Safety in numbers: in Tennant Creek, Aboriginal teenagers can be seen walking around the streets in groups of half a dozen or more.
Credit:Glenn Campbell ''I like to walk around and like, drink and use marijuana β¦ I'm going to find my boyfriend and will go back home with him too,'' says the clearly vulnerable girl, whose name has been withheld from publication by The Age. Standing nearby, Mark Graham, 23, says most of Tennant Creek's young indigenous people are drinkers who have nothing to do and ''walk around at night fully charged, looking for more alcohol ''.
Advertisement ''Most start drinking at 12, 13 and 14,'' says Mr Graham, who has been ordered by the local court not to drink alcohol for a year. It is 9. In Alice Springs, kilometres to the south, a police crackdown ahead of a proposed visit by Prime Minister Julia Gillard appears to have cleared the streets of youth troublemakers, for now at least.
But almost four years after the Northern Territory's Little Children Are Sacred report warned that ''rivers of grog'' were devastating Aboriginal communities, leaving children vulnerable and alcohol and drug abuse rampant in Territory towns such as Tennant Creek and Katherine, drinkers still queue in long lines when take-away alcohol outlets open. Pat Brahim, a respected leader of Tennant Creek's Warumungu people, says she sees the town's problems as a symptom of policy and program failures over many years - programs imposed by often untrained, uninformed bureaucrats living far away who seek quick fixes that suit the electoral cycles of successive territory and federal governments.
Ms Brahim, chief executive officer of the Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation, which provides services to indigenous people, says the federal indigenous intervention ''effectively branded every community as a haven for pornographic and drunken behaviour that has left anger and disengagement that now provokes the young men to play warrior and strike back with criminal behaviour. She says government policies have led to increases in alcohol and drug use by children and driven them on to the streets.
