The letter from Australia is a weekly newsletter from our Australian office. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in the Northern Territory.
Driving through Central Australia can be a battle with dust, flooding, fires, collapsed roads and network failures. And when the load is taken, even a minor setback can have serious repercussions.
The remote indigenous community of Lajamanu was established in the Northern Territory by the Australian government in 1949. Dozens of people, already displaced from their traditional homes, were moved there from another community about 350 miles away due to overcrowding and a shortage of supplies. water.
Today, Lajamanu has a population of approximately 800 inhabitants. Like many other remote communities in Australia, it is supported by a single shop selling everything from food to nappies and washing machines. The store is stocked once a week, sometimes every two weeks, by truckers who have to deal with the harsh conditions and treacherous infrastructure of the region.
For the first few months of this year, the only road to Lajamanu was closed by a combination of record rainfall, storms and flooding. Regular deliveries ceased and stocks of food, water, medicine and other essential items began to dwindle. The community, said Andrew Johnson, a Warlpiri man and Lajamanu elder, was suffering, particularly from lack of food.
“No strength, no energy,” he said.
Under government policy, the store should have been prepared for such an outcome, given the predictability of the annual rainy season. As things worsened, residents and providers repeatedly appealed to the Northern Territory government to declare an emergency.
“The silence was deafening,” said Alastair King, director of the Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA), a non-profit organization that operates the Lajamanu store and others in remote communities. “They didn’t respond, they didn’t tell us what it would take to declare an emergency, and they didn’t tell us why an emergency wasn’t declared.”
So ALPA organized special trucks and small daily charter flights to bring in supplies. He ended up doing it for months (spending more than 350,000 Australian dollars, about $232,000), but the shelves at the Lajamanu store remained virtually empty.
“I was expecting the big military plane, the Hercules, to bring all the food, but all I saw was the single-engine charter plane coming and going, slowly going down,” Johnson said. “It was not enough. “It was not treated as an emergency or taken seriously.”
Similar situations were unfolding about 500 miles away in the remote indigenous community of Minyerri, also known as Hodgson Downs, and 750 miles away in another, Borroloola, both of which had also been isolated by flooding.
In Borroloola, food stocks were dwindling, panic buying was reported, cash withdrawals were limited and there was no phone service or network coverage, making credit card payments impossible. In late March, months after the first calls for help were made, the army was called in to help evacuate Borroloola residents. The Northern Land Council, which represents the region’s Indigenous people, said the response to the disaster by the federal and Northern Territory governments had been “appalling”.
The subsistence supply model is the norm in most remote indigenous communities. It is the product of decades of interventionist policies that removed people from their traditional countries of origin. Now, whenever food security is threatened by supply chain problems, locals are forced to ask the government for help.
In Lajamanu, three months after regular truck deliveries ceased, an ALPA employee told the territorial government in an email that the community was in a “very critical” state. There were no eggs, non-perishable milk, frozen meat or toilet paper.
A Northern Territory government spokesperson said a “food security plan” was put into effect in late March, two days after receiving the email from the ALPA employee, which included daily government-funded charter flights bringing supplies until the roads were usable again.
King said the government began paying for the flights only after a personal appeal was made to Chansey Paech, the Northern Territory’s attorney-general. Paech declined to comment.
An underlying cause of the crisis, King said, was the government’s failure to ensure roads could withstand the rainy season. Pointing to photographs of muddy, collapsed and completely submerged roads, King said the result had been hundreds of people trapped and starving.
“If that’s not an emergency, then what is?” he said.
Now here are our stories of the week.
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