‘Hard, hard’ reality of life for camp kids in Alice Springs

In her life after politics, Bess Nungarrayi Price works with camp kids who have become central to the national debate over chaos in Alice Springs.

Assistant principal at the independent Yipirinya School in Alice Springs, Bess Nungarrayi Price, with students Kalisha Charles, left, and Martina Rubuntja. Picture: Liam Mendes

In her life after politics, Bess Nungarrayi Price works with camp kids who have become central to the national debate over chaos in Alice Springs.

She is candid about their lives. The Walpiri grandmother says the camps where children live on the outskirts of town have become “dumps” despite 40 years of government funding. She believes that what many of the children contend with at home would astound most Australians.

“These students, they come from a hard, hard lifestyle situation. Some of them barely have a good night’s sleep and (there is) everything else that happens within those town camps,” she said.

She says alcohol – and the business of obtaining it – consumes the camps’ big drinkers. They will obtain it by legal or illegal means.

“People drink every day and they’re drunk by six o’clock in the morning,” she said.

“There’s fights, there’s fist fights that break out. There’s ­people who are drinking every day who are so noisy, belligerent.

“There’s all this sly grog being sold.”

Ms Price, a former minister in the Northern Territory government and now assistant principal at the independent Yipirinya School in Alice Springs, does not believe an Indigenous voice can fix any of this.

She wants the Aboriginal people of Alice Springs to take their rightful place and begin to sort out lawlessness that she says has been three or four years in the making.

“What I would really like to see is the traditional owners – the traditional owners who’s first language is Arrernte – speak up and take control of this town of Alice Springs,” she said.

“I want to see them stand up and take control. In Aboriginal culture, they have the authority.”

Ms Price spoke to The Australian as she prepared to receive an Australia Day honour for her service to the NT parliament and Indigenous people.

She was a schoolteacher in her home community of Yuendumu – 300km northwest of Alice Springs – when she met her husband, Dave, a non-Indigenous man, in 1979. The couple moved to Alice Springs in 1983.

Ms Price was the inaugural chair of the Indigenous Affairs Advisory Council for the NT government before she was elected to the NT’s legislative assembly in 2012. She was a minister in the NT government in 2014 when her sister Rosalie was murdered in Katherine. Breaking with Walpiri tradition, she asked media to use Rosa­lie’s name so she would be remembered as a person not a statistic.

She was a vocal advocate for community safety initiatives as a politician and since. “It was always my belief that I was elected by the constituents in my electorate and I was there as their member to fight for them to be able to deliver what was needed out in the communities,” she said.

Asked about the crisis engulfing Alice Springs, Ms Price described wretched and itinerant alcoholics in and around the town who devote their time to circumventing the NT’s bottleshop rules. Until last July, this included a requirement that anyone purchasing takeaway alcohol must have proof of an address. Drinkers would “go looking for someone who has an address, so they can hound that family member to buy them alcohol”.

Now the only requirement is photo identification to prove the purchaser is not on the NT government’s banned drinkers list, so banned drinkers look for an unbanned relative or friend who can buy for them.

“They think ‘OK, it’s going be two o’clock (the opening time for bottleshops before temporary restrictions announced on Tuesday delayed opening times until 3pm) so we need to get enough money, find someone with a car ... and it’s just like open slather.

“They’re in there with their 30 packs, Jim Beam, Bundaberg rum, and it’s sad.”

In recent years Ms Price worked on a night patrol in Alice Springs: she and other Aboriginal people spoke to children roaming the town between 6pm and 2am and took them home before dayshift workers returned for frank discussions with the children’s parents or carers. She was dis­appointed when the program was discontinued.

“We could see the difference we made because the patrol was by Aboriginal people who spoke maybe six different languages, who could communicate to these kids in their own language, and help them understand that they should not be out,” Ms Price said.

“The parents and carers and grandmothers – and whoever was in charge of these kids – they were surprised when we knocked on their door and said ‘Do you know that this kid has been out until twelve o’clock or two o’clock?’

“They usually would’ve been told ‘I’m going to stay with my cousin and I’ll see you tomorrow’. Little did they know they were hanging out in the streets of Alice Springs until the wee hours.”

Ms Price does not trust that an Indigenous voice to parliament would reinstate the night patrol or result in effective policy in Alice Springs. Despite a commitment from the Albanese government’s referendum working group that the voice would be representative of communities across Australia, she believes it would ultimately be another Canberra body.

“I don’t trust these people to get it right,” she said.

Ms Price said her daughter, Country Liberal Party senator Jacinta Price, was an example of a voice that truly represented her community.

“She’s a voice. And we have 11 Aboriginal members of parliament down in Canberra who are the voice who’ve been elected,” she said.

“Why can’t we just work with the 11 that we have now? Build them, and build the trust around them, and allow them to work with their constituents, work with their Aboriginal people out in their states, and become the representatives who will then be a voice for their electorates.

“In the Northern Territory, we have our local councils, we have committees, women’s committees, childcare committees, education committees. They’re all voices for us.

“This voice is just going to be another body that’s just going to sit and do nothing in Canberra.”

At Yipirinya School, Ms Price feels protective of the most vulnerable students in her care.

“I want to make sure that none of this, none of the abuse, happens to these children. I want to make sure that we give them a safe environment at the school, where they can come and know that they have the love and the kindness that’s not there for them at home,” she said.

“The students that we deal with, they go through a lot and if I can just give them a hug and tell them ‘I love you, have a nice day’ and see them off to their town camps every afternoon after school and give them a smile on their faces, I will be happy.

“And for them to give me a hug when they see me next time, just tells me that I’ve done something small.”