Inside the lawless desert town run by a gang of pitiless angry teens
Inside SA’s lawless town with smashed windows, council buildings covered in cobwebs and elders terrorised by an armed youth gang.
Police & Courts
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Davenport sits in an idyllic part of South Australia, nestled between the Flinders Ranges and the ocean.
But when the Sunday Mail visited, we found a crumbling anarchy held to siege by a gang of thin and lost but ruthless youths.
Davenport has a population of 156 and is 4km north west of Port Augusta and 312km from Adelaide.
On arrival, the photographer I was working with and I parked the car at the abandoned council offices and walked to find elder Malcolm “Tiger” McKenzie at his immaculately-kept house.
These lands, he said, are becoming lawless. Tiger said the council had told him it was “too dangerous to remain in town”, police were not feared, “service providers are nowhere to be seen” and there was a gang of half a dozen emaciated kids aged between eight and 14, not attending school who paced the streets with scissors, piping and screwdrivers.
Tiger’s wife Dorothy placed a hot cup of coffee on my armrest. “The kids smash our windows, our Christmas lights. Pull out the electricity box in the middle of the night and they recently found a way into the house – while we were still home,” she said.
After a few minutes with the McKenzies, the photographer went to check on the car. She walked out of the house to find kids had effortlessly broken into the car and stolen her own personal camera equipment, worth just over $35,000 as well as some personal, “irreplaceable items”.
We rang the police in Port Augusta who told us they were too overwhelmed with crime to attend Davenport straight away for a theft but as it turned out they were already on their way to deal with another crime.
On her way back to town to make a statement, the photographer saw two female youths walking down a Davenport street holding “some kind of severed pipes as weapons” walking hurriedly down the street, with a panicked onlooker banging on a door begging an adult male – “uncle, uncle, come out”.
An AirTag left in the photographer’s bag located a house at the opposite end of town with her goods. Police said it would take hours before they had resources to get a detective there.
We knew where it was and had to fight the urge to go and beg for it.
The photographer began the angsty wait to see whether she would get her stuff back.
I knocked on the door of Tiger’s brother’s house, just a few doors away. His name is Alwyn.
He said his family locked all doors all the time, even when they took out the rubbish.
Alwyn said the doctor told him his blood pressure was up.
“I just feel so debilitated, so hopeless” he said softly.
Alwyn said things were not always like that. There used to be two dozen kids on the bus to school everyday, the last few years it’s down two or three.
“Those kids not going to school, not at all, not ever” he said “They are also very thin.”
Alwyn says that he was recently at a 72-year-old woman’s house around the corner with his granddaughter when she had finished a session of dialysis. They heard rocks being thrown on the roof and saw children aged between 8 and 11 outside yelling and demanding money.
“They said ‘give us money or we will rape you and then cut your throat’,” he said.
I stayed put. Took a walk. The auburn soils in the windblown desert plains glistened with chocolate wrappers and broken alcohol bottles. I walked past dumped mattresses rotting in the sun, a disused unshaded playground with its fallen basketball ring, past a free roaming pit bull with its back hair raised. It began to growl when I got within sniffing distance.
I went to see the 72-year-old frail and partially blind woman, who didn’t want to be named.
“Something has gone wrong with these kids, but I really for the life of me don’t know what,” she said.
It’s a similar story at the nursing home, a beautiful facility with lush gardens.
“We had the kids break into residents’ rooms twice in the last few weeks,” a staff member, who didn’t want to be named, said.
“How are they getting in?” I asked.
“I have no idea” she said “But I can tell you this – they are doing this in the middle of the day, these kids are never at school.”
The photographer called to tell me police say they are at the property where the AirTag was sending alerts but the residents there say they don’t know anything about the stolen equipment and refuse to give anything back.
Next, I took a walk to the “youth engagement centre” run by Davenport Community Council; it’s long been abandoned; half the security door is broken off and the rest is covered in cobwebs, a stray cat glanced out from a broken window frame.
National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) funding records show it gave Davenport Community Council $1m in September 2021 to run a youth program through to December 2024 to deliver “Strategic activities that focus on getting children to school and improving education outcomes”.
Davenport Community Council is currently under liquidation and the subject of a Corporate Affairs Commission legal action in the SA Supreme Court.
Tiger told me he ran the council’s youth engagement centre up until 2012 but it nor the council’s chambers had been opened at all for years.
At one time, he said the engagement centre was open every day after school.
“We ran a Friday night disco. We went out and got kangaroos and wombats. We had an annual camp. I took the kids to Darwin and to Parliament House in Canberra,” Tiger said.
The photographer called. She said the police had recovered her camera equipment but it had all been destroyed, smashed to pieces.
“I don’t understand” she said “They didn’t even try to sell it, and they didn’t just destroy it – they completely obliterated it,” she said.
Her “irreplaceable personal items” had not been returned.
We drive past the house where some of the stolen goods were located.
A boy on a steel scooter aged no older than 10, perhaps eight, signals to us near the front garden. Beside him is a girl of about five.
He wanted to speak. I wound down the window.
“Don’t come film this house, don’t take photos, don’t come near here or I’ll get the scooter and I’ll smash it . . . in your face”.
They began throwing rocks and ran off after I opened the car door. Two girls emerged from the house, they started throwing rocks at the car too and the young boy was telling us he was going to cut us up. An adult woman was in their front yard during the whole encounter, she looked hopeless, embarrassed, she actually went and hid behind the tin fence, bewildered by the whole incident.
The photographer headed back to the police station. I began walking back to Port Augusta amid the corella calls in the falling dusk.
An expensive four wheel drive car full of adults stopped, a woman in the passenger wound down the window.
“All those people who you’ve been talking to - they are trying to destroy Davenport. They are lying. They shouldn’t be talking to you. What happens in Davenport stays in Davenport,” she said.
In a statement to the Sunday Mail, a spokesman from SA Attorney-General’s Department said: “The Corporate Affairs Commission recently filed proceedings to wind up Davenport Community Council Inc as an incorporated association as a result of breaches of the Associations Incorporation Act.”
Davenport Community Council did not respond to the Sunday Mail’s requests for comment.
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