Lost and Found

When I was growing up we used to visit some family friends who lived in Paddington. Back then it wasn’t the gentrified neighbourhood of multi-million dollar terraces that it is today. At one particular point walking from Kings Cross Station to their home we used to walk past a half way house for men, where they would be strewn all over the pavement. It was quite a frightening experience as a child, we even had eggs thrown at as once (mind you, I did asked mum for eggs to throw back). Since that time I have learnt a lot about the plight of such individuals, mainly through reading The Big Issue.

In Darwin there are some Indigenous people living on beaches, on the streets and on park benches. The locals call them Long Grassers because quite often they live in exactly that, the long grass. Most have been displaced somehow by their remote communities (remote in an NT sense!) and cannot afford nor find accommodation in the City.

The local authorities see them as a homeless nuisance. They are homeless, but only in the sense that they do not have a roof over their head. Many of them have lived rough, or in the Starlight Motel as some call it, for years and consider themselves residents of Darwin, not vagrants.

In the 1990s the Police began issuing them with ‘sleeping in public’ infringement notices of about $50, which they of course could not afford to pay. Once an individual had been caught a few times and had not paid their fines they would receive a court summons and would be put in jail under mandatory sentencing laws (introduced by the NT Government in 1997). Reading between the lines you could interpret this as the forced gentrification of Darwin. It’s sad to think that the New South Wales Government did a similar thing leading up to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.