Long grass living

Updated

They are some of the most vulnerable Australians and they live on the streets. What is the reality of life for Darwin's long grass community?

In September, an Indigenous man in Darwin was handed a fine for begging alms, failing to comply with a loitering notice and using a musical instrument in a public place.

The $450 fine (and $150 levy) he was ordered to pay was piled onto the several thousand dollars he already owed the Northern Territory Government. The causes for the other debts are unknown, but court records show numerous interactions with the Fines Recovery Unit.

The incident was one of many daily interactions between Darwin's public institutions — police, council rangers, frontline health staff, shelters — and the sprawling, highly visible population of Indigenous visitors who live in the city's streets, parks and bushland — locally known as long grassers.

Two worlds in one city, overlapping all the time.

A doctor who worked at this coalface for 18 months (and asked us not to use her name) was struck by the contrast between Darwin's homeless population and those in the southern states.

They were a population of pariahs, she said, a community dependent on the public health system, over-represented in the justice system, vulnerable and vibrant.

She asked Curious Darwin to investigate the reality of life for people who live in the long grass. Curious Darwin is our story series where you ask the questions, vote for your favourite, and we investigate.

Morning

On Mindil Beach, people walk dogs, go to popular evening markets and sit to watch the sun sink over the mouth of the harbour.

Within some parts of the long grass community, the beach is also a gathering place. As dawn breaks and lycra-clad exercisers jog through the thick humidity, three people are woken by council rangers in a patch of beachside turf. Their friend and brother James Ganambarr surveys the scene, weary with sleep.

Mr Ganambarr travelled from Milingimbi to Darwin to look for his brother and sister in the city, which to many remote Australians is a major service hub.

"They're still here. I'm trying to get them back to home," he said.

He came here eight months ago and has lived in the long grass since.

People might travel to Darwin for medical reasons, to avoid trouble back home, go to court or simply watch the football.

For Mr Ganambarr and the others in this community, St Vincent de Paul Society's Ozanam House is a popular daily checkpoint.

About 150 people walk through the service's gates each day in search of health and hygiene necessities that homelessness might preclude: food, laundry, showers, centralised legal and medical help.

"What we find with many of our clients is that they may have a legal issue, but they may also have a housing issue or some mental health issues," the charity's NT chief executive Fran Avon said.

"Sometimes the presenting issue is not always the root cause of the problems."

By making some of the solutions to these problems available at Ozanam House, the service's Thereza Kagayo said, access to these crucial services didn't come down to things like being able to catch a bus on time.

Several research papers, particularly those by academic Catherine Holmes, have confirmed people who live in the long grass feel they're intensely stigmatised, have often been exposed to profound trauma such as rape, violence and death, and turn to alcohol to self-medicate.

But their lives are not without enjoyment, Dr Holmes concluded.

Ms Avon agreed.

For many, including Daniel May, life in the long grass can remain a choice.

He said he'd seen a lot since a marriage breakdown drove him towards homelessness 25 years ago. He's witnessed substance abuse, the death of friends and been incarcerated.

The community was unfairly humbugged by the police, Mr May said.

Nonetheless, he said it was a lifestyle preferable to one that would see him beholden to rent and other financial stressors. Instead, he'll spend the afternoons wandering the streets in search of cigarette butts, papers and alcohol.

"I've seen a lot of bad things go on, a lot of good things, but nothing's sort of changed — only the law."

Mr May was one of 4,000 people on the banned drinker register at the end of February. He said the government policy — intended to prevent problem drinkers accessing alcohol, though its proponents stress it doesn't work in isolation — has not slowed the flow of grog.

In most instances, he said, eligible family members would do the alcohol run, or people might turn to over-the counter products that contain alcohol to "get drunk, kill the grog shakes".

"If you can't get alcohol, you got three dollars, four dollars on the Basics card, so you go buy a bottle of mouthwash.

"So buy it, mix it up with a bit of water, and that's it, away you go."

Afternoon

Two, three or four times in an hour, Vaughan Williams' mobile phone will ring — a chunky, mechanical ring that heralds someone in need of help.

This time, Larrakia Nation's day patrol service is on the line. It's 3:00pm. They're knocking off soon. Can he drive three Tiwi Islanders between two nearby beaches?

Through his work with Larrakia Nation's HEAL program, Mr Williams will burn a tank-and-a-half of petrol each week taking vulnerable people to renal appointments, delivering them between bush camps, dropping them off at the emergency department.

"It could be anything from a broken hand to a head wound," he said.

"[Intensive care] might call you in to identify someone who's been run over and they've got no ID on them. That's always a pretty traumatic thing to do.

"There's many ways you can end up in hospital, put it that way."

The generally poor health of the community, already more vulnerable than the non-Indigenous population in many ways, is exacerbated by life in the long grass, according to Olga Havnen from the Aboriginal health service Danila Dilba.

"Quite often, they might be suffering from chronic health disease, there might be mental health conditions, they are just generally in poor health," Ms Havnen said.

"They're a really hard-to-reach group in some ways, and the fact that people may not be walking into our doors looking for health services doesn't mean they're not worried about their health, but it may not be the priority for them at that moment in their lives."

More than 80 per cent of the Territory's Indigenous population live in remote areas and encounter significant differences in service delivery to those in urban areas. Providing continuity of care to a group this mobile is a challenge.

"Unfortunately we've never kept pace with being able to provide the sort of accommodation and other services that Aboriginal visitors to town actually need," Ms Havnen said.

"It's been a long-standing problem. It's a complex area for governments to deal with."

There is also the complicated issue of people who are admitted to hospital but choose to take their own leave of it. According to a Top End Health Service spokesperson, the frequency varies widely, and while some patients return, others don't.

Within four hours they're discharged from the ward, and in some circumstances, that can forfeit their transport back to remote communities.

"I think loneliness is a big thing," Mr Williams said of the phenomenon.

"Aboriginal people like to have people around them — family around them, friends around them.

"We try and track them down and get them back to hospital; take the catheters out of their hands or their arms if they're still there."

Helping Mr Williams track them down is Sonda Nampijimpa Turner, an artist, raucous storyteller and someone who has lived in the long grass.

She'd been drinking and smoking heavily for years before a doctor handed her a grim prognosis: stop drinking or prepare for an early death.

The prize-winning Warlpiri artist has since reached the top of the NT's long waiting list for public housing and become a self-styled health advocate.

"I try to help them. Telling them to quit grog; no good for you, but no, they want to keep drinking until they get really sick," she said.

"And they're stuck here and they're camping around anywhere, no blanket."

She is Mr Williams' eyes and ears on the ground, and that is a big job. While there are no official numbers, some estimates place the size of the long grass community well into the thousands.

Mr Williams said numbers had swelled in recent months and believed several factors — including police intervention at the point of sale in Katherine, Alice Springs and Tennant Creek — had driven people north.

"So they started discovering Darwin, and I guess some of them like what they see. Beautiful beaches, friendly town."

Night

By dusk, another fleet of paddy wagons has peeled onto the streets of Darwin and Palmerston. This is Larrakia Nation's night patrol.

Their brief, according to outreach manager Nelson Tinoco, is to ferry people to safe locations out of public sight — shelters, hostels, bush camps, or fixed addresses if they have one.

"Part of that is also interacting with them and engaging with the clients in order to deter them from interacting with the justice system," Mr Tinoco said.

In one of the patrol wagons, Indigenous rangers Brendan Daby and Lawrence Bell are cruising along a highway in the dark night.

"Just advising we dropped one female off to the SUS [sobering-up shelter], and we've got another call centre job for the Nightcliff foreshore — an intox male sleeping," Mr Daby calls into a two-way radio.

Jobs regularly flow in from police, security agencies and the public over the eight-hour shift.

"Throughout the night, we're dealing with people who are pretty happy; we could be dealing with people who are pretty angry, too," Mr Bell said.

In instances like the Nightcliff job, they may be dealing with people who have simply woken up and wandered off into the night.

"We attended the Nightcliff foreshore," Mr Daby tells the radio.

"The POI's decamped. Did you have anything else for us?"

Next, the men head to the airport, where federal police have asked them to pick up three loiterers who are perhaps stranded.

They are making themselves liable by drinking at the airport — "one of the worst places to drink", Mr Bell tells them, and at 9:00pm, their excuse that they have a plane to catch fails to convince.

But Mr Bell is sly and convincing, and the party is soon clambering into the back of the wagon to be dropped off at a nominated residential address. When the men get there, however, the occupant turns the lights off and pretends not to be home.

This puts Mr Daby and Mr Bell in a bind that can take hours to fix if they don't find a drop-off location that will honour their duty of care.

"They're a bit agitated about that, so now we've got a situation where we have to talk to the sobering-up shelter," Mr Bell said.

In the end, it's at the sobering-up shelter that the passengers unload. Patrol services made up about 35 per cent of admissions to the shelter as at May 2018, with police accounting for 63 per cent.

Mr Bell sees the night patrol as a buffer between lifestyles in remote communities and the different set of laws and social expectations that govern life in Darwin.

"Our goal is really to free the police up to start doing what the police are needed to do," he said.

The work can be repetitive, but the people involved say they've witnessed slow steps towards positive change within the community.

Mr Tinoco said regular clients had gradually made their way into stable accommodation, back to their communities, or out of the lifestyle they were living in.

A five-point plan to fix anti-social behaviour unveiled by the Government last year increased some of the organisation's services, and chief executive Robert Cooper said early conversations with other agencies showed promise.

But the nights remain busy for the night patrolmen who collect these people, and work remains for the sobering-up shelters who take them in overnight.

As people wake and dawn breaks on another day in Darwin's long grass, it will likely be another busy shift for the day patrol rangers who will arrive and begin their journeys taking this vulnerable population back and forth between the services they desperately need.

Topics: homelessness, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, social-policy, indigenous-policy, community-and-society, charities-and-community-organisations, people, health, human-interest, darwin-0800

First posted