Newman elder Peter Tinker among many living in squalor as Pilbara town grapples with accommodation crisis

What you are seeing here is a national embarrassment. In the 70-something years that Peter Tinker has walked the red dirt near the Fortescue River, countless hundreds of billions have been made from digging up and selling off his homeland. The iron ore-laden ranges of the East Pilbara have been, and still are, the nation’s cash registers. The land has turned local millionaires into billionaires, bankrolled Australia’s public services for three generations and made shareholders around the world rich. Few towns on earth can claim to have produced so much wealth over such a long period as Newman. And in the middle of this modern-day El Dorado an exhausted old man lives in squalor while, across town, workers scramble to find a place to sleep, shelling out $200 for the privilege of being sardined into a donga for one night. The cavernous iron ore mines that surround it are printing money but Newman is broken. Sitting on his front porch in a part of town locals call East Timor, Mr Tinker runs a hand over his weathered face. “It’s getting worse,” the Martu elder says quietly. “All the time getting worse.” His house has been all-but destroyed by his extended family. The intuitive respect for elders that kept the Martu together for hundreds of generations has been all-but snuffed out by grog. Emu Export is killing a culture that survived tens of thousands of years of cyclones and bushfires. “The parents just won’t look after the kids,” Mr Tinker says as stray dogs run through his legs and into the house. “They won’t send them to school. They don’t care anymore.” Cockroaches scurry over the food scraps and faeces that litter the floors. The home’s electricity works intermittently and there is no hot water. Believe it or not, his house is one of the better ones around him. Boarded houses dot the streets. The plywood-covered windows are a stark and embarrassing reminder of BHP’s hopes of servicing its mines with a residential workforce. Of the 1100 homes BHP owns in Newman, 130 are derelict. A third of those are in East Timor. The workers who refused to live in them because of the lawlessness retreated to fortified camps in the centre of town, sleeping behind sharpened steel bars. Police, nurses and teachers followed them, retreating to the western or “safe” part of Newman. With no middle-class to counterbalance social disorder, parts of East Timor descended into shambolic, drunken lawlessness. The kids in the area are paying a high price for the disintegration of the community. Instead of being taught how to count at school, six and seven-year-olds are in the park learning how to spray neon paint into a drink bottle and inhale the fumes for a cheap high. They do that when they’re bored of sniffing petrol. While BHP secured the empty houses properly, the State Government simply closed the doors. Within days those doors were kicked in and the home trashed. The streets are dotted with empty blocks where homes were burnt to the ground by bored children. A Department of Child Protection property that was once a safe house for at-risk kids looks like a cyclone hit it. In fact, it fell victim to bored children. A swimming pool half-filled with water was properly secured only when a minister was warned that it was a matter of time before a child’s body was found floating amongst the rubbish. It wasn’t always this way. And it’s not representative of greater Newman, which sits as a green oasis amongst the red ranges of the Pilbara. The town has huge amounts to offer — high-paying jobs, incredible sporting facilities, good pubs and strong schools. But it’s been neglected. The ruins of the town’s bowling club stand as a reminder of what life used to be like. “The bowls club used to be the centre of social life in town,” long-time local Troy Patching says near the remains of the building in the centre of town. “We had barefoot bowls, people had weddings there and company meetings were regular. We had a working restaurant and the bar was the place everyone wanted to go for a drink.” A storm tore off the roof years ago and the plastic sheets lashed to rafters as a stop-gap didn’t cut it. “We’re waiting to see where they end up when they get picked up by another storm,” Mr Patching says as he points at jagged pieces of tin hanging precariously from the roof. The property is technically owned by the bowls club, not the Shire of East Newman, so nobody has the money to fix the building. “The shire is in discussion with the community group involved in regard to future plans and opportunities to have the site activated again and to bring bowls and darts back to community,” the shire said in a statement. Locals aren’t holding their breath. Neither are they confident that BHP will fix up the 130 empty houses they own any time soon. Of the $40 million a year BHP spends on community programs, more than a quarter goes to Newman. For a long time it’s been a rotten return on investment. But the company is seeing a glimmer of hope. Some crimes have dropped dramatically and houses are being returned to a liveable state. The renovation program is strategic — it prioritises areas with one or two dilapidated houses to bring an entire street up to scratch. The downside of that policy is areas like where Mr Tinker live remain mired in dysfunction for longer. On top of the refurbishment program, the award-winning East Newman Precinct Structure Plan, is being slowly rolled out. The plan, which was co-designed by the Nyiyaparli and Martu people, envisages short-stay accommodation in East Newman so people are less inclined to doss down in a relative’s living room. It will see the creation of a commercial hub, with a cafe and local grocery store. Importantly, the plan paves the way for the movement of community workers back into the area they are servicing. The green shoots of social recovery are there but locals are worried about the pace of change. Everyone in town is aware of the broken windows theory because everyone has had a window broken. The proposition that minor signs of disorder beget more serious crime was advanced by criminologists in the 1980s. Mr Patching explains the theory in the plain-speaking way you’d expect from a Newman local. “If it looks like shit people will treat it like shit.”

Newman elder Peter Tinker among many living in squalor as Pilbara town grapples with accommodation crisis

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