No. 9

The Age, Epicure December 2010

CHRISTMAS lunch usually began with an acidic squirt of grapefruit juice in the eye. At least that’s how it started for me. After my grandfather had ever so slowly toasted “the Queen, absent friends and family”, we kids finally got the nod to start and we’d stab at our half-a-grapefruit each with tiny forks, unleashing a criss-cross of squirts. A constant re-sprinkling of brown sugar was mandatory.

The long Christmas lunch table was actually a hotchpotch of smaller tables disguised under a soon-to-be-ruined white tablecloth. Set with a confusing array of cutlery and glasses, we’d sit according to a seating plan devised by Grandpa, with innocent children being placed between hot-tongued adults.

But sun-kissed and starving, hair impatiently combed in broad deliberate strokes, we kids were mostly oblivious to any adult tensions. On Christmas mornings, my Dad and uncle purposely exhausted my brothers, cousin and I at the beach. Let off our leads like dogs into the waves, we armed ourselves with sticks and continued the endless search for blue-ringed octopus, whose fluorescent rings were said to glow like the fly zapper in the fish and chip shop.

Inevitably, I’d be left behind and I’d amuse myself by prying limpets off the rocks and dropping the exposed molluscs into the water to lure fish from their hiding places.

When it was lunchtime, we walked to our grandparents’ house, a white weatherboard beach shack on stilts, filled with books, wooden ships inside bottles, paintings of the bush and rock collections. But the Australiana element ended here; our lunches were traditionally British, beginning with Christmas crackers, the room filling with small bangs, bad jokes and too-large paper hats.

Then came the half grapefruit, followed by turkey, pink ham, cranberry sauce, roast vegetables, cucumber and yoghurt salad.

Our childish quirks were loosely adhered to — my oldest brother detested cooked vegetables, our cousin abhorred tomatoes, I was so obsessed with potatoes that my grandmother was convinced I was the Irish throwback of the family, while my middle brother embraced all things edible as long as the use-by-date had been checked.

We were a well-mannered bunch, politely asking for seconds, trying not to swing our legs too vigorously beneath the table. I remember the swan-like necks of the women in our family, my Mum, Grandma and aunt loping around the table, putting food on our plates and collecting the dishes.

Grandpa would pour the wine and I’d thieve tiny sips. He had a saying, Grandpa did — a little joke between him and our grandma where he’d hover his hand over his plate when she offered a final helping of food and say, “I have had an elegant sufficiency.” He’d smile gently at her, then at us benignly, before continuing “any more would be superfluous”. I had no idea what he was talking about.

By the end of lunch, the cushions placed beneath my bum so I could see above the table would be gone. I could only just see the blue flaming Christmas pudding, steamed with silver pence and shillings. Grandma later exchanged these for modern coins except for when my cousin swallowed a thruppence. He was allowed to keep it.

The dessert joke was that our Dad, predisposed to the tastier things in life, would like a little bit of pudding with his brandy butter. It was around this time that we probably became less likeable. We were well aware it was time for presents.

The evening before, “Santa” (Dad) had helpfully downed the yellow can of XXXX beer left out for him, while the real Santa (Mum) placed presents under the potted-pine Christmas tree.

Our presents were usually dotted with torn holes from surreptitious peeking and, awake before it was light, my brothers and I would lug bowls of soggy Weet-Bix to our parents in bed and harangue them until we were allowed to open our booty. Now there was a second round of presents to go through.

These were of vital importance. They determined what we did for the rest of the afternoon.

If it was money, we’d troop to the milk bar. If it was some kind of sporting paraphernalia, we’d try to break it or break something with it. If they were more subdued presents, we’d leave the little pile with our mothers and charge outside.

Standing in a circle, banging on a cowbell, there would be a debate over our next move. Totem tennis, teasing the neighbour’s dog, ping-pong, mixed lollies, running races, the beach or throwing rocks at the boy down the road?

The big brouhaha that was Christmas, the carols, Advent calendars, nativity plays, presents, sleepless nights and schmaltzy movies was over in a flash. We were off and running again, just a muddle of skinny brown legs causing trouble.

In The Best Australian Stories 2010, Cate Kennedy presents a seductive line-up of the year’s most exciting short fiction, featuring the best work from publications around the country alongside pieces published here for the first time.

A literary feud unfolds, blow by comical blow, in the books pages of a Sydney newspaper. Ned Kelly’s mother has her day in court. And as flood waters slowly rise in a small Australian town, a woman quietly watches and waits.

By turns playful, heart-wrenching, intimate and exuberant, these twenty-nine stories reveal the strength and variety of Australian fiction today. The authors include first-timers as well as established masters, and the result is a stimulatingly diverse collection.

Contributors include: Robert Drewe, Nam Le, Karen Hitchcock, Paddy O’Reilly, John Kinsella, Anna Krien, David Francis, Chris Womersley, Ryan O’Neill, Dorothy Simmons, Louise D’Arcy, Joshua Lobb, Tim Herbert, Michael Sala, Sherryl Clarke, A.S. Patric, Josephine Rowe, Mike Ladd, Meg Mundell, David Mence, Fiona McFarlane, Cory Taylor, Antonia Baldo, Suvi Mahonen, David Kelly, Joanne Riccioni, Stephanie Buckle, Gillian Essex, and Michael McGirr

Contributors include: Ali Alizadeh, Luke Beesley, Allison Browning, Justin Clemens, Nathan Curnow, Luke Davies, Bruce Dawe, Adam Ford, Claire Gaskin, Robert Gray, Sarah Holland Batt, John Kinsella, Anna Krien, Anthony Lawrence, Josephine Rowe, Jaya Savige, Craig Sherborne, Andrew Slattery, Ouyang Yu and many more.

My essay Do Not Disturb is an investigation into food technology and the manufacture of flavours.

Contributors include Romy Ash, Gay Bilson, Greg Duncan Powell, Jill Dupleix, Matthew Evans, Kate Gibbs, Helen Greenwood, Michael Harden, Benjamin Law, Lucy Malouf, Campbell Mattinson, Elizabeth Meryment, Pauline Nguyen, Cherry Ripe, Alan Saunders, Joanna Savill, David Washington & Helen Yee

Proclaiming to be speaking on behalf of all women mistreated by footballers, she had in January attended St Kilda’s first training session and thrown flimsy placards on the ground reading “St Scandal”, “HU$H”, “AFL (All Fucking Lies)” and “RESPECT. AFL can you please spell that for me?” Female columnists wrote about her “chutzpah”, while older journalists reported wide-eyed on her ability to text, tweet, film and take photos on her assortment of mobile phones. When the 17-year-old set a “honey trap” for a dodgy 47-year-old player manager, releasing audio and video footage of their alleged affair and his coke-snorting habits to the media, she was applauded. “You’re amazing,” gushed radio host Kate Langbroek on the Hughesy & Kate Nova breakfast show. “We salute you.” Miranda Devine called her “an avenging angel” in the Daily Telegraph. The teenager’s Twitter feed grew to over 20,000 followers. On radio, men fought over whether she was a child or not, and whether it was illegal to sleep with her. Each time the AFL urged the media not to feed on the teenager, the governing football body was accused of sweeping the girl under the carpet. Journalists just couldn’t help it. They were addicted to her, and she to them.

Then Kim Duthie appeared on 60 Minutes (Channel 9 is believed to have paid a five-figure sum for her appearance) and told reporter Liz Hayes she had never been pregnant. “I don’t know why I did it,” she said. “I was a stupid immature little teenager.” The convincing photos she had put of herself on the internet – holding her pregnant belly – were fake. In one photo Duthie’s eyes are wide and she has her hand over her mouth in mock horror. She is wearing a bra and St Kilda footy shorts. Oops, her expression says, look who got me pregnant! It now appears that she made herself look pregnant by blowing air into her very elastic abdomen. The media lapsed into an uneasy silence. To make matters worse, the AFL’s chief executive, Andrew Demetriou, subtly chastised the press when he revealed he had been aware something wasn’t quite right about the girl’s claim. “I was led to believe through some of our other investigations that that may have been the case [she was not pregnant] but as you know … there has been a number of occasions whereby this young girl has said things that have proven to be incorrect and that’s why we’ve chosen all along … to act responsibly and not play this out through the media,” he told radio 3AW. In a style best termed “numb”, Duthie’s revelation was duly reported, but the opinion pieces on her own and the footballers’ behaviour now became scarce. The clamour to write the definitive piece on “the St Kilda Schoolgirl” was over. The spell had been lifted and everyone was naked, muddied and a little bit ashamed.

But questions persist: just because she lied about being pregnant, does it mean footballers are off the hook? If anything, the lie was a placebo test and the boys failed dismally. Faced with the accusations, Duthie says one teammate told her to “fuck off, you slag”; another player allegedly sent her a text message, when there were fears she was suicidal, saying, “You slut. Die.” She also says the club’s management coached her on what to say to police investigating on behalf of the Victorian Department of Education whether players had acted inappropriately at a leadership clinic conducted at her school. Kim Duthie was never going to be a heroine for women’s rights, for taking on the big boys at the AFL. What is interesting is how much the public wanted her to be. Duthie became the weapon for other people’s misgivings about a certain vein of schoolyard misogyny that has persisted in spite of the AFL’s own attempts to graduate.

*

The AFL is big business. Over 7 million spectators entered the stadiums last year. State governments and local councils across the country injected $650 million into the league, while its revenue amounted to $335.8 million. The once working-class game is now flanked by Queen’s Counsels and professional advisers, and supporting a major league football club is not as straightforward as might once have seemed. Instead of going towards the game, members’ money and taxpayer subsidies may end up paying for court trials, settlements, even private detectives to follow and build up a file against an alleged rape victim.

Of the 800 AFL players, on average 75 are newly plucked from a draft of 1000 young men each year. At Collingwood Football Club annual meetings, new draftees are introduced to members. Eddie McGuire, Magpies’ president and former CEO of the Nine Network, reads out their names, followed by height, weight and sprint speed. Lined up, they are the club’s latest investments. Each has passed the closest thing to a quality assurance test. An assortment of fitness tests, medical examinations, potential injury analyses, family background and psychological checks has occurred; even their drop-punt kicks have been filmed and studied in slow motion.

The final touch for the draftees is a photograph. Each recruit is to stare in steely fashion into the camera lens. They are coaxed to flex their muscles. Often a player will grip a red leather ball with one hand (handspan, by the way, is also measured). This photo is perhaps the first inkling that players are entering into more than a simple contract to play ball. The flash of the camera is as searing as a brand. Some players, stars in their country towns and schoolyards, are already naturals at handling this kind of attention, but if you look closely at these early images, you may still glimpse the ghost of a boy, not yet rendered invisible by pounds of meat and muscle.

Although on the verge of adulthood, these footballers are about to enter a state of prolonged adolescence. For most of their peers the social world is set to expand, but for these select few their already insular existence has just contracted. They will be expected to live, eat and train with their team, as part of a single organism. Recruiters have scoured their personal lives for distractions, hidden vices and interests that may later demand priority over the game. Supportive families are great, clingy ones not so good. As the former footballer Tim Watson once wrote in the Age in 2005, defending then Carlton player Nick Stevens’ decision to play footy instead of attending his brother’s wedding:

You can say to your brother: “I will do my best to attend your wedding but if, by chance, we make the final of the Wizard Cup, my priority has to be to play for Carlton. I am a professional football player; it is an occupation I get well paid for and I have sworn an allegiance to the playing group that I am a part of whatever it is we do as a group.”

(Stevens’ allegiance to his football ‘family’ was curiously reciprocated that same year at the Brownlow Medal afterparty at Crown Casino, where it was reported someone had slipped a Rohypnol into his long-term girlfriend’s drink. Perhaps this was simply a ‘prank’ played on Stevens, albeit via the medium of his girlfriend.)

Young draftees will be subject to diets, curfews, lectures and punishments, which will sit awkwardly alongside story-telling nights of initiation into a clique of in-jokes, nicknames, bets and dares, when humour and humiliation control the power dynamic, and veterans wax lyrical about the debauched adventures of Thommo, Johnno and Stevo.

Distil all that and transfer it into the body of a young man – this conflicting state of entitlement and responsibility – and you may well have a very confused soul.

*

“The game has changed.” Whoever you talk to in the Aussie Rules football world says as much. For some – such as Indigenous players – that’s a good thing. Since implementing its anti–racial and religious vilification policy in 1995, the AFL can now boast that more than 10% of players are Indigenous, vastly more proportionally than the Indigenous 2% of the larger population. But for others, well – football just isn’t like it used to be.

In a recent Herald Sun Q&A column, the sports journalist Jon Anderson and the former Carlton player David Rhys-Jones bemoaned the passing of the glory days. “In many ways I feel sorry for today’s players,” says Rhys-Jones. “OK, they get the money, but do they have the fun? No way.” Back then, he says, journalists rolled around in the “same drip tray” as the footballers. Anderson chips in with a memory: remember when someone let loose with the fire extinguisher at Brian ‘The Whale’ Roberts’ pub? Sigh.

If the shift in footy culture can be pinpointed, it was in 1993, when the Saints’ Nicky Winmar responded to racist abuse by lifting his jumper and pointing to his black skin. The photographic image of that event is now famous. This defiant act, said former footballer Andrew McLeod at a recent United Nations forum on racism in sport, “made the AFL sit up and take notice”. Two years later, a policy “to combat racial and religious vilification” was rolled out across the league and then extended to every Australian Rules football competition in Australia.

While the new rules soon became a source of pride for the brand, they also signified the disinheritance of a certain type of football subculture. Dyed-in-the-wool types viewed the policy as a slippery slope to political correctness – and, to be fair, the league does at times seem to be taking itself too seriously. The $2000 fine imposed on Richmond player Matthew Richardson when he gave the finger to abusive spectators and the schoolmarmish posturing when controversial Ben Cousins did the same to a TV camera in the Richmond Tigers’ changing room seem over the top. Cousins was fined $5000 by his club’s leadership group for the incident. When CCTV footage of Brendan Fevola taking a piss in a shop alcove is aired on Channel 7 and results in his club fining him $10,000, it is not hard to conclude that the AFL has put itself at the mercy of a highly strung and righteous media.

However, when football personality Sam Newman impersonated Nicky Winmar by “blacking up” on The Footy Show in 1999, it also became clear that something much darker and malicious was rebelling in the world of footy. Six years later the AFL rolled out its Respect & Responsibility program aimed at shifting attitudes towards women and girls, and The Footy Show responded with another ‘harmless’ prank in 2008. On live TV, Newman staple-gunned a photo of the Age’s football journalist Caroline Wilson to a mannequin’s head. The mannequin was wearing only a satin bra and underpants.

“I tell you what, she’s a fair piece, Caro,” he said, standing back to admire the dummy. As he held up items of clothing, fumbling around its breasts, one of the show’s hosts, Garry Lyon, laughed and wrung his hands.

“You getting nervous about this?” enquired Newman, as he approached Wilson’s teeth with a black texta. “Garry, can I just say something, Garry?” he continued. “We’re only having fun … and I know you’re getting nervous about it, but we’re only having fun. If you’re on our show, you’re on our show—”

“We are!” yelped Lyon, shifting around uncomfortably on his seat. The TV audience was whooping and cheering for Newman. “We are!” Lyon repeated.

Consciously or unconsciously, Newman’s gag and many like it are designed to pull down this new moral code. He tested Lyon’s loyalty on air. Newman later defended the gag as a kind of ‘male’ compliment. It was, he said, a sign that The Footy Show culture, AKA Sam Newman, accepted her. This appears to be the definitive problem with football. Not just AFL, but rugby, American football, European soccer – hell, turn the ball into a puck, put a stick in each man’s hands, and it’s a problem in ice hockey. The problem is not the game per se, but the macho culture of humiliation that tends to shadow and control it.

*

The German word schadenfreude translates to the pleasure one receives at the suffering, misfortunes or humiliations of others. In the world of professional football, winning and losing are the only possible outcomes, and the very basic motivation to win is part and parcel of the sport. To win is to see someone else lose. Empathy is a handicap.

Off-field, schadenfreude can become complicated. It can cleverly disguise itself – particularly in the context of threatened inferiority – as banter, initiation, gags and ‘just a joke’. Be it fending off intruding females or reinforcing your ranking in a team by humiliating new members, taking pleasure in another’s degradation has a seesaw effect. They go down, and you rise up.

In Kim Duthie, football’s dark tendency towards schadenfreude met its match. And this is what the St Kilda Football Club has repeatedly failed to understand in its dealings with the teenager. Duthie was a top athlete when she first met the St Kilda players and, while she was flattered by their sexual attention, she wanted more than simply to sleep with footballers. Duthie wanted to be them. When she was cut off from the team, this highly competitive teenager had her first inkling of the limitations of her sex – and so she broke the rule that bonds all football players: what happens on the footy trip stays on the footy trip.

*

The 2010 Grand Final was a draw. It was an unfathomable concept for the players and spectators – how do you party when there are no winners and no losers? Then, to the delight of publicans, merchandise sellers and sausage manufacturers, the AFL announced a rematch between Collingwood and St Kilda.

The Pies beat the Saints and the city of Melbourne was still cloaked in night when the story of a pack-rape by celebrating footballers began to surface. By morning, police confirmed that they had confiscated bedsheets from an apartment in South Melbourne and were preparing to question two Collingwood players. “Yet another alleged girl, making alleged allegations, after she awoke with an alleged hangover and I take it, an alleged guilty conscience,” retired footballer Peter ‘Spida’ Everitt announced on Twitter, and followed it up with “Girls!! When will you learn! At 3 am when you are blind drunk & you decide to go home with a guy IT’S NOT FOR A CUP OF MILO!” Morning TV host Kerri-Anne Kennerley picked up the thread, sympathising with players, saying that footballers “put themselves in harm’s way by picking up strays”.

Then, just days before Christmas, Duthie posted online the now-famous photographs of three St Kilda footballers. The captain, Nick Riewoldt, is naked and shrugging comically as a younger player, Zac Dawson, holds a condom wrapper close to his penis. It looks like a photo with a ‘before’ story but at a press conference Riewoldt solemnly assured the public that he had just woken up and was snapped as he got out of bed. In the second photo, mid-fielder Nick Dal Santo is lying on a bed, holding his penis as if in preparation for a wank.

Although the teenager claimed she had taken the photos herself, it was said – and later confirmed – that the players took the photos of each other on a footy trip in Miami. Lawyer Ross Levin, the club’s vice-president, threatened to tie the teenager up in litigation for the next 15 years of her life.

Few observers acknowledged the eerie familiarity of the teenager’s choice of font for her Christmas e-card. Over the images she had typed, in red italic font, “Merry Christmas, Courtesy of the St Kilda School Girl!” thereby referencing a viral email that had circulated through the AFL Players’ Association, present and past footballers, footy staff, various government departments, law firms and police officers several months earlier. Attached to the email was first a photo of Duthie taken from her Facebook page. She is wearing black leggings and a St Kilda jumper cut off at the midriff, with “The Saints Girl” typed over the top. Also circulating was a digitally altered movie poster for Three Men and a Baby with the actors’ heads substituted for the players believed to have slept with her.

With her counter-strike, the internet suddenly became Duthie’s schoolyard. “I was not sleeping for days on end,” she later told the Age journalist Peter Munro. “I would just sit up on my laptop reading article after article about myself. I was just so obsessed with wanting to know what the world was saying about me and trying to defend myself at the same time.” When she posted the photos, Duthie was holidaying with her parents in a Gold Coast motel room. By the time her parents settled in front of the TV for the night, their daughter was on the evening news, bizarrely in a room that looked exactly like the room they were in. Scores of Australians watched as Duthie spoke to her laptop, manically tossing her long brown hair and answering her mobile phone to torrents of abuse. “OK,” she says feverishly, leaning into the video camera on her computer, “so everyone wants to know what I’m fucking really feeling like. I can’t even explain it. Do you know how fucking angry I am with everyone? Oh my god, I could fucking scream.”

When Duthie flew into Melbourne Airport, a media scrum was waiting. Her parents, she told the reporters, had taken the bus home and she was not welcome to join them. She was dressed in a black blazer over a short dress, shiny black heels, and had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist like an entry stamp into a nightclub. It was as if Kerri-Anne Kennerley had conjured up a “stray”.

*

“We used to have the Downlows,” recalls Craig Dermody, who played amateur football in Gepps Cross, a rough part of Adelaide. The Downlow was the Gepps Cross club’s equivalent of the AFL’s ‘best and fairest’ Brownlow Medal and it went to the club member who did the most debauched thing on the end-of-season trip. The first Downlow that the then 16-year-old witnessed was at a seafood restaurant with the team and coach. “The owner was getting drunk with us and our coach took the owner’s tobacco pouch out of his front shirt pocket, pissed in it and put it back in the man’s pocket.” Everything that could be drunk was drunk that night in the restaurant, recalls Dermody. The waitress, the owner’s daughter, screwed in the corridor. When I ask if they at least paid the bill, Dermody shakes his head. “Nah, the owner loved us. He wanted to be one of us.” For his “pissing in the tobacco pouch” gag, the coach got the Downlow that year.

Another gag the Gepps Cross Rams liked to do was take a piss while standing at the bar as the next round of pints was tallied up. (When the St Kilda player Fraser Gehrig did the same thing in 2004 and accidentally urinated on the woman standing beside him, the media had a field day. Gehrig later claimed it was “splashback” that had got her.) Gepps Cross, like many other clubs, survived on its bar and pokies earnings. Its punters were also its players and a high level of tolerance was required in order to maintain this symbiosis. ‘Pie and porn night’ is a community club mainstay, as are strippers. In Melbourne’s south-east, Prahran Football Club hired a stripper to rev up its players in the changing room before a match. They lost. In a world like this, as a minion or a top player, it would be easy to start perceiving women as service providers.

You have the mothers who cheer from the sidelines, drive to and from games and training, cook carbohydrates the night before, volunteer in the canteen, get the grass stains out of uniforms. There’s the female support staff tending to the players’ injuries, massaging their hamstrings, studying their eating habits and micro-managing their media image. In the past five years, the AFL has made a concerted effort to have women directors and commissioners but in some quarters the presence of women in powerful positions has strengthened the resentment of females intruding in what is a male domain, especially when they speak up. “They serve very little purpose at board level,” said Newman on The Footy Show, after five female club directors had written to complain about the episode that humiliated Caroline Wilson. “What do they do? I’m not knocking women [but] for very little input they demand a lot of clout.”

On a big night out with the ‘boys’, women are there to make the men feel closer to one another – not only at strip clubs and brothels, but at bars and nightclubs and even on the sidewalk. They bond over a girl’s body – be it checking her out together in a bar, leering out of a taxi window and yelling at her on the street, watching their mate have sex, or even passing a girl between them. One of the problems of watching porn together, particularly with the gang bang as common plot, is that the further detached from reality a group is, and the more entitled they feel, the more they might start to expect a shared porn experience. And then, finally, you have the WAGs, the tail of the dog, otherwise known as ‘wives and girlfriends’ of footballers.

In online photo galleries, WAGs are ogled; “Sports stars not only rake in the big bucks and travel around the world doing what they love most, they also get some of the hottest women in the world. Here are some of Australia’s sexiest sports WAGs,” writes FHM magazine. In the Herald Sun: “Every sport has them, their stars wouldn’t perform as well without them. They are the wives and girlfriends, or WAGs. Take a look.” On radio: “Triple M makes a calendar of Melbourne’s hottest WAGS!” Not only are these lucky women service providers, they are trophies. Amazingly, Wayne Carey’s (suitably nicknamed ‘The King’) fall from grace in the AFL was not when he grabbed a woman’s breasts on a city street after drinking with his teammates for 12 hours straight and said to her, “Why don’t you get a bigger pair of tits?” Nor was it when it came to light that his North Melbourne club had negotiated a $15,000 settlement with a woman who claimed to have been sexually harassed by Carey and another AFL player. No, Carey hit an all-time low in the popularity stakes in 2002 when he shagged teammate and vice-captain Anthony Steven’s wife in a bathroom at a party. Touchingly, the Kangaroo players publicly linked arms around their vice-captain and Carey was shunned. But the issue wasn’t about morality – if it had been, Carey would have been shunned years before. It was about being cuckolded by a teammate.

Back at Gepps Cross, Dermody never got the sense club members had a limit to their tolerance of bad behaviour until Adam Heuskes arrived to coach them. “A few people left then, but not many. He was a former AFL player and a poor club like ours was consider pretty lucky to get him.”

Heuskes was twice accused of raping young women in front of, or with, his teammates, in 1999 and 2000. One incident, on an oval across the road from the Adelaide nightclub Heaven, saw friends take the alleged victim to police immediately after locating her. She said three AFL footballers including Heuskes, who had been drinking in the nightclub, raped her. Police charged Heuskes and another AFL player but the charges were dropped six weeks later when the then South Australian Director of Public Prosecutions Paul Rofe QC advised the police they had insufficient evidence. Without witnesses to the incident, the allegation, like so many, boiled down to a stalemate of ‘he said, she said’. Two years later, the three footballers reportedly paid the woman $200,000 in an out-of-court settlement, and effectively gagged her. Some years later Channel 7’s Today Tonight raised the issue of Rofe’s own connections to the game, as a director at the Adelaide Football Club (and former player) at the time of the rape investigation. When the tarnished footballer came to Gepps Cross, Dermody said his interest in the club and footy was waning – but he did play a few games under the notorious footballer. “He was a pretty charismatic guy,” he says. “And he was quick, always had a comeback. He could humiliate you in a second.”

*

In Aussie Rules, ‘sledging’ is seen as a legitimate way of taking down the opposition. It involves getting in the ear of the opposition and baiting them about their social shortcomings, which used to include being “a faggot”, “a girl”, “a monkey”, “a black bastard” or “a towel-head terrorist”. Recently one footballer was even sledged for being “selfish” for leaving his critically ill child to play footy. Spectators like to join in the sledging, female fans included – who, in footy, make up almost half of the crowd – calling players “girls” and “poofters” when they duck out of a headlong crash. With the introduction of vilification codes, the Respect & Responsibility program and so on, acceptable social shortcomings for use in sledging are getting harder to come by. But as a result of media scrutiny, players are now getting sledged about their scandals. In 2008 St Kilda’s Nick Riewoldt was overheard on an umpire’s microphone saying to Essendon player Andrew Lovett, “You bash your fucking missus.” Lovett had just been fined $500 after he was found guilty of breaching an intervention order taken out by his ex-girlfriend. Less than a year later and Lovett was traded to the Saints.

Then, after a night of drinking, a girl accused the “dark one” of raping her at one of the St Kilda player’s apartments (Lovett is Indigenous). When the players were questioned by police, they said they had crowded around Lovett after the distraught girl left, trying to find out what happened. In court St Kilda ruckman Adam Pattison testified, “I remember Fisher saying, ‘Did you chop her?’ and Lovett said, ‘Yeah, I did, but she had no problem.’”

Then there is Stephen Milne, also a Saints player and the most notorious on-field sledger. Since rape allegations in 2004, Milne is now called “rapist” by his opposition and is booed by spectators. Neither of these creative spins on sledging appear to be moral judgements – rather they’re perceived as weak spots, something to make a player see red and lose sight of the ball.

In 2004 American writer Robert Lipsyte, an award-winning sports reporter and columnist for the New York Times, dropped a bomb at an American Psychiatric Association general meeting when he suggested that “psychiatry has not taken enough interest in jock culture as a window into other American pathologies.” By dismissing sports “as all fun and games”, he said, analysts were ignoring “the values of the arena and the locker room [that] have been imposed on our national life”. This is a far cry from the idea that sport brings people together and is the great leveller. It is also noteworthy that the two teenage gunmen of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 preempted their killing spree by demanding all “jocks” to stand up and declaring: “Anybody with a white hat or a shirt with a sports emblem on it is dead.” In the aftermath, much of congressional and mainstream debate sought to place the blame for the shootings on violent video games, movies and the internet. But a task force set up to examine the Columbine school environment believed there was more to it. “I don’t think any one thing drove them to this,” task-force member Joyce Hooker told Washington Post writers Lorraine Adams and Dale Russakoff. “But I think we need to say, ‘Whoa. Why did they focus on athletes?’” The reporters went on to draw a parallel between the teenagers’ rage, their endless humiliation in pranks and the reign of the ‘jocks’ at their school:

Dozens of interviews and a review of court records suggest that Harris’s and Klebold’s rage began with the injustices of jocks. The pair knew of instances where athletes convicted of crimes went without suspension from games or expulsion from school. They witnessed instances of athletes tormenting others while school authorities looked the other way. They believed that high-profile athletes could finagle their way out of jail.

Australia is not America – but this quote has an awfully familiar ring to it. In the past two years, a series of allegations of special treatment of footballers by the Victoria Police has emerged. In 2010, the Milne rape case (in which teammate Leigh Montagna was implicated) resurfaced despite the two players being cleared. The detective and sergeant leading the investigation had since left the force and the silence around the case came to the attention of Channel 9. Former Senior Detective Scott Gladman said that the investigation had been seriously hindered by other police and that the alleged victim’s statement was leaked to the club. “She’s just one of these footy sluts that runs around looking for footballers to fuck,” one officer allegedly told Gladman, urging him to drop the case. Unauthorised photocopies of transcripts were made, a missing page being found on a police photocopier. Recordings of the player interviews vanished from Gladman’s desk for up to seven hours. “We were told that if things went well, consider yourself a Saints person for life,” Gladman told the TV station. The former cop’s claims were backed up by Mike Smith, who had also worked on the case in 2004. Smith said one cop associated with the St Kilda Football Club was very interested in the investigations. This particular policeman is now widely believed to be Senior Sergeant Hans Harms, who had been a trainer at St Kilda for 17 years. A Saints insider told 3AW that Harms had travelled with the players to games and knew them well. “He gave massages, did training, strapping, game preparation and [ran] water bottles during the game.”

These allegations have since triggered an Office of Police Integrity investigation into Brighton Police Station, which is around the corner from Khyats Hotel, where both St Kilda players and off-duty police are regulars. A raid on the station revealed that witness statements, Gladman’s reports and a master tape of interviews from the case are missing. “They wanted to be seen to be more important in their eyes to the club,” Mike Smith had said of the officers, “anything they could do to help the club they would do.” Then, in July 2010, a freedom of information request filed by Australian Associated Press came through. The police document was largely blacked out but the gist of it was clear: it was a memorandum of understanding struck between Victoria Police and the AFL, a contract which formalised the sharing of files, photos, videos and evidence on people involved in the AFL. The police were required to let the AFL know of any investigations into the league’s players and staff, and would contact it before making any public comment. The formality of this intimacy between police and football looked plain ugly to outsiders. It was one thing to hear about certain police officers undermining investigations because of their fanaticism for a football club, but an official document such as this reeked of conspiracy. And now there’s Kim Duthie. The Age reported last month that over 80 police officers have accessed and read her file on the Victoria Police database.

*

What Kim Duthie now aspires to is a mystery. When she was 15, she was the youngest mountain runner selected to represent Australia in Italy, and she became the under-18 national champion. An interstate competitor for hurdles, long jump, high jump and running, she was a naive schoolgirl, who ate, trained, studied and slept. Now she lives in hotels paid for by the St Kilda Football Club as part of a deal struck by the two parties on the condition that she delete the photos she posted on the internet. Duthie issued a statement asserting that the players involved with her met her socially following a match and not at her school. In the past 18 months, she has tested and stretched the plastic tape of child protection around her and, like a hatchling just out of its shell, she has encountered predators quick to detect her nubile vulnerability. Player manager Ricky Nixon has photos on his mobile phone of Duthie in her underpants; he claims he took the photos to protect himself when she arrived drunk at his office and started to strip. Last month Nixon checked himself into rehab. He is 47 years old.

“I’m already sick of it,” replies my neighbour when I say that footy season is about to start, aware he is an avid AFL fan. As we stop to commune over our green bins, the mention of the game makes his face sour. Football never stops now and his discontent does not stem solely from the handiwork of an angry teenager. The collusion by the AFL and the press that footy is more than just a game has taken a toll. Last year, Carlton’s captain, Chris Judd, won the Brownlow Medal. Known as an all-round good guy, he looked uncomfortable as he accepted the award at the televised black-tie affair. On stage, he answered questions delivered by the event’s host with the usual ‘not really saying anything’ air of a role-model footballer – then suddenly, Judd did something different.

“I think footballers and Brownlow medallists get put up on pedestals …’ he said, in response to the host’s question about what it meant to win the award. “Football, if you like, is sort of make-believe. It’s like a self-indulgent pastime where you go out each week and announce to the football public the type of person you and your mates are. It’s not real.” Struggling to articulate himself, Judd clung to the example of former player Jim Stynes, now Melbourne Demons club president, a philanthropist and youth worker, as someone doing valid work in the real world. When Judd paused, the room erupted into applause. But it felt like a smother. And then, seemingly as quickly as he could, the host moved on: “You touched on it earlier, how tough was it to leave the West Coast Eagles?”

Frankie magazine

This is Cuba: a small alligator shaped island of freedom and ironic regulation where it’s popular to coat your fangs in gold, listen to bootleg ‘reggae-ton’ and patriotically smoke the island’s main produce – cigarettes so strong they feel like inhaling a blowtorch. An uneven economy where education and healthcare is free for all, but the media is censored; where people can’t afford shampoo, but will hot up a pushbike with subwoofers bought on the black market.

The result of various invasions has had a startling effect on the people and city of Havana. Blue Russian eyes stare out of panther-black faces and a patchwork of buildings from pastel pink Spanish Art Deco to Soviet-style prefabricated concrete crowd the streets. Soft drink cans cut into decorations are strung between balconies while children in school uniforms play hopscotch, clutching blown-up condoms on strings.

Tough guys wear pre-loved T-shirts screen-printed with western platitudes such as ‘I love Jesus’ or ‘Keep our kids off Drugs’ donated from Canada. On the coastal boulevard that faces the Straits of Florida, the Castro government erects billboards with illustrations of Cubans shaking their fists at Uncle Sam across the sea. ‘C’mon, just you try it,’ they seem to say.

And yet, despite the bad publicity, hundreds of Cubans risk their lives each year trying to escape to America and the world beyond. One family transformed their Cadillac into a boat, only to be intercepted by Cuban water police a quarter of the way across the straits. Punishment for trying to leave the island is imprisonment. “Some people die, just dreaming of the outside world,” a new friend, Perez, told us.

Cuba is a cryptic, beautiful place where people danced without inhibition, music pouring out of every crack in the wall. For an outsider, you want nothing more than for Cuba to stay the same, to not be infiltrated by McDonald’s and capitalism. But for those on the inside, this island is stuck in time and something will have to give.

Photo Essay published in Frankie magazine, October 2009

And in this strange
cookie-cutter of a country
where waves flick like some girl’s hair,
clouds scuff against a faded denim sky
with its LCD ticker tape of highways,
there are
only wells.
Holes that shriek
like baths being drained.

Sometimes
you see them slowing down,
drifting across a four-lane highway.
The night careening with cross-eyed cats’ eyes,
and the sky,
yellow and piss-coloured,
spits warm into the bay.

Seal-skinned swimmers
freestyle between buoys,
their goggles glint orange
as the sun sinks
behind the smokestacks
the empty apartment blocks
lights left on by real estate agents.

You can hear the blink of ships
as they slip under the Westgate,
the soft plonk of fishing lines
and tinny rambling of AM radio.
The clicking and cracking of the magnet factory,
silver discs spilling towards each other
across the Williamstown warehouse.
Dreams here are black,
except for the solitary flashlight of abalone
poachers.

And at night,
lumps grow.

They grow up
out of the local football field
that used to be landfill,
a suburban grand canyon.
The under 18’s have to dig out car wrecks
that rise to the surface between seasons.

In the cancer ward at Geelong’s Mercy,
women wait
like oysters to be shucked,
hands over their breasts
feeling for pearls.

We drive through Little River,
past the toilet block where my grandma
once found a finger,
a small bloodied pinkie,
black hair still on its knuckle.
My grandma stood there
next to the pinkie
and strewn paper towels,
waiting for the police.

<hr>

I run.
I never jog.

I fill the days
with cups of tea,
checking on my laundry across the road
and visiting the painter downstairs
who does canvases for Ikea
to match their lounge settings.

It’s all about safe colours, he says,
mulberry, chocolate brown and cream.
The post-September 11 palette,
the Swedes call it.
Together
we rename the colours
menstruation, excrement and ejaculation.

I read the newspaper.
A frat boy is found dead
post-initiation night,
his throat clogged with Hawaiian pizza.
They say his body was covered in thick black texta,
I take it up the arse
nigger lover
I suck cock
eat shit and cum.
The ink sunk in like rigor mortis
and the parents had to bury him like that,
covered in the haiku of a fucked-up generation.

<hr>

When I met him,
smoking hurried cigarettes,
ghosts coming out of his mouth,
I knew I was going to take to him
like lightning to a lake.

He had said, striking a match,
that before matches were red – they were yellow.
And the factory workers in London,
they used to glow.
The phosphorus got into their hands and faces.
People watched them coming home,
bright yellow in the night.

His tongue flicked out the corner
of his mouth as he talked,
wetting a patch of dry skin on the curve of his lips.
Treads from trucks lay about us,
rubber flanks restless like horses in the starter box.
And his three-legged dog named Jack Farley
hopped up and down the service lane
barking at the cars.
Later he swore to me
that sometimes he can see a fourth paw print
when looking back at his and Jack Farley’s tracks
along the beach.

For an entire week he stood on a chair,
neck bent like Michelangelo’s,
mapping out the southern hemisphere
with 38 packets of glow-in-the-dark stars.
He copied everything straight from a map
except for the Milky Way.
That, he said, as we camped out in my one-bedroom flat,
he traced from the freckles
spilt across my nose.

When Jack Farley and I slept,
the dog’s phantom leg twitching,
the stickers fading,
he worked.
He would stay up all night
zooming in on strange pixelations
and wispy formations.
A police scanner
read out the sites of ordinary crimes;
homicides and suicides.
He mapped out each ghost religiously
on his free tourist map of Victoria.
He collected life’s leftovers,
and had installed hundreds of web cams
across the state and beyond,
trying to catch the rah-rah skirts of the dead.

And a jogger
(it’s always the joggers that find them)
he would tell me in the morning,
clutching their iPods
sneakers squeaking,
a house key
on a bit of string
under their t-shirts.

They would find the night’s bodies.

Creaking under bridges,
pink bloated pendulums
swinging over concrete footpaths
inscribed with teenage
love affairs.

Sometimes
the joggers note the small
squeezebox
of a heart.
A little bit of night
dragged into the day.
A cat with blood on its whiskers.

Out the window
I watch as the owner of the Laundromat
pushes each machine back against the wall
after they spent the whole night
shuffling forward on spin.

<hr>

In summer the flat is too hot.
The stickers on the ceiling peel off.
He laughs and says
Falling Stars.
Jack Farley barks and tries
to catch the stickers on his tongue.
In just a t-shirt
I can see the tattoos
he had done with another girl.
They had been rubbed out,
covered with other pictures.
Like faded mistakes I can still see them
under his new artwork,
lingering in the way
only an ex can do.

I feel gangly around his ghosts.
My arms thick and legs like pylons.
Boobs like water balloons.
I close my eyes and smell our way out of the city,
past the vegemite factory,
the car rattling like an old Luna Park ride
up over the Westgate bridge.
The Vicks distillery, the treated pine yards
and treated shit farm.

We pass the toilet block
where my granny found the finger.

I can smell this place.
The secret blimps in the sky,
the paused kangaroos,
the ink in my fingers.

Perhaps this country’s fault lines
are not so big and obvious like San Francisco’s cracks,
or shuddering
like the earthquakes of Indonesia.
Maybe at the bottom of all the seas,
the place where letters land,
we are just a yellow canary blowing out
underground.
A little bird,
eyes like poppy seeds.

We pull up at a soap factory
where his most prized webcam
is on the blink,
and I wait for him
beside an open container
of rose-scented soap.
Jack Farley leaves a fourth paw print
on the dusty concrete floor,
and he hunts for ghosts
that stink like potpourri.

When they rounded the corner
it was too late for her to do anything.
So she closed her eyes,
imagined she was a tree, a boat
anchored in the sea,
a lamppost.
She felt their breath,
warm whip of hair
strong as violin strings
as the wild horses
spilled around her like a bolt of velvet.

Old women wrapped
in the muted colours of mourning
stood in their doorways
amid the panicked chicken squall
unable to see anything but a walloping sheet of dust,
piss-warm rivulets of tears
running down their wrung-out tea towel faces
listening to the sound of honky-tonk pianos,
this galloping band of horses.

So let’s start from the beginning. You find a vein, usually on the inside of your elbow, though some seek hidden places like in their feet, penis, or even stretch out their neck for veins in the rearview mirror, but usually the needle goes into the arm and it’s contents travel up the vein like a slug from a gun and bang, a metallic taste appears in your mouth. It’s good. Some people will need $50 worth to get high, others will stick $200 up their arms before they even get a buzz. The difference is that ‘junkies’ will do whatever it costs to get that hit, and the others, the white collars, well they don’t like being ripped off. So they walk, because they can.

The old cliché ‘nothing to lose and nothing to hide’ is inversed for using professionals– they have everything to lose and lots to hide. Some of the users even blushed when they admitted their habit, despite being surrounded by the obvious trappings of success and acceptance. Letters run after their names, they have about ten different passwords to different accounts and, well, they have a job. But a pinprick a fortnight has the power to change all that.

Dean* is a senior lecturer at a top Melbourne university. He has been revived three times. “It feels like hands are trying to pull you out of this really heavy mud.” He was first revived on his parents’ front porch while his mum was inside watching the Australian Open. It was done very quietly with his mate running up ahead to beg the ambulance men to turn off the sirens and lights. One Fitzroy youth worker soon got used to performing CPR on kids who dropped off. “It’s a weird feeling, a couple of pumps to the chest and a few blows on the lip, and they’re up and walking around again. It doesn’t mean much to them,” he recalls.

The last time Dean was revived was twelve months ago. He came around with the help of Narcan to find his lounge room full of ambulance workers and his partner crying on the couch. “I was just going to have a hit before following her up to bed,” he recalls guiltily. “I hadn’t used in months, so I guess I used a bit too much for my tolerance levels.” In a sense, the odd user is more at risk than daily users. They may not have an understanding of what is on the street and how pure (or impure) their gear is.

The image most people get of overdosing is in the cold after-hours down a dark alley, in a stairwell or a KFC toilet cubicle. But many overdoses happen at home. A nurse revived her son three times in his own bedroom. The fourth time she wasn’t home and he died. A parents support group out in Greensborough, north east of Melbourne, is contemplating writing a book of black humor on the antics of their drug-addicted children. One woman recalls meeting her son coming down the driveway pushing the wheelie bin. It wasn’t garbage night and even if it was, he wouldn’t know it. She looked inside the wheelie bin and found the TV, video recorder and stereo.

But the laughter is sort of manic. The sadness that lies underneath it all is palpable. Colin, a young man living in Footscray, says his mother bursts into tears whenever he comes home on heroin. “She thinks I’m going crazy, because when I get high I sort of twitch, like this.” Colin flicks his head repeatedly in a damaged jerky way. “So now I only use a tiny bit. Just to get a buzz, not the nod.”

The nod. The nod is the best bit, users say, and the worst bit, bystanders say. “You’re dreaming. You know that feeling of coming in and out of sleep? It’s beautiful,” says Tang, a twenty-four-year-old woman. A mother from the support group says she videotaped her daughter on the nod. She was on the phone to a friend and kept nodding off into her bowl of cereal leaving milk kisses on her cheek. Afterwards she forced her daughter to watch the footage. “She stopped using after that,” said the mother. “It’s funny but sometimes we just can’t see ourselves.”

Injecting-drug users are one of the most stigmatized groups in Western society with many users unwilling to take part in research for fear of their drug use becoming public. This includes the employed, those in positions of social responsibility and others concerned to protect their public image. Which is why when we hear and read about heroin users, we see the token ‘junkies’ rolled out for another round in front of the media, when an estimated two thirds or more users are elsewhere. These visible users are the homeless, the youth, streetwalkers and those in treatment – people who have nothing to lose being unemployed and/or with a criminal record. Many surveys abide the practice of paying money for research participation, and therefore attracting only those who have none to begin with. The usual price is twenty to fifty dollars to complete a government-funded or academic survey for participants. Just enough for a hit, say some.

Dr James Rowe, from the Centre for Applied Social Research of RMIT University, recently completed a survey to just get a taste for how many functional users are out there. At a discreet needle exchange in Melbourne (being one of several health services under the one roof so people could walk in off the street for any number of reasons) he conducted 150 interviews with a sample of long-term clients. Rowe discovered that nearly a third owned a home or lived in private rental properties. The same number was also in paid employment, with one public servant earning $80,000 pa. More than a quarter of participants had gone on to tertiary education and five had post-graduate qualifications.

“This means zero-tolerance policies will only serve to criminalize and marginalize visible drug users while allowing those who do not fit this category – academics, police officers, journalists, public servants, students, chefs – to continue using drugs within the confines of their own homes free from fear of prosecution,” he says. And in a sense why not, Rowe continues, after all the latter are, for all intents and purposes, model citizens of our mainstream society. Tolerance policies have certainly changed in the past decade – police are no longer required at the scene of an overdose to arrest the dead user as soon as they come to. “This means people are actually sticking around and calling the ambulance when a friend OD’s, instead of running off,” says Chris Morley, a youth worker.

Sofia’s* instincts and good judgment are very important to her. She is a nurse in a busy public hospital and has been for ten years. But every few weeks or so, she goes to St Kilda and scores. She admits there was a time when she ‘overdid’ it. “But that was ages ago and I was young and lost sight of a few things.” Nowadays she enjoys the odd high with her boyfriend in their city apartment. “We stay in and watch television,” Sofia laughs at the “boring-ness” of the event. In a sense, the many users of heroin are exactly that. Invisible and very domesticated. They use in the comfort of their own home, one user saying he often takes the opportunity to clean his fish tank when he’s high. “It’s such a chore when you’re straight,” he said.

Meanwhile at street level, the city needle exchange decreased dramatically before and during the course of the recent 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. Foot patrollers who hand out clean syringes on the streets reported a 77% drop on needle needs. So where did it all go? Did the police just do a damn good job of cleaning up the city, or is an exhalation of ice shifting its way like a glacier down the back alleys?

Crystal methamphetamine or ‘ice’ as it’s known, is described by its users as ‘the cream off the top of a speed bake’. That lower economic users are switching from the sedate heroin to the adrenaline-fuelled ice in the past few years is a circumstantial one. Many street users cannot base their drug of choice on the aesthetic properties of a substance – rather it comes down to budget, whereas Dean laughs when I ask if he is thinking of switching to ice because of the price wars on the street. “No way! It’s the opposite of heroin, why would I want to take that?” He says. But for the visible users ice is cheaper, purer and lasts longer.

Australia’s heroin market has definitely gotten quieter, but workers just say it has ‘finally gotten back to normal.’ In the mid-nineties there was a boom of users, a great big mushroom cloud of heroin exploded over the country. But by the end of the decade things got a little sour with the sellers becoming anonymous and younger kids getting mugged for their drugs. Dealers starting cutting their gear down till some people were buying only 8 per cent purity – if that at all and not the scrapings of an aspirin or chalk. Today caps have leapt from street price $25 to $100. A price only the likes of Dean and Sofia can budget for.

From dealers to users to health workers, everyone’s got a theory about the world’s heroin market and what’s happened to it. America has a cameo role in each theory. Some say that in the 70s the States had the opportunity to give money to Burmese freedom fighters but instead poured millions into the Burmese Government, which in turn went to the drug trade and helped strengthen the golden triangle, a place where donkeys laden with saddlebags full of sap travel rocky conical underpasses up mountains. Farmers lead the animals to dens that unfold into laboratories. Them and a thousand others have spent the season slitting gashes into the bulbs of poppies and smearing the thick sticky black sap into plastic bags. Then later, perhaps in a shipment of tinned water chestnuts heading for Australia, a tomb of heroin lies in the centre of a container.

Others say that now America has shifted its focus from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, the Taliban’s efforts to wipe out all opium crops has since been overthrown and Afghanistan is back into the game. When the Taliban was in power, word in the media was that there was a heroin drought. Today Burma is in an actual drought.

Health workers and emergency wards are lamenting ice’s newfound popularity. “I never thought I’d say it – but bring back the good old days of heroin,” says one worker sadly. “Kids on ice don’t sleep for days on end and when they come down, they get seriously paranoid and violent. A lot more suicides happen on ice too.” One ice user, Yvonne, says you feel ‘singed’ after a week of ice. “You can’t sleep and your head just won’t shut up. Not even heroin can get it over with. I’ve only smoked ice four times and I got a cyst in my lungs from it,” Yvonne said. “It was no big deal though,” she adds in regards to the cyst, “You just swallow lots of salt water.”

And while people call heroin the classic capitalism – you don’t consume it, it consumes you – ultimately heroin is a minimalist’s drug, whereas ice signifies a somewhat violent return to society, even if it is only the outskirts. On ice you got to keep moving; be it between clubs or just speeding through the streets in somebody’s car. Heroin doesn’t need accessories, aside from a syringe, spoon, bottle of water and a cigarette filter (used between the spoon and syringe to draw out any impurities). In terms of merchandising – not much else is required, not even company. You score, you use. You just assume your position on the couch. Hell, you assume your position wherever you can get it. One addict pronounces to be so proficient he can score, use, and throw the fit away all in one city block and ten strides.

“A lot of workers burn out in the system and the kids have to keep retelling their stories to new health workers,” Morley says. And for some addicts, that means reliving the same traumas they are trying to hide under a blanket of heroin. According to Dr Rowe, without a real understanding of drug users in society, the reasons that lead the visible minority into kamikaze drug use will never be dealt with. “Functioning drug users show us is that drug dependence is often a consequence of lifestyles defined by disadvantage and abuse… and stereotypes about who uses drugs allows policy makers to avoid addressing the causes of drug addiction such as lack of housing, education and employment opportunities.”

In the substance abuse health industry, most workers’ say decriminalize heroin. Get rid of the black market. In Denmark, where heroin is legal, there is a notable decrease in users coming up through the ranks. “Heroin addicts don’t become this mysterious absence in society. They stay alive and most of them look pretty shit in their fifties going into the local chemist for their hit. That puts kids off,” says Morley.

Programs for young addicts are more like maintenance projects. “We aim to keep them alive,” says Morley. “You learn to celebrate the small victories. Like making them smile. With half a dozen suicides in eight months and overdoses on top of that, you begin to understand that some will die.” Morley used to visit one addict who couldn’t leave his bed. “He had bottles of his own urine next to the mattress.” Another addict disappeared and was found dead in the tip. She had been murdered working in St Kilda’s red-light district. She was seventeen. Another kid overdosed when Morley was taking a well-deserved holiday. “I felt shit about that for a long time. If I had been there maybe he wouldn’t have died.”

Going ‘cold turkey’ (called that because during withdrawal, blood is pumped to the internal organs leaving the skin white and covered in goose bumps) is – although excruciating – not the hardest part. The hardest part, say addicts, is staying off it. “It’s like trying to wean yourself off your greatest love,” says Sarah, a 26-year old addict, who waits in the methadone queue at a Brunswick chemist. “The world is flat without it.”
It is lonely too. “No one sends you flowers in detox,” says another health worker. “Kids are often hassled to get jobs as soon as they come off heroin, and too often, because of their skill levels or criminal record, they find themselves working in factories alongside people who read the Herald-Sun, hate junkies, and are racist. They’re doing all the right things, superficially that is, and they feel lonelier than ever before.”

Up north, some people disappear offshore on prawn trawlers to have a break from heroin, but in the cities it’s difficult to get away. Taking methadone or naltrexone (a drug which blocks the effects of heroin sometimes resulting in a headache after hitting up) is the most common way addicts abstain from using heroin, while some also attend Narcotics Anonymous (NA) meetings. At NA, addicts are encouraged to do ‘ninety meetings in ninety days’ in the first few months of getting clean. However without much of a star system in Australia, it is hard to come by closed meetings or anonymous rehabilitation programs for the working professionals whose using has gotten out of control and don’t want to lose the only thing they got going for them, their job.

The Victorian Doctors Health Program is a confidential service for doctors with drug, psychiatric or alcohol problems that compromise health practice or medical registration. In the first three years of its establishment in 2000, 220 doctors, interns and medical students used the program’s services, either fronting up by themselves or being anonymously tipped off by a work colleague. While less than half of these doctors who had let themselves become patients had substance abuse problems (mainly alcohol, pethidine and heroin), the director of the program, Dr Jack Warhaft, has stated that in the same period of time some addictions have gone unnoticed or untreated, resulting in 3 deaths in the state industry.

White collar dreamers are good are passing through the office undetected. Their only apparent downfall is a not-so uncommon pattern of calling in sick on Mondays. If they overdose, work colleagues are bewildered. One museum curator recalls being told her supervisor was found dead in his car in the work car park. “We were told it was a heroin overdose, but it was so unbelievable, that I don’t think it ever sunk in for us. None of us knew.”

But not all heroin use ends in death. For many it just ends the week, or the month. Some health workers believe it is the shame and stigma that surrounds heroin that often leads to death. The shame of hanging around when someone OD’s, sharing needles to avoid the scorn of a pharmacy, or for white collars, the fear of being recognized at a needle exchange. There is a saying that heroin addicts are the only people that can look down on you from the gutter. Some parents respond by saying they hope their children are still looking down on them from the heavens. It is a saying that mistakes complete submission for pride. It is also a saying that reveals just an inkling of curiosity about what is it about heroin that these people have discovered, the knowledge of which overrides everything else in their life.

When I ask Dean if he ever feels compelled to dispel the ‘junkie’ stereotype and out himself as a user, he wrings his hands. He’s thought about it a lot of times. But, without a job and his family, he just may well perpetuate the theory. “I think it is horrible that visible users take the rap – and it is the visible users that current laws are based on. Laws that lead the public to believe drugs will turn you into a hopeless, homeless, sex-working ‘junkie’ so we need to crush the fuckers and all associated with them,” he pauses. “The fact is, that heroin and most other drugs for that matter, can be found in places other than where people are putting their hands up. I mean don’t tell me that the Government really believes homeless street-urchins support a multi-million dollar industry in Australia?”

There is something else too. Like the lengthening of a shadow that signals the end of a sunny day, his face darkens. A tightening of the jaw suggests it’s not easy keeping it together, that not handing yourself over entirely to the dreaming is a daily drawing of strength. Perhaps if Dean starts to introduce himself as a heroin user, he just may come to believe it – above everything else. Above his being a father, a lover, a son, a teacher, a commuter and a voter.

In the western districts hospital three Buddhist monks enter wearing orange saris. A Youth Outreach worker greets them solemnly. They are here to turn off a boy’s life support. His veins coagulated shooting up sleep gels – a chemist-bought alternative to when good heroin is scarce– and his brain hemorrhaged. One addict I spoke to described being on heroin as “probably the feeling Buddhist monks get after twenty years of meditation.” I wonder if these monks agree.

*names have been changed

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.

The prison was Bandyup – Australia’s only minimum-, medium- and maximum-security facility for women – but the story is not unusual. In the last 10 years, Australia’s female imprisonment rate has risen by more than 60% (compared with 15% for men). It’s no coincidence that heroin use among women has risen just as steadily.

And despite the permanent presence of sniffer dogs, heroin is a part of life at Bandyup. According to a health worker, the same syringes may have been circulating within the prison for almost four years. The ‘girls’ – as the inmates are called, even if they are grandmothers – can get clean condoms but no clean syringes. And while the jail has a drug-free unit (it’s like living in a “better suburb,” says one guard), it’s only available to those who pass a urine test – and most never take up the offer.

Coils of razor wire leave little doubt as to the purpose of the Bandyup compound. Floodlights loom above the fence. Between these two perimeters is an expanse of grey gravel. Crunching across this wasteland, I imagine many hearts have sunk here. When prisoners act up, they are threatened with the prospect of being moved up north to one of Western Australia’s four remote desert prisons. “It never happens, but it’s enough to quieten them down,” says a guard. Up north, female prisoners must share the facilities with men, and endure stricter regimes than their male counterparts. “Because pregnancies are a bad look,” one official explains.

In the office of Bandyup’s superintendent, Marie Chatwin, a set of steak knives are laid out on the desk. “They need to go into the kitchen,” she laughs, “and I want to see personally they all get attached properly to the wall.” Having worked in male prisons for 20 years, she freely admits to finder female prisoners harder to handle. “The men are much more polite. Women are unpredictable. More often than not their only weapon is their mouth, and, boy, they use it.” Women prisoners are also far more anxious about what’s going on outside, Chatwin believes. “The men just leave the loose ends when they go to jail,” she says. “But for women, more often than not, no one is picking up the pieces on the outside. Many do their time and come out to find the house, children and belongings gone.”

At the beginning of our tour, Chatwin waves her hand as if surveying the land. “The average muster is about 150 women. About 45% are indigenous. Once we had three generations of the one mob in here at the same time,” she says. The vast majority of women in Australia’s prison system are mothers and/or grandmothers. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, around 60% of female inmates have children under 16, most of whom end up following in mum’s footsteps.

“We unlock the cells at 7am,” Chatwin continues. “The girls have to make a movement so the guards can see there is a live body.” Two weeks before our visit, a woman suicided in her cell. But her nightmare wasn’t this place – she was inside for killing her three children. We are shown padded cells with tear-proof sheets and a guard demonstrates a surveillance camera that can observe an inmate at all times. What does it see? The guard shrugs: “Most of the time the girls just hide under their doonas.”

In the medical waiting area, there is a room where prisoners must sit for 10 minutes after swigging their methadone. A tampon in the mouth is one trick the women use to absorb the drug and sell it on later for injecting. For many, jail presents a rare opportunity to see a doctor and a dentist. Statistics show female prisoners across Australia have an unusually high rate of abnormal cells within the cervix, with many never having had a pap smear outside jail. The rotten teeth of many addicts are often only ever removed in jail, and prisoners who are inside long enough can see an orthodontist.

Chatwin describes Bandyup as a bit like a revolving door. “Many women are serving one- to two- year sentences and we see most women twice, at least,” she says. “Those with 20 years are generally white housewives and mothers in for revenge killings.”

Back in the yard, a group of women squeeze out of a doorway while another heads in the other direction. “Fuck you then you cunt!” one of the group screams at the lone inmate’s back. The group notice us and flash a brilliant unanimous smile. “Not you, miss,” they chime sarcastically. They charge off, their uniform blue tracksuit pants rolled up above the knees. Shrugging her shoulders, Chatwin points out the protection unit with barbed wire over its roof. This is where the ‘rock spiders’ go – those committed for sexual crimes against children. “They wouldn’t last a second out here,” says the superintendent. “They can stay in there as long as they like, but…” I finish the sentence for her: “Eventually they have to come out.” Chatwin nods.

I am later told that women who have accrued drug debts also go to the protection unit to avoid being beaten up. The health worker says she is always telling the women, especially the drug users, to look after their ‘prisoner’s purse’ (vagina). “Rape is not common, but domestic violence is,” she says. “Often the only times a girl will get penetrated by force is if other prisoners are trying to get her gear (drugs).”

The prisoner provides women with ‘dental dams’ – a kind of cling wrap cover used to practise safe sex. Condoms are provided for putting over fingers, vegetables and whatever other objects the imagination can enlist. But safe sex and safe needle practise is low on the scale of concern at Bandyup. Just as 70% of female prisoners Australia-wide have hepatitis C, so too do 70% of Bandyup’s inmates. (Around 50% of Australia’s male prisoners have the virus.)

Chatwin leads us toward the drug-free cells, past a ruined barbeque with melted buttons, and a mailbox the women can use to post confidential complaints to the ombudsman. All the guards stand as the superintendent ushers us into the drug-free unit. In one of the cells, she points out the shower. “That’s one of the privileges of being in the drug-free unit,” she says. “The rest of the girls shower together and without privacy.” There are sprigs of greenery in jars on a windowsill, and a purple crocheted toilet seat cover.

In the self-contained units aimed at rewarding “good behaviour and good industry,” I am introduced to a woman with wispy white hair. She shows me her cell filled with Celtic symbols, crystals, dragons and dream catchers. She chats amicably to Chatwin about an essay she is trying to finish, but there is something measured about the way the super responds to her. After 10 minutes of banter about monastic medieval history I finally remember who this prisoner is. I read about her in the papers. I remember court drawings of her. She was convicted for plotting with her son to murder her husband.

Bandyup has four beds for nursing mothers, although only babies under 12 months old are allowed. “That’s all the beds we need here,” says Chatwin. “For some of these girls, the child is better off without them. The reality is, with the kid comes the money. That’s all they care about.”

In a courtyard surrounded by some very basic cells we are shown where the new girls go. “Some prisoners will come in and talk to them, show them the ropes,” says Chatwin. “A lot of the girls are very anxious when they get here. Often they’ve sobered up for the first time in years.” One woman’s hand I shake is covered in blurred tattoos. Getting such artwork done on the inside used to be a given, but now if inmates are caught with fresh tattoos they are charged with failing to meet Occupational Health & Safety standards.

On the way back we tiptoe down a wet half-mopped corridor. “You’re doing a good job,” Chatwin says genuinely to an indigenous inmate with a voluptuous body and big eyes under her frizzy hair. The woman leans on her mop, looking dopey and shy as we pass, but when we’re almost around the corner I look back and catch her rolling her eyes.

As one of only four dedicated women’s prisons in Australia, Bandyup is running out of space. Inmates have been known to sleep in the gymnasium; others have slept like sardines in their cells, or with their heads propped up against the toilet.

“Bandyup is just another bloke’s prison tinkered for women as an afterthought,” says Christine Ginbey, superintendent of Boronia, a $14 million prison with a difference. Built along the lines of a typical neighbourhood in suburban Perth, Boronia is a pre-release centre designed to ease prisoners back into society. “All around the world, prison resources and programmes are directed at high-risk offenders such as sexual and violent repeat offenders,” says Ginbey, a redhead with sharp blue eyes. “Few women fit these categories.” Rather, she adds, most female prisoners have been on the receiving end of these crimes.

The Boronia site was once home to a boys’ juvenile justice centre; old photos of the compound show youths slouching down the low-slung corridors as if the sky was falling in on them. Today the area could be easily mistaken for a brand new housing estate. Only the surveillance cameras – powerful enough to zoom in on a keyhole from 1000 metres – give it away. Those inside are called residents, not inmates, and the guards are staff, not ‘screws’. Boronia’s 70 residents set their own alarms, do their own cooking and washing up, and put themselves to bed. Staff are trained to help with shopping, budgeting and cohabiting. For some residents these are basic rights they never had in the first place. Children up to five years old are also allowed to live with their mothers at Boronia. “But,” as Ginbey says, “the child is not to be imprisoned with mum, the child goes into the community for activities such as day care.” In 2005, Boronia reported a re-offending rate of 10%, well below the national average for all prisons of 45%. Yet the centre has met with angry protest groups with placards reading ‘What about our children?’ During his failed election campaign last year, the then Western Australian Liberal opposition leader Colin Barnett even vowed to close down Boronia, because it “is not what prison is about.”

For Ginbey, the problem is that the wider community has little understanding of how the prison system works. Or doesn’t work. Ever since Boronia opened she has made a point of trooping locals through by the hundreds, leading elderly people on golf buggies and electric chairs, and introducing them to the inmates. Two years on, the centre seems to have won over the community. “For some of the elderly locals, the women at Boronia have provided a captive audience,” Ginbey laughs. “Some of them come in and teach beading or knitting, and one man holds his own jazz appreciation class.”

During the planning stages for Boronia, Ginbey and her team were determined to avoid the traditional prison aesthetic. “We found it difficult to not make the facility look nice,” she says. “It’s not that we want architectural awards – we want normal.” Part of ‘normal’ means having more than one way of walking to and from places. “That way, if you’re having a blue with someone, you can avoid them. In Bandyup it’s impossible to avoid a confrontation. A prisoner gets caught in too many dead-ends.”

Boronia’s design has also helped do away with the demeaning practise of strip-searches. “We made a point of not building in any possible space within the reception for cubicles to shower and strip-search new arrivals and visitors,” Ginbey explains. “We don’t want any possibility for procedures to revert back in the future.” Instead, Boronia has a much higher rate of urine tests than other prisons, and the women are tested each day for alcohol use. “We have the lowest level of drug use in WA prison system. In a sense the prisoners are our best security,” Ginbey says.

‘Kathy’, a Boronia resident, admits she has become a bit of a ‘dobber’ since settling in ten months ago. “We’re treated like humans and you just don’t want to ruin it,” she explains. “Some new prisoners will come in and say ‘Let’s make a brew’, or ‘What are the screws like?’ But they don’t know nothing about how it is here, and they work it out.” Or they get sent back to places like Bandyup. Earlier in the year, two new arrivals at Boronia climbed the fence and were met on the other side by security. They were taken back to maximum security that night. “This here, this is a chance. And sure, some of us will fuck it up, but we don’t forget the offer of a chance,” says Kathy.

The education officer at Boronia agrees. “I asked one indigenous woman to write down what she thought about a particular subject and she sat at her desk for days. I thought ‘Oh shit, I’ve set her too hard a task’ and kept asking if she needed help. She sent me away and at the end of the week brought me back twenty pages on what it felt like to be asked what she thought. No one had ever asked her opinion on anything. She was thirty-eight years old.”

A former heroin addict, Kathy has been in and out of jail for the last 12 years. “When I think about the things I’ve done, it’s hard to believe I’m talking about me,” she says. “I compare what I’ve done to the women who are in here for 20 years after killing their husband. They’ve been ridiculed all their lives by violent men. For them, it wasn’t a lifestyle choice. They’re relieved to be here. I guess that’s the weird thing. I get less time, but I feel like I had more choice in my situation.” Kathy has two young sons, and says she has been clean for the last four years. “Yes I’ve said it before – just to get out and to let ‘em hear what they want to hear. But something has shifted. I think I’m tired. I want to be there for my boys if it’s not too late.”

So far, 32 toddlers have made Boronia home and many older children have visited. In most prisons, such visits are as traumatising for the family as the inmate. “We’ve tried to make the visits as welcoming as possible with a play area for the kids,” says Ginbey. “And when they stay over, the child can stay in mum’s room, not in some strange place that is foreign to both mother and child.” Visitors can also meet with residents at Café Boronia, overlooking the facility.

Kathy describes how in the months before being released from Boronia, the women can start applying for jobs and even attend job interviews. “When you’re out, you feel like you got ‘prisoner’ stamped on your forehead. It’s hard not to fall back into old habits,” she says, “So it’s nice to get a head-start.” Boronia’s residents are allowed to leave the premises to work at nearby community centres and women’s refuges, and pick up their children from care. Their cargo pants and white polo tops are intentionally subtle.

When someone from Boronia re-offends, it is seen as a failure on the centre’s part, but Ginbey argues that most re-offending charges have been lesser crimes than the original stint. “One woman’s child died when she was on the outside and her first thought was to call Boronia for help. She returned to smack and was eventually put back in jail. On the hard face of it, that is considered our failure – but grief does horrible things to people. We try and teach the women to be resilient.”

‘Nell’ is another Boronia stalwart. An Aboriginal woman whose father was a Scot, she grew up along the yellow wheat belt across Australia’s middle. Her brown eyes are mottled with blue cataracts. About a month ago, some bush tucker was brought into Boronia for the Indigenous women as a special treat. Nell smiles. “It’s been a long time between proper bush food. I haven’t been home in 15 years. When I get out, we’ll go back and clean up the family graves,” she pauses. “That’s if they don’t nab me on something else.” Her most recent conviction was based on DNA evidence. “I’d just finished my sentence and had been out for a couple days when they came back and got me. They matched my blood with an incident years ago. I don’t remember it,” she says, shrugging. “I’m not saying I didn’t do it. But people don’t believe in (memory) blackouts. My problem is alcohol and ‘benzos’ (benzodiazepines – sleeping pills or tranquillisers).”

A former Bandyup inmate, Nell has three boys who have all done time. “I worry about my boys,” she says. “I haven’t been there for them. My daughter though – she’s the opposite of me. It’s like she looked in the mirror and said ‘No, I won’t become like my mum.’” At Boronia, Nell has learnt to read and write, something she has been fudging for most of her life. “That’s something I would never have had the chance to do outside,” she says. “We also learn about cognitive behaviour. That might come natural for some of you out there, but most of us here need to learn it. Things like staying with a thug is what most of us think we deserve. And patience,” she chuckles. “I’ve learnt lots about patience.”

Perhaps Australia’s prison system has learnt something too. Boronia’s blueprint is being considered for use in remote Aboriginal communities as well as several men’s minimum-security prisons. And, inspired by the prison’s use of space in its units, Western Australia’s public-housing authority is even considering modifying its standard home design.

Meanwhile on the streets of Boronia there’s a certain kind of normality in the air. Ginbey is recalling the time the local fire brigade called in to investigate a smoke detector triggered by burning toast. Ginbey was at Boronia’s reception desk to meet the fireman “and I kid you not, his chest was bare under his braces!” She told the young man there was no way he was coming into the facility like that – not unless he wanted the toast being burnt everyday. “I demanded one of the older fellas come in. Even then, the women stopped and stared him out. Some flicked their hair, and called out, ‘I’ve gotta fire you can put out!’ One woman pretended to swoon and fanned herself as he passed, ‘Ooh I’m burning up over here officer!’”

Yes, Boronia may well be the promised land of women’s prison. But as the superintendent back at Bandyup told me: “The reality is, most of these girls aren’t going to Boronia.”

Adam Powell, 33

“My ex-missus,” says Adam Powell, “used to get angry because she thought people were staring at us because we were a white man and a black woman together – but I reckon it was the added element of me being a blind white man with a black woman.” He laughs. Now 33, at the age of two Adam was diagnosed with glaucoma – a disease that damages the connective tissues between the eyes and brain. He’s known since then that eventually he’d go blind. Two years ago, the pain in his right eye was so bad that he took 30 painkillers a day until the eye was removed. Six months ago the rest of his sight went. “I tried to kid myself and say, no big deal, what’s to see? I could see the outlines of people for a little while but now, nothing.”

He sits beside an empty swimming pool in Alice Springs, a small town in the Australian desert. He came here when his marriage failed. “At the start I used to try and picture everything but now I don’t care. This here,” he waves at the boarding house where ten other men and women also live, “is probably a dump.” Using a tactile map, Adam gets around with his cane and the odd helping hand. “The Velcro is Stuart Highway, the streets are puff paint, the shops sandpaper and this magnet is home.”

As Adam talks, other boarding house residents pass by behind him. He calls to each by name, identifying them by the jangle of their keys, the squeak of their sneakers or the way they walk. In a way, blindness is the least of his problems. He’s been put in Alice Springs jail three times already for refusing to leave his wife and child alone. “The first time they put me in a disability cell but the third time they said they had to stop giving me special treatment and put me in with the mainstream. I was with about 14 other blokes in a cell and I was scared. But the prisoners were good to me. They poured the kettle for me because it was a shit kettle and spilt all over my hands when I first tried to use it.” Only two things seem to bother Adam: “It’s a hassle being blind with all this new stuff coming out. There’s the new Nintendo 360, playstations, X-boxes, new movies.” The second thing is more serious. The loss of Adam’s family keeps him awake most nights. “If I could see for a moment, I’d see my son.”

Secrets

Yami Lester, 66

Yami Lester was a young boy living in the Central Australian desert when the ground shook and a black mist filled the sky. It was 1953, the year the Australian government made a secret agreement with Britain to begin testing atomic bombs at Emu Station, 180 km south of Wallatina where Yami’s people lived, a land that was officially assumed to be empty. But Aboriginal people lived on it, and the people of Wallatina became sick. Some of the adults died, their bodies covered in strange sores. Yami couldn’t open his eyes. He and other children rubbed their eyes in agony and could not look at sunlight. For Yami, only one eye reopened after he’d seen the black mist. It eventually failed him several years later, leaving him blind.

Thirty years later a royal commission was ordered to look into the effects of the atomic weapons tests on Yami’s people and the soldiers who carried out the tests. But for Australian Aborigines, who did not receive the vote until 1967, documentation crucial to such investigations – medical records, death certificates – was nonexistent. Despite these odds, the commission found the Australian government negligent and recommended group compensation. But Yami has never proved for sure that the bombs made him blind.
Australian scientists have since found that the land on which the tests were performed is still poisoned. It will cost AUS$600 million (US$534 million) to clean it up. “The ground is hot they say,” says Yami.

Now in his sixties, Yami lives in the old homestead in Wallatina, near the sand-hills where he grew up. He looks forward to the sound of his daughter’s car coming down the dirt road and his grandchildren tumbling out calling for him. He delights in his grandchild using an automatic camera like his grandfather does. As his mother tells the boy to look through the viewfinder, he says “Why? Papa doesn’t!” After 40 years of fighting for the rights of his people, Yami is tired of talking about the past. He prefers the company of his family and grandchildren. Without Yami, though, the secrets behind Australia’s nuclear tests may remain hidden, as dark as the cloud that removed a small boy’s sight.

I don’t do the poor blind girl crap

Candice Hilton, 33

Candice Hilton wants to finish her cigarette before she speaks. She squishes out the butt on the ground with her foot while Zelda, her guide dog, waits patiently. Candice and Zelda live in Katherine, a small tropical town below Darwin where the cars veer over roads at night trying to squash pestilent cane toads. The scents of frangipani, beer and rotting road-kill hang heavy in the humidity.

Out on the ridge of Katherine is Candy’s property where she lived alone for five years. Recently, her partner Steven joined her. “I don’t do the poor blind girl crap,” Candy says. “People do help me out, but I always make sure the favour is returned. For example, they might need to go away and I’ll be loaded up with five horses to look after.” Her favourite cigarette is when she first gets on her horse, making sure she stays still while the mare gets used to her weight, her only movement the smoke blowing from her mouth.

Because she can still see fractures of light, Candy knows her horses are white and speckled. “I can make them out, but the chestnut mares are too solid, I can’t see them.” Candy and her horses compete in local ‘cutting’ events, where riders ‘cut’ a cow out of its herd and keep it on one side of the horse for a prescribed length of time. She wears a headset to compete and friends direct her from the sideline. “When people ask me how I ride, I tell them same as they do. I just the horse do most of the work.”

Candy doesn’t feel isolated, because of where she lives or because of how much she can see. “I live in a remote, largely un-serviced area. But I like it. People I don’t even know look out for me here.” When bad floods hit the Northern Territory last year Katherine was devastated, but Candy remembers the time fondly. “People drove out of their way to see how I was and when there was nothing else to do but wait for the water to go down, a group of us women sat around and baked together.” Being blind involves compromising, she thinks. “Sure, society does need to be more aware, but you’ve also just got to learn to fit in wherever you are.”

There is a man who was caught in an explosion, melting parts of his face and body. As he makes his way to the brothel, he looks at the footpath to avoid the eyes of passers-by. He knows the ground off by heart now, and he looks up only when it is time to press the buzzer.

There is another young man who lost both legs after an accident. Now his girlfriend does not feel the same way about him. It is as though something is missing, she tells him.

They are all patrons of brothels. It is a line of trade thought to have begun after phone calls from carers, nurses and families of disabled young men.

At Cromwell Heights, a Collingwood brothel, a room has been equipped for mentally and physically disabled men (women are welcome, too, but there is no record of a woman with a disability ever making a booking). The room has a ledge around the bed to make it easier for a wheelchair customer to lift himself up. The bath has been sunk into the floor and has a handrail to help with getting in and out.

But the room also has courtesans’ accoutrements: it is decorated in plush red with sensual paintings on the wall and has a gold-framed mirror bolted to the ceiling above the bed. The fees are standard for all customers: $200 an hour, $100 for half an hour. But the very existence of Room One is a challenge to commonly held views that disabled people, like children, are asexual.

Kathryn is one of three sex workers at Cromwell Heights who works with both abled and disabled clients. “It is about intimacy with my disabled clients, touching and talking. And self-esteem. These men don’t want to be seen as victims,” she says. Kathryn always asks her disabled clients if they need a helper, and how independent they are. For discretion’s sake, some do not want to come to the brothel with their helpers. “And some really do need helpers. I can’t afford to do my back in lifting a man from his chair to the bed.”

It is a specialised line of work. A sense of humour helps. Kathryn, musing about having sex with a legless men, says: “We tend to roll about!” She laughs. “Ergonomically, it is difficult; sex usually has to be done in a squat position, and lots of cuddles.” Debra, a co-owner of the brothel, looks at Kathryn and says: “I couldn’t do it … I worked as a sex worker for seven years and the most disabled client I had was a man with a dead arm. It was spooky. I kept to the other side of him.”

Mike Letch, a consultant for the disability support service, Yooralla Society of Victoria, has cropped hair and is wearing a tight black turtleneck sweater. He looks in his late 30s but is 54. He is the kind of guy you would go to the pub with, a regular guy, only his legs do not work. They hang like stuffed stockings over the edge of his chair, while the rest of Letch is crisp with energy.

“I was a professional motorcycle racer and, in 1970, I was one of about 15 Australians racing in England on the international circuit. I got wiped out in a bad crash there and ended up in hospital in England for about four months. I remember thinking, this is a really bad scene. I was fairly sexually active, and what were my prospects after this? I had no feeling; I was numb! It was like I had been given this big novocaine injection from the chest down. I was 21 years old.

“I remember asking the charge nurse … what my prospects of having children were like, and she told me to concentrate on my rehab and keep my mind above my navel and ‘you might get somewhere, you little guttersnipe’ – words to that effect. So I thought, ‘I’ll wait till I get back home to Australia, things are bound to be a lot better there’. Got back home, and they were worse.”

After a few years’ working in an auto-part warehouse in Elizabeth Street in the centre of Melbourne, Letch had had enough of peeling parking fines from his windscreen because there were no disabled parking spots and decided to enter the medical field to try to make a change for people with disabilities.

“I found myself working at the spinal unit at the Austin Hospital as a rehab counsellor, and the bulk of the spinal patients were young males between the ages of 18 and 24. Sexuality was a big issue, and people were terrified.
“What tends to happen, particularly in spinal cord cases, is people … think ‘Oh I can’t do that’, and it becomes part of the depressive nature of the whole scenario, which is really unfortunate … Even if you don’t get full return of feeling, it’s still worth working on because the whole thing is very sensuous, and these days things like Viagra can sustain an erection really well. So there’s no real major problem to it just as long as you can bother to put the time into it.”

Yet when it comes to Letch’s own sexual beginnings as a disabled person, he shrugs; “I just experimented with a girlfriend, found something that could work, and then, bingo. The body has an amazing way of transferring its dominance from one area to another, and you can be quite responsive in other parts of the body. So that was how it all started and, with time, everything just comes back.

“This is something that really isn’t understood, certainly in the medical books. They sort of say, ‘Well, it has cut out and that’s it’. But we know of so many people who haven’t given up on sex, and they just kept at it, and everything starts to function again,” he says.

Letch has never visited a sex worker. He finds his wheelchair can work wonders when squeezing in between a woman and the bar. “You always have somewhere to sit, and you always have something to talk about.”
He has, however, found himself inside brothels assisting clients who are unable to undertake the process independently.

“A lot of clients may never have the opportunity to form a relationship because of the nature of their disability, and they will go to a brothel and be treated with respect,” Letch says. “They go in feeling pretty ordinary and come out with their heads held high; it’s a wonderful thing to be able to do for somebody. For some people with a disability, having sex may be the only adult thing they can ever do in their life …”

How about women with disabilities and their access to pleasure?

“I’m ashamed to say it as a male, but it really is an unmet need,” Letch says. “There’s this awful mentality that says that women haven’t really got a problem. It’s the guys that need to have erections and perform, therefore, they have the problem.”

He mentions a company called Achievable Concepts, which adapts recreation and sporting equipment for people with disabilities and the aged. It is also the site, achievableconcepts.com.au, where you can place an order for the Diva, or the Flexipleaser, or the Joystick. The Diva even has separate hand controls to allow for more concentrated control.

“We went through a process a while back where people were looking at the modification of sex toys for people with gross motor impairment to be able to use,” Letch says. “Getting better grips and better switches on vibrators and that type of stuff. Just taking an ergonomic approach to things, so someone who didn’t have five fingers could use a big switch to turn something on.

“We farmed this work out to Achievable Concepts, and they now work in conjunction with Downunder Toys, and make these ergonomic vibrators. Occasionally we do presentations with them, and the favourite trick is to turn on a vibrator and throw it into the audience. Everyone screams. And then it vanishes. You never get ‘em back.”

Alexa Rosengarten, sexual health counsellor at the Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre, walks up the hospital corridor grinning. We are both wearing red pants. We look like a pair of clown doctors, only we have more adult issues on the agenda. And it is a different kind of balloon that Alexa plans on handing out to her patients.

The rehabilitation buildings are wide and spacious. I imagine contraptions that engulf the patients, but also contraptions that recreate nimble beings who dance, shoot hoops and play a mean game of ping-pong.

But there is one more thing some of the patients here want to relearn. Sex. How does one have sex in a wheelchair? What if the left side of your body is paralysed?

Many of the patients who have sat in Rosengarten’s office have experienced physical trauma, the prying of curettes and the prodding of needles. They are angry with their bodies. Rosengarten’s office is like sunlight after winter.
Her work varies between giving practical information about sexual positions to working through the loss people experience over their former lives.

She finds herself teaching grown men, who have been institutionalised all their lives, how to browse porno magazines. “One particular patient cannot turn the pages of a magazine, so he needs help. Who is he going to ask without disrespecting anyone? So I suggest to him to ask one of the male nurses. I tell him no, it is not OK to look at the magazines during the day in a shared ward. How about late at night, with his curtain drawn.”

But while sex workers may meet some needs of patients, they are not going to meet all their needs. “With a sex worker, people with disabilities can learn to understand their bodies without the added pressure of pleasing a new partner,” says Rosengarten, “but, in some ways, it can keep people in a safe place, especially if they have the finances. They can say ‘I don’t have to work through issues about being rejected and trying to meet somebody’.”

She says that people who cannot conform to the beauty myth are often more creative in their sex lives. “A lot of the younger guys in the spinal ward might once have been ‘wham bam, thank you ma’am’ lovers, only to discover after their injuries that kind of attitude to sex isn’t going to work for them anymore. They are challenged to explore intimacy and really connect with their partners.” Rosengarten tries to get to the point where her patients can have a laugh. “A sense of humour is the most powerful tool for a person with a disability … How can we go to a place that frightens us, unless we lift it up and make it lighter?”

Debra sits opposite Kathryn and me in the kitchen at the Cromwell Heights brothel. A round, robust man has delivered eight litres of milk and taken the girls’ lunch orders. Watching the simple transaction, I ask Debra why there is no delivery service between hospitals and brothels.

The businesswoman in Debra glints. “We used to have a working relationship with a hospital … where the nurses from the paraplegic and quadraplegic ward called us to make appointments. It must have made their jobs a whole lot easier!” Debra laughs, mimicking a nurse slapping the imaginary hand of a pesky patient.

Later in the day, a woman clad in Arabian Nights lingerie curls up like a cat in the lap of a man in a wheelchair and gives him a long, tongue-involved kiss. Laughing, she stands up and pushes him to the waiting taxi. He leaves with a grin on his face.

When I was little I became a Christian in a family of atheists. It lasted about five weeks. I prayed every night, organising my stuffed animals to kneel with me beside the bed. My brothers would snigger behind my bedroom door and pretend to be God, answering my prayers in their shrill, breaking voices. I prayed for all the things dear to a child of a nervous disposition – that mum would always love me, that Tiger (an orange stray kitten we found) would live forever, and that `the boys’ (those giggling Gods behind my bedroom door) might leave me alone. Then I would say amen for each of my stuffed animals in voices I imagined they had.

Finding little familial support for my new-found religion (“She thinks she’s a Christian,” my father liked to say to our milk-bar man), I ended up returning the Good News Bible to the library. In Australia, it’s no sin to change your spouse or your religion (but, for God’s sake, not your football team). Elsewhere, of course, renouncing your faith can have far more serious consequences – former Catholics may be excommunicated, while in some Islamic countries the death penalty awaits apostates.

Many Australians, it seems, are religious only by default. According to the national census, while 67% belong to a Christian church, only 9% attend church regularly. The proportion of Australians who categorise themselves as Christian has been falling steadily since the first census in 1901. And, in the last l0 years, non-Christian religions have seen the largest ­ever proportional increase.

Marian Dalton, a theology historian at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, says she can imagine the panic the traditional churches must be feeling but that, in today’s multi­faith society, Christians risk coming across as sore losers. “It must be frightening to see numbers draining away, but that is what happens when people have [religious] freedom,” she says. At the age of 16, Dalton became a born-again Christian. Her parents and brother were agnostic and Dalton says she found she felt more at home among the evangelicals. Like sprinkling a sachet of Sea-Monkeys into a bowl of water, it provided instant friends and a new-found sense of purpose.

But six years on, Dalton fell in love with a fellow churchgoer and they decided to live together. Her priest, aghast that the couple had not married, sent Dalton scathing letters of Biblical verse and threatened to mention her `immorality’ in his sermons. She was no longer welcome as a youth-group leader, Sunday school teacher or choir member. “I became quite disillusioned with the whole thing and we left the church. But I was left with a`god-shaped hole’,” says Dalton, echoing the words of French scientist and religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, who said: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart.”

For Rachel Woodlock, an Islamic scholar at Melbourne’s Monash University, the question of what dwells in our hearts isn’t always so mysterious. Walking down the street recently, her hijab flapping, a carload of men slowed down to yell “Go home you fucking Arab!” at Woodlock. “I’m a sixth-generation Australian,” she says. “Where am I to go?”

Woodlock was raised in the Baha’i faith, a religion with distinguishing principles that include the condemnation of all forms of prejudice. At 24, she married a Baha’i man, only to convert to Islam five years later. For the Baha’i community, this was the worst possible outcome. “So many Baha’i have died at the hands of Muslims,” Woodlock says of the persecution many Baha’i have faced, particularly in Iran. “One man said to me `If it were the other way around, you’d be dead.’ I wasn’t expecting it; I had known these people since I was a baby.”

The term `convert’ is now generally used to mean any transition from one faith to another, but in older usage it implied a transition from sin or `false religion’ to `truth.’ In many Orthodox traditions, commitment is often for life – but in our `tolerant’ Western environment, a convert can assume a new identity without necessarily negating the past, by viewing conversion as God’s will. But for the religion that has been left for another – it is like being jilted at the altar.

Lewis Rambo, a professor of psychology and religion, and author of Understanding Religious Conversion, says conversions from one faith to another are often seen as an act of treachery. For example, if a Jew becomes a Christian, this may be viewed as a betrayal because of the persecution many Jews have experienced at the hands of Christians. This errant convert may be defined as `dead’ by the Jewish community, whereas if the situation were reversed – a Christian converting to Judaism – it could be seen as an “interesting eccentricity or curiosity,” Rambo says.

As a Hindu priest, India’s Swami Dayananda Saraswati regards religious proselytising as barbaric. “Everybody should be given the freedom to practise his or her religion,” he says. “That’s religious freedom as I understand it, and if I put down that religion to convert that person to my religion, I consider it is very gross violence because it’s a violence against something more deep than mere physical violence… In the process, a lot of people get hurt; their whole culture is destroyed, and we have wiped out cultures in Egypt, in Greece, in South America, everywhere. This has been going on for a long time, and it has been because of this conversion alone.” According to the Swami, religion’s universal message should be `Love God’ as opposed to `Love my God.’

While several faiths, including Islam, have been known to share the Christian view that converting people is acceptable, others are less prone to proselytising. The Jewish tradition, for example, holds that a prospective convert should be refused three times. As for the Buddhists, the Dalai Lama has stated he does not want to convert the West, but rather he aims to teach the art of happiness and raise awareness for Tibet’s plight.

For `Sam,’ a regular contributor to the internet chat site Muslim Village Australia, his conversion to Islam was made all the more meaningful by a close Muslim friend who tried to talk him out of converting. “He told me that if I convert, it should be for the sake of Allah only, and not to become part of a ‘club’ or any other thing like that,” Sam says. “Here I was, ready to convert, and I had a Muslim telling me iiot to, unless it was for the right reasons. This left a deep impression on me… It was the best advice anyone ever gave to me.”

Yet the biblical command to “go and make disciples of all nations” (a biblical quote falsely attributed to Christ, according to some scholars of the historical Jesus) remains a tenet of many Christian groups. Others, such as The Church of Scientology and the Hare Krishna movement, are similarly committed to spreading their own particular brand of consciousness.

Under the Charter of the United Nations, “no one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have a religion or belief of his choice.” It’s fine in theory, yet people the world over remain captive to others’ enforced beliefs. In Australia, with its long history of missionary zeal among Indigenous communities, our own Prime Minister wants chaplains introduced as counsel to students in Australian schools. Meanwhile, redefining the very idea of religious freedom, Catholic ministers are overseeing conversions to Christianity in our detention centres.

“Those born into a religion tend not to reflect on the actual meaning of their theological path, whereas a convert has to face up to some serious barriers, from outside and within,” says Rachel Woodlock, when asked how converts differ from those born into a particular faith. While Woodlock’s husband remained a Baha’i, she never returned to the community she had grown up in. “My husband has always supported me; he helped pay for me to study Arabic in Yemen,” she says. “His biggest concern is when we go out people will think he’s forcing me to wear the hijab.”

But for Woodlock, it is her mother who finds her conversion the most difficult to accept. “She thinks the stereotypical things, like Muslim women are oppressed and it is a backward religion.” Woodlock’s two-year-old daughter was recently given a two­piece swimming suit by her grandmother. “Neither me or my husband thought much of it, but my mother decided we were against it because I am Muslim and kept asking if I was going to make her wear the hijab instead. But we just didn’t like the idea of our two-year-old wearing a bikini.” Long ago the Woodlocks decided to leave their daughter’s religious status on the census blank. “When she is old enough, she can make her own decision.”

For parents of converts, however, it can be that you’re damned if you do, an damned if you don’t. In the case of `Jonathon,’ a 23-year-old whose parents are not religious, being brought up without God came to feel a little like being cheated. Jonathon’s conversion is a clandestine affair. Still living with his family, he is reluctant to tell his parents and brother that he is a born-again Christian, and has been for the almost two years. “My family are the kind of people who groan and throw things at the television if someone at the Oscars thanks God,” he says.

Fortunately for Jonathon, the church he attends has sermons on Sunday afternoons so he can tell his parents he’s hanging out with friends or playing sport. (“They would be suss if I was up early every Sunday morning.”) And, while some young men may have a stash of magazines hidden under the bed, Jonathon has the Bible. Not even his friends are aware of his conversion: “All they know is that I am much happier. But I don’t want them to change around me and think they can’t say the same things any more.”

Professor Lewis Rambo likens conversion to falling in love. “It is dramatic; it is intense,” he says. “The world looks different. You feel different. For many converts, that early phase is a wonderful liberation that comes of being in love with God or the church or the Jewish community or whatever you are now in love with. But just as in marriage, sometimes there is a let-down once you start seeing the realities – that not all Jews or Catholics are nice people. Then the reality of what you have done begins to take effect.”

Converts are often more likely to see the inconsistencies between their new religion and its followers. Jonathon reflects: “Some Christians are pretty ‘un-Christian.’ My nan goes to church but thinks we should leave the boat people out in the ocean. Then there is the whole ‘homosexuality is a sin’ angle. I have a few gay friends and one night a group from my church invited me to have pizza and they started saying some really derogatory things about gay people. I felt like a traitor because I didn’t stand up for my friends.”

Newcomers to a faith stress the difficulty of losing `the convert tag.’ “I’ve had a taxi driver who doesn’t pray but wants to lecture me on Islam,” Woodlock laughs. It is often assumed that one’s conversion means a sudden transformation, rather than a rational process of seeking and changing one’s behaviour. But many modern-day conversions are exactly that – a profound internal experience without the drama of visions and fiery red crosses appearing in the sky.

The danger, in our consumer-based culture, is that belief might be somehow cheapened; that converts, or prospective converts, might find themselves trapped in a ‘spiritual supermarket.’ How do you explain the altars, ornaments, yarmulke, jewellery, adornments, even headscarves? And what makes religion any more dissimilar from other subcultures that require external symbolic gestures? Even Buddhism, a minimalist’s religion, could entail a trip to the shops to purchase a water feature, or one of those big clay Buddhas, to help you reinforce your investment in inner peace. A Quaker from Melbourne’s Quaker Friends group – which boasts a vast variety of converging faiths – believes there is a risk to all this diversity. “If you claim to be everything, then you risk being nothing to everyone.”

Where does this leave all of those god-shaped holes’? Does the power of God diminish if ‘He’ changes in size? Marion Dalton filled her spiritual vacuum 17 years ago when she became a Pagan – a religion that was only removed from Victoria’s Vagrancy Act 1958 in 2005. “Most other religions are male; we worship the Goddess. It’s only recently that A Current Affair and Today Tonight have stopped using the graveyard backdrop and spooky music whenever they do an `expose’ on us,” she laughs.

For many converts, a new religion of their choosing can feel like a kind of homecoming after years of trying to fit into the wrong-sized faith. And, while cynics tend to make much of turning to a god in times of crisis, there are more reasons than one to explain conversion; it can be brave, cowardly or even deadly. It can be a crutch or it can be a moment of ecstasy. It can be a relieving of guilt or grief, or a method of overcoming fear. Impending death can often spur one to a faith – there are, for instance, many converts on death row. For others, it is simply a chance for a chat and morning tea. And for many, it is something to hold on to while a wild ocean flows around us.

Rachel Woodlock’s Christmas gatherings are a celebration of varied faiths. There’s usually a couple of Baha’is, her mother’s best friend who is Jewish, her Buddhist brother, a younger atheist brother, children with little persuasion and their eye on a present beneath the tree, and her, a Muslim. “It’s like, so, which one of us is Christian again?” she giggles.

Not me of course. I gave that up along time ago, when I returned the Bible to the library and came home with All Right, Vegemite! But there are still times when I think I would like a religion, something to inflate inside my being for when life gets too noisy; something to stop my shoulders from collapsing forward. Like the wooden pegs children play with, I wonder if I will succeed in finding the right fit for my god-shaped hole or if it’s just a place for the wind to blow through.