THEME

CHILDREN AT WINDALE '...Windale - it's mad, it's mad, it's mad, it's mad ... better than any other place'.

Di Martin: The kids at this school are growing up in a suburb that not so long ago was named the most severely disadvantaged postcode in south-eastern Australia.

Yet today these kids have prospects of a better life, better than their parents, and even some of their older brothers and sisters.

The suburb is called Windale, an old Housing Commission estate south of Newcastle city, and it's in the process of turning itself around.

Perhaps Windale's most remarkable success is tackling a terrible incidence of child abuse and neglect. Windale used to rank in the worst 1% of postcodes in New South Wales. Just five years later it reached the best 25%.

Yet this little community of two-and-a-half-thousand people still has a lot of unfinished business. It continues to grapple with high rates of unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and domestic violence.

I'm Di Martin, and this week Background Briefing on ABC Radio National looks at how one suburb is trying to overcome some of the worst things that can happen in an Australian community.

Changes so far have come about through dogged hard work and a new approach from government. But it's also about breaking an old, hard habit. Instead of looking at its glass as half empty, Windale is starting to see it as half full.

A former Lord Mayor of Newcastle, Greg Heys, says it's inspiring to watch.

Greg Heys: The figures would say that this is the worst-off suburb in New South Wales and Victoria, but when you get to know it, it's a very unique, rich suburb with ordinary people living heroic lives, and it's a great experiment to see how that ordinary working class suburb has had to come to grips with the changes that have affected it .. and is experimenting with different ways of dealing with those changes.

Di Martin: In a brand-new shed just off Windale's main street, a small group of men are busy experimenting with new ways of looking at an old predicament.

They could see Windale's high numbers of unemployed and pensioners as a problem, or they could see them assets. In other words, Windale has a lot of people with skills and time on their hands.

Known simply as 'The Shed', this project is trying to link up local kids who have fallen off the rails, with local people who can help them to get back on track.

Trevor Kelly: This is a screen we're making for .. to protect other people's eyes when we're welding. And we've made this frame up, and we're going to put this covering on it ...

Di Martin: Seventy-six-year-old Trevor Kelly retired a decade ago after a varied career in plumbing, welding and steel fabrication. He's passing on what he knows to a 15-year-old called Daniel, who's been expelled from a local high school. Police referred Daniel to The Shed, trying to keep him away from a slide into crime.

Daniel: Been working here for about five weeks, six weeks. About that.

Di Martin: And so did you learn welding here?

Daniel: Yes. With Trev.

Di Martin: And is Trev a good teacher?

Daniel: Yes, best teacher I know.

Trevor Kelly: Just move it this way a bit, Daniel.

Di Martin: Is welding something you like, is it something you can see yourself doing a bit later on?

Daniel: Yes. I can see myself doing it as a job, hopefully.

Di Martin: As of the last Census, Windale's unemployment rate was five times the State average. Most of this suburb lives on welfare, and nearly one in five left school in their early teens.

Windale's kids have a lot of obstacles to navigate if they're to make a different life for themselves and their suburb.

SCHOOL BELL

Barely 500 metres up the road from The Shed lies a tiny Catholic primary school called St Pius the Tenth.

In a suburb where there are high levels of assault, including domestic violence, the principal of St Pius explains why the school introduced a two-lunch policy. This is Ray Hanley.

Ray Hanley: We found when I started here last year that an hour lunch-break simply was too much, and we had numerous fights. And when these children fight, they fight. They see violence and they know how to do it. So we've changed things around completely, and we have two half-hour lunch breaks each day, and at those breaks the children have ten to fifteen minutes of sitting down and eating their lunches, and then they have organised games with two teachers on duty for 51 children, to get them through the next 15 minutes and not have a riot on our hands.

Di Martin: Ray Hanley has worked in other disadvantaged communities, and has been a consultant to the Catholic education system for 20 years. He says Windale is an unusual case.

Ray Hanley: Of the 51 children we have ten who are funded for special needs. They've got difficulties in learning of one sort or another. We have five children diagnosed with Asperger's or autism, we have ten children on special speech programs because of speech impediments; we have a child with cerebral palsy, we have a child with cystic fibrosis, we have another child who's chronically deaf, and so the litany goes on. We have ten to twelve children in the school with very serious uncontrollable anger management.

Di Martin: Is this unusual?

Ray Hanley: Extremely unusual. You wouldn't get that many children with those many problems in a school with 300 children elsewhere.

Di Martin: And there's 51 here.

Ray Hanley: Fifty-one.

Di Martin: Tell us what kind of issues these kids face in their lives, which might provide some background to these kinds of statistics you're talking about.

Ray Hanley: The majority of these kids come from homes where they are loved and treasured, but they see domestic violence, Windale has an enormous drug problem, Windale has huge alcohol issues, and these children see that sort of thing, often wander the streets till late at night, aren't parented very well, even though the parents love them and care for them.

Di Martin: Right. Tell us where we're going now.

Ray Hanley: We're going to visit the three classrooms. As you can see, the buildings are fantastic, not very old, only about ten years old. And this classroom here now is Year 4, 5, 6, approximately 18 students and the teacher is Mr Stephen Ensell, who was an Australian champion swimmer. Come in.

Stephen Ensell: Twelve, take away six.

Child: Six.

Stephen Ensell: Seven, take away two.

Child: Five.

Stephen Ensell: Six take away one.

Child: Five.

Ray Hanley: Girls and boys, would you like to say hello to Mrs Martin, who's from Canberra.

All: Hello Mrs Martin.

Di Martin: Hello, how are you going?

All: Good.

Ray Hanley: Now sometimes if you listen to the ABC Radio ...

Di Martin: Ray Hanley is seeing changes around the suburb starting to filter through to St Pius.

Ray Hanley: In many ways we are seeing an improvement at this end. We're seeing some fantastic results from children in this school in standardised testing. Our results last year were sensational. For all sorts of reasons I'm not allowed to say what those results were, but we are delighted with the academic progress we're seeing with these kids.

CLASSROOM: KIDS/TEACHER INTERACTING

Ray Hanley: How old am I?

All: 104

Ray Hanley: Now I have after 42 years of teaching, one, two, where's the other one?

Student: Down here.

Ray Hanley: Oh, down there; three, of the best mathematicians I've ever had.

Di Martin: Ray Hanley says a big issue for these kids is the shift to High School.

Windale doesn't have its own High School, so the kids have to leave a fiercely close-knit community and little supportive schools like St Pius and travel to nearby suburbs. It's then they begin to face the daily ridicule that teenagers reserve for the most poor and marginalised.

DOOR SLAM

Peter Riley: Is it eleven o'clock already?

Di Martin: In his neat fibro cottage just off Windale's main shopping strip, single dad Peter Riley and his three sons have all had to endure the slurs thrown at them and their suburb.

Peter Riley says it has a terrible impact on self esteem, a major issue he's had to overcome to end a long stretch of unemployment.

Peter Riley is now a teacher's aide at Belmont High School, next door to Windale.

Peter Riley: Outside this area kids that do attend these schools, put it to you're poor, you've got bad clothes, your parents are druggos, or alcoholics, it's just scum, it's a low area, the kids have to put up with that, some of them, every day put up with that, until they fight back.

Di Martin: So that would answer the question of why so many of these kids are either truanting or leaving school early.

Peter Riley: That plays a big part, a big part, and some of these kids just can't handle the fact that these kids are saying this sort of stuff to them, so they act like it. They will stop going to school, they will act like little junkies. They will do that sort of thing, yeah, they've been told too many times that's what they are.

Di Martin: Peter Riley says most kids at Belmont High come from disadvantaged areas, areas that are not so different from Windale. But they pick on Windale because it's mainly Department of Housing, and so has always been an easy target.

Local State MP, Matthew Morris, grew up not far from Windale. He says the abuse is not just the province of teenagers.

Matthew Morris: They've had people on radio with slurred voices making out they're Windalians, as they used to be called, trying to downgrade and put down those people in that Windale community. When I was growing up, it was pretty intense, it's certainly not as bad these days ...

Di Martin: Matthew Morris says the insults are dehumanising, isolating the suburb and its people. He says it explains why so much effort is going into changing the suburb's image.

Matthew Morris: Because they are decent, down-to-earth, straight up and down people who I very much respect. Over a number of years, the comments and stigmatism that's portrayed on those people, is just extremely frustrating. And I will always defend Windale, I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to help them to support themselves, and I will challenge anybody that makes a negative comment about Windale.

Di Martin: Windale now has influential champions like Matthew Morris. But these days, Windale is more likely to champion itself. Most of its residents who spoke to Background Briefing have had hard lives, and some have survived horrific experiences.

But mostly they didn't want to talk about those experiences any more, instead wanting to focus on what's working in their lives.

Residents of Windale are demanding a new respect for themselves and their suburb, as they make their way back from the social abyss.

CAR DOOR SLAM AND SEATBELT CLICK

It's now generally acknowledged that big Housing Commission estates are a bad idea. By concentrating disadvantage, they tend to cement social dysfunction.

The Housing Commission built Windale back in the late 1950s, and the Housing Department still owns almost three-quarters of the suburb.

CAR INTERIOR

Di Martin: So is this all Department of Housing around here, is there kind of a big patch of private ownership, or is it all -

Glen Beatty: No, private ownership's I suppose scattered amongst the Department, but ...

Di Martin: Driving through the streets of Windale, Glen Beatty says the Department saw a big shift in its tenants during the 1970s and '80s. Governments were cutting tariffs, technology was changing, and low-skilled manufacturing jobs around blue-collar Newcastle were shed in their tens of thousands.

CAR DOOR SLAM

On one of the local park benches, Department of Housing officer Glen Beatty explains how low income working class families started to be replaced with the most needy.

Glen Beatty: And the shift arose out of the high levels of unemployment, the increase in the number of people with mental health issues who are living in the community who were deinstitutionalised following from the Richmond Report, and I suppose an increase in numbers of people with some drug and alcohol issues in the community.

Di Martin: Glen Beatty says the Department witnessed a steady decline in Windale.

Glen Beatty: Well we had vacant properties; we sometimes had difficulty in filling those properties, because Windale by then, had developed a reputation as being the sort of suburb that you wouldn't want to live (in) and the sort of suburb that you wouldn't want to raise children. So it became sort of almost housing as a matter of last resort, because we had difficulty in being able to put tenants into the properties, you have a slow breakdown of the social fabric, so it actually becomes quite a snowball effect. And so this has been a long build that probably started from the early '70s.

Di Martin: That's Glen Beatty. Probably near its lowest point, Windale was thrust into the spotlight by an influential study of social disadvantage.

LIFT NOISE

On the 7th floor of Sydney University's Education building lies the office of Professor Tony Vinson.

Tony Vinson: The thing about these transparencies is they're so slippery.

Di Martin: Tony Vinson has a long history with Windale. Back in the mid-1970s, when he looked at the link between crime and disadvantage in Newcastle, Windale topped a list of 72 suburbs.

Twenty-five years later, Jesuit Social Services asked Tony Vinson to broaden his earlier work and rank disadvantage in New South Wales and Victoria by postcode area. Tony Vinson set about examining various social indicators to create what became known as his postcode report.

Tony Vinson: We certainly looked at unemployment, both in the short-term and in the longer-term, long-term unemployment. We looked at unskilled workers, the number of people who had left school before 15 years of age, people in possession of low incomes, particularly low household incomes ...

Di Martin: And the list went on. Windale was discovered to be the most disadvantaged postcode area of all.

Tony Vinson: Out of 587 postcodes in New South Wales, Windale ranked in the first dozen or so on all of those different variables.

Di Martin: All of them?

Tony Vinson: All of them.

Di Martin: Tony Vinson concedes that Windale will always rank badly in a study by postcode because of its high levels of public housing.

He was also aware his postcode report would further stigmatise the suburb, so he started to lobby government on Windale's behalf.

Professor Vinson says his report was only released after the New South Wales government had agreed to tackle Windale's decline.

Tony Vinson: The view was taken, I can remember it well, that the people of Windale deserved to have in their possession, the ammunition if you will, to be able to themselves lobby for the services and the benefits that they needed. Now let me tell you, that in some of the preliminary discussions at that time, people rejected the idea that Windale was a place in particular need. I'm talking about within government circles. Ultimately, the government reached a good decision, that it ought to be the subject of, what they called at the time, a strengthening communities project. And indeed, on the day that the report was released, the Premier of New South Wales commended it to Members of Parliament.

Bob Carr: Mr Speaker, the community of Windale, living in the Lake Macquarie area, tops the disadvantaged list in the Vinson Report. Mr Speaker -

Mr Speaker: The Member for Gosford's on three calls.

Bob Carr: Today we're announcing the beginning of a Hunter community renewal scheme that will involve all government agencies. Working with the locals, they'll examine ways of improving the physical environment, social and welfare services and training and job opportunities.

Di Martin: That's Bob Carr, then Premier of New South Wales.

One of Windale's community leaders explains what happened next. This is Roger Greenan.

Roger Greenan: Well we received a letter from the Premier's Department which explained the basics of the Vinson Report, and they wanted to hold a public forum to address the issues of improving the lifestyle and the image of people living in Windale. And anyway, they set a date and down at Community Hall and a lot of people turned up. We had a mix of Police and Council and government agencies, Housing of course; it was just sit around and talked about all the issues and problems, and then they put butcher's paper up on the walls, and split everyone up into various groups. So each group had an action area to address, what the community would want to happen to address these issues.

Di Martin: That's Roger Greenan. He's one of the community leaders enlisted to help mend Windale, under the banner of the Hunter Renewal Scheme. It targeted things like employment, drugs and alcohol, and community pride.

During the past five years, such schemes have begun to crop up in different parts of Australia. They focus government efforts on a community for a couple of years. Part of that is about funding new projects, and Windale received an extra $655,000.

But it's mostly about better co-ordinating the multitude of government and non-government groups that operate in failing neighbourhoods, and getting those groups to listen to what the community wants.

Windale's renewal scheme was made more effective by regular meetings of all relevant senior government managers, what's called the Directions Group.

It's still running six years later, and it's chaired by Anne Maree Gleeson, from the Department of Community Services.

Anne Maree Gleeson: I knew that any of the players around the table were genuinely committed to this, and if they said they were going to do something, they'd do it. And if they had struck some problems that perhaps we hadn't anticipated, they'd come back and they'd say that. They'd be upfront, there was no defensiveness, we could get the issues on the table, warts and all, and we would get the agreement from the agencies pretty much at the table at the time, which was fantastic.

Di Martin: Anne Maree Gleeson says having community leaders at the table kept all managers on their toes.

Anne Maree Gleeson: We can think we're doing well or we're making big changes, but if you've got community reps at the table saying Well I'm here to tell you it ain't working, and you said you were going to fix this six months ago, or eight months ago, and it's still not fixed. It's pretty grounding, really.

Di Martin: But the Renewal Scheme was only funded for three years, and then Windale was told it had to take over the process of change. So the Windale Community Group was born, kicking and protesting that the Scheme had finished too early.

DOOR OPENS

The Windale Community Group is staffed by volunteers, yet opens its doors every weekday. It runs some of its own projects like the Annual Windale Festival. The Group also tries to plug gaps left by government agencies. So dole forms can be dropped in at the office, and a Chamber Magistrate sets up in a back room once a fortnight to give advice on the court system.

The Windale Community Group is largely led by older working-class residents, who decided early on that restoring pride in the suburb would be a key mission.

Seventy-one-year-old Paulina Milanovic shows off one of the Group's projects.

Paulina Milanovic: Here's our flag up here. We have the broad base of black, representing coal under our feet, bounded by the green for the fields, and white for our clean air. The flag bears the name of the suburb, Windale, the State, and our unique postcode, 2306.

Di Martin: What do you think of the flag, Paulina?

Paulina Milanovic: Oh I love it, I think it's great. Nobody else has got one and we can stand proud and say Look, 'that's our flag', there, and that's me. I've got a keyring with a flag on it, and I proudly show that around with all my keys on. No, I live in Windale and I'm proud of where I live.

Would you like a cup of coffee? Roger would you like a cup of coffee while I'm at it?

Di Martin: Over a cup of tea and some of Paulina Milanovic's home-made pumpkin scones, members of the Windale Community Group discuss changes they've seen in their suburb. Most nominate the local volunteer Crime Watch group as a key factor in seeing drug related crime drop in Windale.

Paulina Milanovic: We had a lot of drug problems, and they're down at the telephone boxes and they're making their deals. Now we had elderly people going into the Post Office, and they weren't game to come out, they were getting that way that they were getting frightened to walk down the street. But see, with our Crime Watch and that, that's a different story now. You look at our street now, it's perfect ...

Sue McQuillan: ... and people are yelling out gidday from the other side, you know ....

Paulina Milanovic: The buses, are every half hour.

Sue McQuillan: The word was atmosphere. The atmosphere has totally changed.

Don Spence: We've upgraded the streetscape of the entrance established the Festival which has been enormously successful. We established a Newsletter, which goes to every home in Windale, and that is produced through the efforts of our volunteers ...

Di Martin: And one of the first volunteers to put up her hand to help was Coral Sandford.

Coral Sandford: Abby! Oh no Sandy ....

Di Martin: Up near the area known as the Ghetto, Coral lives with her 14-year-old daughter, 8-year-old grandson, three dogs, assorted cats and a peach-faced lovebird called Little Bill.

Coral Sandford: Little Bill. Where's me kiss. Kiss kiss.

A former ward of the State, Coral lived on welfare for more than a decade. There were often many generations of her family under the same roof. Her life started to change when she began to work on the community Newsletter.

Coral Sandford: I started off right down the bottom, and went out and got the information from the community to put in it. Then in the long run with the Newsletter I jumped right up to the top and became the Editor for a while, and I ended up printing two Newsletters out, which I've still got my copies ...

Di Martin: Then through the Renewal Scheme, Coral Sandford got her big break, to train as an assistant in nursing.

Coral Sandford: I tried to be a nurse when I was 15, and for me, to get them qualifications and to become a nurse finally, after all them years, it was like what I'd waited for for years, it was just so exciting. So I'm sort of on Cloud 9 now, I went from having a house with bits and pieces in it, to a house that now has like a matching lounge suite, new TVs, a new fridge, a dryer even, a brand new washing machine. Yeah, I'm really rapt. And I can't praise the people actually who helped me get here enough, because they were so fantastic. They've totally turned my life around.

Di Martin: And it's not only Coral's life that's starting to change. She says her unemployed daughter is now talking about getting a job.

TRAFFIC NOISE

Di Martin: So I'm standing on the corner of Windale's main streets, Lake Street and South Street, and instead of seeing something like an urban slum or anything of the sort, there's a whole lot of neat little businesses, newsagent, chemist, butcher, baker, bottle shop at the end; there's a thumping great pawnbroker, but apart from that, you wouldn't be able to tell this shopping strip from many others in Australia.

The calm was broken less than a minute later by a fire truck racing past.

SIREN NOISE

Di Martin: The fire engine stopped about a kilometre away down at the local creek. A small fire had been lit, a clear highlight in the day of these three teenage boys.

Teenager: Listen, I thought they caught the kid who lit the fire.

Di Martin: After running around the corner, the three were disappointed that they couldn't see someone being caught. So they returned to their pastime of jumping on top of an upturned shopping trolley, and throwing a bike at the road.

SFX BIKE CRASHING

Teenager: That's what we're doing, nothing at all, we're just bored so we're wrecking it.

Teenager: We're sort of having a war with that one and that one, trying to smash it up.

Di Martin: One of the teenagers throwing the bike was tall, thin, had lost an eye and looked unwell.

Di Martin: So how old are you?

Teenager: Sixteen.

Di Martin: Sixteen, what about you?

Teenager: Sixteen.

Di Martin: So are you all in the same class?

All: Don't go to school.

Di Martin: Right.

Teenager: He left ages ago.

Teenager: In about Year 7, it was a long time ago.

Di Martin: Did they kick you out, or did you leave?

Teenager: They kicked me out. Two schools they kicked me out at Waratah, then they kicked me out again at Hunter Sports High.

Di Martin: Have you heard about The Shed thing? Yes, well what they're going is they're trying to get people who can do welding and fitting and turning and stuff like that, and carpentry, and then they hook them up with people who either left school early or want to do that kind of stuff.

Teenager: Me and him.

Di Martin: Would you be in to that?

Teenager: Yes, definitely. His Nan got it in the Newsletter the other day and she was telling us about it.

Di Martin: So you think it's a good idea?

Teenager: Yes, I think it's a good idea.

Di Martin: There are other renewal schemes around New South Wales where community Newsletters and projects like The Shed are making a difference. What's unique about Windale is that the State government effort is coinciding with the widespread use of a strategy developed in the United States.

The strategy is known as Asset Based Community Development, or ABCD. It was developed in an Institute with the same name and ABCD is starting to gain currency in Australia.

The Institute's Director is Jody Kretzman.

Jody Kretzman: We were interested in taking a look at struggling communities, though not to study once again their challenges and difficulties, but to study with local grassroots leaders, the keys to rejuvenating those communities. What was the explanation for those success stories that were present even in the most devastated communities; what explained how a community could take a park back from the drug dealers, or what explained how people could take youngsters our of a violent gang situation and turn them into, say, a carpentry co-op that was rehabilitating burned out buildings. And what we discovered was that in almost every case, and we collected over 3,000 case studies like this, in almost every case there was someone at the sort of middle of the action, somebody who was the catalyst for what was happening, that had taken a different view of their own community. They had rejected the idea, often promulgated by some of the most powerful institutions in the society, like mass media and universities and funders, that the most important thing about these devastated communities was their devastation. And what we found was at the core of these success stories was somebody who had rejected that idea as the only relevant idea about their communities, and instead had said, Well that's true, we have these challenges, but we also have resources, we also have strengths, we also have assets. And the way we're going to make anything positive happen here, is we're going to take our assets seriously, and put them into motion around trying to make something hopeful happen.

Di Martin: Jody Kretzmann.

This American strategy was a guiding principle for Windale as it pulled off a remarkable achievement. It turned around a terrible incidence of child abuse and neglect.

Consecutive postcode reports from Professor Tony Vinson showed that Windale climbed from the worst 1% of postcodes in New South Wales, to the top 25%, and in just five years.

It's highly unusual for child abuse statistics to be revealed for an individual suburb. But the success was so outstanding, a leading national child abuse agency publicised the figures.

The centre that's been at the forefront of turning around attitudes to kids is called Alcazar. It's a brightly coloured demountable just off the playground of Windale Primary School.

BREAKFAST CLUB NOISE CRUNCHING CEREAL

Volunteer: What are you having for breakfast this morning sweetie?

Background Briefing went along to the kid's Breakfast Club, where any of Windale Public's students can come in and pour themselves some cereal.

Child: Actually I want ricies.

Volunteer: You want ricies too? I think we can share ricies between you two ....

Di Martin: Alcazar gets funding from many agencies, and one of them is the Department of Community Services. This is Regional Director, Anne Marie Gleeson.

Anne Maree Gleeson: Children are reported to the Department of Community Services if they're considered to be at risk of harm or neglect, and that can mean that people are noticing children in difficulties in the early stage of trouble, so they may see signs of neglect, which would be perhaps children coming to school without breakfast, and with not having lunch, and perhaps not having had a lot of sleep. That ranges right through then to children who perhaps have broken bones, and have been severely sexually assaulted and perhaps maybe needing to be hospitalised. So it's a very broad range of ways it presents, but it's generally about families that are under enormous stress and pressure, usually without access to sufficient supports, who are not able to meet the needs of their children when they're wanting to, and the systems around them are not there when they need them.

Di Martin: Which is where Alcazar came into its own. Its primary job is to support local families with kids aged from birth to eight years old.

With so many agencies involved, Alcazar became a one-stop referral centre for any family that walked through the door. The centre could also access resources from those agencies to tackle an issue like child abuse.

Wendy Lawrence was Alcazar's coordinator at the time.

Wendy Lawrence: We realised very quickly that kids needed to get some access to information, and the best way to do that -

Di Martin: Information about what?

Wendy Lawrence: About child abuse, and be open to know this is what child abuse is, and these are the things that you can do to stop it for yourself. And so about six agencies got together and agencies that you would never think that would work together, like Centrelink, and the Samaritans and Health and Housing, and we all got together and said, 'Well let's buy in a theatre production'. So every child in Windale, for free, could get access to information about child maltreatment. And there was a whole process around it. The theatre production, one agency did debriefing for the staff, another agency did debriefing for the children and answered all the questions they had at the end of it. And that was one of the first things we did. We got a lot of reportings after that, and quite interestingly enough, not one parent had a problem with their child being involved in that.

Di Martin: Wendy Lawrence says Windale had high rates of domestic violence, so Alcazar needed to get local men involved.

Wendy Lawrence: Because domestic violence plays a great part in child maltreatment as well. And we went to the Windale Festival one year, 2004, and we interviewed 85 men who allowed us to take their photograph and who committed themselves to work with us. And they allowed us to use their photographs on posters, where they said, 'I would never hit a woman, and I'm ashamed of anyone who would'. And it was quite amazing. And it actually gave children in the community a different look at, and looking at men in their street, next door, who were saying, 'This isn't OK'. It had quite a profound effect for children, and it had a profound effect on consciousness raising amongst the men in the community as well; and they were really chuffed, actually. The age range of the men was from 17 to about 80. Every program we ran, we had an element of child protection training in every program, so it was a real emphasis for the whole of the four years, and as a consequence that's how the actual stats went from the highest to one of the lowest.

Di Martin: Wendy Lawrence. She says another part of breaking the cycle of abuse is drawing people out of isolation. When families are dealing with issues like child abuse and domestic violence, they often withdraw from the world. But it's that isolation that makes the abuse more likely to happen again.

Wendy Lawrence says using the US-developed strategy of looking at strengths, rather than weaknesses, was especially effective in changing the way people thought and behaved in Windale. At least after the initial response had worn off. She describes how people first reacted to examining Windale's strengths and skills.

Wendy Lawrence: With shock and horror. They really didn't know what I was on about for a long, long time.

Di Martin: What were the skills that you found in this suburb which is known as having severe disadvantage?

Wendy Lawrence: Leadership skills, people with fantastic IT skills, self-taught; we had community artists, we had a whole range of things. I can remember walking out on the back step of the school once, and there was a mother sitting there teaching a child doing some reading. And I just stood and listened to her, and she was just amazing, and I thought - I walked up to her and said, 'Oh, you've had teacher training'. And she laughed, and went, 'Hardly'. She now is actually employed full time at another school as a teacher's aide.

Di Martin: Your budget? You're laughing.

Wendy Lawrence: My wages and $10,000, and we operated often, 37 programs a year on $10,000.

Di Martin: Wendy Lawrence says Alcazar had particular success amongst Windale's indigenous parents. A fifth of all Windale Public's students are aboriginal.

Soon after Alcazar opened its doors it carried out a survey. Instead of looking at the needs of aboriginal families, it looked at their assets. The project found that there were an astonishing 15 different tribal groups in Windale, with a wealth of linguistic, historical and cultural knowledge. It also revealed untapped skills that Alcazar could use to get programs off the ground.

An indigenous assets register was drawn up, and Alcazar became the hub of projects that started to knit isolated aboriginal families into the wider community.

Every new aboriginal parent that walks into Alcazar is celebrated as a victory, yet there are a lot who are still too scared to come. Here's Robyn Parton and first, her friend Petah Saxby.

Petah Saxby: A lot of people don't want to tell their personal ... what's going on with them, in their lives and that, and they too scared, or ashamed, embarrassed. And so if you go up there, the whole of Windale or the whole of Newcastle would know sort of thing. But it's not like that. It's not like that. Whatever's been spoken about here, it doesn't leave this room. But they're too scared, yes. But I know a lot of us have been in the situation where we've had to sit down privately with Wendy Lawrence who was the facilitator, and sat and talked to her, had a cry, and it never went any further. So ..

Robyn Parton: A lot of people should be like that, be able to come to somewhere and be able to just let their feelings go to someone. Because a lot of years ago, no-one would have listened to them, and a place like this, it's the best thing for them. They want to get something out they've had on their shoulders for years, because I did. And it sort of just made me feel a bit better and a different person. When I told Wendy my side, what was pushing me back from what I wanted to do, and so I'm getting there. I'm there half-way there.

Petah Saxby: You are, you are. Like I can say that Wendy helped me grow and helped me realise that I'm not a nobody, that I'm someone, and I can go further in life and I have, and it's like, wonderful, because yeah I've never ever felt so in control.

Di Martin: That's Petah Saxby, and before her, Robyn Parton.

Alcazar's success has meant shaking up the status quo. Often that was welcomed for the striking results it brought. But occasionally it led to conflict.

Windale has quite distinct factions. There are the older working-class residents, and there's the newly arrived. Because of growing demand on public housing, only those with the greatest need are being offered places, and drug abuse often comes with the territory.

Drugs became a major fault line between Windale's factions, because drug abuse was so common, it was so public and it had such an impact on other people's lives.

Here Corinne May describes her family's struggle.

Corinne May: I have a 30-year-old son, I have a 25-year-old son, and I have a 23-year-old son, and they were rough boys, like they were buggers, and I've got one that's up the Highway to Hell, and too far down there to get back, so to speak. I don't know whether anybody understands that, but it's a choice he's chosen; and it scares me, but I can't bring him back.

Di Martin: So, Corinne, you're their mum, what do you think would influence them to change?

Corinne May: They've got to want to change. They've got to want to do it. They've got to come to me and say, 'Mum, I've had enough'. You know, I was probably wrong; I always was the one that said, 'You want to try any drugs, you come to me; I'll get the drugs, I'll do this.' I may be wrong saying this but that was how I was. I reared my three boys on my own for 11 years, and we went great. We went great. I was their Mum, their Dad, their Grandma, their Grandpa, everything, because it was just me and the boys. And I have one that is, I don't know whether you would call it brain fried or what you would call it, but due to drug use, he can't even think straight. The next fellow is good, the 25-year-old, but the 23-year-old, he is now suffering stomach ulcers. He bleeds from the bowel when he, you know, but it's still not enough to scare him off drinking rum and taking ekkies. The day-to-day problems with it all is just - if there is a God up there, you know, one day they'll come to me and say 'I've had enough'. Because until they say they've had enough, there's no coming back.

Di Martin: Like many things in Windale, efforts to curb drug use are a work in progress. One of the initial aims of the renewal scheme was a decrease in drug abuse. The older residents of the Windale Community Group volunteered for Crime Watch duties, and fed police information on drug houses in the suburb. Several were closed down.

But it was when the Group adopted a zero tolerance policy against drug dealers that they locked horns with Alcazar. The reality is that users often deal a bit on the side to afford their next fix. And some of those users were parents with kids at Windale Public.

Wendy Lawrence says Alcazar opposed zero tolerance and kept working to rehabilitate those parents and make their kids safer.

Wendy Lawrence: To the point where housed the drug and alcohol worker in the community within our service. And we drew her into that service. And it was probably one of the most successful things we did.

Di Martin: It would have been reasonably controversial, having a drug and alcohol worker in a primary school.

Wendy Lawrence: Extremely controversial, and it certainly took some talking to my management committee.

KERRY HAWKINS ON PHONE

Di Martin: The drug and alcohol worker at Windale Primary School is Kerry Hawkins. She works for Mercy Community Services, and acknowledges the controversy when she set up in an office near the school's front gate.

Kerry Hawkins: I'd say yes at first, because I think the community thought, Oh my God, you know, I'm going to be a honey pot for people with drug and alcohol problems. But it hasn't been like that at all. A lot of people in the schools, not all people or whatever, but there are people that do have drug problems that have children, naturally enough, and it's easier for them to come and drop into my office and say, you know, I might need some help.

Di Martin: Kerry Hawkins plays a unique role because she doesn't work for a government agency; instead she's funded by two local businesspeople.

Kerry Hawkins: I know that it might seem strange to have a drug and alcohol worker in the community that's not funded by the Health Department or anything else. And having said that, I can work outside of the system a little bit better by actually - people know that I'm going to be there very, very quickly, and when you're invited into somebody's home, because they have a problem, then you need to react quickly. Which is different to a lot of the other services.

SCHOOL BELL GoeS

Kerry Hawkins and Di Martin: Just reminding us we're in the school grounds.

Di Martin: Kerry Hawkins describes herself as a coal face worker, dealing with those in greatest need. She's been working with Corinne May and her sons. Corinne May says the changes taking place around Windale are commendable, but for her, it's all window dressing. She talks about a minority of residents that are making her life tougher.

Corinne May: They just don't care. They run you off the road, they yell abuse at you as they drive past in cars, they come into your street and do abusive things, throw rocks at your house. The physical threats, just everything in general, is just out of control.

Di Martin: Corinne May says the violence is getting worse, partly because the new drug called ice has arrived in Windale. She says users become very aggressive.

Corinne May: Definitely, definitely.

Di Martin: So with ice, like are you seeing more kids getting hit, you're seeing more women being beaten up?

Corinne May: I see women and men beating each other up, but yes, the ice is terrible.

Di Martin: And can people afford it?

Corinne May: You can buy it for little as $10. And if you can't, then they pretty much credit you, and then they own you, then you work for them to keep your habits and etc. going.

Di Martin: Government agencies are worried by the potential impact of ice, and assaults in Windale are on the rise. But police say that could be due to greater levels of reporting. The local command also says there have been big improvements in some parts of Windale.

It's very difficult for this suburb to show statistical progress. That's partly because the people who do take advantage of new opportunities, who perhaps get a job, become ineligible for public housing. And because there's so little private housing in Windale, they have to move out of the suburb, being replaced by another family from Housing's priority list.

The changes in Windale are remarkable. But there's still a lot of unfinished business as the Windale Football Club knows all too well, from recent experience.

When Background Briefing arrived one Saturday morning before the games, the shed housing the sprinkler system and the garbage bins had been burnt down during the night.

Di Martin: What's going on?

Graeme House: We had a fire here last night and nobody bothered to tell us. We come here this morning to get ready for the games and this is what we found. Unbelievable. They started a couple of little fires out the front of the canteen the last couple of days, and I don't know, you just get this gut feeling that worse is yet to come. Ross!

Di Martin: Graeme House led me past the smouldering shed and introduced me to footy club stalwart, Ross Capararo and his wife Julie.

Julie Capararo: It's heartbreaking. Cos you put so much work into something like this and then you come down; it's out of the ordinary, we haven't had anything like this for bloody years, and you come down here and you see something like this, it turns your stomach, it makes you sick. You'd like to get them and just string them up, and - and I shouldn't say that because it's not right. Yep. It's hard.

Di Martin: Because you two are very active volunteers in the local community.

Julie Capararo: Just sometimes you wonder if it's worth it. Sometimes you feel like you're beating your head against a brick wall.

Ross Capararo: But you don't give you. You don't give up, no. Stronger people do things to try to bring us down. No. No. Makes you stronger. We'll build it, and when we build it, it'll be a lot better, a lot stronger.

Di Martin: Ross Capararo is one of those people who flatly refuses to see the glass as half empty. He says even if you've got a kid who's 90% bad, you've got to look at that other 10% and give them a go.

Ross Capararo: My son his first year at High School, we bought him a Redline pushbike, which is a pretty dear pushbike to race in BMX. He bugged and bugged me, he wanted to ride his bike to school and be one of the boys. So I let him ride it to school and bugger me dead, he's come home, it's been stolen. He's crying his eyes out. Anyway I came down here, I was involved in the football, and we had under-15s, 16s here, and I said to the boys, 'I want to know who stole me son's bike'. 'Oh I don't know'. And I said, 'Well if you find out who did it, I'll buy you a carton of beer'. And anyway, that night, a knock on the door, there was a handlebar, then a wheel, then another wheel, and the cranks, because it was all aluminium, you know. And the bike eventually came back. In pieces. Anyway we got the bike back, and all the kids are so stoked and they came down to training, 'Where's my carton of beer?' And I said, 'Boys, I can't give you a carton of beer, you're under age.' But those boys are still here, involved in the club. And one of those boys that was a bit wild, on the wrong side, went through and became President of this club and he was President for a while; as a matter of fact he became a life member of this club, he served ten years.

Di Martin: The next postcode report from Professor Tony Vinson, will rank all Australian communities by disadvantage. It's due out early next year.

You've been listening to Background Briefing. Co-ordinating Producer is Linda McGinnis, Research from Anna Whitfeld, Technical Operator is Leila Shunnar and Executive Producer, Kirsten Garrett. I'm Di Martin, and you're listening to ABC Radio National.

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