by Melissa Lucashenko

extract from Griffith REVIEW Edition 41: Now We Are Ten

Four years ago I moved with no great enthusiasm and a troubled child to Logan City, one of Australia’s ten poorest urban areas. Divorce had cost me my farm in northern New South Wales, and housing in Woodridge was, and remains, some of the very cheapest within striking range of the Brisbane CBD – according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 96 per cent of Australian postcodes have higher socio-economic status than we Woodridgeans. The shift over the Queensland border was unwelcome, but it wasn’t frightening. I had been poor before – I had the skill set, or at least the memory of it – and more or less agreed with Orwell:

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

For me, Brisbane-born and partly Logan-raised, it was a case of returning to the dogs rather than meeting them for the first time. For my unwell teenager, though, it was a revelation to discover that that there are entire supermarkets which stock no bread other than sugary white pap; that smiling at strangers is often viewed here as a highly suspicious precursor to extortion; and that screams followed by sirens can become the unremarkable aural wallpaper of your urban existence. Our inaugral visit to the local shop became family legend; as we pulled up in the car, exclaiming, League of Gentlemen style, that these same establishments were to be our localshops, we were interrupted mid-recitation by a junkie hurtling out the Foodland doors to projectile vomit on the footpath not three metres away. We fell about, snorting and leaking with laughter. Ah, the serenity. Four years later that same shop was at the epicentre of the 2013 Logan City riots, three nights of fighting which saw young men armed with fence palings and baseball bats warring on your TV screen.

I had known, of course, back in 2009, that by moving to Woodridge (chosen for its proximity to the rail line and to the wonderful two thousand acres of bush that is Karawatha Forest – thanks Lord Mayor Soorley!) I was placing myself squarely in what Brisbane Aborigines refer to as the ‘Black Belt’. This is a geographic-cum-cultural entity stretching from Ipswich in the west, through Inala and Acacia Ridge, and reaching Woodridge, Kingston and Loganlea before hitting Eagleby/Beenleigh and petering out in the northern Gold Coast. This – along with select pockets like West End and Annerley – is where the Brisbane Aboriginal underclass have historically concentrated; in mainly housing commission ghettos where all the whites are poor too, ‘everyone mixes in together’ and, as one of my interviewees stated, ‘You don’t have to worry about snobs staring at you if you go to the shops in bare feet’.

So the Black Belt is where I came to live once again, my house sandwiched between two skilled labourers, and over the road from a depressed, possibly mad, invalid pensioner, and a w-hite Housing Commission family whose spray painter father leaves noisily for work at 5 am on his throbbing black Harley. There is one other Aboriginal family in this relatively quiet Woodridge street, that of seven-year-old Shanaya, whose daddy died in a car crash (‘and the cops shouldn’t even of been chasing him’) who talks non-stop, struggles at school and has a new kitten or puppy or bird to report nearly every time I see her, the life expectancy of Logan City pets being little better than that of their owners.

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