Alice Springs Aquatic Centre

Just as they were celebrating the opportunity to swim all year-round, Alice’s dedicated daytime swimmers will be disappointed to learn that the town’s beautiful 50 metre lap pool may be closed for six hours a day during the period when it is most appreciated: the summer.

The Council tender for management of the Alice Springs Aquatic and Leisure Centre stipulates the minimum hours the outdoor pool is to be open are from 6 am to 9 am and 3 pm to 7 pm.

The 25 metre indoor pool – part of the $20 million package that was completed last year – is to be kept open all-year-round, but that will be luke-warm comfort for lap-swimmers who have been enjoying the olympic pool during the daytime, in some cases for decades.

They were given a foretaste of the new policy last summer when the “big pool” was often shut, but management explained the daytime closure by lack of staff.

Now it’s obviously just lack of money.

If implemented, the new hours will mean that all the swimmers and would-be swimmers who shared a 50 metre long space will be crowded into one half that size.

The centre is a wonderful facility. So wonderful that I put aside the concerns I had when it was in the planning stage that the whole thing was a tad ambitious for a town of Alice’s size. Gathering twenty million dollars was an achievement, but people seemed to be in denial about how much it would cost to run.

The decision to leave a hydrotherapy pool out of the centre (despite intense lobbying) was another example of how Council failed to look ahead, or consider how it could work with government  and non-government organisations to meet the needs of the population. Do we really want people to spend their lives here, or are we happy for them to take their life-savings to the east coast?

The centre is a fait acomplis, and most of us are glad we’ve got it. But making it work and making it economical will need both imagination and communication with the people who use it. Closing one of Australia’s most stunning olympic pools for six hours a day during our long hot summer would be a big loss. Let’s hope the successful tenderer can cut costs elsewhere, perhaps by restricting the hours of the indoor centre during summer rather than the outdoor pool.

The tender closes tomorrow. – D.R.

The BBC reported:

Mr Falconio, who worked in Kent and was from Huddersfield, was ambushed with his girlfriend Joanne Lees while they were driving along a desert highway between Alice Springs and Tennant Creek in northern Australia.

Ms Lees told police she was bound, gagged and bundled into a pick-up before she escaped.

Mr Falconio’s body was never found.

Mr Noble, who believes Mr Falconio is alive, created a poster advertising the reward.

He said: “It’s not publicity. I’m not interested in the book per se, I’m interested in us finding Falconio.”

Mr Noble, who lives in Austria, said he had written five letters to the Falconio family asking them for a response to his claim, but he has not yet had a reply.

Opening of Adelaide House, 1926. A.I.M. Collection

With the ever-spreading Alice Springs Hospital near the end of its latest growth spurt, it’s fascinating to learn how ambivalent townspeople were about the idea of a hospital in the first place.

As Max Griffiths related in last month’s Doreen Braitling Memorial lecture, some Central Australians actively campaigned against the town’s first hospital, Adelaide Hospital.

Fate intervened rather brutally to reveal the value of professional nursing care.

Max, who succeeded Fred McKay and John Flynn as the third superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, presented the annual Doreen Braitling Memorial Lecture as part of Heritage Festival activities in Alice Springs.

Max’s well-researched talk, reinforced by his own memories, provided an illuminating perspective on the persistent themes of health care in Central Australia.

John Flynn’s dream, as Max told us, was to put a hospital within a hundred miles of wherever there were people in the outback.

Adelaide House took five years to complete as the AIM struggled with the hostilities of climate, remoteness and the lack of expert builders, When it was finished, it was – and remains – one of Central Australia’s most remarkable and serviceable buildings. But not all of the 26 townspeople, or those who lived around it, saw it that way.

“The first two nurses met with considerable reluctance from the locals to come to the hospital for treatment, because the locals feared that the nurses wouldn’t last five minutes in the bush,” Max told a large audience.

“It wasn’t cynicism, it was based on fact. People would come up with all the best intentions in the world, last five minutes and then take off again and leave people where they were before.”

It seems the most outspoken opponent of the hospital was cattleman William Hayes, whose descendants still pepper the Centre. Hayes declared the hospital “a complete waste of money”.

Ultimately it was Hayes’s horse who managed to change his mind, with back-up from the two nurses.

After Hayes fractured his femur when the horse threw him, 80 km from town, he was carted to the hospital. There the nurses proved their nettle by building their own traction machine, with instructions delivered from Darwin doctors via the Overland Telegraph Line.

“It was an unwieldy contraption, but it worked,” said Max.

“They kept William Hayes in hospital for 76 days, and during that time he underwent a total conversion in his attitude to hospitals and became its most ardent advocate.”

But while the hospital quickly won friends and supporters, the stresses on staff continued to grow, with the population increasing to 90 by the time the railway was extended from Oodnadatta in 1929, and then to 1000 by the beginning of World War Two.

The issues facing nurses, and the doctors who were introduced with the war, were much the same as they are today, but writ large: distance and transport to Alice from outlying centres, burnout among overworked staff, and the inability to provide some medical proceedures, and sudden epidemics.

As Max illustrated with a case drawn from the nurses’ own records, the challenges of different cultural views and lifestyles, with all their attendant misunderstandings, were also well in place.

One of the biggest concerns for the nurses – as they wrote – was the extent to which they could treat “non-white” people in the hospital.

A large number in the white community were unhappy about admitting Aboriginal people in particular because of concerns about their hygiene standards, and the consequent fear of cross-infection. 

On the other hand Aboriginal people often wanted their babies born not in the hospital, but in their camps.

As an example, a woman came to hospital for a pre-natal examination. She told the nurse that she was married to an Afghan man, that her father had been an Afghan,and her mother part-Aboriginal. That’s what she said.

Her first baby had been born in the Oodnadatta hospital, but on that occasion she’d told the hospital that all her people were white, because she was afraid of racial prejudice. However here in Alice Springs she had cast off her fears and was now unafraid to declare her cultural tradition as an Aboriginal.

The problem was that her cultural tradition required her baby be born in her camp. But she wanted one of the nurses to be present.

The nurses were in a dilemma. While they respected the various traditions, they encouraged all expectant mothers to come to the hospital for the birthing and remain there until the nurses decided it was safe to return to the less than desirable hygiene conditions of the camp.

In addition to their concerns for the welfare of the mothers and babies, the mothers also feared that if they feared that if they agreed to the request of the Afghan woman to have her baby in the camp, every other mother in that situation would demand the same treatment.

In the view of the nurses, this would put both mothers and babies at unnecessary risk. To further compound the problem, if they carried out the deliveries in the camps, it would appear that they had capitulated to some of the whites’ demands to keep the whites out of the hospital.

To be continued: The Stuart Arms link.

I have always assumed there are large numbers of them, but I wonder if perhaps they create that illusion by moving fast and chirping a lot.

The huge gum in our back yard appears to be the jealously guarded centre of their universe, to which only short visits by other birds are tolerated.

Recent events suggest that our particular honeyeaters may be permanent residents, but I’m happy to stand corrected on this.

My impression arises partly from the fact that they seem to be be here all-year-round, but also from watching their social and family life and the very effective way in which they utilise our garden to enlarge their family.

As far as I can tell, the honeyeaters are the only birds that nest in our yard, and on this occasion I noticed the nest had been built at least two weeks before the eggs appeared in it.

The eggs seemed to lie there for another couple of weeks. We were beginning to think they’d been abandoned, and were quite excited to notice some activity there.

It was easy to keep an eye on things from then on, as the nest had been built at chest level in our potted pomegranite tree, with a clear view to passing traffic.

It seemed there were at least two guardians and possibly more, feeding the birds and keeping an eye on them. They complained fairly pointedly about my taking pictures, so I tried to keep my observations to a minimum.

Eventually the nest was looking distinctly overcrowded. One day I was trying to replace the air filter on our antique lawnmower, which is kept in a niche about two metres away from from the nest on the house side of the verandah, when I noticed some activity back at the nest.

I snuck back to the house, grabbed my camera, and, without being too obtrusive, managed to get a good view of the first twin after it had just crawled out. The second was clearly working up the courage, with one of the adults occasionally briefly flying in to try and persuade it.

As you will see in the film, after ten or fifteen minutes it finally got the hang of things.

I was able to keep an eye on the youngsters for the next couple of weeks.

I was surprised by the way they stuck together, how tentative their early flights were, and how close the honeyeater extended family really is. The infants are still noticably awkward; this morning, one of them  flew into the window at the front of the house. After hearing the thud, I ran outside and managed to get  him onto his feet and call off our dog in time for him to get airborne.

Having my own acquaintance with all aspects of empty nest syndrome, I was only too glad to help out while the parents were off-guard. – Dave Richards

Karl Hampton. Photo ABC

The Minister for Central Australia says he’s “disappointed”  by Northern Territory Police Commissioner John McRoberts’ announcement that he won’t dispatch any more police to Alice Springs.

Mr McRoberts has told media that current levels of crime and social dysfunction in Alice Springs are “not new” and have “been around for 30 years.”

ABC News reported that Mr McRoberts has asked Alice Springs residents to “have faith” in a multi-agency taskforce he is setting up with representatives from the departments of health, housing, education, and children and families.

Mr McRoberts said last Friday he would consider the need for more police in Alice Springs, while stressing that more police were not the answer to social dysfunction in the town.

He arrived in Alice Springs at the weekend and on Tuesday announced there would be no extra police for Alice Springs

“There is no doubt that Alice Springs is experiencing levels of social dysfunction and crime and disorder that is unacceptable and needs to change,” he told a media conference in Alice Springs on Tuesday.

“But I also need to emphasise that as far back as I can find, the records show that in March, 1990, the Centralian Advocate was reporting that there was a law and order crisis in Alice. The levels of social dysfunction that we are currently experiencing are not new. they have been around for more 30 years. My task is not to run a police operation, and this is not a police operation.It is a whole-of-government, whole-of-non-government organisation operation and it’s an operation that is designed to bring the community to bear.”can’t be solved by focusing on law and order alone.

“This is not a police operation, it is a whole-of-government, whole-of -non-government organisations operation … designed to bring the community to bear,” he said.

Robyn Lamley told Alex Barwick on Tuesday ABC Drive program the Police Commissioner’s statement was “an excellent piece of Government spin”.

“We’ve heard the same message consistently for years now, this multi-agency, multi-functional team, this taskforce business,” she said.

“What we didn’t hear from the police commissioner was a follow-on from the Chief Minister’s promise last week that he would organise a zero-tolerance strategy to fight crime in Alice Springs.

“What we heard from the police commissioner was a complete deflection and abdiction of responsibity to fight crime in Alice Springs, and he deflected it on to these other agencies, and they are extremely important parts of the whole equation.

“But what we didn’t hear from John McRoberts .. was what he as a police commisioner is going to do about how this social dysfunction and social disorder manifests in our society, and that is crime.”

Karl Hampton told the ABC’s Nadine Maloney that he had lobbied for more police and had been given an undertaking that as many as 20 police could be brought into Alice Springs.

He said he would continue to urge for more police, and believed that 13 more officers were required to be permanently stationed in the town.

But he said police were “only one part of the strategy”.

“The other bit is the youth action plan and the co-ordination of government agencies, and I believe what we are seein 24 hours a day is people on the streets  to support families to get kids off the street. We know through the family support centre there’s 29 families being assisted through the family support centre at the youth hub, something that the CLP would tear down.”

Meanwhile in the wake of Mr McRoberts’ visit, the Department of Education – part of the taskforce he has set up – is “considering” making more effort to curb truancy, according to another report by ABC News.

Central Australian Schools executive director David Cummins said department had had 204 meetings with parents, most of which had resulted in young people returning to schools. The department had issued three infringement notices for truancy, and was considering getting “authorised officers” to stop unaccompanied children on the streets in school hours.

“These are people who can stop children in the street who aren’t accompanied by an adult or in a school group and ask them why aren’t they at school, where do you live and make steps to take them home or get them to school to get enrolled,” he said.

Harry Nelson

Yuendumu residents claim reports of another “riot” and a scalping of a young man have been exaggerated, according to ABC News.

Current Affairs reporter Tom Nightingale reported a man was in hospital with brutal head injuries after a fight broke out on Saturday morning.

But the man’s uncle, Yuendumu resident Harry Nelson, had said that police descriptions of injuries “similar to scalping” were grossly inaccurate.

“He wasn’t scalped at all. He was hit by really nasty weapons like sickle, iron bars or something like that. Wasn’t a scalping,” Mr Nelson said.

“When the Aboriginal people fight, they don’t scalp their hairs off, or scalps off. That’s nothing. That’s a lot of untrue story and people have been misled.

“Mind you, people will be charged. I know exactly what’s going to happen to the person who’s now being held in the Alice Springs Hospital. [People] will, no doubt, be looking for revenge.”

Mr Nelson said Yuendumu people from both sides of the long-term conflict at Yuendumu wanted police expel “a handful of trouble-makers, which includes men and women aged between 15 and 25.”

(Last Friday Northern Territory Police Commisioner John McRoberts said troublemakers were not welcome in Alice Springs and would be told to go back to their communities.)

Enough is Enough: too much for the Country Liberals

By John Boffa of the People’s Alcohol Action Coalition

The NT’s Country Liberals Opposition must build on worthwhile evidence-based alcohol policy put in place by the NT Government in recent years, rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater.

It’s easy for the Opposition to indulge in simplistic politicking about the NT’s undeniably high serious assaults rate.

The Country Liberals then claim, without demonstrating any evidence or logic, that their proposed ‘new approach’ to alcohol policy will prevent such incidents. On closer examination, however, the Country Liberals’ plans reveal that this emperor has no clothes, not even a nappy, and the ‘policy’ amounts to taking a great leap backward.

The current NT Government has implemented some very successful alcohol policy initiatives. With Alice Springs in a social crisis in 2005 and early 2006, when the town had experienced an average of almost one homicide a month for a year, then Chief Minister Clare Martin moved to bring in evidence-based supply reduction measures in the town. There followed a significant decline in alcohol consumption amongst problem drinkers, the vast majority of whom had previously drunk cheap wine. Most made a shift to the beer following the October 2006 reforms, as it then became, at least for a period until cheap the cleanskin wines entered the market place, the most accessible popular alcoholic product.

The photo ID system, also started at that time, has more recently allowed the use of alcohol banning orders which can prevent banned persons from purchasing take-away alcohol, and enable easier identification of under-age people attempting to purchase alcohol.

The Banned Drinkers Register (BDR) and the Enough is Enough reforms in general have created significant consequences for problem drinkers. There have been more than 2000 people banned throughout the NT, and more than 12,000 refusals of service to banned drinkers. Early assault data is showing a small downward trend. However, the new AOD Tribunal has not had the power to either income quarantine or hear cases in absentia until new legislative changes, and these new powers will make a significant difference in the operation of the whole system when they are implemented. No-one should have expected that most heavy drinkers would just voluntarily turn up to the Tribunal, and they have not done so; so up to now the system has not been as effective as it will be going forward.

This whole set of regulatory reforms is precisely about creating consequences for the bad behaviours which are often exhibited by people who are under the influence of alcohol. The assertion by the Country Liberals that the focus is on alcohol and not on behaviour is completely untrue.

Of course, these measures will not prevent all serious alcohol-related assaults and other alcohol-related crimes, but no-one has suggested that they would.

The Country Liberals are proposing to remove all these very worthwhile measures, and simply replace them with mandatory treatment of drinkers. Unfortunately, this is likely to lead to more assaults and more alcohol-related child neglect.

The NT simply does not have the money to build a number of prisons or prison farms that could house even 500 of the thousands of problem drinkers at any one time. The Country Liberals’ proposal would cost hundreds of millions of dollars in capital for infrastructure, and, at a minimum of $150 per day per inmate, at least $27 million per year to run. The whole exercise would produce little result other than to temporarily remove these people from the streets.

If this sort of money were available it would be much better spent on increased early childhood and pre-school facilities, school improvements generally throughout the NT, and other strategies with proven track records in preventing alcohol and drug addictions, such as intensive case management of disturbed children and youth.

Given that the NT is so heavily subsidised by Australian taxpayers, a strong case could be made that no NT administration has the right to misuse taxpayers’ money to the extent being suggested.

In any case, the Country Liberals have stated that this treatment would last for periods of only three months. We know that two-thirds of rehabilitated dependent drinkers relapse after twelve months; and one third of the remaining third relapse after they have been alcohol-free for another 12 months. This would leave only 20% or less of the original cohort sober. More will relapse later. On available data this will mean that there will always be a great many problem drinkers in the community at any one time even with mandatory treatment.

Further, this myopic approach will do little to prevent the production of new waves of alcohol-dependent people on the NT’s streets, as it abolishes existing preventative measures.

The advantage of the Enough is Enough approach is that it does create consequences for problem drinkers, and these consequences have rightly been strengthened now that the AOD Tribunal will be able to apply its sanctions in absentia of the drinkers – sanctions that include 70% income quarantining, and lengthier periods on the BDR . It does not criminalise public drunkenness, and even with the recent introduction of ‘on the spot’ fines, is not going to result in people going to gaol. The CLP itself acknowledges that alcohol dependent people need treatment and not gaol, but it’s deliberately pretending that the current approach will lead to imprisonment. Again this is generally untrue, and could only occur in very rare exceptions, if at all.

PAAC believes we have all had enough of political grandstanding on the issue of alcohol. We cannot afford to undermine the progress that is being made on the alcohol issue by throwing the baby out with the bathwater and put into government an emperor who has no clothes – not even a nappy or fig-leaf – when it comes to alcohol policy.

Henderson and McRoberts (The Australian)

Northern Territory Police Commisioner John McRoberts has foreshadowed a crackdown on the parents of truants and warned troublemakers from out bush they are “not welcome in Alice Springs”.

The NT Police Commisioner will arrive in Alice Springs this weekend to begin co-ordinating an “all of government response” to issues of crime and social dysfunction in the town at the request of Chief Minister Paul Henderson.

The move follows the rape of two European tourists at gunpoint during the week. Police have arrested three males in connection with the crime.

Speaking on Nadine Maloney’s ABC morning program today, the commisioner said he had had many reports that Alice Springs was “not a safe place to live anymore.”

Asked by Maloney how he would include bush communities in the developing the response, he said Alice Springs should be its primary focus.

“What we are saying is that if you misbehave you are not welcome in Alice Springs,” he said.

“If you are from a remote community, then you are going back to those communities, and that’s where you need to address your issues in life.

“Don’t become a burden to the citizens of Alice Springs, regardless of your ethnicity, where all you do is make life miserable for the people who want to enjoy the wonderful features that Alice Springs has to offer.”

Asked whether he would order a permanent increase of police numbers in Alice Springs, McRoberts said he would do so if the operation proved the need.

But he repeatedly emphasised the view that issues of social dysfunction could not be solved by more police, and needed the attention of other Government departments to “address the root causes”.

“There are kids not going to school, there are people abusing alcohol, there are people who are just becoming a nuisance and engaging in crime, and it is not only the responsibility of the police to intervene in those people’s lives,” he said.

“They need intervention from a variety of government agencies, and there are a variety of non-government organisations, so they don’t just continually go through this revolving door called the criminal justice system.”

McRoberts refererred to the issue of truancy several times:

“If they’re not going to school because their parents are drunk every night and can’t properly care for them, then the Department of Children and Families needs to intervene and either put those parents on family responsibility agreements or change their behaviour.

“If that still can’t be done, then those children need to be take into the care of the Northern Territory Government so that they have some prospect of growing up to be able to enjoy a normal healthy adult lifestyle.

“Similarly, if people don’t go to school, but they’re out till two o clock in the morning there is no chance they’ll go to school.

“So what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to find youth workers who are going to take these kids off the streets with the support of the police and make sure they start going to school. Otherwise there needs to be some sort of sanction for their parents.’”

McRoberts said law-abiding citizens of Alice Springs had enough of crime and anti-social behaviour in Alice Springs.

“What I am saying is that we are coming in, we are going to work very closely with non-government organisations, we are going to work with the citizens, the business people, and we are going to work with the government agency staff who are already down there doing a wonderful job day-in, day-out, and we’re going to do everything we possibly can.”

Police say two European women were raped at gunpoint after being disturbed while they were sleeping in their car.

They are looking for a car  like the one pictured.

The painting shows three members of the Ukaka Band playing at a shed on the Whitegate camp, which was the central location of Rod’s book The Hard Light of Day.

Rod says he was both shocked and thrilled by the purchase of the painting, which he hadn’t considered one of his very best.

Ukaka Band at Whitegate was brought to life in a video starring the band, which featured in an Alice Online post last October, along with a piece written by Rod Moss and another painting called Playing With Fire.

Rod’s painting features Rodney, Adrian and Trevor Coulthard, while the band format in the video features Trevor and Rodney with Vivian Ryan on drums, performing Song About Fire (below):