Your Tax Dollars At Work

Since moving to Meeka, I noticed that there is almost an obsession among the aboriginal community with funerals. People are away almost every week for a funeral either in town or as far as Perth and everywhere inbetween. There is always a huge turnout of mourners and it's a big deal, with people coming from all over the place and camping out. Alcohol restrictions kick in for the days before, during and after the funeral and they're associated with a big jump in violence & crime. Interestingly, the funerals are very much in what you would call a Christian or white tradition, rather than an aboriginal cultural style.

In my conversations with the aboriginal people I have met both here and in my travels I really noticed how often they mention funerals - they're either just coming back from one, or about to head off for another; sometimes three or four in a row, involving travel all over the state, sometimes for weeks at a time!

At first I attributed this to things like extended family groups and high mortality rates from poor health in a shattered indigenous population, but there's another factor. An aboriginal person who can prove a relationship to a deceased person can get a $500 payment from the government for "travel expenses" to attend the funeral. So apparently you get cars jammed full of "relatives" sharing petrol costs coming from all over the place and then spending the money on cartons and cartons of beer, which of course then leads to the inevitable tribal fighting, general violence, and opportunistic break-ins and thefts. Hence the alcohol restrictions.

This week we had a funeral plus pension payment day plus court day, which is why we've had such a big mob of people coming in to town, fighting and drinking for the past few days (I can hear them as I write). Gary's bathroom window got ginged last night and the teenage kids are completely out of control; I rang the police today about a gang of them ginging down at the creek by the hostel. All the adults are either at the pub or sleeping off the night's beer intake (you should see the sea of cans at the infernal pensioners' flats at the moment), so the kids are pretty much living out in the wilds around town.

Every day I can see both sides of the story; I feel both pity and disgust.