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*