“Call the police! Call the police!” A barrel-chested Aboriginal man is yelling out to his mates on the night patrol. A red station wagon with plastic sheets for windows is grinding its tyres in the dirt, a woman wailing in the backseat. Five patrollers are jostling beside the four-wheel-drive patrol van, an iron cage attached to the back. “C’mon!” they call out again to Trevor Cook, the 23-year-old boss of this mob, as he pulls out a mobile phone and starts to ring the police. The police are 50 kilometres away up the road. Phone pressed to his ear, Trevor looks across at the patrollers. He brings the phone down. “Outta credit.”
We are outside the gates of Ti Tree, a dry community 200 kilometres north of Alice Springs. Scores of crows peck open the bellies of dead kangaroos. Termite mounds poke up like little red tombstones and hundreds of plastic bags sway in the breeze, fixed on Spinifex. There is a sense out here that the land will always beat you. Barefoot kids scrounge around rubbish tips, pillaging burnt-out cars for parts and digging up the odd blockbuster movie poster. The gloss image of Bridget Jones’ Diary looks bizarre as it sails through the desert clutched by dusty little hands. The boys wear LA ghetto-style T-shirts – Eminem, Tupac, 50 Cent – and their all-defining question, “Do you have a football oval?”, is followed immediately by another: “Dirt or grass?” And in the dark as I take a piss, squatting in the dirt, a wild brumby gallops past with a feral dog nipping at its heels. I watch them disappear into the scrub.
The Ti Tree night patrol consists of five blackfellas whose job is to stop grog-runners. Ti Tree might be a dry zone but peering over its shoulder is a yellow Four-X billboard, erected by the nearby roadhouse, a reminder that beer is a ten-minute drive away. Aborigines say they don’t have a dreaming for booze, a song to ward off its evil spirit. Instead it sings to them, along with the roadhouse’s bain-marie, keeping the fried chicken, dim sims and hot chips warm. Trevor solemnly says he never touches a drop but another patroller tells me he doesn’t mind the odd beer. “On the weekend, you know?” Sometimes the patrol feels like a bit of a show. Proudly they shine a torch into cars coming and going, checking for casks of goon and beer. They hurl empty casks into the scrub and puncture already sucked-dry bladder bags of cheap wine. A busload of tourists whips past. “McCafferty’s,” says Trevor, as if spotting the species of bus company is the same as spotting an emu.
Wispy kids tramp through the grass, lighting fires that cast long flickering shadows across the dirt. The patrollers tell them off, but here fires seem to light up like the fall of footsteps. About a metre from the fence-line that marks the dry zone a party is underway. “Today is payday,” says Trevor, meaning government benefits day, otherwise known as thirsty Thursday. Payday can also mean payback. Recently a man got tanked on goon or beer then headed off to stab another fella in the thigh. Why? “It was tribal,” explains a night patroller from Alice Springs. But why? “It goes back a long way. His grandfather tracked their grandfather for the government.” It seems the reverberations of Australia’s Native Police Corps, where the British employed Aborigines to commit crimes against their own people as a kind of ‘divide and conquer’ method of colonisation, is still fulfilling its initial purpose.
Further up the road, where the night is so black you could lose an outstretched hand, is the Falconio stretch. Everyone in Alice Springs has a theory different to the court’s verdict about what happened to Peter Falconio on the night he went missing in 2001. The desert is a place where weird things happen and nobody is around to witness them – unlike the city where everything is observed, even if it’s just a fleeting glance through venetian blinds. “Something stinks about it,” says the bartender at tourist pub Bojangles. As with the Azaria Chamberlain case two decades earlier, a lynch mob of misfits, mercenaries and missionaries grind their teeth. Their theories seem based on boredom rather than on any outstanding evidence.
Boredom drove one blackfella out of his community west of Alice, declaring with the back of his hand: “Too many meetings here.” Like desperate housewives, a handful of white workers on every community organise the locals into football teams and battles of the bands, arranging sporting events and tug of wars. They hold meetings, take minutes and ask for a show of hands. They run around collecting signatures for health grants, and black eyes follow them silently, no doubt wondering why these strange agitated white people aren’t with their own mob.
We take the road through Utopia to get to a sports carnival in a remote community 300km north east of Alice. Along the side of the dirt road, cars flipped onto their backs had been pulled apart, slowly becoming more and more skeletal as time flickers on by. This is where cars come to die. Four hours down the red road, we arrive at the only petrol bowsers and general store for 400km minutes before it closes. Frozen kangaroo tails poke out of the refrigerator, and hanging above the store cash register is a Xavier College school photo, an all boys Melbourne private school. No one in the shop knows why it’s there.
The sign for Ampilatawatja must have blown away again, the maintenance worker tells us, after we have spent more than an hour driving in circles, (taking the long way round through Utopia,) before stumbling through the back entrance to the community. The sports carnival is on and people have gathered in groups round the dirt oval’s sidelines, cheering barefoot boys and men as they tear after a football, weaving around each other like insects. Sometimes the players become silhouettes in the haze of a red sandstorm that turns white singlets pink and fills your nose with orange snot. A huge pig wanders from group to group, snuffling at scraps, and two wild donkeys stroll across the oval at half-time, poking their heads into the open windows of parked cars. Posters of the local Labor member Peter Toyne wearing an akubra, are plastered over the general store. Toyne has donated a $300 prize for the winner of the Best Dressed Car competition and all around Ampilatawatja, a community of about 15 concrete houses, men are standing beside their vehicles, using watercolour paints to turn them into football mascots, wrapping crepe paper around the wire coat hangers that make do for aerials. Some of the windscreens are so shattered that looking through them must feel like it is perpetually raining.
Patiently Toyne waits for the competition to begin. He has a camera so that a photo can be taken of the winner and himself shaking hands. But come 5 p.m. there is no sign of any car competition organising itself. When one of the older Aboriginal men, told that Toyne is keen to get going, is finally asked what’s happening, he stares blankly ahead and rubs his chin. “We’re not ready,” he says. “Maybe tomorrow.”
By day, the carnival consists mostly of football and of men doing languid laps of the community in their dolled-up cars. At night the battle of the bands takes place on the back of a pick-up truck, children’s eyes glinting from their hiding place under the stage, staring out at the dance floor. Clouds of red dust swirl as about 50 people jerk and twist to a mongrel mix of rock, ska, reggae and country and western. Marjorie and Nigel, two born-again black Christians, take it upon themselves to don the baseball caps of the night patrol and drive around the community. The battle of the bands, say Marjorie and Nigel, is the sanctioning of sin. They set up an alternative stage playing gospel tunes where about five people are in attendance.
Setting up Ampilatawatja’s night patrol involved more than its share of difficulties. The community nominated one of the most respected men in the land to be boss of the patrol; the trouble was, the reason he was so respected was that he was the main grog-runner. Anxious to let the democratic vote reign, the white workers looked on for months as the new patrol vehicle was used to deliver beer and wine into the 300-strong community. Eventually the novelty rubbed off and the grog-runner resigned. No one took over. The patrol uniforms and vehicle were discarded and, for a while, that was that.
Paul Quinlivan, a health worker at Ampilatawatja, says there is no “one size fits all” model for night patrols. Out at Kintore, further west, he says the introduction of a night patrol resulted in the locals begging for a police station to be installed. “Blackfellas don’t want to tell each other what to do … they don’t want to be the ones seen drawing the line,” he says. Kintore eventually got its police station and I can’t help feeling sorry for the three police persons and their families. They have been called in to one of the most remote and lonely places in Australia, to be loathed and scowled at but secretly appreciated by a community too scared to tell one another that they’re beginning to scare each other.
Quinlivan has worked with Aboriginal people since the 1980s, witnessing secret ceremonies he chooses not to talk about. But when the prime grog-runner is voted head of the night patrol even he becomes sceptical. “I mean, what is an elder? And who determines who is an elder?” He says Aboriginal Australia anoints chiefs in the same way whitefellas try to find kings. Perhaps even the idea of a community, of small bands of nomads trying to live peacefully together in groups of 500 or so, is a white construct. None of the children at Ampilatawatja go to school. Instead they tear around the one-block outpost with their black and blonde mops of hair flying behind them. Quinlivan is trying to get in on the government’s new “No School, No Pool” policy. “It would kill two birds with one stone,” he says. The children would start attending school and the swimming pool they receive in return would act as a disinfectant to a lot of the infections, mainly scabies, to which they are prone. The dogs at Ampilatawatja lurk away from me in the shadows, distrustful of affection, because they know that most white people out here would like to shoot them dead. But at night these same dogs curl up with the children, passing on their lice and scabies, which can result in kidney infections, because the kids scratch at the sores on their bodies and often draw blood. “If we had a pool,” says Quinlivan, “we wouldn’t need to coax anyone with big speeches about health and votes on medicine. They could just jump in the pool and get clean instantly.”
It seems that Aborigines with a fixed address are short not of money but of stuff to spend it on. In the Ampilatawatja general store, the only shop for 100 kilometres, the single food aisle contains pasta sauce, tinned vegies, sugary bread, soft drink, crisps and lollies. People talk about shooting roos, digging for yams and roasting budgies on a stick but kids get high on Coca-Cola, glucose snakes and chips. Even in Alice Springs, where there is no shortage of healthy food, social workers say many Aborigines choose to do their shopping at the petrol stations, even though it’s more expensive, because of a sense of shame: when they set foot inside a supermarket they are watched like hawks.
In the rubbish tip behind Ampilatawatja discarded bikes, sometimes with only one spoke out of joint, are scattered among the empty Spam tins. People’s problems run deeper than money. And yet their preoccupation with money is palpable. One blackfella who comes over to talk to us about the Schapelle Corby case cannot get over the bag of marijuana found in her boogie-board bag. “Did you see how much ganja she had? Huh? How much money would that be worth, eh? A lot of gangja, eh. A lot of money.” People knock on Quinlivan’s door at the health centre to do their internet banking. He says people rarely think to Google the world around them.
One man tells me the story of the football grand final at Uluru three years ago. There was this Aboriginal player who was so good he could have made it in the AFL. But after he kicked the winning goal in the semi-final four policemen ran onto the field and cuffed him. They had 30 warrants out for his arrest. His team-mates ran alongside the divvy van, banging their fists and begging for him to be released. The next day the coach visited the police station, pleading with them to let his star player out for the grand final. Finally they relented. A cop car accompanied him to the oval and he took up his position in front of the goalposts, where his wife was waiting in a car, revving the engine. Everyone knew she was his wife except the cops. He kicked six goals and they won the grand final. And when the siren went off and the spectators mobbed the ground, he jumped into the car and they took off down the backways of the desert. Legend has it that he and his wife were last seen in South Australia, where he was playing footy for one of the teams down there.
After hearing this story I think about the image Australia promotes overseas. I think of the tourist billboards that portray the true-blue larrikin, the laid-back bloke, and of our award-winning low-budget films and their stories of Aussies playfully avoiding the law. And I realise I don’t know a single whitefella like that.
Conrad Wiseman is a windswept cowboy. He takes us out on night patrol in Alice Springs, driving wildly cross the terrain with his thumbs. He was scared, he admits, when he first went out on patrol. He had to press his hand over a blackfella’s gushing stab wound while being thrown around in the white mesh cage as the patrol sped towards the hospital.
At first glance the Alice Springs night patrol can look like a glamorised taxi service. Conrad and his team pick up folks who wave them down and take them to their town camp. But one afternoon a sheepish-looking Aborigine knocks on the back door of the night patrol’s portable office and asks if there are any lifts going out to his community, 200 kilometres away. His wife and three kids stand watching behind the cyclone fence. He fidgets nervously while he is told that he has left it too late and that no one will be going out that way until Monday. He looks back at his family and then squints in the direction of Alice’s town centre. Trouble will find his family if they stay here for the weekend, the lure of the drink overwhelming.
On weekends, the 20 autonomous town camps in the vicinity of Alice are overrun by families from remote dry communities, often loaded up with card-game winnings. The average town camp, hidden away in the scrub, is guarded by a gang of wild dogs and consists of five to seven concrete-slab houses, each sheltering up to 15 people. Because they are so close to the town centre it is impossible to make these camps dry zones, and the tyres of the patrol ute crackle as we flatten hundreds of VB cans strewn in our path. Conrad is a master of tough love. He tells off a bunch of Aborigines after they try to scam a lift off him with plastic bags full of cask wine. “We’re a bloody night patrol, you idiots,” he hollers at them, before accelerating off.
We hurtle past the drive-in with graffiti scrawled across its white movie screen and past the Todd Tavern, its windows blacked out and covered in chicken wire on the side where the Aborigines drink, the door guarded by a burly bouncer. On the other side of the pub, reached through a different entrance, the whites drink. You can see them through sparkling clear windows. We go past the drive-in, on the tail of a Mr Whippy van, playing its slow winding music and stopping for the occasional blackfella who wanders over from a campfire huddle to buy an ice-cream. Strollers are left overturned and abandoned on the roads, as if the mothers got sick of the awkward contraptions and preferred to carry their babies. Children play in the skeletons of trampolines and car wrecks. Makeshift campfires flare up in the doorways of the concrete homes, and one granny defecates on the verandah outside. The doors to the toilet cubicles have been torn off their hinges, exposing the blocked porcelain toilets with their shattered lids and jammed flushes.
Amid the squalor are normal things too. Two chairs are placed facing each other in conversation under the shade of a tree. Picture frames nailed to walls rattle in the evening breeze. A family is setting a table for dinner, while just outside Conrad is trying to get a woman holding a bloody rag to her face into the patrol ute, except that her boyfriend keeps shoving her away from the car. In the end the patrol, which is not allowed by law to physically intervene, has no choice but to call the police. And to the rusty whine of country and western, we drive through the night. We pick up one man sprawled flat out in a park. He has shat his pants and stares at us through glassy eyes. The patrollers radio back to base and are told they can’t take him to the main drying-out house because a woman there is complaining about him. We drive around with him in the cage, waiting for the green light to take him to another sobering-up place.
After dropping him off Conrad checks the time: a train from Adelaide is due in half an hour. We speed through the scrub and belt alongside the train track, our spotlight shining on the railway sleepers. “Sometimes drunks try to cross the track, trip over and knock themselves out on the sleepers,” Conrad explains. “And then the train comes along,” he adds, pointing to the headlights of the oncoming Ghan, which shuffles back and forth cross the desert between Adelaide and Darwin. As Conrad toots his horn joyously, the sound lost under the shriek of metal, I wonder if the people inside will ever know that unconscious lumps of intoxicated people are being cleared from the tracks to make way for them.
We bypass Camp 18 because of sorry business; the community there is mourning two three-year old boys who got trapped in a car while playing with matches and were both burnt to death. “The parents were playing cards,” Conrad murmurs. Madeline, Conrad’s shy sidekick, silently transcribes the night’s happenings into a report as we drive along. The night before she and Conrad discovered a woman whose legs had been doused in petrol by her boyfriend and set alight. The couple had been sniffing together in the dry creek bed when he turned violent. “You can tell the drunks and sniffers apart by the smell,” Conrad tells us.
Madeline reaches out her long black arms and adjusts the car’s spotlights as Conrad takes the car off the road and into the creek bed once more. It is here, in the dried-out caverns of the Todd River, that I understand what night patrol means. It’s a way of telling people they are not forgotten, of shining a light over the vast insides of this country and spotting a crumpled body passed out, instead of losing them to the pneumatic cold of the night. To call in the police is to rat on your own people – and besides most of the cords dangle, cut loose, in the phone booths round here. Night patrol is a presence, the first non-alien presence Aborigines have had in a long time.
“Working for the night patrol is like working for the government in the old days,” says Ron McNamara, head of the Laramba night patrol. “A little bit of tea and a little bit of sugar.” Only on the Alice Springs night patrol do employees earn wages; workers on central Australia’s 15 remote patrols are paid nothing. Laramba is considered one of the best, having put a stop not only to grog-runners dropping booze off, but also to the grog-runners who used to pass through ferrying grog to communities even further out. “The police told us we couldn’t confiscate their alcohol like that, that it was theft,” Ron laughs. “But that’s white law. We knew where they were heading with that grog.”
Ron and his colleagues are pushing for a pay packet. Visiting politicians – or “the men in grey”, as the mob refers to them – sometimes echo this call, perhaps seeing night patrols as a way of empowering Aboriginal people while skimping on police and safety services. It seems a salary, though, can be both a blessing and curse up here. Long-lost brothers and distant family members will crawl out of the cracks of the earth to collect their share. The burden of a wage can sometimes prove too much, and many Aboriginal employees opt to return to the dole. Checkout chicks are hassled into letting their family pass through the register without paying. Shelf-stackers are pressured to hand goods out the back way. Night patrollers endure the wrath of their countrymen. Rumours that patrollers have suicided over the shame of having to confront their own people pass from mouth to mouth but are never confirmed. Some patrollers have suicided. But it appears there are many reasons to suicide out here.
Richard Khan, a Pakistani refugee who came to Australia with his parents, used to be a petrol sniffer. He got into it with some Aboriginal kids out Coober Pedy way, cutting the tops off soft-drink bottles and sniffing the petrol out, his little face sealed perfectly in the opening. His parents soon got wise to it and moved the family out of the community, but many years later Richard returned to the land to marry an Aboriginal woman and became involved in the very first night patrol at Tennant Creek. He is a passionate advocate for confrontation and for Aboriginal people taking responsibility: “If they don’t want to help their brother, then they’re not night patrol.” The hardest bit, says Richard, is “making sure all the patrollers are sober”. Once he resorted to ordering a breathalyser from the city for patrollers to blow into before clocking on for work. “It took three years to sober up our crew,” he says, “and then all of a sudden night patrol became a place to sober up.”
After ten years of working on night patrols, from Tennant Creek to Coober Pedy, Richard suffered a nervous breakdown. He had seen too many things he could do nothing about. He remembers being given 15 minutes to clear people out of a dry creek bed ahead of a flash flood, dragging people too drunk or too old to run. He saw things police could not – would not – confirm. He saw promised wives being taken against their will, then heard them howl while they were broken in by their new husbands. He saw kids’ hearts exploding after sniffing too much petrol. “That was why the night patrol folded in Papunya,” he says, “because when the patrol took up chase of kids sniffing fuel their bodies were so fragile that sometimes their hearts just ticked over from the running.” After taking a break Richard has now returned to night patrol, training young patrollers down at Mutijulu, near Uluru. “I will not stop unless these people give up or die out.”
On the way home we stop to fill our hire car with petrol before heading to the airport. A queue is forming outside “The Gap” bottle shop, which is built like a fortress, razor wire over the back entrance. I am sitting on the bonnet when a blue Falcon stutters in beside us. Its belly scrapes the ground like a pregnant cat and it is full of blackfellas. The driver must have just gotten out of the hospital across the road because a clear tube with a seam of red blood inside it is attached to his neck. He uses a chisel to get his door open. His mate on the other side wriggles out through the window. The driver heads to the petrol bowsers and the other guy unties the bonnet, which is held down by a piece of rope, and peers inside at the engine. After fiddling around for a bit, they pay for the fuel and the man with the tube in his neck grabs a screwdriver from the dashboard and sticks it in the ignition. The car starts.
