Australian correspondence is the weekly newsletter from our Australian bureau. This week’s issue is written by Northern Territory journalist Julia Bergin.
Driving across central Australia can be a battle with dust, floods, fires, collapsed roads and internet failures. When the cargo is food, even minor setbacks can have serious repercussions.
The Australian government established the remote Rajamanu Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory in 1949.
Today, the population of Rajamanu is approximately 800. The store is supplied weekly (sometimes every two weeks) by truck drivers who must contend with the region’s harsh conditions and dangerous infrastructure.
Record rainfall, storms and flooding in the first months of this year cut off the only road to Rajamanu. Regular deliveries stopped and stocks of food, water, medicine and other essentials began to dwindle. Warlpiri man Andrew Johnson, a Lajamanu elder, said the community was suffering, especially from a lack of food.
“No power, no energy,” he said.
According to government policy, stores should be prepared for such an outcome given the predictability of the annual rainy season. Residents and vendors have repeatedly called on the Northern Territory Government to declare a state of emergency as the situation gets worse.
“The silence is deafening,” said Alastair King, director of Arnhem Land Advance Aboriginal Corporation (ALPA), a not-for-profit organization that operates Lajamanu stores and other stores 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 they weren’t declaring an emergency.”
So ALPA organized special trucks and daily small charter flights to deliver supplies. In the end, it took several months — and cost more than $350,000 Australian, or about $232,000 — but the shelves at Lajamanu’s store are nearly empty.
“I thought the big military aircraft, the Hercules, would be bringing all the food, but all I saw was single-engine charter planes landing back and forth, little by little,” Mr. Johnson said. “It’s not enough. It’s not being treated as an emergency and being taken seriously.
Similar situations occurred in the remote Aboriginal community of Minyerri (also known as Hodgson Downs), about 500 miles away, and Borroloola, another Aboriginal community 750 miles away. Both communities were also cut off by flooding.
In Borrolula, food stocks are dwindling, there is panic buying, cash withdrawals are restricted and there is no phone service or internet coverage to pay by credit card. In late March, months after the first distress call was sent, the army was sent to help evacuate Borroola residents. The Northern Land Council, which represents the region’s Aboriginal people, said the federal and Northern Territory governments’ response to the disaster was “appalling”.
In most remote Aboriginal communities, a self-sufficient supply model is the norm. It is the product of decades of interventionist policies that forced people from their traditional homelands. Now, whenever food security is threatened by supply chain issues, locals are forced to turn to the government for help.
In Rajamanu, three months after regular truck deliveries stopped, an ALPA employee told the territorial government in an email that the community was in a “very critical” situation. No eggs, shelf-stable milk, frozen meat or toilet paper.
A NT Government spokesman said a “food security plan” came into effect at the end of March, two days after receiving the email from ALPA staff, and included government-funded daily charter flights to deliver supplies until roads were available again.
Mr King said the government only started paying for the flights following a personal appeal to Northern Territory Attorney-General Chansey Paech. Page declined to comment.
Mr Kim said the root cause of the crisis was the government’s failure to ensure roads could withstand the rainy season. Pointing to photos of muddy, collapsed and completely flooded roads, Mr King said hundreds of people were trapped and starving as a result.
“If this isn’t an emergency, what is?” he said.
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