WADEYE, Australia – Along the dusty red road that leads from the lonely airstrip into town, the signs flash by: "No alcohol," says one. "Petrol sniffing kills," admonishes another. "Don't bring gunja into our town," warns a third.
And then, one more: "Welcome to Wadeye. Give every Aboriginal kid a chance."
Up the road, a dozen people slump across the porch of a tiny, graffiti-stained house. Inside, a ceiling fan loses a battle with the rancid smell of the garbage and feces that litter the bathroom floor. Palm-sized cockroaches skitter across the shower, and the two bedrooms are crammed with tattered mattresses where some of the home's 18 residents sleep.
This town of 2,500 is the largest Aboriginal community in Australia's remote north, so isolated that it can only be reached by air for half the year when monsoonal rains flood the main road. For years, Wadeye was a drugged-up, crime-ridden wasteland and a painful reminder of Australia's tortured relationship with its oldest inhabitants — a relationship it has tried to both fix and forget.
Now this battered town is in the middle of Australia's latest attempt at a fix: a tough set of policies known as The Intervention. In the past two years, the government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Aboriginal communities across the Northern Territory — and forced upon them strict new rules. Residents are now required to spend half their welfare checks on family essentials like food. Welfare payments are suspended if parents in some settlements don't send their kids to school. Pornography and alcohol are banned — although in Wadeye, many white people are allowed to drink in their homes.
But what is pitched as tough love has a downside. A 2008 government review of the intervention found feelings of betrayal and resistance. Many Aborigines complained of "intense hurt and anger at being isolated on the basis of race and subjected to collective measures that would never be applied to other Australians."
So is tough love enough? Or is it doomed, like past approaches, to fail — condemning Aborigines to a third-world life in a first-world nation?
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Walter Kerinaiua leans against the porch railing of a newly-built, four-bedroom house, where the buttercup-yellow walls still smell of fresh paint and the linoleum floors shine bright. It sure beats his sister-in-law's rusted, steel-sided home a few streets over, where possums, rats and deadly snakes creep through the missing windows after dark.
Kerinaiua is an Aboriginal leader in Nguiu, about 300 miles 500 kilometers northeast of Wadeye. He's thrilled with the 25 new homes built in his community, but he still struggles to describe his feelings about the intervention. Finally, with a sigh, he settles on one word: "Frustrating."
The new rules were confusing at first. Eventually, Kerinaiua says, most residents warmed to the program, understanding it was meant to help.
But how and whether to help Aborigines has been a loaded issue since the first white settlers came to Australia in 1788. British colonists brought diseases that wiped out vast numbers of Aborigines; and those who survived were driven off the land they had lived on for generations.
For much of the 20th century — through the 1970s — the country forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their families, creating what is dubbed the "Stolen Generations." Australia claimed it wanted to protect children from neglect or abuse. But in most cases, children were taken with no evidence of mistreatment, and were instead abused by their adoptive families and in orphanages.
Aborigines now make up around 2 percent of the country's 22 million-strong population. In recent decades, billions of dollars have been thrown into community programs, housing and education. Yet Aborigines remain the poorest, unhealthiest and most disadvantaged minority, with an average life span 17 years shorter than other Australians.
In June 2007, a government-commissioned inquiry concluded that child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities had become an issue of "urgent national significance." Australians were horrified by the revelations: an 18-year-old high from huffing gasoline fumes sodomized and drowned a 6-year-old; another teen raped his 7-month-old niece.
One week later, then-Prime Minister John Howard announced his government would use its constitutional powers over the Northern Territory to impose strict measures aimed at protecting children. Along with banning alcohol and pornography, the government pledged to improve schools, homes and health care, and create jobs. The initiative cost 687 million Australian dollars $543 million in the 2007-08 financial year alone.
Some Australians were outraged, calling it paternalistic and unforgivably racist. But officials argued they had to do something in the face of so much suffering.
Really, the victory is that they are there at all.
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