Grim Realities Of The Outback Bermuda Triangle
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday September 29, 2003
Services taken for granted in the cities of Australia are a mirage to the people of Cobar, where women make a 300-kilometre dash to Dubbo to have their babies delivered.
The psychologist left last year, there is no mental health worker and local Aborigines encounter government bureaucracy when they try to use the Aboriginal dental service at Bourke, 160 kilometres away.
Four feisty Aboriginal women last week told the federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, of the reality of life in a town of 4000 people with few services.
Women black and white fear the miners' down time, when the men have four weeks off and head to the pubs to spend their hard-earned cash.
There are no refuges in Cobar, and if a woman is bashed by her husband, she is ``shipped off" to a Dubbo refuge, leaving behind all family support. In some parts of the Murdi Paaki region, domestic violence accounts for more than 60 per cent of the crime rate.
Six per cent of the town's population is indigenous, the same percentage as the unemployment rate for white residents. The jobless rate among Aborigines is 26 per cent.
``Cobar is the Bermuda Triangle," one woman told Dr Nelson, because it was on the border of area health services.
``We rely heavily on the ministers of religion here because they have counselling skills," another woman said.
It is just such problems which are different in each town that the joint project between the federal and state governments is trying to tackle. Some can be solved by better communication between state and federal agencies; others require long-term plans.
Dr Nelson said that in some towns children were not going to bed until 3am because their parents were in pubs drinking or playing poker machines. When they arrived at school they were hungry and sleep-deprived.
``There is a sense of aimlessness and all the manifestations of societal disengagement," he said.
Shane Williams, the Indigenous Education Leader for the federal Education Department, is co-ordinating the six trials across Australia. He cautions that results will take time probably many years but the starting point is ``letting their voices be heard".
``They want access to services, No. 1, and they want the knowledge of where those services are," he said.
© 2003 Sydney Morning Herald