Prize for SBS with town camp story

Hear a prize-winning report by SBS Adelaide correspondent Karen Ashford highlighting the hardships of life in an Alice Springs town camp.

Prize for SBS with town camp storyPrize for SBS with town camp story

Prize for SBS with town camp story

SBS Adelaide correspondent Karen Ashford has won another award for reporting excellence.

 

Karen has received the social justice reporting prize in the radio division of the Archbishop of Adelaide's annual media awards.

 

The judges said her report, featuring one woman's life in an Alice Springs Town Camp, was an excellent piece of radio.

 

They said stories on Aboriginal Australians were often overlooked or put in the "too hard" basket.

 

However, Karen had gained the trust of the community to present a story of disadvantage and neglect on an Aboriginal settlement with sensitivity and compassion.

 

This is the prize winning piece:

 

The Northern Territory intervention is marking its 5th anniversary and faces a decade long extension under the Stronger Futures legislation, but not all those it's supposed to help are happy.

 

In Alice Springs, housing in town camps continues to be a divisive issue, despite more than $150-million spent constructing new houses and renovating old ones.

 

Critics say government programs are focused on Aboriginal migrants from outlying areas, while the area's Traditional Owners continue to subsist in appalling conditions.

 

One custodian who says the intervention has achieved nothing is school teacher Felicity Hayes.

 

Karen Ashford looks at the struggles Mrs Hayes faces trying to support her family, after years of promises which have come to nought.

 

A few years ago, the corrugated iron church at the Whitegate town camp burnt down.

 

With no money to rebuild it, the community's erected a frame from saplings covered in chicken wire with a cross atop it, where they conduct their services.

 

These days Felicity Hayes' belief in authority is as tenuous as Whitegate's church.

 

"That used to be the church up there, and we used to have Sunday Mass up there but it got burnt down, and nobody - Tangentyere (Land Council) was supposed to come and fix it but it never happened. Do you have any faith it's going to happen? I lost faith long time ago."

 

She's tired that some 20 or more years of promises for decent houses and reliable services have amounted to little.

 

Homes, if you can call them that, are hardly better than the church.

 

Uninsulated tin sheds with no window glass, no electricity, and no water are the norm at Whitegate.

 

"It's very hard. Like now the winter's coming on and it's really cold here, we got to go out, me and my husband go out bush and get some firewood to keep us warm and cook our food. Do you have electricity for a stove? No. Do you have electricity for anything? No."

 

In fact the only power is via solar panels perched above a ramshackle ablutions block.

 

An exposed extension cord takes a trickle of electricity to a shack.

 

It's just enough to run a naked light globe for a few hours of an evening.

 

The water supply's not much better.

 

There are three taps scattered across the open ground between the tin shacks - they often freeze up in winter.

 

Felicity Hayes points to a tank used to store water for showers which has been leaking for months , and explains how a fire has to be lit under an old gas cylinder to heat water for showers.

 

"This has been leaking for a while now and the water's getting bigger and bigger, probably a month, two months maybe…. Sound of water leaking… to make hot water for the shower, we get some wood, put it in there and make hot water."

 

The community's toilet has been overflowing for more than six months, repeated requests for it to be pumped out have gone unaddressed.

 

And it's not as if their living standards are a secret.

 

Politicians have visited - Mrs Hayes vividly remembers former Labor Opposition leader Mark Latham promising nearly ten years ago he'd get them houses straight away - but still her dream is unfulfilled.

 

"I would like to have a house, get houses built here, for me and my families. You've been asking people for that, what sort of response have you had? Nothing, no response. They come here, say things that they promise us to build houses and do all sorts of things here but nothing happens, no feedback."

 

She says it's not just politicians who fail to deliver on their promises.

 

"Oh, a couple years ago there were a lot of people who come here from the United Nations, come here and talked to us and saying they was going to help us but it never really happened - they just went and forgot about us. Even the United Nations? Yeah, they come here. So the whole world has looked at your living conditions - yeah - and nothing has happened? Nothing has happened."

 

Whitegate is one of 19 town camps in and around Alice Springs.

 

It is arguably amongst the most basic, yet is just 500 metres over the hill from suburbia, where a neat iron fence separates the camp land from two story brick veneer houses.

 

Felicity Hayes says she sees evidence of the government's largesse in multimillion dollars office blocks for indigenous organisations, but says such organisations have done little for her people.

 

"There was some people from the Land Council come one day and was talking with me and my sister, 15 years ago maybe. They said they was going to help us build houses here, and they come put all the ribbons on the trees they were going to fences around , but you know, they just come and did that and just went, forgot about it . And same thing happened a couple years back the Lhere Artepe (Aboriginal Corporation) came and say they were going to help us and they went off and same thing, didn't do nothing."

 

She's further disheartened to see houses built for out-of-towners who have come to Alice Springs to escape violence in their homelands, or for medical treatment, or sometimes she says, just to drink and fight.

 

Meanwhile she says her people, the Traditional Owners of Alice Springs, are overlooked.

 

"Towards Hermannsburg, they call it the Golden Mile, they got a lot of houses there with the electricity, and on the north highway too they got a lot of houses on their blocks too, but over this way we only just got tin sheds."

 

Many millions have been spent in the Northern Territory under the federal government's Emergency Response, known simply as the Intervention.

 

In Alice Springs alone, about 150 million dollars has been spent building 86 new houses and refurbishing nearly 200 old ones, but still there are no houses in Whitegate.

 

The federal government has just secured its Stronger Futures legislation, a ten year extension of the intervention which promises to address the social needs of the Territory's indigenous citizens.

 

But a spokeswoman for indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin says Whitegate is a special situation as there's no secure tenure over land , meaning houses cannot be built there.

 

She says the Commonwealth is negotiating with the Territory government for a solution, but that's being complicated by a native title claim.

 

The spokeswoman says the best option for people seeking houses may be to move to another camp.

 

But Felicity Hayes says she doesn't want to leave this land.

 

It's her view that the intervention isn't working, and is creating more problems than it's solving.

 

"Because people are on basic cards and there's you know, you got to look after your children and like today there's a lot of little children that's going in to foster carers now, and I think the intervention just went and turned everything upside down. Didn't fix anything, just create more problems."

 

Her wish is simple.

 

"We want houses. We want houses here with electricity and all that. Toilets, flushing toilets, showers, hot showers for the morning. For our families."






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