The Demon Drink

It’s closing time at the local pub, and the main street of Borroloola, 730 km southeast of Darwin, has erupted in a series of drunken brawls. Spilling from the beer garden, heavily intoxicated Aborigines hurl cans, stones and abuse (“F___ you, c___, I’ll kill you”) at each other. At the hostel across the road, guests watching the communal television barely flinch. “We are so used to it now,” says owner Trish Elmy, who sometimes puts up a barrier of water sprinklers to deter the mob from fighting near—or collapsing in—her property. “We know nothing gets done, so what can we do?” It’s a frustration expressed in equal measure by victims and legal authorities.Some locals call the drinking epidemic “green-can Dreaming,” a reference to the packaging of the popular Victoria Bitter beer and the paralytic state many indigenous drinkers attain. But this Dreaming long ago became a nightmare. Under its influence, many drinkers spend their entire welfare checks in the pub. And the damage they do—to property, to the spouses and children they beat or keep destitute, to the drinkers’ own bodies—is incalculable. Borroloola’s troubles with alcohol are shared by most Top End towns where the sale of alcohol is virtually unlimited. Authorities say they are working hard to remedy the problem, preparing alcohol-management plans, cracking down on liquor suppliers who break the law, and providing social services to help mitigate the damage. But if things in Borroloola are any guide, none of it is working.Despite constant pleas for government assistance from the town’s council, health clinic, businesses and residents, the epidemic of binge drinking and violence continues. Nearly every week, some 30 people, most of them Aboriginal, seek treatment at the town’s clinic for alcohol-related problems. Violent cases account for almost 9 in 10 after-hours admissions. Most common are injuries caused by stabbings, bashings and fist fights. To take just one example: last October mother of five Ruth Rory was beaten with a tree branch by her partner, Andrew Davey. He struck her with such ferocity that her leg was pulped and had to be amputated. She now hobbles around town on a prosthetic leg; Davey is serving four and a half years in jail.”All our people are dying through alcohol abuse,” says Fraser Baker, chairman of the Mabunji Aboriginal Resource Centre. “The drinkers spend nearly all their wages. There are families here whose kids are not going to school. We have to sort this out.” Borroloola Council ceo Jeff Colver agrees. “When the [Federal government] baby-bonus payments came through recently,” he says, “there was a massive stream of people wandering around clearly drunk, carting cartons of alcohol.”Police Superintendent Ian Lea, the local area commander, is also worried. In the Borroloola area, he says, “alcohol-related violence fuels long-running disputes, particularly in the indigenous community.”

Staff at the health clinic, and many other residents, say the town’s only hotel, the Borroloola Inn, feeds the mayhem by serving people who are obviously drunk. The operators say the unfair accusations have driven them to put the pub up for sale. “The hotel in any Aboriginal community is probably looked on as a monster,” says Christopher Taylor, the licensee’s husband. To limit the risk of problems, he says, closing time on Sundays has been brought forward to 7 p.m.

In these parts, some smaller communities have banned alcohol with varying success. But few people think that would work in Borroloola. For now, the aim is harm minimization. Since a general community meeting last March, the town has been trying to prepare an alcohol management plan. Money from the N.T. government has yet to reach the local council to pay the consultants needed to draw up a scheme; the demand for such social services in the Territory is so great that Borroloola is just another community in the queue.The Territory’s Darwin-based head of Racing, Gaming and Licensing, Elizabeth Morris, admits that some complaints about the Borroloola Inn were not investigated for months after a licensing inspector failed to forward e-mails. But she blames most delays on an unwieldy Liquor Act (which is to be rewritten at the end of the year) and Borroloola’s remoteness. “We have to charter a plane to get there,” she says. As for the convoluted process for dealing with complaints, “We do need to have a fair system,” she says.

Borroloola’s problems due to alcohol continue. Just last month an Aboriginal woman stabbed her elderly partner in the stomach with a bread knife during a drinking session at their home. Such incidents are as common in the Top End as the crunch of green aluminum cans underfoot, and the slowly decaying human beings who have discarded them.