The negative repercussions are evident in sickness and death, violence and despair, exclusion from education and meaningful employment, as well as families and communities in disarray. The vast over-representation of Aboriginal people in the criminal justice system is directly attributable to the mediation of alcohol: large numbers of Aboriginal people are apprehended by police and held in police cells owing to drunkenness, even where public drunkenness is no longer a criminal offence.
On the positive side, many families and communities are confronting the problems that alcohol is causing. This is possible because although some Aboriginal people equate drinking rights with racial equality, most have a negative view of alcohol abuse. A large proportion of Aborigines, particularly women and those who don’t live in towns, abstain altogether. Furthermore, Aboriginal people themselves are beginning to put pressure on problem drinkers to limit their drinking, and are now able to implement new laws to reduce the damage that alcohol is doing to their families and communities.
A case study illustrates these efforts. Imanpa is a small Pitjantjatjara community between Alice Springs and the tourist mecca, Uluru (Ayers Rock). Seeing their community racked by alcohol-related violence and death, Imanpa residents looked at ways to limit availability of alcohol to residents. With neighbouring communities, they successfully lobbied the Northern Territory Liquor Commission to limit the amount of takeaway alcohol that could be purchased at highway roadhouses to six cans of beer. They reached co-operative agreements with the licensees of these roadhouses that they would not serve takeaway alcohol to anybody travelling to, or living on, Aboriginal communities. Imanpa drinkers can still travel the three hundred kilometres to Alice Springs to purchase alcohol, and the community is looking at the possibility of pressuring government to reduce the number of takeaway outlets in Alice Springs: with approximately seventy outlets for a population of twenty thousand, Alice Springs has the highest per capita availability of alcohol in the world. The people of Imanpa are also supporting the efforts of their neighbours in the Mutitjulu community near Ayers Rock Resort. At the resort, habitual drinkers persist in persuading well-meaning tourists to buy alcohol on their behalf. The community is working with the resort to try to educate the tourists out of being tricked or intimidated in this way, and to stress the benefits of limited alcohol supply for the community’s future.
Poor health continues to reduce substantially the life expectancy of Aborigines. In 1989 the first comprehensive National Aboriginal Health Strategy was put in place. More effective and widespread health education, more access to better-quality housing, greater health services specifically aimed at Aborigines and better immunization programmes are all parts of the strategy. As with most areas of social service, health services for Aboriginal peoples have been the province of white professionals until very recently; an essential focus of the new strategy is to empower Aboriginal people by giving resources to them directly.
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