The Lucky Country (Part2)

[Julian2]

The fringe dwellers

Thursday, November 2, 2006

Welcome to Tennant Creek -- the other side of the Australian dream. Life for many is a bare tin shack, and permanent debt to the local shopkeeper.

At a passing glance, the conditions of Aborigines who live on the fringes of Tennant Creek, 510km north of Alice Springs, are about as bad as it gets. On closer inspection, it gets worse.

 

Men, women and sometimes children live in bare tin shacks with no electricity and no water. The floors are concrete or dirt. The inhabitants are mostly alcoholics, whose most valuable possessions are the clothes they wear. They might own a pot and a plate. They have beds, stripped of lining and down to the wire. They keep warm with mangy dogs and filthy blankets. Some camps have solar hot water from a communal shower block. Some don't. An Aboriginal organisation, Julalikari, trucks in water and firewood.

 

Early in the morning, at Drive-In Camp on the east side of town, Robert Edwards is raking the dirt. The camp, despite its wrecked state, is spotless. So are Edwards' clothes. He hand-washes his one pair of jeans and his shirt.

 

Asked if he likes living here, Edwards says: "Yeah, I like it." Asked why he likes it, he shrugs and says: "It's the only place we can stay."

 

A fire is burning down under a heavy wire grill. The camp residents have had breakfast. It was meat, delivered before dawn by Angelo Perperiadas, a local grocer and butcher. Perperiadas keeps the ATM cards of the residents of this camp, and of many others. He runs a book-up service, delivering meat, bread, tea, sugar and cigarettes and then deducting money using the owner's pin number. He does not provide alcohol. If they want that, which most do, he hands over cash from their accounts and they buy it themselves. By the end of the welfare fortnight, they have no money left. They are in perpetual debt to Perperiadas.

 

Some see Perperiadas as a shark. Aborigines who use his service see him as their only hope. Women who want to feed themselves and their children give him their ATM cards so their husbands don't drink it away. And older people don't like to keep theirs in their back pockets - young men are known to frogmarch them up to the ATM and demand they withdraw all their cash.

 

What's most important is that Perperiadas always turns up with food and money. He seems to know the immediate needs of the people more than any government organisation. What Perperiadas does is legal. The authorities have been through his books many times and he's always come up clean. He claims Aborigines owe him $500,000 in unpaid book-up. That's because when people get heavily in debt to him, they get smart: they cancel the ATM cards which Perperiadas holds, order new ones and go for book-up somewhere else. Perperiadas can't recover the money; he'd be wasting his time calling the bailiffs on fringe dwellers.

 

There is much said about Aborigines on welfare, but the welfare payments keep most of the white-run businesses in this town going. Everyone is gripped at the same teat.

 

Over in Bottom Camp, Eric Elkedra appears to be coming off a long night on the turps. There are people strewn about the place, sleeping it off. Some are local, some out-of-towners, in Tennant to escape - sometimes for days that turn into years - the no-alcohol rules that apply on the Aboriginal lands.

 

"What I'm telling you guys," says Elkedra, "is nothing ever changes here. What I'd like to see happen here is power. We want to watch TV. They won't put [on] power. We'd like a [bitumen] road from here to town, with lights because we don't want to come home in the dark."

 

There's no power because no one would bother paying the bills. Most could apply for a house in town: a concrete block with light switches and hot water. But they don't want to live like that. The tin shacks are rent-free. Living in town would mean upsetting neighbours and confrontations with police. It would also mean rent would be automatically deducted from welfare payments. They'd rather spend it on beer and wine. They are committed to drinking and socialising and little else.

 

On hot days, they splash water on the dirt to cool things down. On cold nights, they burn fires and repair friendships with the camp dogs. "How we live is pretty hard," says Elkedra. "You can see that for yourself." In white terms, they are lost people. In anyone's terms, they have achieved something close to pure anarchy. Those who know them feel admiration and despair.

 

Over in Dump Camp, on the south-west side, Johnny Nelson, an ancient Warlpiri man with cataracts, rake-skinny and walking stick in hand, mentions he was in the army defending the north when the Japanese bombed Darwin during World War II. Town power runs right past his shack but it doesn't lean down to offer the old soldier a line. Perperiadas suggests that what he really wants and deserves is an air-conditioner to help him see out the wicked summertime. Nelson agrees, strongly. "Oh yes ... but nothing here."

 

As governments get richer, they only look poorer. They're Australia's too-hard people.

 

[Flashermac]

Sounds like some of the Indian reservations in the US ...

 

 

 

[Julian2]

I think the Indians were more advanced than these people when they received the advantages of European culture. Agriculture, weaving etc but also no booze. Was alcohol present in the major Aztec or Mayan civilizations?

[Torneyboy]

Trouble is they will not help themselves at all...they ...want ...want all the time...

There is only a handfull of full bloods left now.

[Flashermac]

The Apaches had a sort of beer called Tiswin. Don't know about the Aztecs or Mayas.

 

 

[Central Scrutinizer]

Story and Origin of Mayahuel:

 

According to Aztec myth, Quetzalcoatl and Mayahuel were fleeing tzitzimime (star demons) and tried to disguise themselves as the branches of a tree. Mayahuel was recognized, however, and the tzitzimime tore her to small pieces. Quetzalcoatl buried the pieces which in turn sprouted into the first maguey plants. These are then turned into pulque, an alcoholic drink used by the Aztec in their religious rituals.

 

Family Tree and Relationships of Mayahuel:

Wife of Patecatl

Mother of Centzontotochtin, an innumerable group of rabbit gods of drunkenness whom she fed through her 400 breasts, all delivering the alcoholic drink made from agave. Each of the Centzontotochtin are responsible for a different sort of drunkenness. For the Aztecs, "400" was the number they used for anything they considered innumerable.

 

Mythology and Legends of Mayahuel:

Apparently, Mayahuel first got the idea of distilling agave from watching the actions of a very drunken mouse.

 

[Central Scrutinizer]

Blue Agave, the tequila agave of the Agave tequilana species is an agave that is an important economic product of Jalisco state in Mexico due to its role as the base ingredient of tequila, a popular alcoholic drink.

 

The tequila agave grows natively in Jalisco, favoring the high altitudes (over 1500 meters) and sandy soil. Commercial and wild agaves have very different life cycles. Both start as a large succulent, with spiky fleshy leaves, which can grow to over two meters in length. Wild agaves sprout a shoot when about five years old which grows into a stem up to five meters tall and topped with yellow flowers. The flowers are pollinated by a native bat (Leptonycteris nivalis) and produce several thousand seeds per plant. The plant then dies. The shoots are removed when about a year old from commercial plants to allow the heart to grow larger. The plants are then reproduced by planting these shoots; this has led to a considerable loss of genetic diversity in cultivated blue agave. It is rare for one kept as a a houseplant to flower. A fifty year old blue agave in Boston has grown a 10 meter (30 foot) stalk (requiring a hole in the greenhouse roof) and flowered sometime during the summer of 2006.[1]

 

Tequila is produced by removing the heart of the plant in its twelfth year, normally weighing between 35-90 kg. This heart is stripped of leaves and heated to remove the sap, which is fermented and distilled. Other beverages like Mezcal and Pulque are also produced from Blue and other agaves by different methods (though still using the sap) and are regarded as more traditional.

 

Over 200 million Blue Agave plants are grown in several regions of Mexico, but in recent years the ability of farmers to meet demand has been in question. Through poor breeding practices, Blue Agave has lost resistance to fusarium fungus and several other diseases which currently render 25%-30% of the plants unusable for consumption.

 

 

[Julian2]

Thanks Cent, err.... do these rabbit gods of drunkenness have a church anywhere?

[Julian2]

So true Torney Boy, how dare they complain about the bounty our civilisation brought them, booze to deaden the senses, tobacco to rot the lungs, petrol to sniff when the grown ups wont let you drink their grog, the concept of land ownership only starting to sink in when all the land was gone; poison, smallpox, measles and all that other good stuff. They never had it so good and they don't appreciate it one bit. And those half and quartercastes claiming to be Aboriginal, just because they been treated likes blacks all their lives doesn't make them one eh?

[bust]

I really start to wonder Julian whether we will ever solve any of these problems. I was talking to a friend the other day who is the Art Director for the WWF advertising campaign. The latest run of promotional materials simply says "The Future Is Man Made" Summed it up nicely I thought and could be applied to just about any current social issue throughout the world.