By Zach Hope

Vietnam veteran, Geoff Shaw, 77, at his home in the Mount Nancy town camp in Alice Springs.Credit:Kate Geraghty

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.

In the jungles of Vietnam, down the deep gullies and on napalm-fried ridges, he lost three comrades barely an arm’s length away. He has his medals, including an Order of Australia, and his demons.

No one could say he hadn’t earned it, this small emblem of freedom fizzing half-full on his outside table like a trophy.

Geoff Shaw with his wife Eileen Hoosan at their home in the Mount Nancy town camp.Credit:Kate Geraghty

Until recently, it had been illegal for Shaw to drink a beer at his Alice Springs home since 2007, when the Howard government rolled troops and bureaucrats into the Northern Territory in response to the Little Children are Sacred report, which documented cases of Aboriginal child abuse and neglect.

Along with remote communities, Alice Springs’ 18 town camps – small collections of ramshackle homes with histories of dysfunction and pride – fell under the purview of restrictive laws applied like a blanket across majority-Aboriginal country, regardless of circumstance or record.

“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’.

“It was embarrassing for me. I was in charge of them.”

One time, Shaw says he called police to report domestic violence in the nearby riverbed. He had just started on a six-pack, smuggled into Mount Nancy from family or friends. When the police arrived, he says they tipped out his open can and took the rest.

“They said, ‘you can f— off back to the RSL’ and similar words. There were men and women still fighting – and they were more worried about my six-pack.”

The Emergency Response, as it was officially called, became known as “the Intervention” – a saving grace or damaging violation, depending on who you’re speaking to.

The restrictions continued in the form of the Gillard-era Stronger Futures laws, until they lapsed without replacement in July last year. Now, the only booze rule Shaw had to follow was from Eileen, his wife of 42 years: No beer inside.

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.”

On Sunday night, he says, young people emptied the fire extinguishers and ripped a fuel pump from the bowser.

The week before, the town’s Woolworths was forced to shut down after a 13-year-old boy came in wielding a machete. Another local tells this masthead he witnessed three assaults on Aboriginal women during a 20-minute bike ride by the Todd River.

A group of people of mixed ages in the central business area of Alice Springs.Credit:Kate Geraghty

At night, Aboriginal children – relieving boredom, escaping home life or peer pressure – fan through the streets of boarded-up windows and razor wire fences in their hundreds, most of them friendly: young people doing what young people do. Some just want Wi-Fi.

Another cohort, often coaxed by disillusioned and unemployed young men, according to locals, is determined to cause chaos.

Mayor Matt Paterson this month pleaded for the Commonwealth to help. The confluence of raging debates about the date of Australia Day and the impending referendum for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament once again injected Alice Springs, an iconic desert town long saddled with the complex manifestations of inequality, into the national conversation.

“This is my third visit to the Northern Territory as prime minister. I intended to come to Alice Springs in December, but COVID got in the way.”

The first words from Anthony Albanese at his Alice Springs press conference on Tuesday, surrounded by a retinue of overheated federal and Territory Labor politicians, may offer insight into the pressures felt within his office to show his face.

This crisis, he seemed to want people to know, was not his “I don’t hold a hose” moment. Here he was in the Territory, again, and would have been sooner.

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”.

The meetings with Territory Labor ministers and town leaders this week, said to be respectful despite differences of opinion in the room, produced stopgap responses. There would be no reimposition of the alcohol bans, as called for by the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, but a snap review, a smattering of money and new booze restrictions.

Bottle shop trading hours were to be reduced and customers limited to one transaction a day. Most significantly, no takeaway alcohol could be sold on Mondays and Tuesdays, a return to the “Thirsty Thursdays” policy (the day welfare payments usually arrived) deployed with mixed results in Tennant Creek for more than a decade to 2006.

The changes would apply to everyone in Alice Springs, in keeping with Chief Minister Natasha Fyles’ position of removing “race-based” alcohol policies. She has proposed a vote run by the NT Electoral Commission asking each town camp adult if their community should once again be dry.

But this was no lasting solution to entrenched, multi-generational issues, according to Scott McConnell, a white man with deep connections through the desert, and who advocates for creating remote jobs and lifting appalling school attendance.

He was also a Territory Labor politician, until he quit the party in 2019 over frustrations about the government’s remote policies.

“Of course ministers have to go and go to these meetings and present these things,” he says. “But what are we doing on the ground?

“People are getting pushed to the margins, and we know what happens when people get pushed to the margins.

“You can’t have large towns that have effective unemployment rates of north of 90 per cent. It’s just not tenable. We must work on the participatory economy.”

Should there be a vote on town camp alcohol policy, it would not be hard to predict where Shaw’s might land.

“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.”

Kiri McKay, 23, and her brother Paumea McKay, 32, driving the Tangentyere bus which provides safe passage home for people in the city and town camps.Credit:Kate Geraghty

Shaw and locals say much of Alice Springs’ alcohol-related harms stem from kin coming to town from remote communities, many of which remain restricted areas under NT legislation or elders’ wishes.

Their reasons for travel are numerous. Access to alcohol is but one, according to the young, mostly Arrernte, staff of the Tangentyere Council night patrol.

The minivans run nightly in Alice Springs, usually shuttling between 50 and 80 people home to town camps or wherever else they may be staying.

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.

“One carload came in all the way from Lajamanu, 900 kilometres away, just to get KFC,” a Tangentyere youth worker says.

There was money from mining royalties in Alice, too, and more drunk adults. In response, the banks and authorities agreed to turn ATMs off overnight.

This masthead rode along for about two hours this week and met a sample of clients: a family from Papunya, 250 kilometres away, visiting Alice to have the cast removed from a child’s broken arm; a grandmother aged just 36 from Hermannsburg, 130 kilometres away, here because of a daughter’s heart problems and the fact most of her close family from home were dead.

At one of the stops, a softly-spoken middle-aged woman gets onto the bus concerned for her safety.

“It’s getting worse,” she says in broken English, adding the young people were throwing rocks at people sleeping rough.

Just tonight? “All the times.”

At one of the town camps, a woman rushes to the door asking to be taken somewhere else because she is feuding with family. The reason, she says, is “I accidentally stabbed my partner in the stomach” last week.

The situation is defused and she remains. The bus is for taking people home, not out.

Patrick ‘Froggy’ Nandy stands at the entrance to his home at the Hidden Valley town camp.Credit:Kate Geraghty

Before the start of the Tangentyere bus shift, staff swing through Hidden Valley camp to see elder Patrick “Froggy” Nandy, a mad Collingwood supporter (“Can’t you see I’m black and white all over?“).

“The kids,” he says, “They’re giving this town a bad name.”

Paterson, the mayor, emerges from his meeting with the PM and other politicians on Tuesday unsatisfied and frustrated.

Unsatisfied because he believes the new rules are not enough. Frustrated because he has left one of the most important council meetings of his tenure only to be made to wait on the outside steps for almost two hours after his scheduled allotment.

Shaw, too, was supposed to speak with his son Walter, the chief executive of Tangentyere Council, alongside Albanese. Left too long in the baking desert heat, they walk away without a meeting, only learning later of the prime minister’s pledge of $2 million for the powerful Aboriginal organisation’s domestic violence services.

The impositions announced on Tuesday receive mixed responses. Logic suggests less alcohol would mean less crime and antisocial behaviour.

But questions remain about what it would mean for the “sly grog” racket, in which two cans of mixed spirits sell for $50 and a bottle of rum for upwards of $200. There are also concerns about whether people with chronic alcohol addiction would be even more emboldened to break into homes or businesses in search of booze.

McConnell says there have been decades of government waste. It is in the halls of parliaments, he adds, that true intervention is required.

“We’ve [just had] Australia Day, often called Sorry Day here. I would ask, are we sorry for what happened in the past, or are we sorry for what we’re doing to the future?”

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