Part One – Halls Creek

Its 12 midday in the Eastern Kimberley. The sun is reaching its apex from where it emits soul-sapping heat. About 39 degrees, no breeze. At least it’s a dry heat for now. The red earth which shimmers in every direction bakes your feet through your shoe’s soles. You are cooked from both ends indiscriminately once you’re out in it.

By now one of the world’s great migratory routines is well underway. Like the Masai Mara wildebeest navigating the savannah for green shoots of grass or the Mali desert elephant following the rains through the hyper-sensory nerve system of their interior trunk, the indigenous population of Halls Creek awakes and instinctively embark on a committed drive too. For they also have a single objective that occupies all mind and soul. An uncompromising push toward their unmistakable ‘raison d’étre’.

At the car park entrance of the Sports Bar of the Kimberley Hotel, Jimmy, one of the guards, presents like a metal guitarist ready to hit the stage. In his heart, that’s probably what he wants to be.

A South Australian native, Jimmy is a stalwart of outback security postings. He is dressed all in black and is brimming with energy. He is proudly bearded with a low-key ‘ZZ Top’ styling, is heavily inked, is festooned with a scattering of piercings, has gravel brazed tone of voice and with a naturally aggressive facial veneer he is as intimidating as a huntsman spider on your bedroom wall.

Jimmy routinely unpadlocks the gate and places a straw into a breath-analyser, ready to screen the first of a disheveled looking lot who have formed something of an orderly queue, awaiting entry to the premises while melting in the sun.

In the primitive years of my stop-start hospo career back in Melbourne, I worked a few rough-house suburban venues, some of which where bouncers checked patrons in with handheld metal detectors, sure. But breath-testing all patrons upon entry is a new one.

It’s taken me some time to write about being here at Halls Creek, living and working the East Kimberley. Despite being peppered with loads of questions and requests for pictures and information from those back home, I’ve kind of refrained to answer with detailed accuracy up until now. I just straight batted or deflected most enquiry.

This is not because I didn’t want to share it with anyone, I just didn’t know how to get my head around it all and articulate. To frame this place wholistically is very difficult. The issues here just run so much deeper and are so much more immediately confronting. However, there is beauty which runs deep here too.

It is not possible to talk about Halls Creek or anywhere in the Kimberley that I have yet been without addressing alcoholism, substance abuse or juvenile crime. It’s all a part of what you sign on for. To skip over it you would simply be talking about somewhere else. But there is way more to the Kimberley than the negative aspects which are admittedly so easy to over focus on. There is so much more to it to be found. I’ll get to that as well.

To gain entry to this bar, a prospective patron will need to blow sub 0.08 BAC on the breath testing device Jimmy instructs them to exhale into slowly. You’d be surprised how many can’t do this even at midday.

A few weeks back, same time of day, an indigenous male speaking with considerable clarity claimed he’d had nothing to drink in the last half hour and explained he’d ‘just finished work and want a few beers’, managed to blow 0.33 BAC. That’s pretty much clinically dead.

This guy stood quite capably balanced without assistance or slurring of words. Jimmy congratulated him on this remarkable feat before refusing his entry and logging the data and time of offence into a registry.

That individual cut a forlorn figure as he retreated to a nearby bench in the shade where he sat down and slumped. There he then would have no doubt began scanning any left-alive neurons for other possible avenues to obtain alcohol and keep that bender alive.

That’s what daily routine is for the immediate local ‘black fella’ majority here. Not for all of them, but for the many. It’s an everyday quest to move from awake to immediate inebriation.

Not much gets done without the promise of alcohol. If these people heard a rumour that Buzz Aldrin accidently left behind a keg of Bundy the last time he swung by the moon, they’d find a way of constructing a ladder long enough. I have total faith.

Most of the black folk that fall into this routine don’t work- never have, never will. Why would they? They have no aspirations, ambitions or dreams. None that I can see. They don’t have to pay rent or utilities, and should they seek it, they don’t pay for anything medical related. They wait for generous sums of government money to hit their accounts periodically and then they funnel it all into the bar’s point of sales as fast as we permit them to.

They are slaves to the only obligation that they have to themselves, which to reiterate, is a hell-bent course of alcoholic annihilation without compromise, every day of the week that ends with the letter ‘y’.

As Jimmy’s deltoid tattoo states, “nothing else matters”. Welcome to Halls Creek.

Don’t believe what I’ve just written above? Think I may be inclined to exaggerate? No problem. Get yourself to Halls Creek with a WA approved Responsible Serving of Alcohol certificate (which takes as long to get as your average Associate Diploma) and your education will commence. I have work for you, especially if you know how to pour beer or Bundy.

Now my job, among other things, includes processing food and beverage outlet sales daily. Take it from me, business is very good. And this is just low season.

Around 90 people are currently prohibited from entering the hotel premises on past bad behavioral grounds. That’s not far off ten percent of the towns population. Imagine a town in country Victoria banning ten percent of it’s population and trying to survive. No chance. And just feast on some of the listed reasons below as to why some of these people are serving bans. Yet despite this the place is rammed most nights.

When patrons successfully get past the guarded entrance, white fellas typically find a seat at the bar or the odd miner might enquire as to the daily food specials. Black fellas hit the ATM and do so with ferocity. There is an evident uneasiness about them at this moment. They feel pressure here. For they have no way of knowing when the well will run dry.

While crushing their first Emu Export of the day, they line up and take turns to punch numbers in the cash dispenser until it is completely drained. This typically takes under an hour. Like the other four ATMs in Halls Creek, it won’t be replenished until the next morning, if at all.

Cash is everything to the indigenous community as it enables access to the black market for one thing. This is another critical source of alcohol, substance and whatever else is going. Alcohol, pound for pound, is worth more than gold here. You could even argue that the alcohol is harder to get.

Halls Creek was founded on gold about 130 years ago. The town was relocated in the 1950’s to its present position, about nineteen kilometres away, so an airstrip could be accessed. Gold is still as important to the town’s survival today as it was then. Halls Creek Mining (listed as Pantoro on ASX) is this town. It pays for it to be. A further recent strike of high-grade gold, not far from here, will apparently assure its future for at least another thirty years or so.

The immediate region, which as a shire is a huge geographical area, has a population of about 4000 (including mines and stations), but the town itself is only about 1200 strong. Aside from the hotel there is a camping ground, a motel, a post office, a roadhouse, an IGA and an eight-bed hospital.

That hospital usually records two or three deaths a week that are due to alcoholism or alcohol related incidents, which given the population profile outlined above, is ridiculously inflated.

You see, when individuals belonging to the said indigenous majority fail a breath-test, run out of money or are too incapacitated to reach another source of legitimate booze, they turn to other things. The latest of which is emptying the towns hand sanitiser dispensers, prevalent since Covid times, and mixing it with Coke (meaning Coca-Cola to be clear).

Now of course hand sanitiser is up to eighty percent alcohol in content. So people die. All the time, unnecessarily. It’s a horrendous waste of life. A life not lived is wasted. Few lives here are lived to my way of thinking. It’s sad and sometimes depressing to bear witness to.

Ahh but there’s an ‘upside’ if you wish to look at it that way. These fatalities are followed by the subsequent funerals. Again, paid for by the government (ah-hem me and you) funerals and more to the point the subsequent wake, represent free alcohol opportunities. These occasions are not to be missed events. So much so, I’m informed they can be postponed by up to a year if it strategically means maximising drinking consumption by not clashing with another funeral. Rest in piss.

Funerals are not the only red-letter days though. The biggest day of all in the black man’s calendar, comes around just four times a year, thank fuck. It is bigger than any public holiday, Christmas or even the Melbourne Cup.

It is referred to as ‘royalty day’. I’m not talking about the passing of QEII or any King’s coronation.

The titanic amounts of gold pulled from the ground in the Kimberley has to be paid for. Permission granted to drill here comes at a cost in the millions every financial quarter. Just like Gina Rhinehart and ‘Twiggy’ Forrest who also have stations and mining stakes not so far away, Halls Creek Mining pays a premium to the native title holders in order to continue to operate with clear conscience and keep everyone happy.

How that considerable war chest is divided up every three months is an issue of almost unfathomable contentiousness. It’s one that stirs historical battle lines between different Kimberley tribes, families and native land claimants. Traditional tribal battles were the cause of thousands of years of blood spill, long before Charles Hall or any other white man arrived here to jag a pick in the earth looking for gold.

Credulous woke folk back in the East will have you believe the white man introduced violence to this country. It says so in ‘The Dark Emu’ right? Duh.

If you’re irretrievably stupid or have been toxically infiltrated enough in attitude to adopt that narrative (like Melbourne University administration), then there’s no point you continuing to read the rest of this. Go and count your pronouns or something.

Mining royalties are not distributed evenly. Far from it. The official line is they are distributed to community leaders. These leaders then assume the responsibility of allocating funds where they should be most needed.

But of course, there are leaders and there are “leaders”. And there’s no interest like self-interest.

One such “leader” recently offered me “twice the price for your car in cash” on the condition that I surrendered it to him on the spot, while I patrolled the Sports Bar floor one evening. When I attempted to defuse his enthusiasm by explaining my car was back in Victoria, he advised me to “bring it here for next time” before taking a slurp of his rum and coke and then offering me a token fist pump. Cool.

It’s little wonder I’ve frequently witnessed indigenous families in the bar with children tugging at parent’s clothing crying for pizza or chicken, only for their pleas to be passed over so mum could initiate a split transaction between two different credit cards and then make up the difference with some shitty pile of tarnished once silver coins from the bottom of her pocket, just to clear the $15 asking price for one last Bundy can for the evening.

Like anywhere else where there are ‘haves and have-nots’, there’s always conflict. Black man is no different to white. Their actions are motivated by money as well. How else would they afford Jack Daniels at these prices?

On that point, for those interested, a carton of Carlton Light beer cans to take away will set you back a staggering $81 here. Yep, I said ‘light’. Nothing comes cheap in the Kimberley.

So on royalty days indigenous personnel converge on Halls Creek from all around the East Kimberley, including dry settlements. These are extremely remote communities where usually alcohol is prohibited all together.

Roads closed, no problem. Still they come. From under the rocks, from out of the holes. They come to collect their share. To get what is rightfully theirs. No one misses this payday.

When you consider the hundreds of thousands of dollars each ‘leader’ is responsible for allocating, that creates enough tension on its own. Then you mix outsiders with locals, blend and blur the ancestral tribal lines established over the last twenty thousand years, and factor in some-get-plenty and some-get-none animosity. Dowse the whole situation in alcohol, jack it up on some prescription meds and chromed substances had for breakfast that morning, you have a high-octane time bomb right on your doorstep, just ready to explode. And it does.

Just before my arrival, one of our guards refused entry to some sozzled mob of outlanders who ‘blew over’. They came back and set upon him with bottles and kicked the crap out of him. He works only in our maintenance department now and will soon leave for good. He’s reclusive and seemingly damaged. It’s understandable.

The local indigenous man’s day will typically end by passing out or by being punched out. Either suits them. For us, as long as by that point they are off premises we are all good. Responsible serving of alcohol principles have been adhered to. The police officers, all of them FIFO ring-ins from Perth, getting paid loads to risk their lives here and gain a significant career badge of honour, will sign our registry and in the ‘comments’ column typically remark “no issues”.

One night a punch up started just outside our gate at around midnight. It was in the vacant block opposite our lot. The overnight security guard, a reliable Pakistani called Umair, swears they did not stop going at it until 4am. Come daylight there was just motionless bodies still lying all around amid broken glass and other assorted debris, starkly visible on the radiant red earth as the rising sun shed light on it all. The police drove by a couple times but weren’t overly concerned.

What goes on behind closed doors, domestic violence and the like… I shudder to think. Concentrate only on what you can control.

The wheels on the bus go round and round. For they must. There’s lots of money to be made here and many are doing that. No reason to stop anything. Everyone takes their slice of the gold findings, directly or not.

So what about the young? Where are the kids in all this? Where are the under 18-year-olds when all this is going down? What hope them?

Frankly, not much.

They are about 99.9% of all crimes going down in this region and many others like it. Right through the Kimberley, the Pilbara, the Territory and Northern Queensland, and many more parts, it’s the same deal.

Juvenile crime incidents in the East Kimberley are like the thunderstorms that have blown in here recently heralding the preliminary wet season. They are usually without warning, brief and violent.

Cars are stolen daily around here if they are not securely compounded. They steal them, joy ride them and often set them alight when they’re done.  If they can’t find something to steal, they are throwing rocks at windows, monuments, cars passing by, people, each other or starting bush fires. Just for jolly. They have no fear of consequence because unless they kill or permanently hurt someone, there really is none. For now.

Magistrates won’t punish indigenous children for fear of being perceived and labelled ‘racist’ by leftwing Perth or Eastern media, which could damage their career irreparably.

Parents don’t stop them because they are those talked about above, either busy getting drunk, flat on their back unconscious or soon to be so. As long as the children don’t interfere with drinking time, all is fine to them. They couldn’t give an extinguished Winfield Blue cigarette butt if their kids were setting fire to the whole land, and that is exactly where they are and what they doing.

However, when you introduce shades of lawlessness people take things into their own hands to protect property. Some weeks ago the kids started hurling rocks at the road trains coming through the junction. Truckies don’t bother calling in the law, they just take whatever weaponry is at their disposal and go get. We were unable to get police attendance that night at the bar because officers on duty were rescuing some kids the truckies had cornered and were laying into. Ah well.

Last New Years Eve, the kids set fire to a disused diesel tank reservoir on the outskirts of town which started a bushfire which took a few days to control. Since I’ve been here, they’ve taken out the hospital accommodation unit, school bus, the night patrol van and the elderly and frail bus service which is used to transport the said infirmed to the shops once a week, because they can’t get there on their own accord.

One particularly warm night the kids approached the hospital claiming they wanted drinking water. The reception attendant and security officer on duty failed to notice they had their pockets loaded with rocks. Once admitted inside the building the kids began running riot, shattering windows and destroying equipment. Some nurses were wounded by projectiles and quit their jobs as a result. They’ve been short staffed ever since.

I’ve seen more car chases since I’ve been in Halls Creek than all my years watching Hollywood movies accrued. It’s like Benny Hill scenes from your balcony.  I admit, with a vodka and Smith Street Band on the sound system, it kind of works for late night entertainment. But it’s easy for me behind the barbed wire, soon to be electric fence.

If I were to list all the major incidents that have gone down here since I arrived, this would simply become a crime dossier of about thesis length. By now you get the point.

The kids won’t stay kids forever though. They’ll hit legal age and then they’ll start being sentenced jail terms when leniencies eventually expire. Wokes will like that back East, because they can point to disproportionate crime figures for black incarcerations and go on promoting their poisonous agendas. Again, there is no interest like self-interest.

You see by cleansing our ‘sorry’ conscience and paying overs in reparations for the ‘stolen generation’ we are now eliminating hope for the next generation. May as well steal that too.

These children, like their parents, will likely never seek education, employment, skill (other than hot wiring) or have any ambition. Why would they? Monkey see, monkey do.

When they get out of jail, they’ll get their government benefits, mining royalties and drink their way to the grave. It is their ancestral rite of passage now. It is ingrained in their DNA. It is guaranteed and fortified by the virtue signaling, politically correct wave of witless morons who insist on speaking for them and presuming to know how people here feel. This of course preserves their black entitlements and further sees to their premature deaths. Everything must run it’s course.

What a country we live in. Really makes me want to get out of bed and start Waltzing Matilda.

Those at the coal face say that the drinking restrictions put into place and exercised in recent times are making a difference, if only by small margin. These people would be the police and the hospital workers mostly I’m referring to, both of whom have terrible jobs to perform in this place.

What’s really needed in lieu of parenting are role models of course, in my view. Leadership. But people with their feet here on the ground, not politicians in Melbourne or Sydney who tick the ‘First Nations/Torres Straight’ box on an application form that gains them their next concession or hand out. The black folk need their own to show them the way, not fakes and phoneys.

Actions speak louder than tattoos.

Perhaps some likely role models fall to Halls Creek in the form of the returning AFL players who come from around here. Individuals who have demonstrated that there is life beyond all this.

Halls Creek has a long list of AFL, VFL, SANFL and WAFL players who cut their teeth here. Recently, the three current serving AFL listed players made it back here for a visit. Sam Petrevski-Seton of West Coast, Ash Johnson of Collingwood and Adelaide’s Shane McAdam all spent time here in their off-season. This is important for the community.

Whilst it is always nice to meet an emerging Collingwood star, it was actually Petrevski-Seton with whom I struck rapport.

SPS is the son of a well-known stockman and grew up near Fitzroy Crossing on a station. Having played a hundred odd games for Carlton he’s lived in some of my old metro Melbourne neighbourhoods. He also has a Macedonian mother, an ethnicity I’ve been exposed to thanks to a friend back home.

Although I never got the chance to go ‘barra fishing’ with him as planned, SPS went to some lengths to explain the family structural differences between black and white families in general terms to me. I suppose it was like learning about a metamorphosis from tribe to family in a modern setting. That’s how I can best put it.

However there are differences I’ll probably never entirely grasp. One thing I do know from spending a few months in the ‘Heart of Gold’ … if I were to devote the rest of my life to studying black fella history and culture, I’d likely die an ignorant man.

To Be Continued… thanks for reading this.

Matt Hayman