Serious Whitefella Stuff by Mark Moran

Author:Mark Moran [Moran, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522868296
Goodreads: 28653988
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 2016-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

EMPLOYMENT IN farming was a cornerstone of the SRA. It was linked to trialling the removal of Centrelink’s ‘remote area exemption’ in Ali Curung, which relieved welfare beneficiaries from looking for a job in communities where there were few.11 Ali Curung emerged as an ideal location for the trial, given the large number of jobs expected from a proposed irrigated fruit farm nearby. This major development was being led by Centrefarm, an Indigenous-owned business investment organisation. Through 2006–07, negotiations were underway between prospective fruit farmers, the CLC, Centrefarm and traditional owners over a commercial lease for the proposed farm.

The SRA sensibly included a community market garden, to serve as a training ground for the ‘real jobs’ to come at the fruit farm. While the land for the fruit farm was still under negotiation, the ground for the market garden was ready to go. The project had support among Ali Curung residents, with several older residents reminiscing about the days of the mission garden. Any surplus crops could be sold at the store, increasing the quality and quantity of fresh produce. The market garden just needed a work team to start laying the crops.

As for most of the proposed SRA projects, available funds were insufficient to implement the market garden project. Almost all of the projects required CDEP workers and employment training funding for implementation.

The market garden CDEP gang was formed, but their work was limited to short bursts of activity when trainers were available, amounting to a handful of men attending intermittent 10-week courses. Despite the stop-start progress, irrigation for the market garden was installed and a paddock of watermelon seedlings planted. There were some small harvests, including a few truckloads of watermelons sold in Tennant Creek. The market garden gang also tried some alternative crops, but the ground was too hard for carrots and something got into the lettuce. Around about the time when the training money ran out, the irrigation dripper lines proved to be faulty. Then the council sold off their only tractor with a ripper and replaced it with a front-end loader. With the ground too hard for hand tilling, and no mentors or trainers to oversee them, the men working in the garden moved on to other projects and priorities. A major diversion was the revival of the community footy team, the Ali Roos, which had been temporarily banned from the Tennant Creek regional competition for bad behaviour. The team began training five nights a week on the community’s dirt oval in the lead-up to the 2008 footy season.

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