A LONE RANGER REACHES OUT PATROLLING HUME'S HIGH WAY TO HELL

He drives in a big circle under thick black rain, a solid day at the
wheel on the valley roads that run with the creeks in the shadow of
the snow country, telling stories heavier than the tree-top sky.

We pass places where the local boogey man has come in the dark, in his
balaclava, to do over those who owe him money, who he thinks have
cheated him, who he thinks have talked too much.

The balaclava boogey man is the heaviest of the heavy. Many of the
people he heavies are still children.

The man at the wheel looks heavy, like a Viking. Indeed, he is a
member of a local biker gang, the Tramps. Mark Serong is also team
leader for Open Family's drug and alcohol youth outreach service in
the Hume region, a part of the state which has high youth suicide and
youth crime.

Serong has about 20 clients on his own beat, half of them using
heroin. Some of the others have dabbled.

The brief is to reach people aged 12 to 21 with drug and alcohol
problems on top of their still-born lives. "The youngest client I've
had was 11, a girl," Serong says.

His beat covers three shires, taking in Benalla, Wangaratta and the
green plains around Myrtleford and Mansfield to the east, where the
country rolls gently, violently lurches and flattens in places
between. Driving all day, we do not see close to all of it.

We pass caravan parks that sit at nowheresville crossroads, where
nowhere kids go to hide from the scene, taking a break from the
riverbank, the tent in the bush, the water tower. But in the caravans
they are still living cold, with nothing going and only the scene
beckoning. "Often it's all I can find for them," he says.

One of these crossroads is home to a girl starting over from playing
with the needle, with spray paint. The needle had her a year ago, when
she was 14. No parents claimed her then or now. Now she has the
caravan and nothing much in it; all thin hope hanging on the long bus
ride to school, her one good thing.

"I haven't heard from her in six months," Serong says. "That's a good
sign. You tend to only hear from them when they're in trouble."

We pass over little bridges where he has found children sleeping and
wasted, past shacks of mould and pigeon dirt where he has gone to feed
their pets while the children away doing de-tox, where he has come
away carrying plastic bags heavy with their used needles, where he has
come away carrying a baby (later returned) from its young mum and dad,
too strung out between engagements with heroin to cope.

"One baby and about 3000 needles in two years," Serong
says.

Country kids, eh? Serong is all they have got out here. He knows them.
The biker thing, the that's-how-it-goes attitude, means he does a lot
of his job by just hanging out with them, by turning up and seeing how
it is.

The needle scene, he says, is very secret, very closed, and ignored or
denied by the drug-free (if not always sober) citizenry.

Save for one Benalla doctor, who described the local heroin problem as
"significant", none of the withdrawal nurses or needle-exchange people
Serong approached on my behalf wanted to talk to The Sunday Age about
shooting up in their towns.

Two weeks ago The Sunday Age, as part of a report that described the
rise of heroin use in rural Victoria, reported that heroin starter
kits were being seen in the Hume region. Serong was the source of that
news. He got the word in Wangaratta, from one of his clients.

Some days later, The Wangaratta Chronicle ran a story in which local
police, citing a drop in break and enter burglaries, said heroin was
not an issue and not on the rise.

Last week The Border Mail reported the Anglican Bishop of Wangaratta's
support for injecting rooms, and his reminder that there indeed was a
rural heroin issue and it shouldn't be ignored.

"Over the last three years," says Mark Serong, "I've met about 100
people in Wangaratta using needles. And about 100 people in Benalla.
There is an significant IV drug problem here and very few people want
to talk about it." Late in the day, Serong and I drive to Benalla, to
the home of B, a tough woman whose son and son's girlfriend, and 30
other people she could think of, are in deep trouble with heroin.

Last year, B and Serong were among 150 people who packed a small hall
to spilling to discuss local kids and local drugs. They tell the story
of one young man, 15, a heroin hostage, speaking out against the tone
of blame and accusation poisoning the meeting.

One of the chair people tried to throw him out. "These kids don't have
a lot of trust in them. And why should they? They're treated like
scum, even when they're having a go," says B, who runs a support
network for families.

She serves us tea and cookies and talks about a gun being pulled on
the street last week in a drug-related palaver.

Serong also introduced me to a number of his clients, heroin users,
recovering and otherwise; and they talked about the growing number of
people they knew "getting a feel for the steel".

We went for a drink with working man P, who Serong claims as a
success. P told me speed has long been the injecting enthusiast's
local favorite in the Hume region. And when speed goes off the scene,
there is heroin.

"And if there's no heroin or speed, you might do some jellies
(sleeping capsules)," says P, father of the little baby that Serong
once had to farm out for the night. P's father is a retired policeman,
living locally.