When Tony Hunter first shakes your hand, he holds your gaze a long time, calmly sizing you up, perhaps looking for a common bond. His outback New South Wales drawl is slow, but his mind feels fully engaged. Tell him he looks a lot younger than his 69 years and he looks sceptical: “I lost 10 years to alcohol in there.”
Twenty-seven years ago Hunter and his partner, Melinda Bonham, were sitting on the porch of their house in Shalvey, a suburb of Blacktown, when Hunter fell silent, lost in thought. It was 1994, and the local Aboriginal community had endured a long cycle of drug and alcohol addiction, trauma and premature death. After a while, Hunter spoke: “I’ve gotta do something to help my people.”
Marrin Weejali Aboriginal Corporation.
Marrin Weejali Aboriginal Corporation was born out of that thought.
As Hunter strolls around Marrin Weejali’s crowded two-storey building in Blackett, near Mount Druitt, he introduces Rob and Brian, drug and alcohol counsellors. Another man, Drew, simply walks up, shakes hands, and identifies himself as a recovering alcoholic: “I can’t say enough for what Marrin has done for me,” he says.
An outsider cannot easily tell counsellors from clients, which is not surprising, since six of the centre’s 10 counsellors, along with Hunter, were once addicts themselves.
In the back courtyard, Hunter introduces another worker, Steve. “I found him on the side of the road chasing a lizard,” Hunter says. The reference is mysterious to all but Steve, who laughs, and lingers to chat. No one is in a hurry; everyone seems to have time, and to have come through a great trial.
Established by Hunter and Bonham in 1996, Marrin Weejali is Sydney’s only Aboriginal-run drug and alcohol service. In Wiradjuri, the most widely spoken Aboriginal language in NSW, marrin means body and spirit, weejali means essence. The goal is to unite these two in the one person. Marrin’s core philosophy grows out of the therapeutic community model and programs such as Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous, which are built on the belief that people sharing their common experience can solve their common problem.
L-R Michael, Chris and Brian chatting with Marrin Weejali counsellor Brian Hunter
Groups meet to discuss not only addiction but mental health, family planning, anger management, and domestic violence. While some are for Kooris only, others are open to all; Marrin Weejali takes anyone who walks through the door. While 80% to 90% of clients are Indigenous, others have white, Islander and South Sudanese backgrounds.
“We can’t say no to these non-Aboriginal people, because they grew up with Aboriginal people,” Hunter says. “If you went to school with an Aboriginal fella and he comes in here, where are you going to go? You become part of the Aboriginal community.”
‘From riverbanks to Sydney’
In 1823, governor Macquarie established a native institution in the area in order to effect what he called “the civilisation of the Aborigines of NSW”. It was one of the first public policies “aimed at eliminating Aboriginal cultural traditions and enforcing assimilation with a European way of life,” according to the Blacktown Native Institution Project.
In time, people called the place Blacktown.
The local government area of Blacktown city contains nearly 400,000 people – 40% of them born overseas. Residents come from 188 countries and speak 182 languages, according to the Blacktown city council website.
What makes Blacktown exceptionally diverse is that it also holds Australia’s largest urban Indigenous population: more than 10,000 people, and nearly 5% of the population in Mount Druitt, which is part of Blacktown local government area.
For Aboriginal people, Blacktown marks a place of sorrow, of being severed from their ancient life. In these times of statue-toppling and cancel culture, of renaming places and recasting the past in light of present values, the name of Blacktown might have been considered a candidate for the chop. Far from it.
Local high school children walking home in Shalvey.
In 2015, Liberal Party members of Blacktown council campaigned to change the name of the municipality to western Sydney. Councillor Jess Diaz told Guardian Australia that Blacktown should be “a modern metropolis which people will embrace, aspirational people. The branding of Blacktown is a negative for many developers. I think we should try and give the city a positive name.”
Leaders of the Darug people, on whose land Blacktown stands, fiercely objected. They liked the name and the link with their history, however tragic, and it turned out that the people of Blacktown agreed. In a council survey of more than 3,000 residents, 80% voted against changing the name.
Blacktown’s Indigenous residents comprise the Darug and a larger group – made up of Wiradjuri people and others who moved from country NSW – and their descendants.
It is one of Australia’s great migration stories, rarely told. In the 1960s, many Aboriginal people saw an opportunity to leave behind the oppression of the missions and small towns of outback NSW, and to start a new life in the city. Aboriginal leader Chicka Dixon called it a mass migration “from the riverbanks to Sydney”.
These journeys were no less difficult, in many ways more so, than those made by newcomers from overseas, writes Western Sydney University sociologist George Morgan.
Many of these migrants arrived in Mount Druitt just as the state government opened the area to public housing. A Housing for Aborigines program was established in 1969. The modernist planning principles of the time sought to clear what were seen as the cramped and unhygienic slums of the inner cities. In new outer suburbs, more spacious houses, quiet streets and big backyards with trees would lead to better lives.
But as early as 1969, a local state MP warned that population was running way ahead of planning. “There are thousands of children in the area, no playing fields, no meeting places, nothing for teenagers to do, and inadequate transport facilities to take them anywhere.” These problems dog the area even today.
Michael has been attending Merran Weejali for more than three months since realising he had an addiction and he needed to do something to change that.
Many families did see their material conditions improve. But there was a catch, writes Morgan. “Prospective housing commission tenants from all social backgrounds – Anglo working class, migrant, Indigenous – had to demonstrate they were capable of living in a manner deemed respectable by those petty officials who assessed their applications.”
These pressures fell especially heavily on Indigenous people, Morgan writes. Having been told for generations that their culture and ways of life were worthless, most “naturally felt exposed and inadequate when they moved into suburban housing”. Neighbours watched them closely; the commission discouraged visits by relatives; a woman was twice threatened with eviction because her lawn was not cut.
Morgan writes of women, whose male partners were often absent, who succeeded beyond expectations. “They struggled assiduously to keep their houses cleaner than those around them. They dressed their children neatly and respectfully. They were strong and held families together.”
One of the Aboriginal women who moved to Sydney and into Mount Druitt public housing was Connie Hunter, along with her son Tony, then 20, and his seven siblings.
On a warm Wednesday in April, Hunter sits down to tell his story. He speaks very slowly, laughing sometimes, pausing often, occasionally closing his eyes and remembering.
‘There’s no ticking boxes here, mate’
Hunter and his brothers and sisters grew up in a tin humpy on the banks of the Barwon River, in Brewarrina, or Bree, in far western NSW. In the 1930s, when Connie was just a girl, welfare officers removed her from her family on Angledool Station in the far north of NSW, and brought her to the Brewarrina mission.
Tony Hunter in Plumpton Park, Plumpton.
Two of Connie’s sisters had lost all their children to the welfare officers. Whenever the welfare cars came into view, the Hunter children would jump into the river and swim to the other side.
Hunter took to Sydney life. He worked as a welfare office for an Aboriginal organisation, then as a foreman for a meat company in Chullora. But in the 1970s, marijuana and amphetamine use were adding to alcohol problems in Mount Druitt, Hunter says. “They caused a lot of division among the Aboriginal people, a lot of thieving. A lot of people were burying their children. The grieving was horrific. And there weren’t any programs for Aboriginal people to help them, counsel them.”
Calmly, he lists the casualties in his family. “My old [step] dad, he went first, he died in 77. Then my sister in 84; she was hit by a truck while on the drink. He didn’t stop, and they never found him. Then a young brother died in his sleep with an enlarged heart, alcohol related. Then another brother, then another, all from the alcohol and the speed. These three brothers didn’t see 35 years of age.”
In 1989, at the age of 54, Connie had a stroke. She died two years later – in part, Hunter believes, of grief.
“By this time, after burying them all, I’m hittin’ the drink pretty heavy by now,” he says. “I was trying to sedate pain, but it was everywhere. I didn’t want to live, and I didn’t want to die.”
Hunter can name the date when everything changed: 7 January, 1992.
He had been caught drink driving. “My probation officer knew a bloke named Les Beckett. One of those tall Queensland Aboriginal fellas. Now Les Beckett, he had lived an hour and a half from Bree over the border. I’d known him since I was 11 or 12. He’d gotten sober about three years before. The probation officer said, ‘Take this paper over to Les, he’s going to take you to AA meetings, and you tick them off on this form’.”
Hunter says he had already been drinking that morning when he took a cab to Beckett’s place in St Mary’s, just west of Blacktown. “Les came out of his house and put his arms around me. He cuddled me. And he said, ‘Tony. I knew God would bring you back to me.’ And I said to myself, ‘Oh no, don’t tell me. He must have done Bible studies. He must have turned a Christian.’”
Inside his house, Beckett read the form Hunter had brought from the probation officer, then threw it in the bin. “He said, ‘Tony, there’s no ticking boxes here, mate. There’s a meeting on at St Mary’s at half past 12. Come with me. You might be able to get sober.’”
They went to the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. People stood up and told their stories of fighting the grog. Hunter hated and scorned every minute of it. But at the end of the meeting, “they’re all coming up shaking my hand, all these whitefellas, saying: ‘Hello Tony, how are you mate?’”
The men went back to Les’s place. “We sat around a big table, and they were just constantly talking to me. It was a windy, cloudy sort of day, and I was looking up at the sky thinking about all the people I’ve lost. I was grieving so much, looking at the clouds, and the tears were rolling out of my eyes. These guys didn’t pull any punches with me. They said, ‘Tony, there’s a way out, mate. You don’t have to drink to have a good life.’ I felt the spiritual part of it through these guys. They were living it. And they were interested in my future, my life. I’d never felt this before.”
Hunter went to more meetings. He began to see a counsellor who had also been an alcoholic. “It was like I got this new awakening. I just rocketed out of the dead zone, the evil spirit, where I was pinned down by alcohol.”
Melinda Bonham in Plumpton Park, Plumpton.
‘Marrin is a sacred protected site’
Hunter and Bonham were a good fit for creating Marrin Weejali: his storytelling power, her gifts in organisation. They consulted addiction specialists, other rehabilitation centres; both did diplomas in drug and alcohol counselling.
The organisation began with meetings in a church, then a cottage provided by the housing commission, before federal funding enabled Hunter and Bonham to open a much larger centre in Blackett.
But it took eight years to build. The locals fought hard against having an Aboriginal drug and alcohol centre in their midst. Protestors tried to challenge the move in the state land and environment court. After the centre was opened, an old man would walk past and throw dog faeces over the fence. A woman who lived out the back would fire her hose over the fence and drench a group of men sitting in the backyard doing a 12-step program.
Slowly, however, Marrin Weejali put down roots. Bonham says attitudes changed when the federal government asked them to be a drop-in centre for filling out the 2011 census. The goal was to address an undercount of Indigenous people in 2006, but any local was able to fill out the form at the centre. “White people would come in, hesitate – ‘What am I going to walk into?’. Our staff would say, ‘Hello, how are you, would you like a cup of tea?’. That really broke down a lot of barriers. Some of those people still drop in today.”
Marrin Weejali’s open door policy has taken it beyond its original mission. Locals use its optometrist, and the centre distributes government vouchers to help low-income people pay their energy bills. Young people can volunteer at Marrin Weejali to pay off fines for misdemeanours such as travelling on a train without a ticket. A counsellor, Lesley Strickland, says Aboriginal people see the centre’s phone service as “like the Black Yellow Pages: have you got number for this doctor? Where can I get my cat desexed?”
“Marrin Weejali has never been broken into,” Hunter says. “It tells me that the community has taken ownership of this centre.” He laughs: “Marrin is a sacred protected site.”
The original Marrin Weejali centre.
Bonham says she still sees racism towards young Aboriginal people by some local police. “Strip searching, out in the open, pull them over for no reason, harassment. It’s disgusting.” On the other hand, police use Marrin Weejali’s rooms for meetings, as do corrections officers and other public servants. The centre employs a Vietnamese psychologist and works with a Chinese doctor. “I think there’s still racism in this community but there is quite a bit of learning and blending,” Bonham says.
Most important is the long connection Hunter and Bonham have to the Mount Druitt community. People think, “If Tony can beat his addiction, I can too,” Hunter says. The six Aboriginal counsellors at Marrin Weejali are all from Mount Druitt and “all defeated the drug ice”. Bonham says Aboriginal people make good counsellors. “With the sorrow and trauma you understand other people’s journey better. Non-Aboriginal people feel that walking in the door.”
One of these counsellors is Brett Moran. In 2009 he was 26 and facing a long jail term. He had been getting high on marijuana and amphetamines – and in and out of custody – since he was 12 years old. When he was charged again, an Aboriginal Legal Service court support officer in Penrith got him referred to Marrin Weejali. “The moment I walked through those gates I felt welcome, I felt comfortable, I didn’t feel judged,” he says.
Kicking his addiction was not immediate; it required time in a rehab residential centre, and many hours of sitting in a group with other men, talking about the struggles that had brought them to Marrin Weejali. But on 10 May 2010 – Moran knows the date by heart – he stopped using drugs and has been clean ever since. He now runs the same groups at Marrin Weejali he once joined as a client. “At the end of every day I lie on my pillow and feel grateful for the day I’ve just had,” Moran says. For that he thanks his wife, Kristy, his three young daughters, and Marrin Weejali. “Marrin is a sacred place for me. Thanks to Uncle Tony, Mel, everyone here, I have my family, my freedom, my life.”
The steady federal funding Marrin Weejali receives – $2.4m a year at present – is both a measure of its effectiveness, and of the need. “The demand for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander substance misuse … services is appalling,” states a Marrin Weejali annual report. That demand has only grown over the past 10 years with the ravages of the state’s methamphetamines epidemic.
Bonham and Hunter are seeking funding to open residential services for men and women who need a home while they try to recover from addiction. Hunter also wants to develop programs that take Aboriginal people back to the bush, “and have people meet them, and walk with them, and say, ‘This is where your family comes from – this is why they left’. To create that opportunity for reflection, to lift their spirit. Some of the stories are sadder than mine. They bring tears to my eyes.”
There are heartening stories, too. Hunter tells of a girl from far north Queensland who was using ice. She tapped “Aboriginal” and “drug and alcohol” into Google, and found Marrin Weejali. Staff found her sitting in the foyer with a suitcase and a three-year old child. “She’s living in a nice unit now, she’s working, four or five years sober. She still comes to the NA meetings here on a Friday.”
‘People of understanding’
Brian Hunter has worked at the Marrin Weejali Aboriginal Corporation for two and a half years.
The Aboriginal journey from the bush brought gains as well as losses. It led to the development of urban Indigenous organisations, what Morgan calls a “pan-Aboriginal culture and politics”. The work of the late Maria Lane, an Indigenous academic from South Australia, has shown how the postwar migration from the missions has been critical to the surge of Indigenous university students to 20,000 today, twice as many as 10 years before. Some of these students come from Blacktown.
But the journey was not kind to Connie Hunter. “I think she regretted leaving her homeland,” her son says. “Down here, there were nice big hotels where she and her friends went to have lunch. I think she joined the Rooty Hill RSL Club, the hospitality she really enjoyed. But it was a different world.”
It has become her son’s world. “I’ve been here for 50 years and survived,” Hunter says. Although he and Bonham have moved to “a lovely home” in Windsor, on Saturday mornings, he skips the local shops and drives for half an hour to have coffee at a Greek café in Mount Druitt.
“Once you learn to sleep with one eye open, Mount Druitt is a great place. There’s a lot of people that have come here from the fringes of town, from the world of decency. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. The Tongan community – I talk to some of their elders. You look in their eyes when you talk to them – they’re beautiful people. People of understanding. Want to work together, live together.”
Hunter sees us out through the Marrin Weejali courtyard, where two men are making coffee. “This is where people have a cigarette together, where a lot of yarns happen.
“Healing can begin with a handshake,” he says. “It knocks down the barrier, reflects straight back into here.” He points at his chest: “The spirit is right here, between our rib cage. Let’s shine a little bit of light and hope in here.”
This article is based on a narrative paper on Blacktown written for the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute.
