Resident John Stapleton reflects on the social catastrophe that has engulfed his neighbourhood
`HOW much is four 50s -- 200?" asks an Aboriginal child of her friend. "Two hundred? No it's not, four 50s, no it's not," comes the reply.
Both of them are about 12 years old. They're dealing heroin but they can't count. And while, according to the law of the land, they should be in school, they're not. Hard little faces, sad eyes too old for their years, they pass up and down this Redfern street doing quick deals.
Children are harder to bust, everybody knows it.
Later in the day a woman with a pram and two young children nods off in full public view at the top of Eveleigh Street, the children crawling around among broken bottles. The police, bending over her, try to sort something out but are greeted with hostility.
This is life in Sydney's inner-city Redfern. There are always scenes, ambulances carting off another body, tableaus of dereliction which have as much to do with alcoholism and addiction as the vexed subject of race.
Sometimes the scenes are so improbable they're almost funny. "I'm a sensible man, I'm a sensible man," shouts an Aboriginal man, standing in the middle of busy Lawson Street, drunk as a lord, weaving as traffic dodges around him.
"No, you're f---ing not, you stupid c---," yells a woman from the pavement. "Get off the f---ing road."
"I'm a sensible man ..." he continues to shout, another car barely missing him.
But in the end there is nothing funny about the complete lack of hope in the lives of so many of those who are now the public face of Redfern.
Some nights, when the mob is in from Kempsey or Walgett or wherever, a dozen children, the oldest perhaps 12 or 13, wander around kicking garbage cans, shouting, throwing things. Sometimes they smash windows, just for the hell of it. No action is taken against them. What are you going to do? Send them home to their parents? Yeah, right.
I feel sorriest for the younger ones. It's a typical scene, an addicted mum pushing a baby in a pram and shouting about something, a six or eight-year-old boy trailing on behind, eyes full of tears.
What hope do some of these children have? Absolutely none.
I came to live in Lawson Street, the scene of this week's extraordinary riots, more or less by accident. The house is good, the surrounding chaos alarming or sad in equal measure. Most residents in the immediate area live behind grilles and firmly locked doors. They accept that having your car windows periodically and gratuitously smashed is part of city life.
Until I came to live here, within a 100m of Eveleigh Street, I had no idea how utterly dysfunctional the situation was. For a long time I wanted to write a novel titled Red Fern of the Apocalypse, just to conjure the atmosphere of the area; the lonely motifs in the middle of the night, the strange streams of abuse and the sounds of personal crisis.
Now, the sound of yet another woman shouting for help outside my front door after her bag has been snatched barely even motivates me to look out thewindow.
In 1998, the last year for which figures are readily available, about 452,000 syringes were dispensed on The Block. The famous picture of a young teenage boy shooting up in the gutter in Caroline Lane, which embarrassed the Carr Labor government so greatly before the 1999 election, was taken near my house.
The government's response to that picture was basically to push heroin dealing down from Caroline Lane to Eveleigh Lane, further into The Block, where no journalists had the guts to go. This deliberately kept the problem from the public. It solved nothing.
Thin, pale-faced, sweating, in that desperate hurry only a junkie knows, hundreds pour into the area every day to score in an already besieged community. That circumstance has been exacerbated by the Government's concerted crackdown on other prime heroin spots such as Cabramatta, making it safer to "pick up" in the interlocking back alleys of Redfern than under the nose of cameras and circling police in other parts of town.
The NSW Government has known about the problems in Redfern for many years. Its inaction has compounded the problems.
It was in 1997 that NSW deputy premier and then minister for Aboriginal affairs Andrew Refshauge issued a statement, after months of chaos around Redfern station, claiming the Carr government had "acted quickly to recent incidents", with former police commissioner Peter Ryan holding a summit to "address thesocial issues affecting Redfern", and to find "real solutions to the social problems".
Among the measures announced was a police shopfront at Redfern station within two months. In fact, it was more than two years before that was established -- and it lasted a matter of months before being closed.
It was surreal, but not entirely unexpected, to be sent on Sunday evening to report on a riot in my own street. On that night it looked more like Beirut than modern-day Australia. A torched car sent flames high into the air and black smoke billowed across the street. From where I watched, it looked as if my house was about to burn. Broken glass and bricks littered the ground.
The media was kept corralled behind police tape. For hours there was a Mexican stand-off, with police gathering their forces in a line across the street as they brought in riot gear and reinforcements. The firefighters with their hydrants lined up behind them.
After work, it was impossible to get home, the rioting continuing virtually until dawn. I stayed with a friend in a unit overlooking the beach and thought about moving.
What do I think the solution is? Once, in my younger days, I would have automatically sided with the Aboriginal children and assumed the police were bastards. Now, I think the cops have been given a bad rap on this one.
Until this latest outbreak, the heavy police presence in Redfern, including a police car sitting regularly at the top of Eveleigh Street and police regularly patrolling the station and surrounding area, has kept things quieter and more under control in the past six months.
That makes it safer for the thousands of people, mostly university students and office workers, who pass in and out of Redfern station every day. And safer for the local residents, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike.
From my observations, the policing of the area is not overtly racist or heavy-handed. The blatant dealing, the public drunkenness, the routine thievery, would not be tolerated anywhere else in Sydney. The young police, many of them women, find themselves watching scenes they have no control over. They seem as saddened by what they see as everyone else. They, too, seem utterly puzzled as to the best courses of action.
If, as is being mooted, the police move in to arrest the dozens of young children involved in this week's riots, does anyone really believe this will improve thesituation? Most of them are just children.
Sending them to jail will curdle already problematic lives. There has to be other styles of intervention to ensure they join the many children and adults who have recovered from difficult histories to live productive lives. What began as the terrible death of a 17- year-old boy, Thomas "T.J." Hickey, should end with new approaches to these intractable problems.
In recent days it is clear the elders in the Aboriginal community have stepped in to calm the situation. The concert on the Block on Wednesday night in honour of the Hickey family showed a side of Eveleigh Street rarely seen; it was well-organised with good security and a positive atmosphere and lots of talent and goodwill on display.
But that's not the sight that greets the thousands of commuters pouring out of Redfern station every day. Perhaps, as always, real change will come from within -- this time from the Aboriginal community itself.
