In the nation’s red heart, a Vietnam vet cracks a beer, an emblem of freedom fizzing on his table like a trophy. But there is little to toast in Alice Springs, a town in crisis, once again thrust into the national conversation.
Geoff Shaw cracked his first especially for this interview – a statement of sorts from an Aboriginal man born by the dry Todd River who rose to command men.
“I’ve had a number of visits from my soldier mates and their wives, they’d travel from around Australia to come here,” Shaw says from the porch of his Mount Nancy camp home on the north side of town.“I said, ‘Hey, they got legislation here, you’d be charged with bringing a six-pack and supplying me with beer’. Most of the time I’d meet with them in town to reminisce. They were pissed off. They said, ‘Christ, you were our commander’.
But the freedoms in Alice Springs come with a cost. Grog flowing into town camps has been blamed for soaring crime, up between 40 and 60 per cent in categories such as break-ins, domestic violence and assaults.“It was pretty bad three years ago, but now it’s just crazy,” says service station worker Frank Brook, a lifelong Alice local. “The last year it’s been increasing, just the volume of it.”
Another cohort, often coaxed by disillusioned and unemployed young men, according to locals, is determined to cause chaos. The trip was brief, only an afternoon, but released a valve on the persistent calls from the opposition which, when it held government, did little in response to a less-publicised letter from Paterson in January last year titled “An urgent plea from a town at crisis point”.
He was also a Territory Labor politician, until he quit the party in 2019 over frustrations about the government’s remote policies. “Walking into the supermarket for my own alcohol,” he says, recalling when the police, stationed outside the bottle shops to check addresses, let him inside unimpeded. “What that feeling was like.”
January is a busy time any year, but this one was supercharged, they say. Many had come to town for medical appointments. Others were escaping communities running low on food or in danger of being cut off by summer rain. The end of tough COVID restrictions added to a festive rejuvenation experienced in most Australian cities and towns.
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