When Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin announced the quarantining of welfare payments for indigenous people would continue, ostensibly to manage alcohol abuse, as part of the NT intervention she was reflecting a belief straight out of the 1950’s. It is a belief implicit in the reasons given for welfare quarantining. In 1950’s parlance it is that ‘Abo’s can’t handle their grog,’ the inference being that non-indigenous people can.

One of the major focuses of the intervention has been alcohol abuse in indigenous communities and amongst indigenous people. Although the intervention has primarily operated in specified indigenous communities most indigenous people have been ensnared in the discourse of alcohol and indigenous people that surrounds the intervention.

A group of drunken indigenous people sitting in a park in Darwin reflects the raison d’etre for the intervention for many non-indigenous passers-by. The group may be loud, abusive, upset, and angry; surrounded by the debris of their drinking. In truth they are no different to a high proportion of NT residents. The main difference is the public spectacle versus the less public spectacle, a difference rooted in economics and culture.

The rivers of grog flowing into indigenous communities became a mantra for John Howard as he sold the intervention to the Australian people. The truth is there is an ocean of grog swirling around NT. Alcohol abuse is a way of life in NT, in fact it signifies a ‘True Territorian.’

NT has almost double the Australian average of alcohol consumption. The Australian drinking guidelines state high risk drinking for women is 5 or more standard drinks a day and for men it’s 7 standard drinks or more. That’s an after work session at the pub for the average Territorian and doesn’t include the mandatory six pack thrown in the car on the way home.

When Random Breath Testing was introduced in the NT in 1980 it was considered an infringement on the NT lifestyle by most people and elicited a host of complaints. That idea hasn’t really gone away. I live next to a pub/drive through bottle shop and the stream of cars filling up with grog hardly abates from 9:00 am till 10:00 pm. When the pub closes the screech of car tyres fills the air as drunken punters do burn outs, sometimes crashing their cars in the process.

Even the local MP’s aren’t shy about their love of alcohol. In late October 2008 a local MP was accused of being drunk in Parliament, another MP hosted a Christmas party in 2007 at his electoral office and supplied free alcohol resulting in one man collapsing and 2006 another MP, who’d been drinking all day at the cricket, made lecherously obscene comments to a woman security guard. When questioned about his behaviour he claimed he couldn’t remember making the comments.

The daily local paper, the NT News, is a litany of alcohol abuse stories and not indigenous people in communities but people in clubs, in cars or their own homes. To walk down Mitchell St, Darwin’s nightclub precinct, on any night but especially the end of the week is to run the gauntlet of alcohol soaked violence.

I drove cabs in Melbourne for ten years, trawling for fares on King St and most other night club areas and have lived in Sydney and Brisbane. I have never seen a more drunken violent environment than Mitchell St on a Friday or Saturday night. It’s not uncommon for thirty person brawls to erupt on the street when the clubs close down and the clubs themselves are a repository of violence as evidenced by the regular articles in the NT News about people being glassed, beaten unconscious, kicked to oblivion and so on. The perpetrators of this violence are generally non-indigenous locals and the occasional backpacker.

Non-indigenous locals also tend to leave the debris of their drinking and partying all over the place, much like their indigenous counterparts who drink in the parks. I recently walked to Vesteys Beach, a popular Darwin Beach. There’d been a party in the car park the night before, the car park was a carpet of broken glass and bottles and cans were strewn all over the grass. The partiers had been drinking pre-mixed drinks and spirits as well as beer, not the drink of choice for ‘long-grassers’ as itinerant indigenous people are often called. Recently there’s been a number of letters in the paper complaining of Magpie Geese hunters leaving their empty bottles and cans as well as packaging around the shores of a local wetland and other complaints of people camping at Gunn point and leaving piles of rubbish and human faeces everywhere. Magpie Goose hunting is enjoyed by many Territorians and Gunn point is popular with recreational fishermen. Neither place is known as an indigenous itinerant enclave.

The main difference between the indigenous people targeted in the intervention and everyone else, aside from their skin colour, is where they drink. Many of the indigenous people either targeted or signifying the raison d’etre for the intervention drink outside. The reasons for this are either economic; they have no house, or cultural; they prefer to be outside or they are not allowed in the family home when they drink. Many non-indigenous people will walk past the group of indigenous people drinking and arguing in a park and look at them with disdain thinking they can’t handle their drink, then go to a nightclub, get in a fight with someone, break a glass in another person’s face and drive home so pissed they can hardly see the road. And somehow they think they can handle their drink!

If the NT and Federal government want to reduce the incidents of alcohol abuse and related harm on indigenous communities they need to acknowledge that alcohol abuse is endemic in NT and that it crosses all classes, cultures and races and act on it. To target indigenous people for their problem drinking and refuse to act on problem drinking in the wider community is to legitimise one people’s drinking and criminalise another’s all because one is more visible than another. Alcohol is causing problems across the NT and obviously the impact will be greater in economically disadvantaged, socially isolated and disenfranchised communities. Indigenous people will see the double standard; that their drunken behaviour is unacceptable but everyone else’s is and is fact culturally and politically endorsed and it will only lead to resentment. The federal and NT government by perpetuating the myth that ‘Abos can’t handle their grog,’ is rubbing salt into recently opened old wounds whose scars stretch back in history.

I fronted up at the duly appointed time to dive a reef, with a few people doing their Open Water certificate, just around the headland to be told the boat had broken down so the dive was off although I could do a wreck dive from the shore if I wanted. The idea totally excited me, I’d always wanted to do a wreck dive and this one was only a ten minute walk away followed by a short swim. I asked how deep it was and my buddy/DM said it was from 15-25m, I quickly suited up, got my gear and followed him as he pushed a cart with our tanks, BC’s, regulators etc. There was only he and I diving, I’m not sure what happened to the people doing their Open water certificate.

He hadn’t come on the dive I did yesterday although I’d met him as he’d spent a lot of time playing with my daughter Ksenya the day before and talked to my partner, Liza, for awhile and shared with her a personal tragedy that had recently befallen him. I found him to be an easy going and decent bloke.

We arrived where we had to swim out to the wreck from and got our gear on. My buddy took off before I’d finished getting ready and was talking to the guys from the dive shop next to where we had to enter the sea. Before I knew it he was walking into the sea, no mention of a dive plan, no mention of anything. I hurriedly followed him, threading my way through the rocks, ever mindful of stonefish. It didn’t take long for the warm water to be lapping at my thighs so I inflated my BC and followed my buddy who was swimming backwards and yelling out to me to watch out for buoys. I tried to get some idea of what was going on but he wasn’t saying much.

It didn’t take long for the clear water to turn dark. I was amazed at how quickly it got deep. A couple of hundred yards from the shore my buddy stopped and said it was time to descend. I deflated my BC and sank into the deep green sea, my ears felt tight, I equalized and kept going. I couldn’t see the bottom, my buddy was just below me, a stream of bubbles colliding chaotically signalled where he was. The dark green enveloped me, the surface became a veneer of light far above. Still we kept going. Visibility was about 3m, not good for the South China Sea, which is known for its good diving visibility on the east coast of Malaysia and west coast of South Thailand.

Finally we hit the bottom, a plateau of sand with the odd clump of colourless seaweed sprouting out of it. I looked up, the surface was an opaque shimmering light, and around me was the dense dark green sea. I checked my depth gauge, 28m. I’d never dived so deep before, not that it worried me, in fact I was pleased because it meant if I saw a 30m dive going in the future I’d feel able to join it. I knew that such a dive meant a decompression stop other than the regular 3 min at 5m safety stop but I didn’t know at what depth but I wasn’t worried, my buddy/DM would know, even if he hadn’t told me the dive plan.

He gave me the thumb and forefinger circle sign for are you ok, I responded in kind and we set off to find this wreck. You don’t hear much at that depth, just the sound of your own heavy breathing and bubbles; that combined with the flat sand seascape we were swimming over gave the impression of being on another planet. No fish crossed out paths, just the odd little shrimp, transparent with its antennae waving gently and black stalk eyes. We swam on, no wreck loomed from the gloom, no reef appeared like a kaleidoscope. There was nothing but sand sloping into darker depths. I began to wonder if my buddy knew where he was going. He stopped, checked I was okay then pointed his thumb towards the distant surface, meaning ascend. I made to follow but he signalled stop with his hand then pointed to himself and made the ascend sign then pointed to me and made the stop sign. I figured he meant for me to stay down while he surfaced. I guessed maybe he was lost and wanted to get his bearings. It wasn’t the time or place to argue although deserting your buddy is one of the cardinal sins of diving I figured he’s the DM, he knows what he’s doing so I made the ok sign and watched him ascend until he disappeared into the gloom, leaving me alone 28m underwater or 15 fathoms.

Nothing moved. I focused on a small piece of dull red seaweed made up of a series of small tendrils about 10cm long, it was the only thing around. I knew if I kept that in sight then I wouldn’t move and my buddy would find me by my stream of air bubbles, otherwise I didn’t know how he’d find me in the gloom and with the tidal flow. I could see nothing past 3m, there was nothing but dark green gloom unless I looked up where I could see a slight light diffusion that was the surface but between me and it there was nothing discernable. My breath rasped and my bubbles exploded like gunshots around my head. I checked my watch, he’d been gone ten minutes, I checked my air gauge, I had 20 bar left, I had 200 when I started and 50 bar is considered the time to think about surfacing-in fact between 50 bar and 0 there’s a red colouration just so you know, sort of like the petrol gauge in a car has that red colouration so you know not to start any long journeys without filling up. Pity there’s no air refill stations at 15 fathoms.

I knew I should start ascending but as I didn’t know when to do my decompression stop I really wanted the DM back. I figured I’d go when I hit 15 bar. I was using up my air faster than I should have. I’d been in the water just over half an hour, the day before I’d done 50 mins and was left with 40 bar. Admittedly the deeper you dive the more air you use but I was chewing through it.

I hit 15 bar and started to ascend, I got about 3m from the bottom when I felt a tug on my fin, I looked down and saw my buddy. I swam down to him and showed him my air gauge, now hovering at around 10 bar. He looked at it and swam off, not up but across the sea floor.

I was gobsmacked. Here I was perilously close to running out of air and he was swimming away. I had no choice but to follow him as I knew I’d never get to the surface as my air had dropped to below 10 bar. I hastily swam after him, making sure he was within hand reach. We finned for few minutes, still only sand, then I breathed in but there was a gap, like a misfire of air, I breathed again, more of a gap and less air. I tapped my buddy, he stopped and I moved my arms horizontally across my throat, the sign for no air. He passed me his secondary regulator. I stuck it in my mouth and breathed, sucking in a mouthful of water. I’d forgotten to clear the water from it, I pushed the clear button and a jet of air shot into my mouth then I began to breath, burping from the air I’d just shot down my throat. My buddy grabbed my arm and I his and we gradually ascended. The shimmer of light slowly grew bigger, the sea faded from dark green to light green and the water seemed less dense. He stopped at some depth for a few minutes then we hit the surface and inflated out BC’s.

Bobbing around on the water I was too stunned to say much, he asked me if I was okay and feeling any pain. Obviously he hadn’t worked out the decompression stop properly and was worried I may have the bends. I told him I was fine.

We slowly swam towards the shore then stopped and he told me he was going to look for the wreck and he descended. I was left to float around and keep my eye on a moored boat as a way of ensuring I wasn’t drifting away. He reappeared ten minutes to tell me he’d found the wreck and did I want to buddy breath down and have a brief look. I wasn’t sure about doing that but he said he felt bad because I hadn’t seen the wreck so I agreed.

We descended into the green, gripping each other’s arms as if doing a strange dance. Within a few minutes the brown shape of a boat surrounded by small fish loomed out of the gloom. It was an old fishing boat laying hull down but slightly tilted and on an upward trajectory. We did a brief pass, enough for me to wish we’d managed to find it when I had some air and time to explore it then we ascended and paddled to shore.

I hope the DM got a reality check and that he improves his game, diving is not something to do in a half arsed fashion and really a DM has to know what they’re doing and abide by common diving protocols and procedures. His pleading not to tell his boss makes me think he realised he’d fucked up in a major way. As for me, well I’ll always insist on a dive plan before I leave the shore so I’ll always know what’s going on and I’ve done a buddy breath ascent from 15 fathoms, not what any diver wants to do but an experience none the less and isn’t that the point of life?

In February I was offered a short term position as a special needs teacher at an International School in Kuala Lumpur. With my partner, Liza, on maternity leave this was an ideal opportunity; she could have a holiday of sorts with our three month old daughter, Ksenya, while I worked. We’d been to Thailand when Ksenya was two months old so had an idea what it would be like living in South East Asia with an infant. Little did we realise that after a few months living in Kuala Lumpur we would view returning to Australia with trepidation because of the cultural anxiety surrounding children and what it does to the social relationships between them and adults.

Within three weeks of being offered the job we were waking to the sound of temple bells and horns mingled with the haunting murmur of the call to prayer, the grind of the monorail and the ever present undulating white noise of Kuala Lumpur’s traffic. Our weekends and holidays were filled with indulging in the great variety of cuisines available in Malaysia and travelling through the ethnically mixed South to the predominantly Malaysian Muslim North East and all points in-between.

One commonality we found was the adoration and sense of community responsibility for children from all ages and genders. This wasn’t a matter of the exotic otherness of a white baby, as the behaviour exhibited towards Ksenya we saw repeated with local babies. The spontaneity and naturalness of people’s reactions was a reflection of a cultural practise and understanding that is a radical contrast to the social construction of infancy and childhood in Australia.

In almost every cafe and restaurant we were greeted with cries of pleasure as staff left their posts and asked to hold Ksenya. This wasn’t just women but men as well who demanded to hold her, who made faces and baby sounds at her, who walked past her and tickled her chin, stroked her cheek, offered up their fingers to be held and gently mopped her face with tissues. And this didn’t just occur in cafes and restaurants but at markets, walking the street or waiting for a bus or train.

Imagine if an unknown male asked to hold a woman’s baby, stroked its chin, made baby sounds or asked questions about the baby in Australia. He’d just as likely be lynched or at the very least the shadow of PAEDOPHILE would haunt his days with snide whisperings and anxious angry glares.

Eating out became a pleasure because invariably someone would offer to hold Ksenya as we ate, especially if Liza was juggling a squirming Ksenya and a Laksa. In most cases the staff would hold her and she’d do a tour of the kitchen, the street outside and the cash register. If they were too busy often a customer who’d finished eating would offer to hold her and take great pleasure in doing so. Every cafe and restaurant has numerous baby chairs and they were whisked to our table the minute we sit down so on the odd occasion no one wanted to hold her we could still eat easily. You’d be hard pressed to find a baby chair in any Australian restaurant and lucky to find one in a cafe.

There are of course mandated areas for infants in Australia; cry baby sessions at the cinema, childcare centres, Gymboree and the local park. But should you want to go out to dinner, or even lunch, and don’t want to manoeuvre a bulky pram between tables then your options are limited. Such a situation would be unheard of in Malaysia, it’s assumed that infants will accompany parents into almost any situation and allowances are made on a commercial and a social level.

In Australia children, particularly infants, are seen as the exclusive property of the parent(s). The family is almost cultish in its psychological internalism and fear of strangers; the relationship is exclusive and insular save for the intrusion of in-laws and the odd friend. Children are not seen as part of the community, the occasional outbursts, in letters to the editor and on talk back radio, from people complaining their taxes are being used to pay for child care places they will never use is a reflection of this mind set.

There is a sense in Malaysia that children are part of the community, their presence brings joy to those around them, which is why people are so keen to hold, to touch, to tickle and tease. The pleasure of children is shared pleasure where as in Australia it’s a pleasure reserved for family and close friends only, and of course lowly paid childcare workers.

We like to think Australia is a good and safe place to bring up kids. We’ve legislated and mandated our interaction with children to achieve that effect but somewhere in the process we’ve removed the community from the picture. The ability for strangers to interact with our children in the smallest ways, the sense of collective care and love for infants and children has become a predatory fear, a horror. It hasn’t made it any safer for children and has only made society a lonelier and more fearful place. Is it any wonder kids are spending most of the day indoors playing with gadgets and conducting relationships through the internet when we’ve constructed the world outside of the home as the badlands filled with predatory strangers.

This mindset begins with the social relationships we encourage and discourage with infants. By reducing the social sphere of infant relationships to childcare workers, friends and family we begin the process of severely limiting their social world and inculcating a fear of strangers.

Infants learn reactions, smiles, laughs, grimaces and so on from those around them and these reactions influence their developing psychological relationship to the world. If their social world consists of overworked childcare workers, family and a few friends, all of whom have a limited capacity to smile in any twenty four hour period conversely the infant will spend less time smiling and being happy. If the infant lives in a social reality where they are being smiled at, tickled, held and played with by any number of people over a twenty four hour period conversely the infant will spend more time smiling and being happy.

So it is with trepidation I view our return to Australia because it’s an emotionally cold place, a place where children are ignored by most people and where they learn to fear who and what they don’t know. People may say the sad reality is that children need to fear strangers; that ‘stranger danger’ what every child needs to learn in these dangerous times. As anyone one who works in the area of child abuse will tell you most abuse is perpetrated by family members or friends of the family. Certainly as a teacher that’s what I’ve found.

There is a vast difference between telling a child not to get into a strangers car and allowing a stranger to interact with your infant or child in a cafe or on the street. An interaction with a stranger with a parent present does not lead to your child jumping into a stranger’s car one day in the future. Somehow we’ve forgotten that distinction, that predator in the car has become every stranger who smiles and waves at an infant. A society that doesn’t encourage the natural inquisitiveness and sociability of infants and children is a society whose soul is dead.

They are loath to use the meters, which is not uncommon in SE Asia and I’ve got used to it. Everywhere else I’ve been in SE Asia you say where you want to go, the cabbie quotes a ludicrous fare, you act all outraged and offer a substantially lower amount, they respond with a more reasonable figure and on it goes until you a both satisfied. You still end up paying a heap more than a local but that’s to be expected and nothing to worry about. KL cabbies don’t bother with the middle bit, the negotiation. They prefer to quote an outrageous fare, 5-10 times what the fare should be and if you offer anything different they drive off or shake their head. There is no negotiation.

You’re doing pretty well if you even get to the stage of finding a cab to take you somewhere. The excuses they offer for not taking you are extraordinary. My favourite is ‘Jam time,’ meaning there’s traffic jams on all the roads, I mean hello, KL is one big traffic jam. Still it’s a common excuse and one I find astounding. The cabbie would rather drive around empty than sit in a traffic jam with the meter going or collecting cash for the off meter job they’re doing.

‘It’s too far’ is another common refrain. Too far, shit when I was a cabbie everyone dreamed about the big fare, a nice $50 fare was always a bonus. Not in KL, to the KL cabbie a RM50-100 fare is just a nightmare, they’d prefer to sit empty or get a RM5 and wait an hour for another job. That’s not to say the journey is too short is not an excuse, it is.

Another good one is ‘wrong direction.’ That one makes sense when you’re doing a shift change and you have to be somewhere at a certain time but the old wrong direction excuse is offered up any old time.

So really if you want to get a cab in KL you have to be going the same direction as the cabbie wants to go, not during ‘jam time’ and not going either too far or too short a distance.

So the best time to get a cab is probably between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. and hope he’s going the same direction you want to go and be prepared to pay 10 times what you should.

Another crazy thing about KL cabbies is they like to drive around with their friends or family in the cab and pick up a fare at the same time. When I was driving taxis some nights I seemed to spend half the night picking up friends but I’d never then pick up a fare as well. KL cabbies think nothing of it. I’ve got cabs where the driver had a mate in the front seat to keep him company or where they’ve detoured to pick up their wife, and waited while she finished shopping, with the meter going, and even where his wife and kids are crammed in the front seat and they’re off to some function.

One of the reasons for this lacsidasical approach to cab driving may be that cars are expensive in Malaysia and many cabbies are working other jobs as well as driving, so driving a cab is really about getting a car to drive around, to do chores in and drive family around. Actual working as a cab driver is something to do only if you can be bothered but most of the time it’s too big a hassle.

This is not to say all cabbies are like this, they’re not. I’ve had plenty of cabbies who put the meter on, especially when it becomes apparent that you live here, and cabbies who don’t mind working in jam time. I’ve always found the cabbies to be friendly once I’m in the cab and very few of them drive in circles to push the fare up. I just find the excuses and attitude to be comical when it comes to why they can’t take you somewhere.

Finally I saw my name and was ushered into the back of the van by Shara and Ahmed from the school and we hit the freeway, heading to the house we got as part of my employment package. Cars slipped by as we tore down the freeway, passing toll booths and apartment blocks. We drove for an hour with Shara turning back from the front seat to make conversation. I was feeling pretty tired and slightly weirded out by the situation, I really just wanted to sleep, as did Liza and Ksenya.

Eventually the van turned off the freeway and headed towards some sort of housing estate. We passed the first boom gate with a guardhouse and were waved through by a uniformed man. Liza and I traded glances of consternation. The van passed palatial mansions, a grove of pine trees, and still we drove for fifteen more minutes, until we arrived at another boom gate and guard house opposite a lake and next to ‘the clubhouse’ as Shara described it.

We were waved through the next boom gate and wound our way through an estate of cloned houses, all white stucco exterior and red roofs clustered together like herpes. Spotless roads and evenly spaced trees joined the clusters together in perfect harmony. I felt like I’d been dropped in the middle of the set of The Stepford Wives.

Shara opened the door as if were about to enter a palace. It was a nice enough place, plenty of room and a backyard that dropped down to the lake but Country Heights, as it’s called, was the epitome of suburbia. The school had thoughtfully left some supplies for us, which only served to amplify the suburban reality, sliced cheese, white bread, biscuits and an army of chemical cleaning products. A nice gesture but nothing we would ever use.

If any country has mythologised suburbia to the sacred it’s Australia with the dream (and a dream it is these days with housing prices) of the ¼ acre block, the hills hoist and the chorus of mowers roaring in disharmony on a Sunday morning. It’s not what I came to KL for.

Shara and Ahmad left with the promise of taking me to lunch the next day with the Principal and Vice principal. We looked out the back, not a tree to be seen aside from those stationed like sentries alongside the road. The view was of uninterrupted brown grass, the freeway and a disused train line. The nearest shop was a 15 minute drive away; there was no public transport, no market, no hawker stalls, nothing aside from the club house.

This was not the KL of people and cars and food and smells and chaos. This was suburbia honed to a nightmare.

We headed to ‘the clubhouse’ for dinner. The clubhouse was no more than a cafe, a pool full of people and rooms people could meet in, staffed by a few people who acted like they were working at some exclusive provincial country club rather than a semi-abandoned building in the middle of nowhere. The food was passable but not spicy and there was more culinary variety in a Soviet cafe than here.

We wandered the deserted streets and tried to find something redeeming about the situation then went back to the house, unable to even buy a drink to obliterate reality.

In the light of dawn and after a good sleep Country Heights seemed even worse. There was nothing to do but wander the streets, gaze at the fields of brown grass and the placid lake and look forward to a forgettable lunch at ‘the clubhouse.’

That afternoon we went ‘the clubhouse’ so Liza could call her mother for her birthday. We had no change for the phone and despite much pleading were unable to get any. The full horror of our reality hit us and we ordered a cab to pick us up in twenty minutes and ran back to the house where we hastily flung our possessions in a bag and waited for the cab.

The bewildered attendant at ‘the clubhouse’ couldn’t understand why we’d want to leave such a slice of paradise as we handed him the key to the house after twenty four hours living in Stepford. Twenty four hours was twenty hours to long.