A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  The truth was complex and very different from the distant idolatry. In Australia, as in South Africa, the white labour movement was founded not on ideals of international brotherhood, but on fear and the bigotry of white supremacy. The reason Australian politicians supported child endowment legislation was not necessarily visionary; many were obsessed by racist theories of ‘populate or perish’.

  When the English Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb travelled to Australia, they were shocked by the harshness of ordinary life in the ‘Workers’ Paradise’. Poverty seemed intractable in the tenement slums of the cities and in the extreme isolation of the bush. Utterly dependent on imperial markets and immersed in debt, Australia suffered disproportionately during every world depression. There had been historic gains, but these had yet to be balanced against continuing losses.

  This began to change dramatically in the years following the Second World War when the Labor Government of Ben Chifley enacted an ambitious programme of economic planning. The results were great public works, new industries, a remarkable immigration programme and full employment. By the end of the 1960s Australians could claim to live in a country where the spread of personal income was the most equitable in the world. The egalitarian myth of ‘fair go for all’ appeared safe at last.

  Today this is no longer true. Indeed, the opposite is true. The new order of the 1980s, the Order of Mates, has redistributed the national wealth with such alacrity that many Australians, especially those comforted by nostalgic certainties, have yet to appreciate that their sunny society is changing beyond recognition.

  The most profound effects of these changes are seen in demography and people’s self-image. In the post-war years ‘middle Australia’ was not perceived in the popular middle-class terms of Western societies. A successful Australian was ‘a battler who made it’. ‘He wears a blue collar’, wrote the journalist Deirdre Macken, ‘and lives under those red-tiled roofs smeared across suburbia. He left school early, got a trade and joined a union. He rented a house and married a woman who wanted to stay at home and look after the kids. He thinks of himself as middle Australia and his spirit is celebrated in commercials on the telly.’ However, this embodiment of the nation ‘now represents only one per cent of the Australian population. In just twenty years, his dominance of the Australian economy, culture and society has disappeared.’8

  As middle Australia has disappeared, so the Bonanza Class has risen. Until the 1980s there were few millionaires. ‘To protect its well being,’ wrote the English reformer Robert Schachner, ‘Australia has refuted big wealth.’9 The rich were mainly of the ‘old money’ and, in the tradition of a European gentry, they maintained a discreet subterfuge. Indeed, in 1969 only 12 per cent of households were considered ‘well off’. By 1984 this group had grown to 30 per cent and controlled more than half the nation’s income.10 Today there are some 31,000 millionaires, multi-millionaires and billionaires who are the antithesis of gentry and whose conspicuous frolics have already been described.

  In striking contrast, the numbers of the ‘less well off’ have risen sharply from 17 per cent of households in 1969 to almost a third of the population commanding only 10 per cent of incomes in 1987.11 Since the Hawke Government came to power in 1983 the rich have grown richer, wages have been effectively cut and poverty has deepened.

  This has been caused in part by a ‘consensus’ which Hawke and Keating established between big business, Government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions. The aim of this arrangement was to ‘restrain’ wages. This meant that union campaigns ‘outside the guidelines’ – for wage increases that might compensate for inflation – were defeated; that tax cuts for higher income earners were approved; and that by the late 1980s more than $A30 billion had been shifted from wages to profits.12 In the countryside, the new order has meant de-regulated markets, interest rates of up to 34 per cent on farm debts, with rates of unemployment treble and poverty double the national average.13

  While the Australian Bonanza Class are now wealthier than the rich in most advanced industrial nations, the poor are worse off. The phenomenal growth of poverty is one of Australia’s contemporary secrets. Indeed, modern Australian poverty is distinguished by its concealment. The word itself carries a stigma not known in other countries; and poor people will go to lengths to hide the deprivation of their lives and others to deny that poverty exists at all. Rather than dispel the myth of an egalitarian, one class society, with a ‘fair go for all’, people are encouraged by politicians and some commentators to regard the growing number of poor no longer as ‘battlers’, rather as ‘slackers’, ‘dole bludgers’, even ‘loose women’. Of course, when it comes to children, this argument is difficult to maintain. ‘Australia’s record for the treatment of its children’, wrote the journalist Adéle Horin, ‘is, in fact, shocking.’14

  One in five Australians born during the Bicentenary year faces the prospect of long-term poverty. A higher proportion of Australian children live in poverty than do children in Britain, Germany, Canada, Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. Australia’s child poverty rate is 16.5 per cent. Only the United States is marginally worse.15 Moreover, provision of support for the poor is less than in any other advanced society.16

  Daisy and Chikka live on the streets around King’s Cross in Sydney. Daisy’s face is pitted and skeined grey, her blonde hair matted to her waist. Chikka is the shape of a pipe cleaner, his forearm bandaged, his hand extended. They are both seventeen. Tourists cruising ‘The Cross’, with its nefarious reputation, see them. Foreign journalists, scratching beneath the Paul Hogan gloss, occasionally speak to them. ‘Other than that,’ said Daisy ‘we’re not noticed, really, not even by the cops. We’re embarrassing.’

  There are about 200,000 children living in poverty in Sydney alone. The Human Rights Commission has found that between 20,000 and 25,000 Australian children are homeless. ‘Not only are their human rights not being observed,’ said the Commissioner’s report, ‘but in some cases these children are actually dying.’17

  The day before I met her, Daisy’s friend, Pip, was found in Darlinghurst Road with a needle in her arm. ‘She’s in St Vincent’s,’ said Daisy. ‘They got her in time.’ Chikka has had his own experience with the needle. ‘I got into it up on the Gold Coast’, he said, ‘ . . . mucking around up there.’

  Daisy and Chikka are ‘Westies’ from Campbelltown and Minto, which are suburbs more than thirty miles down the western line. The last she heard, Daisy’s mother was working in a bottling factory. She and her two sisters had been brought up by whomever ‘kept an eye on us’. ‘Mum didn’t have the time,’ she said. ‘She had to work. I knew from when I was small I’d be off as soon as I could.’

  Up to a third of young ‘Westies’ are unemployed. Daisy and Chikka have never had jobs. Without skills, there are no ‘real jobs’ for them. Their homes vary from ‘friendly floors’ and refuges to beaches and parks. Daisy was living in a launderette when I met her. After two days the owner spotted her and seemed kind, and gave her food and money. ‘But the greasy bastard wanted to screw,’ she said. ‘I might have done it to stay there, but he was . . . yuk.’

  Chikka lived in a clothing charity bin next to a church in Manly, across the harbour. ‘There was a system,’ he said. ‘If it was already occupied, the person inside left an empty cigarette packet on the edge of the hole you crawled in. It held three of us. I lived there on and off for six months.’ He has also lived in a tunnel near Palm Beach, and under the bridge over Cook’s River, and on the floor of a block of lavatories. Daisy’s longest stretch was in an abandoned car. ‘I used to have a little boy,’ she revealed, ‘but they took him off me.’

  ‘She’s bullshitting,’ said Chikka.

  ‘No I’m not!’ said Daisy. ‘How would you know anyway? Yeah, what have you ever done? You can’t even remember anything.’

  In the inner city the battlers used to be old and acceptable: the ‘wino’, the bent old woman with a string bag. Today a decorous veil is dra
wn over the new poor, for the young as derelicts are incongruous and unacceptable in a ‘young country’. It was not long ago that the young were at the beach, or joyously hitting a tennis ball against a playground wall, or in cricketing whites or uniforms of some sort. Then they were spruce and ‘keen’. The family was said to be universal and alternatives were aberrations. This was not true, but it was believed and believed in.

  There is an added confusion. Those like Daisy and Chikka do not look like battlers, or the needy, disadvantaged or underprivileged. On a sparkling Sydney day few look poor in the way the iconography says the poor should look. Australia, more than most developed countries, is where poverty has been ‘modernised’. A consumerist ‘skin’ is readily available here: a cheap copy of designer jeans and running shoes, a fashionable haircut, even a tan. In an age of mass-marketed expectations, real poverty is internalised as hope is denied. ‘What have you done with your life?’ Daisy asked Chikka in a cruel aside.

  Home ownership in Australia is a national ethos. About 70 per cent of Australians are home owners or mortgage holders, one of the highest rates in the world. This leaves the bottom third with few choices. Australia invests a lower proportion of its Gross National Product in public housing than many developed countries; and as home ownership has risen the public housing programme has become, in effect, a welfare housing programme.18 This has helped to create colonies of the new poor far from the low-rent flats with the big picture windows overlooking the harbour, the symbols of our pride.

  Western Sydney is seen by few outsiders. If you do not live here, there is every reason not to come. One and a half million people, almost half the population of Sydney, live here. But the Sydney of beaches and views and tree-lined, undulating streets, with Thai restaurants and Italian delis, does not reach here. Western Sydney is a void between Arcadia and ‘the back of beyond’.

  Campbelltown and Minto are in western Sydney. The white African notion of ‘township’ has an echo here. This is a fringe place, at once dependent upon and estranged from the ‘advantaged’ world. It is also the fastest ‘growth area’ in Australia. Since 1971 the population has trebled. The reason for this is to be found in newspaper headlines such as: THE PRICE OF A HOME: NO KIDS FOR TEN YEARS. People unable to repay mortgages at interest rates of up to 17 per cent, or rents that have doubled overnight, have no choice. Aborigines, new immigrants, single women and unemployed teenagers have no choice. As many as sixty new residents arrive in western Sydney every day, and this is expected to continue into the twenty-first century.19

  Some arrivals have even less choice and must remain outside in caravans, ‘mobile homes’, old cars and structures that look like shipping containers. These are plywood boxes and are known as ‘modular homes’. They are waterproof and come with sewerage. Eighteen-year-olds, those with jobs, rent them for $A141 a week.

  Much of Campbelltown was built rapidly by the New South Wales Ministry of Housing for the new poor. Its houses are set against a flat horizon, relieved by tracts bulldozed as common recreational ground, which were later found to be swamp. There are no corner shops and few bus routes. For young people casual work exists in the fast-food chains, which employ those aged between fifteen and eighteen, then dismiss them rather than pay the higher rate required by law.

  In their health Westies are another nation. Campbelltown people are 30 per cent more likely to die from heart attack, cancer and respiratory diseases than other Australians. Women are 30 per cent more likely to die from diabetes. Among the highest rates of death from all preventable diseases are here, along with the highest rates of low birthweight babies and congenital birth defects.20

  Conditions in this other Australia are occasionally revealed by a few diligent journalists, notably Graham Williams of the Sydney Morning Herald. A study on ‘human service provision’ in the Campbelltown region was not widely reported. It described ‘profound stress arising from social isolation’, ‘inadequate basic services . . . public transport, public telephone, child care and neighbourhood centres’, ‘the highest rate of juvenile crime’ (adding that ‘only desperate teachers will come to Campbelltown’), ‘relatively easy availability of heroin’, ‘the highest number of referrals of children at risk’.

  The young of western Sydney, said the study, ‘will shortly be reproducing another generation born to inherited disadvantage . . . Australia’s future well-being will rely to a major extent on how well we service young families, for it is they who will provide the nation’s wealth in the 1990s and early next century.’21

  The television soap, Neighbours, which represents Australian suburbia to much of the world, ought to be set in Campbelltown, for it is the real ‘Neighbours’. Campbelltown might have been painted by an Antipodean L. S. Lowry. It is dotted with inanimate figures, young women walking aimlessly, with prams and children. One of them is Julie, aged thirty-three. Her six-year relationship broke up when she was pregnant with her second child. When the baby was two months old, she was given a Housing Commission home in Campbelltown, for which nothing in her life had prepared her. In 1989 she and her two children had $A176 a week to live on. This included less than $A35 support for each of her two children. If she is able to find a job paying more than $A160, she would have to give back two-thirds of every dollar she earned, or she would lose her pension. Either way her dependence on an inadequate and punitive welfare system was ensured.

  ‘I had worked in an office and a boutique,’ she said, ‘but here there was nothing. The local supermarket would only employ teenagers. Going into the city meant travelling as much as four hours a day; and, anyway, employers don’t like taking on Westies because the trains are unreliable and, I suppose, because of everything else they are told about us.’

  She gave the impression of being under house arrest. She had no family of her own. She could not join the local netball team because she could not afford the twenty dollars for a babysitter. Yet she is neatly dressed, bright and pleasant. Poverty for her is an almost complete lack of control over her life. ‘I think that among the women here I’m one of the strongest,’ she said. ‘We know we’re dumped, and that leaves us not knowing what sort of lives we’re meant to lead.’

  When the dust came, it was like a ball of fire, rolling toward the town. There was a silence in its path, and no breeze. Then the blood red dissolved to the colour of sand and earth, and the dust was both walls and ceiling, as if the world had turned upside down. Once it reached Sulphide Street, it eclipsed the sun.

  ‘The air was full of the same zinc and lead that rotted the miners’ lungs,’ said Thelma Thompson, ‘we knew it would do the same to us. Whenever we saw that thing coming we ran and ran; and when we got home we shut everything and nailed down everything that moved: tables, chairs and chooks. Then we hung on as it shook our souls. And when it was over there was dirt and sand inches thick on everything: food, everything. We didn’t get rid of it for weeks, that damn poison.’

  Thelma survived the ‘storms over the lode’. She was eighty-nine when I visited her in her weatherboard and iron house in Broken Hill, five hundred miles from Sydney in the far west of New South Wales. ‘The memory’, she said, ‘is so important. If we forget why we fought to gain what we gained, if we don’t pass that on, or just put it back into pages of a history no one will read, we’ll be caught short again. It doesn’t matter if there’s videos and that sort of thing; progress is what men and women are prepared to suffer for.’

  Thelma was born shortly after Broken Hill was established in a wilderness. The annual rainfall seldom reached seven inches and all water and food came overland from South Australia. In winter the earth froze; in summer the temperature seldom fell below the century fahrenheit. These unconsoling conditions were well understood by the Wilyalo people, who had lived here for 30,000 years. They were few and they survived with a rhythm that exploited the plains in winter while conserving the resources of the Barrier Range for the long, dry summers. Their land included a jagged, hump-backed ridge, the tip of an
orebody containing the world’s largest deposit of silver, zinc and lead. A boundary rider, Charles Rasp, had named it Broken Hill.

  Believing the extraordinary shape was rich with minerals, Rasp formed a syndicate with seven sheep-station workers and pegged out a claim. But they were inexperienced and their initial exploration yielded little; Broken Hill was sold to a group of wealthy pastoralists who formed the Broken Hill Proprietory Company (BHP). ‘By 1890 the mines were conservatively valued at £8,000,000,’ wrote Edward Stokes in his history, United We Stand,

  but little of their wealth found its way back to improve the community. By 1897 all the original syndicate had left the area to pursue lives of luxurious ease, and distant ownership exacerbated the town’s neglect. If some of the syndicate had actually lived in Broken Hill – or even re-visited their mine – conditions might have been better. However, none ever did. Not one extravagant mansion ever graced the town, despite the orebody’s vast wealth. Similarly, few Broken Hill shareholders had any notion of the town’s drab existence. A few mine managers took an interest in their men’s lives, but most were transients who contributed little to the town. Others displayed an almost contemptuous disinterest. W. H. Patton, BHP’s manager, rarely donated any of his opulent salary to local causes and in 1889 he refused to open the new hospital.22

  With no fresh food and mostly contaminated water, epidemics decimated the very young and old. Typhoid took 123 lives in one year. Safety in the mines was non-existent; Broken Hill’s death rate was twice the national average. Thelma Thompson was a trainee nurse in Broken Hill hospital when the Great Strike began in 1919. ‘The men and the town had had enough,’ she said. ‘There were twenty-one different kinds of lung disease and all the men had them. One after the other they’d be brought to the hospital, dead or half-dead, often from cave-ins on the night shift, between two and four in the morning. The attitude of the company was summed up by one of the managers who said, “No working man should have butter on his table; margarine is good enough.” Well, margarine in those days was worse than dripping!’