THE SNIFFERS
“ … petrol sniffers are often the most intelligent of the juvenile population… “
Out on the lonely plains of the Tanami Desert, 440 kms north-west of Alice Springs, a small group of tribal elders trying desperately to establish a rehabilitation base for the young petrol sniffing addicts of Yuendumu.
Spearheading this unique initiative are Johnny Japangardi Miller (the traditional custodian of the Mt. Theo area where the “sniffer camp” is located), Peggy Nampijimpa Brown, Barney Japangardi Brown and Molly Nampijimpa Langdon.
In 1993-94, a School Liaison Officer and the Yuendumu school principal became concerned about poor class attendances by an increasing number of youngsters who had been recruited into petrol sniffing.
The community tried various strategies to solve their predicament, including banishment and public floggings, but all without significant effect.
About the same time, Peggy Brown’s five children started sniffing and she could find no help. In desperation, she and her husband, Barney, sought an isolated area where the sniffers could be taken for remedial action – i.e., detoxification and vocational-spiritual guidance.
The traditional owner of Mt. Theo, Johnny Miller, offered his tribal lands for the fledgling project.
“Back at that time,” Peggy Brown said, “we only got pensions. No one give us much money. We had to pay for nearly everything ourselves from pension money – motorcar, diesel, tucker, little bit clothes for kids.”
To help along the project, the elders were kindly assisted with a donation of $5000 from the Yuendumu school, the Women’s Centre, and the Yuendumu mining company.
Firstly, Peggy and the Yuendumu school council arranged women’s night patrols of Yuendumu’s streets in an attempt to deter the sniffers. Initially, she said, there were about 70 addicts. Today, she claims, the number has been reduced to 17.
“First off, we couldn’t make them sniffer kids go to Mt. Theo. They proper cheeky fellas. They say no. What can we do?” she shrugged.
Other parents were strongly urged to press their affected children into making the 175 km journey to the Mt. Theo base camp.
“But some parents said they were sick of trying to do something and then they told me, ‘Eh, we can’t keep doing this. They aren’t our kids. Let them die.’”
Two youthful sniffers suffered severe burns when their cans of petrol accidentally caught alight. Another died in a vehicle roll-over. The Yuendumu community store stopped selling leaded petrol, replacing it with Avgas. When the addiction was widespread, Peggy remembers seeing adolescents sleeping with cans of petrol held to their faces. This no longer occurs, she says.
As in other communities where petrol sniffing is tolerated, some of the juvenile offenders occasionally become extremely violent: one threatened a Youth Worker with an axe; the community store was trashed to the tune of $10,000, and single white female staff were harrassed at night.
The elders collected together the offending sniffers and trucked them out to Mt. Theo. When parents were requested to visit their teenage children at the rehabilitation camp, only some parents obliged.
It was noticed that the addicted youngsters seemed to come from dysfunctional families: single parents lacking control, the elderly or ill, or parents who had literally abandoned their kids through alcohol abuse.
At Mt. Theo the four main elders provided activities for the petrol sniffers; two thirds pf them male, one third female. For the first three years volunteers worked unpaid. Fortunately, some of the basic infrastructure was already on site, ready for use.
At Yuendumu the programme was marginally assisted by fund-raising, selling hamburgers at Youth Discos.
Johnny Miller said: “We give them kids proper bush tucker – wild tomato, turkey, kangaroo, goanna. Feed ‘em up good way.”
Johnny and Barney also gave the teenage boys instruction in tribal law and other related matters.
“We teach ‘em up them boys to sing and dance,” Barney said. “We teach ‘em business (ceremonial) things. We teach ‘em how to make spear, boomerang, stone axe.”
Daily activities were to become a significant factor in a remarkably successful rehabilitation procedure. Their rough-and-ready approach apparently instilled in the affected youngsters elements of their basic needs.
“My biggest son was sniffer,” Peggy revealed. “Now he big man, got wife and kids, and he healthy fella now.”
Initiatives undertaken in this manner by community elders contrast sharply with, say, the Pitjantjatjara Lands where teenage petrol sniffing is seen by parents and the adult population as “normal”.
At Indulkana, for example, there were (in the mid-1990s) 17-19 year old sniffers who were given only months to live. Adults – and this included community councillors – actually sold leaded petrol to the sniffers for fifty dollars per coke bottle full.
Sniffers, when deprived and frustrated, held the white and black community at bay by storming through the streets armed with star pickets and rocks, smashing houses and car windscreens, stoning the office and clinic, and generally terrorising the entire community.
Hence the short term employment of many European staff.
A sniffer attacked the administration office armed with large rocks, yelling through the barred window to a white female book-keeper: “Come out here, you white cunt, or I’ll kill you!”
When the inevitable enquiry was made as to why there were no attempts at rehabilitation being initiated by any of the relevant authorities, the usual response was: “Don’t let yourself get too close to the sniffers. You’ll only get upset when they die.”
The more cynical saw the apathy as a facade for a deliberate form of benevolent genocide, or as a Pitjantjatjara white staffer put it:
“You can kill them off just as quickly with kindness as you can with bullets and poisoned flour.”
The petrol sniffing problem is aggravated when some youngsters combine sniffing with marijuana, which may result in excessively violent outbursts, self-mutilations and maiming.
Ironically, petrol sniffers are often the most intelligent of the juvenile population. Boredom, and possibly the lack of vocational opportunities, are seen by some observers as the triggering cause of the addiction.
In small, isolated Aboriginal communities, such as those on the Pitjantjatjara Lands, sniffers gather in the ruins of houses they themselves have trashed. Most suffer from malnutrition and have lost body fats.
They always carry a blanket, even in hot weather, because they feel cold nearly all the time. The ever-present blanket, almost a sniffer’s uniform, is draped around the shoulders, or over the head, giving them a monkish appearance.
Tin cans containing, usually, a cupful of super petrol (unleaded does not have the required effect, they say), very rarely leave the face of the addict. The lethal fumes are constantly inhaled deeply into the lungs.
A clinic nurse told me: “They just don’t seem to realise that inhaling petrol fumes kills brain cells. If they don’t stop doing it, the brightest kids of a generation are going to be killed off.”
Some Aboriginal communities try to sublimate the petrol sniffing habit of their young folk by conducting sports activities, such as basketball. But having seen sniffers running around the court with a tin of petrol clenched firmly between their teeth, one wonders if it is a deterrent at all.
When an Indulkana Aboriginal warden snatched a tin of petrol from a teenage girl (daughter of a Nganampa Health worker), she became hysterical, exploding into a fit of temper as she watched her precious supply being thrown to the ground. This type of trauma can result in epileptic-type convulsions.
Collapsing, the girl lay trembling and frothing at the mouth, grunting, groaning and whimpering.
Watched uncaringly by an Aboriginal police aide and other adults, she was left on the main road, thrashing and semi-conscious, while vehicles drove around her prone body. At last, an elderly woman strolled over to the sniffer, prodded her with a stick, then, taking hold of her wrist, the woman hauled away the girl, like a dead thing, dumping her near the clinic fence.
With puzzling logic, a Yankuntjatjara elder told me: “Aborigines can’t do nothing to fix it up. It’s a white fella’s problem, not ours.”
Aboriginal councils across the Pitjantjatjara lands mostly ignore the problem of petrol sniffing. They profess it is not really a problem at all; it is a youthful aberration and is publicly tolerated as acceptable behaviour. When visitors point out to them the kids with glazed eyes holding cans to their faces, the elders shrug and give a “so what” expression. One quickly senses the problem is beyond their capacity to control, much less understand.
The hierarchy of many S.A., W.A. and N.T. Aboriginal communities tend to transmit the impression they have successfully dealt with the petrol sniffing problem among their young people. This is largely bluff; the truth is that the addiction is increasing throughout the Aboriginal world, but it is kept secret due to great shame.
A 1984 survey among the Pitjantjatjara, Yankuntjatjara and Ngaanatjatjara revealed the number of petrol addicts then identified: Ernabella 30-50; Fregon -25; Amata -55; Mimili – 17; Indulkana – 25. In 1996, while I was in the locality, the sniffer populations would certainly have increased, but there were no reliable research statistics to consult.
Across the Pitjantjatjara Lands one commonly hears that petrol sniffing has largely been eradicated.
“You never see a sniffer at Mimili,” one hears, “or Amata … Pukutja” – the inference being that the problem has been tackled and removed. Not so in reality. Petrol sniffers are highly mobile. Where they are not tolerated, they quickly move on. Mimili claimed to have rid their community of the addiction, but on my first visit there I observed a youthful sniffer trying to hide himself behind a shed as I drove by. Most of the youthful addicts congregated at places like Ernabella, Fregon and Indulkana, where the Aboriginal councils tended to classify the addiction as “normal” for adolescents. At Indulkana, while I was there, there were about 90 young people aged between 10-20 years. At least 40 were identified petrol sniffers, males and females. Sometimes children as young as eight years could be seen sniffing. Others were as old as 25 years. One pretty 19-year-old lass had been given four months to live.
Years ago, according to a surviving account, the old men decided to tackle the petrol sniffing addiction of their young males during the course of their annual “men’s business” ceremonies.
The senior men took a teenage sniffer out bush, threw away his can, stripped him naked, then set about to thrash the young fellow with sticks. The youngster was flogged insensible, his entire body covered in bloody welts. Typically, when traumatised, the sniffer fell into an epileptic-type fit, trembling and babbling half unconscious on the ground and frothing at the mouth. A Nganampa Health male nurse was summoned. The sniffer was carried into the clinic and slowly nursed back to a reasonable state of recovery. At this point the sniffer was returned to the ceremony ground where he was again subjected to violent floggings until unconscious and in need of hospitalisation in Alice Springs.
On those occasions when when Aboriginal elders have tried to interfere with the sniffer’s life style, communities have suffered their houses being pelted with rocks throughout the night, vehicles being wantonly vandalised, tyres deliberately punctured, windows smashed, noisy squabbles in the streets to prevent sleeping, and even personal violence with stones, spears and fighting sticks.
Casual visitors to such communities invariably ask why all windows are heavily barred like gaols and why doors are reinforced with metal sheeting and angle iron.
A reign of terror by sniffers can result in resignations by European staff, many leaving their battered houses at first light.
If no petrol can be stolen, the sniffers gather at night and completely trash any unoccupied house they find. Their frustration can drive them into hateful furies of destruction. By morning, the house will be completely destroyed, with only the internal frame intact. While I was at Indulkana, two fully equipped houses and a church were smashed to smithereens by rampaging sniffers.
A councillor commented: “It don’t matter. Them Aboriginal Housing mob fix ‘em up, or give new ones, might be.”
In apathetic communities where volatile substances are abused, sniffers are quickly trapped in a nocturnal sub-culture where they lurk in dark corners by day and emerge nightly to steal food and siphon fuel from vehicle’s tanks.
Although all cars are deliberately secured in sheds, the sniffers lever off wall panelling, or prise up galvanised iron sheeting, in order to gain access to a petrol supply. If the tank itself is locked, they crawl underneath the vehicle to cut the fuel line. Some pragmatically-minded staff actually leave a bottle of petrol on the bonnet of their vehicle overnight, hoping the ploy will prevent damage. White staff with super petrol cars are frankly advised not to lock petrol caps, but to leave them invitingly open.
Throughout the night, young female sniffers may tentatively knock at the doors of unmarried European males, offering to prostitute themselves for food or a cupful of leaded fuel. On cold desert mornings, sniffers frequently congregate about a rubbish bin that has been set on fire, leaning over the flames with their petrol-drenched bodies dangerously close.
At this particular community, where the residents are quite used to sniffer’s rampages, none of the houses are fitted with glass windows; all are a transparent plastic – not dangerous when shattered and less costly to replace.
Addicted mothers have been known to pacify babies by encouraging them to inhale from their own cans. When kids sniff petrol, they commonly hallucinate, or “see pictures”, they say. They feel “funny in the head”, or slightly drunk, which helps to offset their feelings of depression, anger and isolation.
The organic lead in super fuel penetrates the sniffer’s body via the skin and lungs and lodges in body tissues. The lead eventually damages the liver, kidneys, brain and nerves. Physical indications of the addiction are loss of weight, slow reflexes, slow heart rate and low blood pressure. Chronic sniffers display such symptoms as slow responses, staring spells, disorientation, sleeplessness and irritability. Occasionally a sniffer will lapse into a deep sleep that can deteriorate into a coma and sometimes convulsions.
Sniffers can expire if they become physically excited or agitated; their heart beat becomes erratic and the youngster will collapse and die, a condition known as “sudden sniffing death.”
Once lead has been absorbed into the brain it cannot be nullified or eradicated by medical intervention.
An unverified cause of petrol sniffing dates back to the African-American servicemen based in Arnhem Land during World War II. Their camps, being on an Aboriginal Reserve, were declared alcohol-free. Consequently, to get “high”, U.S. troops took to sniffing petrol fumes, and the habit was copied by young Aboriginals throughout Arnhem Land, Central Australia, the Pitjantjatjara communities, and as far afield as Warburton and Galiwinku (Elcho Island).
Today, the worthy group ofYuendumu elders who have taken the responsibility upon themselves to rescue their young sniffers are expressing concern over two significant issues. Firstly, funding is required to ensure the continuing success of their rehabilitation programme at Mt. Theo. Secondly, they need authorisation to be able to compel youngsters with the addiction to participate the the rehabilitation procedure.
“As it is,” a Youth Worker explained, “kids who have become involved with the court can be instructed to attend the Mt. Theo programme. But that’s not good enough. We really need to be able to identify the ones who are most at risk and be able to instruct them to participate in the activities at Mt. Theo.”
Peggy Brown commented: “We want to keep them young people alive. The old ones properly sorry for sniffers. If they die from petrol, we have to spill our blood. We got to hit ourselves with stone or axe in sorry business. We don’t want that …”
Aboriginal health worker and community councillor, Ned Jampijimpa Hargraves, added: “We have to do everything we can to help these young people. We love our kids. We love them …”
