathtaking mix of fumbling, infighting and indifferent funding.

But in some cases there has been fabulous innovation. In some instances solutions are working. In some places the petrol sniffing has stopped. In some the crime rates have tumbled and the health statistics have improved.

Some measures do work, missed perhaps as the media continues to focus on indigenous affairs as seen from Canberra through the prism of the Australian struggle for identity, and as certain commentators seek kudos through writing lazy, accusatory columns about what has gone wrong.

As the substance abuse researcher Anne Mosey says in a report on petrol sniffing in Central Australia, "countless" community-generated initiatives have received neither publicity nor funding. "Thus, there has been a tendency on the part of service providers, the media and new non-Aboriginal residents in remote communities to assume that nothing is being done."

By definition, much of the work to hold together the fabric of indigenous communities is experimental, with a high risk, but some experiments have had impressive results.

The latest Aboriginal and Islander Health Worker Journal recounts that the establishment in 1996 of a sobering-up shelter at Wiluna, in Western Australia, led to a 33 per cent reduction in alcohol-related injuries in its first year, a 90 per cent drop in arrests for damages offences and 67 per cent fewer arrests for assault.

But effects can be more subtle - such as when the Derby indigenous community got its own health service 18 months ago. The medical director of the Kimberley Aboriginal Medical Services Council, Dr Richard Murray, says the children suffer the "diseases of poverty and poor diet" such as scabies, trachoma and gastroenteritis.

Previously, a child with scabies would have gone to casualty at Derby hospital and be given antibiotics, a scabies cream and a dressing. "If this [child] is one of five in the care of a grandmother in a two-bedroom house which is crowded and she doesn't get any money for the kids, [the child] will be back again ..."

But with the Aboriginal Medical Service (AMS), "the health worker ... can look at support like housing, how to get the water and other things fixed, not just concentrating on the skin problem, but the whole child."

The chief executive officer of the Bourke Aboriginal Health Service in NSW, Judy Johnson, is "nipping domestic violence in the bud" by using a $20,000 grant from the Department for Women to install 11 phones in the homes of women under threat. The phones dial only the 000 emergency number.

The service put in the phones after surveying residents at Alice Edwards Village, which has only one phone every four blocks and not enough working vehicles to go around. The police station was a 15-minute run from the village, the hospital a 20-minute run.

Johnson says the women pay a $10 connection fee and the health service pays the rest. She hopes to have 100 connected.

Dr Paul Chantrill, who has helped the Queensland communities of Kowanyama and Palm Island to set up community justice programs that cut juvenile incarceration, says the magic ingredient is having "the community and all the agencies start working together".

In both communities, elders re-exerted their authority and imposed their own discipline on the young, while the key agencies that serviced the communities - including police, children's services, juvenile justice, corrective services and visiting magistrates - worked with them.

In Kowanyama, the 18-member elders' council took the young on cultural camps, berated neglectful parents, rounded up children and sent them to school, and, to limit shoplifting, made a deal with the local store not to allow schoolchildren in during school hours.

The council also successfully lobbied to get a 50-metre swimming pool and floodlights for the sportsfield. It is seeking to stock the community's outstation, Sefton, with horses and cattle to give the young something to do.

The statistics show the number of juveniles in the communities ending up in court fell from 231 in 1993-94 to 28 in 1996-97.

Petrol sniffing, recently on the rise in Central Australia, encapsulates the nightmarish, seemingly intractable visitation of social ills on Aboriginal communities - the young destroying themselves and those around them, the older people paralysed by powerlessness or seeming indifference.

There is an intrinsic dilemma in trying to overcome this form of substance abuse, says Dr Craig san Roque, a psychologist who has assisted several communities. Just as petrol sniffing dissolves the connecting processes in the brain, it dismembers the connections between people in communities.

It produces hallucinatory images redolent of aggression and death, such as skulls and poisonous snakes. Users destroy their brains. Under the influence, they lose the capacity to discriminate between heat and cold, hunger and satiation, friend and foe. They may destroy their communities, smashing houses and cars and menacing people with axes and knives.

Ending petrol sniffing seems too hard. Yet, there have been successes.

But researchers Peter d'Abbs and Sarah MacLean, whose findings on what works in tackling petrol sniffing were published recently by the Co-operative Research Centre for Aboriginal and Tropical Health, have found that the best solutions are multi-pronged, with community involvement.

Seven years ago, the Arnhem Land community of Maningrida switched from petrol to Avgas, an aviation fuel which causes severe head and stomach aches and does not pack petrol's euphoric punch. The community simultaneously introduced training and job programs. The sniffing stopped and the crime rate dropped. Between 1987 and 1990, the local court dealt with 147 cases; from 1991 to 1994, just 62.

In the vast Pitjantjatjara lands of South Australia, 22 communities simultaneously introduced Avgas in the early 1990s. According to d'Abbs and MacLean, the estimated 254 sniffers in 1986 - or at least 10 per cent of the population - were down to 85 by 1996, or 3.6 per cent of the population.

D'Abbs and MacLean record that after the deaths of two teenage sniffers at Mimili elders told their families that anyone continuing to sniff would have to leave. Visiting sniffers were sent back to their home communities.

Five years later, the community is still sniffer-free.

At Fregon, the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council Aboriginal Corporation has used a Federal Government grant to employ a full-time youth worker to work with an elder to engage young people with sport, artwork and music projects.

Over the past month, san Roque has worked with the Fregon people to identify the sniffers for detoxification in bush camps to "wash petrol out of their brains".

These are small but important steps and Dr Maggie Brady, visiting research fellow at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, says the key to successfully tackling substance abuse is focusing on it tightly, rather than the wider issues of dispossession and colonisation: "I have always been anti the huge-scale analysis ... because it invokes a sense of helplessness in people."

D'Abbs and MacLean say: "If young people who sniff petrol do not stop of their own accord one, or a combination of three groups is usually identified as being responsible for dealing with it: families, communities or outside agencies such as police, non-government agencies and governments.

"The support of elders is a critical element in all programs."

Non-Aborigines, say these researchers, expect Aboriginal organisations such as councils to help, but often such new bodies do not have authority within Aboriginal communities. Yet, the effects of sniffing make it difficult for families to manage their children, who may care more for their peer group. Sometimes families ask councils to act on sniffing, causing tensions. Other times, they get angry when communities interfere in controlling their children.

The institutions of white Australian society can also be more hindrance than help. Petrol sniffing is illegal on the Pitjantjatjara lands, for instance, but not in the Northern Territory. Sniffers given sanctions, says san Roque, flee across the border.

Funding is often sporadic and short-term, with little commitment to longer-term solutions. D'Abbs and MacLean reported that in the early 1990s one outstation program at Pipalyatjara, at which a husband and wife team had 15 boys working with cattle, failed to secure funding to continue. Within a few months, "all the boys involved were in jail in Port Augusta".

Brady complains of buck-passing and confusion between Federal Government departments and between the Commonwealth and the States: "There is unbelievable fragmentation and a failure to follow on."

Brady now deals with calls around the country for help, from communities newly hit by petrol and other substance sniffing. There is nowhere else for them to go, she says. "There is no proper resourcing in terms of ideas and options and material. Petrol sniffing has been around since the 1960s. That's 40 years. It's a long time."

What can be done? Secondary schooling is virtually non-existent in most remote Central Australian communities. A doctors' conference two years ago in Alice Springs identified "proud work" as an important diversion from substance abuse.

That is what can be found in the efforts of MY Vineyard Services, a small contract grapevine-pruning business servicing the fast-expanding vineyards around Cowra, which according to ATSIC figures has a male unemployment rate of 27 per cent. Run by two Wiradjuri men, Brian Young and Brian Moynihan, it has 16 full-time workers on its books, plus five trainees from the local CDEP, the Aboriginal work-for-the-dole scheme. The ultimate aim of the two men is a 30-strong workforce.

The company, which began with a $10,000 grant and a $10,000 loan from ATSIC, paid out $155,000 in wages from October last year to the end of June this year. Next month, it will give each of the five trainees what Young calls "a real job with real pay" with the chance of earning up to $700 gross weekly.

Young says members of the 500-strong Cowra indigenous community, who previously thought their future was welfare-dependency, are clamouring for work.

What went right in this case? Young is critical of the way so many Aborigines rely on ATSIC for funding, shunning the banks, which would be the normal avenue for non-Aborigines seeking start-up capital. Yet, he concedes, the banks often discriminate, and do not trust would-be indigenous entrepreneurs like himself.

Young and Moynihan in a small way are working to restore the Aboriginal economic base which colonisation destroyed. The indigenous educator Jack Beetson calls the two-year advanced diploma in applied Aboriginal studies - which he runs - a "cultural renaissance" course. It has helped Aborigines removed from their families as children to piece together their indigenous identity, taught those familiar with their own communities about the big socio-economic picture, and reminded even the teachers of some aspects of their culture they had forgotten.

The course is held at the community-run Tranby Aboriginal College in Glebe and at Beetson's Linga Longa Philosophy Farm near Port Macquarie. The 78 indigenous students, aged 18 to 65, from all over Australia, do not have to write many essays, but they learn to identify bush tucker and bush medicine - even in Mansfield Street, Glebe. The women learn to make coolamons and clap-sticks, the men artefacts such as boomerangs. They contemplate the nature of Aboriginality and, with that, of Australia itself. They learn colonisation history and contemporary politics.

"Aboriginal people," says Beetson, "have had awful lives over the past 212 years ... a lot know what they are but they don't know who they are. Who they are is about those cultural things.

"We hope to ... restore what was stolen. It's an indigenous attempt to give back to our communities what was taken by the non-indigenous community or government."

ATSIC's chairman, Geoff Clark, says the Aboriginal endeavour is to re-build the communities, as nations do after a war.

Among many Aborigines, san Roque sees "an absentmindedness" which amounts to giving up on taking care of their own long-term future and that of their children and their culture.

It is a mirror, he says, of their absence from the minds of Australians, which began with the doctrine of terra nullius, the empty land. The nihilistic sniffers "personify that in the most tragic manner".