What to do when river town of Murray Bridge turns to ice

How does a town respond after it’s been labelled the meth capital of Australia? Police in Murray Bridge ‘turned over a rock’ and were sickened by what they found.

Murray Bridge Police Station’s Superintendent James Blandford. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

How does a town respond after it’s been labelled the meth capital of Australia? Three years ago this unwelcome title was bestowed upon Murray Bridge, the South Australian river town once known only for houseboat holidays and paddle steamers.

A woman was bludgeoned to death by a drug-addled man who attacked her with a concrete ­statue, then dumped her body in a wheelie bin. The woman’s life had spun off the rails as she succumbed to methamphetamine and fell in with a bad crowd. In the ensuing investigation into her 2018 murder at her Murray Bridge home, more than 100 homes were raided in this town of just 20,000, with police sickened and amazed by what they found.

Children living in total squalor in drug houses, their parents and even grandparents consuming, making and selling methamphetamine. The town acquired a reputation for violence. In a memorable low point, one of the townsfolk, a 68-year-old woman, was chased down the street by an addict holding a live chainsaw after refusing a request for change.

Mildura, Shepparton, Mount Gambier, the NSW central coast, Logan — many cities have been ­afflicted by their meth moment, but in 2018 Murray Bridge was crowned worst of all, and to this day is regarded as the most meth-affected in Australia.

The head of South Australia Police’s Serious and Organised Crime Branch, Detective Superintendent Steve Taylor, is a realist who admits the state has a particularly acute problem when it comes to meth. “We are talking here about a drug that takes perfectly normal people and turns them into monsters overnight,” he says.

Murray Bridge superintendent James Blandford likens the raids on those 100 homes to turning over a rock. “We were stunned by what we found. It was sickening. But we set about to fix it.”

The raids focused on the southern side of Murray Bridge in the Swanport area, where houses are currently listed from $115,000, where the local shopping centre is abandoned, and where several houses have five, six or seven old cars in the front yard, the residents tinkering on 1990s-era Commodores and Falcons to make a quid.

‘Set the rats running’

Lifelong Murray Bridge resident and mayor Brenton Lewis lowers his voice as he remembers 54-year-old mother of three Sally Rothe. “She was a nice kid,” Lewis says. “I remember her as a young girl. Sally was a local girl who fell on bad times and was known to be involved with that culture. The circumstances around her death were horrible and a lot of comments were made about Murray Bridge that were very negative. It hit the community pretty hard.

“Our community is a proud community. It knocked a lot of people around. I took it pretty personally. But an incident like that happens and everything else follows. It was just a bad time.”

In the immediate aftermath of Rothe’s death, for which her killer Travis Kirchner was jailed for life, Murray Bridge police sent an SOS to Adelaide. With back-up from the city’s drug squad, they launched a series of raids without precedent in an SA country town.

Lewis says Murray Bridge had never seen anything like it.

“It was an absolutely bloody meltdown,” he says. “There were 160, 170 convictions in about five days. They had the rats running everywhere. They were always there, though. They just flushed them out.”

Three years ago, Murray Bridge was dubbed the meth capital of Australia. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

As the raids unfolded amid the search for Kirchner, Murray Bridge became the subject of some garish fly-in, fly-out journalism which upsets the town to this day. Reporters from tabloid TV shows and news websites descended, ­declared it a hell hole, and the caravan then moved on, leaving the people of Murray Bridge to wonder what to do next.

“As someone who lives here I just found it all very sad,” 34-year-old Pia Young said.

“In a town like this we are all just two degrees of separation from the person who died. Her family still live here. The way people spoke about the town was vastly unfair and hurtful. It was insensitive. I wasn’t surprised that it happened, though. I am under no illusions.”

On the frontline

Young is probably the best equipped person in Murray Bridge to talk to about the ordeal the town suffered over the past few years and the manner in which it has responded.

She is originally from Adelaide but she and her partner have made Murray Bridge their home for the past eight years with their two children. She is a community engagement leader with the youth mental health foundation Headspace, and has been pivotal in implementing a program known as Planet Youth, originally developed in Iceland and which was rolled out in Murray Bridge last year.

Pia Young of Head Space. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

The initiative is overseen by the Alcohol and Drug Foundation through what’s known as the LDAT program where Local Drug Area Teams work with schools, health professionals, police, councils and youth groups to identify and address alcohol and drug problems.

Planet Youth has had huge success in Iceland in reversing that country’s previously record high level of teen alcohol and drug abuse. In the 20 years from its ­inception in 1998, teen alcohol and drug consumption plummeted, with the number of Icelandic Year 10 students who had been drunk in the previous 30 days dropping from 42 per cent to 5 per cent, and the number who had tried cannabis more than once falling from 17 per cent to 6 per cent.

Finding out the facts

With commonwealth support, the scheme was rolled out last year in Murray Bridge and nine other Australian locations, almost all of them regional. One of the things that is making Planet Youth work is that everyone in Murray Bridge wants it to work. When The Weekend Australian spoke to the police and council, the first thing they said was: you have to talk to the people at Planet Youth.

Young explains that one of the best features of Planet Youth is that rather than having solutions brought in from outside, it is framed around making local people responsible for devising them.

The starting point for the program was a survey of Year 10 students across the town’s schools which went to alcohol and drug habits, their family environment, and recreational and sporting interests.

“I know that ‘meth capital’ makes a good headline but the ­reality was that the survey found that the main problem for these young people here is alcohol abuse,” Young says. “I was expecting other drugs like cannabis to be higher, but far and away alcohol was the worst. Meth was there, but only in very small amounts.

“The reason for amassing all this data was to give us a sense of what young people were doing, but also to give that data back to them, to their individual school communities, so they could work out what they wanted to do. The key thing we are aiming for is prevention. The issue is not so much the drug, it’s the initiation point, be it for alcohol as it usually is, or any other drug. If you can put that initiation point off for as long as possible, all the data says that the later you start anything, the better you will be. And hopefully there are things you won’t start at all.”

Making the right call

The alcohol and drug data has been overlaid with responses about how young people live, relax, and entertain themselves — and as the Icelandic study showed, one of the key problems in Murray Bridge came down to boredom and a lack of supervision.

“In a town like Murray Bridge we always assumed we are on the river and we love our footy and so on, but the survey found that only 15 to 20 per cent of people were ­involved in any kind of sporting activity,” Young says.

“So the second part of the challenge has been to work with the different community groups on preventative strategies around ­activities. And it’s not just as simple as saying join the local footy club, as that only works when the club culture is good.”

One of the key problems in Murray Bridge came down to boredom and a lack of supervision. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

The long-term goal of the program is to build up a new generation of young people who make good choices and that their life­styles become the norm.

Lewis is in his second term and one of his first steps after his election in 2014 was to set up the Bridge Safe Task Force, an anti-crime program that now works with Planet Youth and the ADF’s Local Drug Area Team.

The task force receives regular updates from schools, police, housing, child protection and the ambulance service about the town’s performance.

Lewis says the data is heartening but the town isn’t out of the woods. He also says that while the focus on youth is essential, he fears Murray Bridge, like the rest of Australia, still has a problem with older drug users who cannot be reached.

“I would like to say, hand on heart, that we have definitely turned a corner, but I am not able to support a comment like that yet,” he says. “I do believe we are making headway. The good that came from all the negative attention was that a lot of people stood up and said we are not going to stand for it any more.

“The focus needs to be on youth because there is a chance to make them all aware of the downside of drug taking. If you are 35 and you’re on ice, frankly, the best you can hope for is that you might want to get some help and get off your addiction and make it to the other end. But someone aged 15, 16, 17 … if they are given good support and you make them think ‘Do I really want this to happen to me?’, then that’s why education is so important.”

Telling it as it is

On the main street of Murray Bridge, you get the sense people want to say things have improved, but keep seeing or hearing things that make them unsure.

There has been another murder since Rothe died — Oliver Todd, 47, was hacked to death in December 2019 with a tomahawk and his body left at the dump downriver in Jervois. Four men are awaiting trial. Only this week, a man presented with stab wounds to his legs at Murray Bridge Hospital, and two locals, brother and sister Steavan and Donna Polk were sentenced to two years’ jail for dealing meth.

In a commendably blunt statement for a police officer, Superintendent Blandford says much of the problem in Murray Bridge is no different to the rest of regional Australia — limited attention and insufficient resources from city-based governments. “The fact that so many people in such a wealthy and free country can be living so poorly is an absolute disgrace,” he says. “It should shame us all that these people are not living to a standard that we would expect.

“I am a vocal supporter of regional Australia that really does not get its fair share of focus and support outside the metro bubbles of capital cities. We are a very metrocentric state. And it is just not on to declare us, or anywhere else, as a meth capital. It’s not a contest. Meth does not define Murray Bridge as a community.”