Three bedrooms, 12 occupants, 10 years of waiting

ROBYN Wanambi is sick of talking.

ROBYN Wanambi is sick of talking.

Over the past year, a passing parade of bureaucrats has come to visit her three-bedroom house, home to 12 people, in the remote community of Yirrkala, in a seemingly endless round of consultations.

The consultants, project managers and government officers who have come knocking on her door ask questions about culturally appropriate housing and Aboriginal participation. Her answer is always the same: "I just want a house, please."

Ideally, Ms Wanambi would like a new home for her five children and three grandchildren. At the very least, her overcrowded house is in desperate need of renovation.

Yirrkala, in northeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, is a beautiful seaside community home to a proud Yolngu people. The town is earmarked as one of the Territory government's 15 "growth communities" and is one of 73 communities that are set to receive a chunk of the federal government's $672million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program funds.

Yet 15 months after the project was launched, no new houses are being built in Yirrkala, at least not for indigenous people. Up the road, new houses are under construction, under a different set of funding, for transient white health workers.

"I've been waiting more than 10 years for a new house," Ms Wanambi says. "I want to say to the government, you need to build the new houses.
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"But nothing is happening. We are upset. The Europeans, they always come here to talk about the houses and we go to a lot of meetings. Nothing happens. We are still living in this house."

Stuck on the walls of Ms Wanambi's bedroom, where six people sleep, are symbols of aspiration: awards given to her children at school, times tables, the outline of a human hand containing the words "Jesus loves me".

Sitting on top of a bar fridge in the bedroom are the bare essentials of life: a packet of Bushells, a box of Huggies, a packet of white sugar and a plastic bottle of Handy Andy. The walls of the bedroom are lined with childish graffiti.

The house might be best described as squalid, according to white sensibilities, but it is this set of generic possessions, these family photographs pinned to the wall, of weddings and days at the beach, that contain a sense of pathos at the way lives carry on happily, despite terrible governmental neglect.

There is a growing anger building in Aboriginal Australia. It is a feeling of having been duped. For two years, indigenous people have copped welfare quarantining, intense scrutiny over child neglect and sexual abuse, and the myriad other upheavals brought by the federal intervention into remote NT communities.

Many protested loudly, but many kept the faith, with the federal government's promise of better housing the main motivator. Now, two years on, housing is failing to materialise and Aboriginal leaders are seeing their worst fears play out, yet again. The money that is so desperately needed for housing is not being spent on the ground, but is going into the pockets of bureaucrats and the coffers of the Territory government.

Alison Anderson, the indigenous policy minister who quit the Territory Labor government on Tuesday, is so concerned at the progress of the SIHIP, and her former cabinet colleagues' seeming indifference to it, that she is willing to bring down the Labor administration over the issue.

And her protest has a bitter and disturbing edge: she has clearly claimed that it is not just mismanagement and apathy that drive the continual failure of the NT regime on indigenous issues, but institutional racism.