Midnight swims keeping Aboriginal teens out of trouble.

By BEN COLLINS.

Fitzroy Crossing’s public pool is being opened at midnight on welfare paydays in an effort to protect teenagers from alcohol-related abuse, and to prevent them from engaging in petty crime.

It is almost midnight after a baking, 40-plus degree Friday in the central Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing, and the temperature has barely dropped below 30 degrees Celsius.

Despite the late hour, the hot blackness of the night echoes with childish whoops and laughter.

More than 40 children, mostly aged from 10 to 16, are making their way across town, drawn by the promise of fun, games, and a cooling swim.

Chapter 1: A midnight refuge

The program is an initiative of Royal Life Saving WA’s Aaron Jacobs, who manages the pool in the majority Indigenous Kimberley town.

“There’s always been an issue with a lot of youth walking the streets at night time, sometimes getting up to no good,” he said.

“So I just wished to provide them with a good supervised and safe spot to be, and hopefully be a good mentor.”

He says the kids have embraced the program.

“We do fruit for laps, which is a program run by Royal Lifesaving Society, and we might have a game of aqua-basketball,” he said.

“I’m really happy they’re here, in a sense, because they’re off the street.”

Earlier in the evening, the large crowd of children were madly chasing a football through pools of light in a park next to the dusty Great Northern Highway, with Broome more than 400km in one direction, and Halls Creek just under 300km in the other.

Despite quite a few of the children having not even reached their teens, the only adult supervision came with a visit from veteran Kimberley police officer, Sergeant Neville Ripp.

Where many southern Australians would be deeply troubled by the sight of young children unsupervised at night, Sergeant Ripp sees dramatic improvements from his time in Fitzroy Crossing before alcohol restrictions were introduced to the town in 2008.

“I suppose a good word for it was bedlam, with the amount of alcohol that was getting consumed,” Sergeant Ripp said.

“Domestic violence was going through the roof. It’d be nothing to have 40 or 50 persons incarcerated overnight.”

Fitzroy Crossing became nationally infamous when the extreme rates of alcohol problems helped local women successfully lobby for restrictions on the sale of full-strength alcohol.

Chapter 2: Progress outweighs problems

Marmingee Hand was one of Fitzroy Crossing’s community leaders who fought for restrictions on alcohol.

“The women of Fitzroy got together and looked at what was the root of some of the problems that we had here, and it was alcohol,” she said.

While the restrictions brought immediate relief from the carnage, they marked the beginning of the huge job of rebuilding a devastated community.

“This community is slowly trying to heal itself of what happened before the restrictions,” Ms Hand said.

As the program manager of the Fitzroy Valley Girls’ Academy, Ms Hand works with as many as 50 girls to change the town’s reputation for alcohol-fuelled dysfunction.

“We really should be equipping our young people to be able to have the resilience to say, ‘That is not for me’. And to make those decisions for themselves in this environment that they are growing up in,” she said.

While Fitzroy Crossing still has problems, Ms Hand wants the town’s reputation to be based on the progress that has been made.

“Yes, we’ve got lots of issues within our communities, but I think Fitzroy is showing other communities that it can be done, and it can be done in a positive way,” she said.

Chapter 3: Back from the ‘war zone’

It is with this understanding of Fitzroy Crossing’s journey of recovery from an alcoholic Armageddon that children at the public swimming pool at midnight can be seen as a positive, according to long-term resident and community development worker Geoff Davis.

“Some of these kids are going to be sheltered from sexual abuse, or violence, or dysfunctional families or partying,” he said.

“So that’s a good thing for them to be able to go to a safe place where there’s somebody who cares, where somebody can listen … even though they should be asleep.”

Mr Davis believes the midnight swimming program is a small example of a community-wide push to keep Fitzroy Crossing moving towards recovery.

“I think that if we’ve all got that aim, that we are going to try and make the place a better place for our kids, then we’re going to end up with a good place,” he said.

Sergeant Ripp is in no doubt that something positive is happening in the town he once likened to a war zone.

“The housing’s come a long way, education, the way we’re policing the town is different,” he said.

Sergeant Ripp said it all began with the alcohol restrictions brought in by local people.

“It’s empowering those people, giving ownership to them, getting them to care about their community, and they’re doing a fantastic job,” he said.

Back at the pool, Mr Jacobs recognises there’s still a long way to go.

“There really needs to be a huge focus and investment on communities like Fitzroy to encourage a bit more of a non-nocturnal lifestyle,” he said.

“It’s been happening for so long, it’s the new normal.”

In the meantime, Mr Jacobs is happy to take it one Friday night at a time.

“I hope that the kids will get a decent swim tonight. At the very least they’ll have a decent bath anyway,” he said.

“They’ll go home, hopefully, tired and cold and want to curl up somewhere instead of walking the streets for the rest of the night.”

This post originally appeared on ABC Online.

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