NOWHERE
LAND
Edited version published: The Big Issue #329 (May/Jun 2007)
[PHOTOGRAPHS BY
TAMMY LAW]
Mona Mona is a place that doesn’t even appear on Queensland
maps. Its history is complex; its future uncertain. But Benjamin
Law finds members of a small but strong Indigenous community fighting to
make the best of what they have.
To
get to the Aboriginal community of Mona Mona, you need to drive right
off the map. Flick to North Queensland’s
large-scale directory, and the rectangle where Mona Mona should be is
faded out. “There are presently no maps for the areas shown,” it
says, “however, they may be included in future editions.”
Mona
Mona’s official status has always been murky. Queensland’s
Department of Communities has been the trustee of the land since the
mid-90s, and, since then, every decision about Mona Mona – home
to a community of around 50 people – has gone through the department.
Last year, the government announced, out of the blue, that officials
wanted to consult with Mona Mona’s leaders. Then came 10 months
of consultations, which made everyone quietly optimistic, even excited.
Things that community leaders had long lobbied for were finally being
canvassed: infrastructure and trusteeship, freehold and ownership, leases
and land tenure. There was even talk of an Indigenous tourism plan: music
festivals, craft workshops, nature tours.
Finally, last December, the
department’s director-general, Linda Apelt, called a community
meeting to unveil Mona Mona’s new direction. Locals could become
trustees of the land, Apelt said, but only over 100 hectares of the existing
1610. The rest of the land would become a national park. Then she bowled
an unexpected bouncer: no one could live in Mona Mona any more. The standard
of living was deemed unsafe. Camping would be okay though, she said.
Glenis Grogan, the 55-year-old Aboriginal woman who heads the Mona Mona
Action Group, left that meeting shaken and also – as one of Mona
Mona’s leaders liasing with government – embarrassed. She
drives me to Mona Mona alongside fellow group member Rhonda Brim, an
elderly sprite of a woman with the face of skit comedian. We leave the
bitumen behind and stampede through the pine and rainforest, which provides
homes for so much wildlife that it feels as if we are driving through
a safari preserve. Cassowaries, wallabies, brumbies and cows all leap
out of nowhere; it’s surprising there aren’t more crushed
remains to be seen.
Brim points to the trees and starts chanting, unimpressed. “Cut ’em
all down. Cut ’em all down.” When I look puzzled, she raises
her hands. “They don’t even know imported trees from the
bloomin’ native ones out here.” Turns out, these pine trees – the
ones the government wants to absorb into the national park – are
an imported species, first planted here by Aboriginal people forced to
live in Mona Mona’s missions. The pines, Brim says, represent stolen
wages.
Most of Mona Mona’s history is so dark that outsiders find
it surprising anyone would choose to stay here. Established in 1913 by
the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Mona Mona exists on the spot where
a slew of Indigenous people were forcibly taken – in theory, at
least – to get closer to God. But anyone whose grandparents lived
in those original dorms has bleak tales of sexual, physical and verbal
abuse. There’s a story of one Mona Mona man who, upon reaching
puberty, was forced away from his parents and into the dorms. From that
point onwards, the law prevented him from speaking to his parents, even
if he encountered them on the street.
After a few decades, things changed.
The community began to thrive. Babies were born. Photos from the early
60s show rows of neat, Amish-looking houses, pastel-coloured weddings,
and crowds of kids dressed in school clothes and paper crowns. There
were tug-of-wars, baptisms in the creek, and pumpkin harvests so large
they were laughable. Mona Mona boasted its own local butcher, bakery
and church. Then, in 1962, everyone was forcibly evicted to make way
for a proposed dam. But the dam was never built, meaning that the eviction
is still regarded as a bad joke. Grief-stricken, many people returned
to Mona Mona and tried to rebuild from scratch.
In current-day Mona Mona,
dwellings for the 50 or so permanent residents range from self-made shelters
of corrugated iron and branches to family-sized camping tents bought
from Big W. There are government houses from the 90s made of heat-retaining
besser bricks – too unbearably hot for Far North Queensland. In
the middle of everything, giant concrete steps lead to an empty blue
platform. It used to be the church. Older generations gathered here to
connect to Jesus, but local kids now climb up to try to get mobile-phone
reception. It’s a futile exercise; you can’t call out of
Mona Mona.
Instead, one solar-powered public phone is shared among Mona
Mona locals, like the telephone of an old college common room. The phone
stands outside the home of Rhonda Duffin, a pale-eyed Aboriginal woman
in her forties and another member of the Mona Mona Action Group. (Rhonda
Brim affectionately refers to her as ‘Rhonda #2’). Duffin
and her husband, Andy, both have family history here: Andy’s father
and Duffin’s mother both grew up in Mona Mona.
After three years
on the Sunshine Coast raising their kids, their plan was to move to Cairns.
But they couldn’t find a place, despite the couple’s A1 tenancy
record, Andy’s full-time job and Duffin’s degree from Curtin
University. Then this house came up. “Around here,” Duffin
explains, “as soon as someone moves out, they’ll say to someone
else: ‘You want a house?’ That sometimes happen, and you
just say, ‘Okay, I’ll give it a go.’”
Six people
call this three-bedroom place home. Duffin, Andy, and their youngest
daughter Cheralee, 9, sleep in one room; footy-loving son Rodrick, 17,
sleeps with his cousin Jordan, 15; eldest son Freddie, 23, has a room
to himself. “It’s very badly designed,” Andy says of
their house. When asked what he means, he clarifies: “in every
way”. When it rains, it pours straight through onto the veranda.
There aren’t any working doors at the moment, the stove doesn’t
work and the toilet gets backed up. Though it’s supposedly government
housing, no government body has maintained the house since it was built
in the mid-90s.
There are no power lines running to Mona Mona either.
Instead, a single generator outside the Duffins’ place runs all
evening: it sounds like an old car left with its engine running. The
generator powers not only the Duffins’ house, but the two houses
opposite and also the neighbours’ place. Everyone pools in for
petrol, but it’s Andy’s nightly responsibility to fill up
the generator with 15 litres, which lasts everyone from 6.30 to 11.30pm.
After that, it’s an automatically enforced lights-out. Anyone with
a fridge puts their food in the freezer before they go to bed.
The Duffins
don’t pay rent, leaving them perplexed about who should take care
of the place. “No one claims responsibility for it,” says
Duffin. Roughly $2.6 million in infrastructure was to be flushed into
Mona Mona, to revitalise it as part of a funding program released by
the Keating Federal Government in 1995. Now, tracing where the money
went – or, more accurately, how it disappeared – would involve
navigating through a labyrinth of organisational acronyms, some of which
stand for bodies that have ceased to exist. They run like a string of
capital letters that, side by side, don’t mean much. NAHS. ATSIP.
FASCHIA. ATSIC. DEWIR.
Still, for all the palpable anger about the lost
funding, there’s also a defiant – almost contradictory – sense
of pride in how everyone gets by. Rhonda Brim lives in a camp-out shelter
made of a corrugated iron held up by a sturdy skeleton of branches, each
the girth of human legs. Some of the floor is dirt, and the rest is made
of scratchy industrial strength carpet. Prior to this, Brim had been
living in the nearby community of Mantaka, but moved back to Mona Mona
after she lost her husband to cancer. She left the family house to her
son, who is raising seven kids. Brim is stoic about her prospects if
infrastructure funding isn’t forthcoming. “We’d get
by,” she says. “People forget, we’re Aboriginal. But
if you had a decent house, you’d be in paradise. I’d prefer
something that’s lockable.”
Despite the isolation and disrepair,
Mona Mona is still beautiful. One morning, we walk down to Flaggy’s
Creek, where locals used to be baptised. Nowadays, the kids swim there
when it’s hot – which is most of the time. From far away,
Flaggy’s looks like a swampy graveyard for automobiles, a stagnant
brown pool complete with the rusted skeleton of a flooded-out campervan.
But when you get closer, you realise that freshwater rushes through it.
The water is surprisingly pure, perfect for visitors to strip off for
a morning bath.
When we make our way back, four men have come to inspect
Rhonda Duffin’s place – three white men from the Department
of Communities, and an Aboriginal man from QBuild, the state’s
department of public works. One of them asks Duffin: “If we installed
a stove, would you use it?”
Duffin sits on the veranda and looks
at him coolly before replying: “Yes, of course we would.” After
they leave, she tells me this is the first time maintenance staff from
the department have visited the house in a decade.
Some of these issues
blew up at the Queensland state election in March. In the week leading
up to the elections, the Mona Mona Action Group arranged to meet the
candidates for the marginal seat of Barron River, all of whom needed
the black vote to win. Labor’s sitting member, Steve Wettenhall,
scrambled to reverse the government decision on Mona Mona. But a face-to-face
meeting with the opposition leader, Lawrence Springborg, convinced Glenis
Grogan that the conservatives offered a better deal for Mona Mona. On
voting day, she wore a blue-ribbon, and locals were treated to the rare
sight of an Aboriginal woman handing out how-to-vote cards for a conservative
candidate. “That ‘I’m Aboriginal, so I vote Labor’ attitude
is bullshit,” she said that day. It didn’t matter, as it
turned out. That evening, Labor was returned in a landslide.
Grogan is
still hopeful, though. “We’ll get land tenure one way or
another, because there’s no way to move us [except] at the point
of a gun. Resources are going to be hard to get, because there’s
no money anywhere – federal or state. So we have to be enterprising.” What
they need, she half-jokes, is a rich benefactor. When rumours swirl around
that Oprah Winfrey, the US TV star, might be visiting the neighbouring
tourist town of Mossman sometime, we start discussing how best to trap
Oprah and lure her to Mona Mona.
The model of land tenure and ownership
floated by the Mona Mona Action Group is different to Native Title, since
they recognise the land doesn’t belong to one tribal group. “It
is different,” Grogan explains. “It would be owned by all
the ex-descendents of Mona Mona, which includes most of the Tjapukai
people.” Under that arrangement, they’d have complete sovereignty
and ownership of the land, and able to start up businesses like tourism
projects. Rhonda Duffin, however, reckons the government will make it
as tough as possible, so they’ve just started talks with a prominent
Indigenous lawyer who will work for them pro bono. “If they grant
us this, this sets precedence for other Aboriginal groups,” Duffin
says. Her husband, Andy, chimes in: “And that’s why we haven’t
got it, as of yet.”
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Last
Updated :: 18 May 2009
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Benjamin Law 2009