Quiet As

This was the view in my street a bit more than two years ago, after the death of TJ Hickey. As the SMH reported: "TJ, 17, was impaled on a fence in the inner city suburb when he fell from his bike on February 14 2004. The local community said he was being chased by police at the time. His death became the catalyst for a riot. A coronial inquest found police were not responsible for the accident." It happened on a Sunday. Working a night shift, I had to report on the riot, and then couldn't get home. Went and stayed at Stephens.

It's all much quieter now; since the police moved into the TNT towers next to Redfern station. Their cameras are no doubt pointed down the Block and across the hotspots; and any trouble is promptly squashed. There's almost no one down the Block now, the area of land basically given to the Aboriginal Housing Company by then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. Once the centre of urban aboriginal movement, radical, progressive, proud, whatever you want to call it, there are only 16 families left. It fell apart in the 1990s when heroin gripped the area, assisted by government tolerance, the location of a needle bus and health regulations which insisted that police could not conduct any activities which would discourage addicts. It became one of the biggest or the biggest heroin market in the city; an already beleaguered community inundated with the city's junkies; an unlovely mob, desperate, ill, ruthless; capable of anything. Kids crawled around in broken bottles while their mothers nodded off. A bloke with sores all over him passed out at our front door. We didn't want to touch him. We called the ambulance.

All this has changed. Every night there's a fire and they gather around, drinking, in off the train from Kempsey or Wilcannia or wherever, the remnants of once warring tribes in an entirely different place; the shock of invasion collectively experienced. But there aren't many of them and it's mostly harmless, down there in the dark. With the exception some weeks back of the rape of a woman by something like 15 men which turned the mood sour, so much for the noble savage. A drunken band of street alcoholics, their streams of invective still puncturing the night; but nothing like what it used to be. There isn't the same level of drunkenness, of out of control dereliction.

Once you'd regularly hear women in the street after they had been robbed. The Daily Telegraph ran a front page picture of an Asian woman being dragged across the road by her bag. These bags, sans cash, would often end in my backyard and if there was enough to make it worthwhile, licenses, keys, I would take them up the local cop shop. But of course there are still scenes, some hysterical in their bizarre twists. As I heard it, the other night three aboriginal women, drunk as skunks, were having a bit of a dingdong argument opposite the station while the police looked on. Then one of them passed out completely in the middle of the street. Eventually, furious with their non-responsive mate, they dragged her by the air across the street and dumped her at the feet of the coppers. "You look after her, you white c...s" they shouted, arguing with the police before heading off the to the RSL, leaving their friend unconscious in the street.

The war over the future of the Block continues, with the NSW Government in the form of the generally disliked Frank Sartor, former Mayor of Sydney, trying to basically zone the area commercial, while the Aboriginal Housing Company's Pemulway Project, a mix of housing, an open air market, an aboriginal business college, all very progressive and empowering; compiled with some of the city's best architects on side. All ignored as the two dig their trenches and make their statements to the media. While defended as a "sacred place" for aboriginal people, a place they will never back down on, recently planning Minister Sartor, who has all the power, said was looking for "a presence for Aboriginal people in a sustainable way in the broader community of Redfern. When you can integrate them better -- not in a homogeneous sense but in a harmonious sense -- there are wins for everybody." Yes, well, that's why he's hated.

Media Watch:

International Herald Tribune:

BAGHDAD U.S.-led forces pressed on Friday with an offensive against suspected guerrilla targets near the north-central town of Samarra, witnesses said.
"Operation Swarmer" came as Iraq's deeply divided political leadership prepared to meet again, hoping to break a deadlock on forming a unity government that might avert civil war.
U.S. military officials said Thursday that the operation, involving 50 helicopters, was the biggest "air assault" since a similar airlift across Iraq just after the war in late April 2003. That operation was also conducted by the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division.
A U.S. military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, said ... that 50 people had been detained and 30 remained in custody. The U.S. military usually describes insurgents as "terrorists," so Iraqis netted in the raids could have just been ordinary farmers from rural areas near Samarra.