Michael Green

Journalist, producer and oral historian

Changing a whole system: racialised policing in Melbourne

In Social justice on

LAST week, the State Coroner began an inquest into the death of a young man whose body was found in the Maribyrnong River. The hearing didn’t make it halfway.

On Friday the Coroner, Ian Gray, suspended it, directed police to reinvestigate on his behalf, and requested that a more senior detective lead that search.

It is already over a year-and-a-half since Michael Atakelt disappeared. It will be many months yet before his family and friends learn more about what happened to him. After a week of public evidence, only one thing was apparent: the investigation by the Footscray police was woefully inadequate, at best.

***

Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on a Sunday evening, June 26, 2011. His body was spotted by a fisherman, and retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale, eleven days later.

Overland Journal contacted me in early August 2011 and asked me to write about the case. The editor said that while the details were unclear, Atakelt seemed “to have died either in, or directly after being released from, police custody”.

Before long, I learned the situation is not so simple, the institutional violence not so overt. In the early hours of the Saturday morning – more than a day before he disappeared – Atakelt was held in the Melbourne Custody Centre for drunkenness and then released without incident.

But the facts are still far from clear. The Coroner heard from crucial witnesses who had not previously been interviewed, and about whole avenues of enquiry that were not followed.

The most glaring error was this: the police brief said Atakelt had likely entered the Maribyrnong River near Smithfield Bridge, approximately 4 kilometres downstream from where his body was recovered.

On the fourth day of the inquest, Sergeant George Dixon from the water police gave evidence that it was “very unlikely” Atakelt’s body had entered the river near Smithfield Bridge. He said that although the river is tidal in its lower reaches, the body could only have entered the river “a very short distance” downstream from where it was found; it was more likely to have entered the river upstream, possibly as far as two kilometres.

Dixon has been in the water police since 1986 and he gave evidence for almost a whole day, about currents, tides, water flows and body recovery. Yet the investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, had not spoken to him before the hearing began.

It was an extraordinary omission. But even so, you shouldn’t need three decades working on the water to form a hunch on which way a river flows. The Footscray police had not looked into the possibility that Atakelt entered the river upstream of where he was found.

The Sergeant’s evidence cut the previous investigation adrift. The barristers clutched at improbable new theories until it became clear that there was no sure footing from which to continue at all.

***

Atakelt arrived in Australia in 2006, from Ethiopia. He was from the Tigray ethnic group, who live in the country’s north and in Eritrea.

A week after his body was found, over 250 people from several African-Australian communities attended a public meeting in North Melbourne. It was fronted by Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana, who was then responsible for the north-west metro area.

Among the speakers he heard that day were many young men who complained of constant harassment by police; and Atakelt’s mother, Askalu Tela, who said Footscray police hadn’t taken her missing person report for three days, despite repeated visits and phone calls.

Shortly afterwards, several young people started a group called Imara Advocacy, to help them speak out on issues such as racialised policing. When the inquest was suspended, one of the founders, Reem Yehdego said the community had been “demanding an independent and comprehensive investigation from the moment Michael Atakelt’s body was found”.

***

On Monday, I joined a swarm of journalists outside the Federal Court, where six young men had just settled a racial discrimination case with Victoria Police. It is five years since they first lodged the claim with the Australian Human Rights Commission, when they were all teenagers.

They say the police regularly stopped them around Flemington and North Melbourne for no legitimate reason, and assaulted and racially taunted them.

Despite the settlement, Victoria Police denies the allegations and maintains that the teens were stopped for legitimate policing reasons. But it has agreed to a public review of its cross-cultural training and the way officers deal with “field contacts”.

It also agreed to release documents prepared for the case. One document – statistical evidence based on police data – shows that young African-Australian men in the area were policed out of all proportion: they were two-and-a-half times more likely to be stopped and searched, even though they committed relatively fewer crimes than young men of other ethnic backgrounds.

Before the cameras, one of the men, Daniel Haile-Michael, said the courts alone wouldn’t be sufficient to put an end to racial profiling. “It’s going to take all Australians and the media and huge community support to get these changes to happen.”

An ABC journalist pressed him on why he’d settled the case, if police had really assaulted him. “I myself have been beaten up,” he said, “but it’s not a personal thing. We understand it’s a systemic issue and that’s why we’re trying to address it in a systemic way. It’s not about one police officer, it’s about changing a whole system.”

***

In the police force, the system starts at the top. Chief Commissioner Ken Lay had been subpoenaed to give evidence in the racial discrimination case, but when it settled, he was excused. “The Police Commissioner is off the hook,” said Justice Shane Marshall, to the amusement of the court.

Later, despite the statistics, Lay dismissed the idea that racial profiling is a problem within the force. He told The Age: “I do not believe our members would identify people and harass or continually check them simply because of their ethnicity.”

The case of Michael Atakelt goes just as high. In December 2011, Assistant Commissioner Fontana attended a second public meeting in North Melbourne. He assured the large gathering that the brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation” and that he had “total confidence” in the officer who prepared it.

At the same meeting, Detective Sergeant Sol Solomon, from the homicide squad, said he had overseen the investigation and that it was “first class” and “all possible leads have been explored”.

Later that month, Fontana repeated the same claim to me, over the phone: “We have had closer oversight of this particular case than we have of others,” he said. “The homicide squad were involved all the way through, in terms of a very close supervision, as were the Ethical Standards [Department].”

At the inquest, as I watched the police investigation unravel, it was difficult to believe those words could have been true – or if so, to accept what it implied about the quality of our detectives.

Worst of all, it was difficult to believe the investigation would have been so poor if it were me who had disappeared instead.

Something has gone badly wrong, whether wilfully or negligently. And because of that, Atakelt’s family and friends may never find out how and why he died.

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website.

For background, read the other articles I’ve written about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’, ‘Watching a hearing’ and ‘Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death’.

Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death

In Social justice, The Age on

THE State Coroner has adjourned a hearing into the death of a young man whose body was found in the Maribyrnong River, and requested that police reinvestigate the case on his behalf.

Michael Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on 26 June 2011. His body was retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale eleven days later, on 7 July.

Julian Burnside, QC, appearing as an assistant to the Coroner, applied for the hearing to be halted in light of evidence given by Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, about the likely location the body had entered the river.

Dixon had not been interviewed by Footscray police investigator, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher, before the inquest began.

Burnside submitted that the investigation should be resumed with a senior officer. “It may be embarrassing for Mr McKerracher to be sent out to uncover things he has overlooked. It may be the evidence is no longer available. To avoid that embarrassment it is preferable that a senior officer be sent in.”

The State Coroner, Ian Gray, said it would be an independent investigation on his behalf and that new dates for the inquest would be set within two weeks. He said that the adjournment was not “intended to imply any criticism of Mr McKerracher”.

Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum, said he did not believe the investigation into his son’s death had been “thorough and rigorous”.

“The whole Ethiopian community does not have trust in the Footscray police investigation,” he said.

Reem Yehdego, from Imara Advocacy, a youth group that formed after Atakelt’s death, said the community had been demanding an independent and comprehensive investigation from the moment his body was found.

“Despite assurances to the community from Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana of the quality of that investigation, this has not been the case. The Coroner’s decision today to suspend the inquest and order that a more senior investigator step in is of profound significance.

“The community is delighted that as result of the State Coroner’s intervention Michael’s death is finally getting the investigation it deserves,” she said.

In December 2011, Fontana, who was then assistant commissioner for the north-west metro area, told a public meeting in North Melbourne that the brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation”. He also said that he had “total confidence” in Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher.

At the same meeting, Detective Sol Solomon, from the homicide squad, said he had overseen the investigation and that it was “first class” and “all possible leads have been explored”.

The police brief to the Coroner said Atakelt may have entered the Maribyrnong River at the Smithfield bridge, approximately 4 kilometres downstream from where his body was recovered.

On Thursday, Sergeant Dixon said that it was “very unlikely” that Atakelt’s body had entered the river near the Smithfield Bridge. He said it could only have entered the river “a very short distance” downstream and it is more likely that the body entered the river upstream, possibly as far as two kilometres.

The Footscray police had not investigated the possibility that the body entered the river upstream of where it was found.

Earlier yesterday, Mourad Mohammed, 21, from Footscray, gave evidence that on the evening he went missing, Atakelt was upset about being held in police custody two nights earlier. He was also upset about a dispute with his girlfriend and the death of his grandfather in Ethiopia, of which he had been informed that morning. Atakelt told Mohammed he was going to take a long walk.

The hearing was scheduled to last for ten days and hear evidence from 34 witnesses.

A spokesperson for Victoria Police said it would be inappropriate to comment because the matter is currently before the court.

Read this article at The Age online

For more information, you can read previous articles I’ve written for Overland Journal about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’ and ‘Watching a hearing’.

Bursting the carbon bubble

In Environment, The Age on

Energy analysts and activists are warning that most of the world’s fossil fuels must remain in the ground, and that it can’t be business as usual for the industry.

LAST Tuesday, at 2 pm in San Francisco’s city hall, the regular council meeting was called to order, as usual. But that afternoon, councillor John Avalos proposed a decidedly irregular resolution: the city’s retirement fund should withdraw its money from fossil fuels.

“San Francisco has aggressive goals to address climate change,” he said. “It’s important that we apply these same values when we decide how to invest our funds.”

He isn’t the first to say so. In December, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn declared that the city’s cash balances – the US$1.4 billion it uses to manage its daily operations – would no longer be stashed in fossil fuel stocks. He also wrote to the city pension fund, which counts Exxon Mobil and Chevron among its major holdings, requesting it do the same.

The deliberations in the two west coast cities made a media splash, adding momentum to America’s fastest growing social movement: ‘Go Fossil Free’, a nation-wide blitz calling for universities, governments and churches to freeze new investments in fossil fuel assets, and to sell what they’ve already got.

The impetus for the campaign is a set of simple numbers – a global carbon budget.

It is a way of framing the climate crisis that is uniting student activists and market analysts. The former use the numbers to prosecute a moral case that the fossil fuel industry has gone rogue; the later, for a cold-blooded calculation that trading away from carbon-heavy assets is in the self-interest of investors.

The numbers were set out in a report called ‘Unburnable Carbon’, released last year by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a group of analysts and environmentalists in the UK. It highlighted the work of the Potsdam Climate Institute, which in 2009 produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

These are the numbers: for a low chance – one-in-five – of exceeding 2-degrees warming, we can only emit another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by mid-century.

But proven fossil fuel reserves (held by listed corporations, private companies and nation-states) equate to 2795 gigatonnes; five times the carbon budget.

In Copenhagen in 2009, the world’s governments agreed to limit warming to 2 degrees. To do so, four-fifths of our fuel must stay in the ground.

James Leaton, Carbon Tracker’s research director, says this “huge overshoot” of reserves represents a “carbon bubble” in financial markets. We’re on track to exceed the budget by 2028. “Investors need to start questioning the wisdom of companies pouring more capital into developing even more reserves,” he says.

The International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook for 2012, presented a similar case. Using the same research, but choosing a higher, 50-50 threshold for exceeding 2-degrees warming, it stated that two-thirds of proven reserves must stay in the ground, unless carbon capture and storage is widely deployed. (It observed that the pace of deployment of the technology “remains highly uncertain”.)

Bill McKibben, the author and activist who inspired Go Fossil Free in the US, explains that despite decades of advocacy, “the penny dropped” when he saw those numbers.

“I’ve followed this all pretty closely – I wrote the first book about climate change – but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of this story was written. It’s utterly clear. There is no room for wishful thinking,” he says, on the phone from his home in Ripton, Vermont.

“These guys have five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn. Once you understand that, then you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.”

Last August, he published an article in Rolling Stone, called ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’. Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber was on the cover, but it was McKibben’s essay that went viral.

Spurred by its unexpected popularity, McKibben hit the road the day after the US election, on his ‘Do the Math’ tour. With support from Desmond Tutu, author Naomi Klein and others, he spoke to sold-out concert halls “in 24 cities in 26 nights”.

Just two months on, students on over 250 campuses have started campaigns for their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies. (Together, US colleges command over US$400 billion in endowments.) Already, three have agreed.

“It’s actually happening faster than we thought,” McKibben says. “These are hard fights. All these kids know that, but they also know that this is their future.”

The campaign is modelled on the anti-apartheid divestment movement. In the 1980s, 155 colleges sold their South African assets, and scores of cities, states and counties joined in economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime.

This time – and with the blessing of Tutu – the call for divestment is about undermining the fossil fuel industry’s legitimacy. “We’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon; colleges selling their stock is probably not going to do that,” McKibben says. “We’re trying to take away their social licence.”

The writer is scheduled to visit Australia in June, before his organisation, 350.org, holds its ‘Global Power Shift’ conference in Istanbul. But local activists aren’t waiting until then.

In January, Friends of the Earth began to promote Market Forces, a new campaign “to stop our money going into projects that would harm the environment and drive global warming”, according to its founder, Julien Vincent.

Likewise, the Australian Students Environment Network has started Lock the Campus, which targets universities’ investments, research and partnerships with the fossil fuel industry. They have a precedent: following a brief student campaign in 2011, ANU agreed to sell its million-dollar stake in coal seam gas company Metgasco.

As it turns out, the students have an unlikely ally – albeit one with a slightly different goal in mind.

John Hewson, the former leader of the Liberal Party, now fronts the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) and its accompanying social media campaign, The Vital Few, which is aimed squarely at superannuation funds.

The Vital Few website is set up for battle, rallying the public to “storm the castle” and “rewrite the future”. In practice, that means emailing your fund, requesting transparency about its interests in fossil fuels and calling for a bigger stake in renewables.

Hewson says the average pension fund invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in “high-carbon intensive industries” and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

“These asset owners have a long-term, not a short-term, horizon,” he says. “Their fiduciary responsibility is to maximise the returns to superannuates over time. How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low carbon intensive industries.”

In the finance world, “climate risk” translates as the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change. That could come by way of physical impacts – say, a flood that destroys infrastructure – or cheap clean technology, or tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing and regulations.

Alongside Hewson on the AODP board is Bob Litterman, the former head of risk management for Goldman Sachs in New York. He sees an analogy between the carbon bubble and the sub-prime crisis, in which financial institutions “piled up mortgages on their balance sheet, assuming they were safe”.

“Similarly, today, we’re piling up carbon emissions in the atmosphere. When there’s a recognition that it cannot absorb an unlimited amount of carbon, there’s risk that people will very quickly revalue all the assets producing those emissions,” he says.

Last year, the AODP – which has connections with the Climate Institute – launched an index of the world’s pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. It ranked them on their management and disclosure of climate risk.

The highest rating fund was Local Government Super, based in New South Wales. It estimates that low-carbon assets comprise more than 10 per cent of its total holdings. Members can choose a coal-free shares alternative, which screens out BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers and Whitehaven Coal, among others.

CEO Peter Lambert insists this attitude to climate risk is pragmatic, not political. “Increasingly the blowtorch is going to be turned towards these issues and there will be a time when they’re priced into assets.

“You can say you’ll sit back and wait until that occurs and then start to adjust your portfolio. Our position is that we should be ready for it now, because by then it’s too late and it will cost our members money,” he says.

That view is not yet widely shared in the industry. Nathan Fabian is the CEO of the Investor Group on Climate Change, which covers more than sixty institutional investors. “I’m confident we’re heading in the right direction,” he says. “But the truth is that the process is going slower than what is necessary to address climate risk.”

For funds and analysts, the risk boils down to the likelihood of widespread carbon pricing. Most are betting against it – that is, they’re tipping we’ll exceed the budget and press on to a hotter world.

Even for the most concerned among them, it is difficult to translate knowledge into action.

Typically, super funds invest heavily in “passive funds” that track the market – deviating from that benchmark entails a risk of doing worse than everyone else.

The very nature of financial modelling is a barrier, Fabian says: a dollar today is worth considerably more than a dollar in a decade. When you factor in deep uncertainty about carbon policy, along with fund managers who are rewarded for meeting short-term targets, a systemic, long-term risk such as climate change slips off the computer screen.

“The risk is there,” he says. “It’s just hard for us to measure it.”

Nick Robins is the head of the climate change centre at HSBC Bank, in London. Over the past year, his team has tried to measure the risk by estimating the impact in Europe of a deflating carbon bubble. In their scenarios, it could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. And yet, he says, “at the moment this risk is not being priced at all”.

While the San Francisco and Seattle divestment proposals received a lot of press, the funds in question haven’t yet adopted them. In Seattle, a consultant’s report advised the board that doing so would be “costly”.

But just as the current patterns of world finance continue to reinforce the fossil fuel economy, so the movements for change – laid out by Carbon Tracker, McKibben and the Vital Few – weaken the walls of the carbon bubble. The more noise they make, the more exposed fossil fuel investments appear.

Robins says divestment is “not on the cards” for large institutional investors. “But people are recognising that over the next two years, they will need to come up with investment plans about how they’re going to be part of a 2-degree world, rather than the 4- to 6-degree world which they’re on at the moment.”

For his part, McKibben expects Go Fossil Free will spread rapidly and internationally, precipitated by citizens’ experiences of weather extremes.

“If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. You guys broke every temperature record you had, day after day in January,” he says.

“Either we pay attention, or we engage in the most incredible collective denial that human beings have ever engaged in.”

Read this article at The Age online

Dee and Rob

In Social justice, The Big Issue on

TWO years ago, I began researching a long story about homelessness for The Big Issue. My article followed the fortunes of two people: Albert, who had been homeless most of his life; and Dee, who was on the brink of it, for the first time.

It was a privilege to be let into their lives. Afterwards I tried to stay in touch, but Albert changed his number before long; I don’t know what he’s doing now. Dee and I, though, are still in contact. After the article was published, something extraordinary happened that involved us both, and a man named Rob, from Sydney, who happened to buy a copy of that edition.

***

Dee had just turned 40 when I met her. It was two decades since she’d moved here from New Zealand. Lately, she’d had a run of bad luck: a serious workplace injury and an associated legal dispute, then cervical cancer, and then her long-term rental house was put up for sale.

She had moved to a flimsy unit, far away from her neighbourhood, but even so, was paying higher rent. One of her daughters moved out. Dee fell further and further behind; the eviction notice was only days away.

When I visited, she introduced me to Brandi, her big handsome dog. “She’s depressed – it’s too small here,” Dee said. “Her face wasn’t grey, but she’s gone grey like me.” She rubbed the dog between the ears. “We’ve turned old, haven’t we?”

Another time, when I left her house, she walked with me as far as her letterbox. In the article I wrote this:

“It was the first time I’d seen her outside her unit, unencumbered by the closeness of the walls and the darkness of her lounge. As I walked away she bent down to pick up her mail and called out, ‘Want to take my bills?’ She gave me a big throaty laugh. I laughed with her and for an instant everything seemed like it would turn out okay, until I remembered it probably wouldn’t.”

That’s what I thought. Albert had found a place in supportive housing – he’d had a tough life, but maybe things had turned around. For Dee, I just couldn’t imagine a way out.

A few days after the article was published, I opened an email from Rob, who found me through my website. He said he’d been “deeply affected” by Dee’s situation.

“I suppose I personally resonate with her story – I’m a Kiwi myself and have been in a similar situation previously. Nowadays life is good and I am successful and affluent in a middle of the road way,” he wrote.

“I do not wish to make things worse by promising things that cannot be fulfilled, but a simple monthly stipend to help cover bills and rent is, I suspect, well within my power. I made a personal promise sometime ago, after pulling myself out of the dark, that I would not fail to act when I have the opportunity and ability to do so.”

I called him to talk about it. Then I called Dee. She was astonished, but wary. She said she’d talk to him.

A couple of weeks later, Rob was in Melbourne on business. I met him and we drove to Dee’s house, near Frankston.

He was about 40, I guessed – Dee’s age – and wore a baseball cap and a blue-collar shirt. He was a straight-talker: before we’d travelled a suburb, he was telling me how he’d nearly become homeless during the financial crisis. He had accumulated debt in the hundreds of thousands, and suddenly, he had no income. For a few months, he covered rent by selling his possessions. He contemplated living in his car, but narrowly avoided it. Slowly, he righted the business. The debt was under control by then, but he was still a renter – not a one-percenter.

His phone rang as we approached Dee’s street, and before we had time to gather our thoughts, she was answering the door.

I sat next to Dee on her L-shaped couch, chitchatting to ease their nerves. After a while, we all stood to make cups of tea, and then Rob sat next to her instead. Dee handed him a stack of bills and paperwork; he made notes as they calculated what she earned and what she owed. He offered to pay her next month’s rent, plus some outstanding bills, and put money in her account every month to top up what Centrelink didn’t cover. For as long as it took.

“Sometimes you just need to know that somebody will be there for you, that you can rely on someone,” Rob said, turning towards Dee, and looking her squarely in the face. “All I ask of you – and I know you’ll do this – is to genuinely look for work. I understand that things take time. It may not happen, and that is okay. I will be here. I’m not going anywhere.”

They hugged. We all cried. “I’ve been around the block,” Rob said. “There’s nothing you can tell me that I’ll be shocked by, and nothing I’ll judge you for.”

When Rob dropped me off, back in the city, I called Dee. She was relieved, giddy. She said she felt as though she had known Rob a long time, as though he was fatherly towards her. In the car, he’d told me he felt like he knew her too. It turned out they’d grown up not far from one another and on the same side of the tracks.

In her flimsy, darkened lounge that day, I got shivers all over. And I still do, every time I think about it.

***

It hasn’t been easy, since then. Every few months Dee and I exchange a text message or an email. She writes like she talks: fast, without fuss or restraint. I got an urgent email one day asking me to contact Rob, because she hadn’t heard from him.

“…im pissed. and hurt i opened up and shared my life with him and he dumps me like a piece of crap with no explanation. hope youre well and happy new year. dx”

In May, she sent me this:

“…now impossible to survive without robs help. thank god hes been my saviour and weve been talking a bit so thats awesome. My plan is to get a JOB!!! But shit michael ive just had ultrasounds of my elbows and been diagnosed with golfers elbow, lol funny name aye… my arms swell and ache for days sometimes…”

About a year after they first met, Rob wrote me this:

“Dee and I patched things up. I sent her a long email and laid things out honestly, and she understood that what felt like me ignoring her was actually just me struggling to keep faith with all my commitments… ”

***

I called them both this week. Rob was on the Gold Coast, on business again. Business is good, but it means he works very long hours – the work of about three people, he guesses. And that means he doesn’t call Dee as often as he’d like. “I feel a bit guilty that I haven’t helped her in other ways that aren’t financial. But I’ve come to realise I really don’t have the time,” he said.

This kind of arrangement, he said, is “probably not for everybody, but there probably should be more of it. There are a great deal of us who have the wherewithal to do it, but we don’t, because it’s too hard, or someone told us once that everyone should fend for themselves. So we just let other human beings go to the wolves.”

He said “probably”, because he knows that helping is not simple. But there was one idea he wanted me to write down:

“If someone is in trouble and they are going to be helped, they need to be helped for a long fucking time. People don’t just get well and all of a sudden it’s peachy. That’s Hollywood. That’s storybook. That’s not how it works in the dirty messy world.”

The day I spoke to Dee, one of her daughters had just returned from New Zealand. They will live together this year, and that’ll help with the bills. When she gets over her golfer’s elbow, she wants to work again. But lately, her depression has been worse than ever, and Brandi, too, has gone grey all over.

Dee and I reminisced about that afternoon when the three of us sat in her lounge. “It still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck,” she said. “And every single day I know I can pay rent because of Rob. He is making my life bearable. I wish I could yell it out to the world.”

Illustration by Michel Streich

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre dailies

Read the original article on The Big Issue website or here.

Better Block

In Greener Homes on

Residents can take urban planning into their own hands.

IS there a streetscape near you where no one goes? Somewhere ugly to look at, hard to walk, and too scary to ride?

Just go ahead and fix it. That’s what Jason Roberts did in Oak Cliff, a rundown part of Dallas, Texas.

In 2010, with a crew of volunteers, he staged a one-off community event, called Better Block. For a weekend, they widened the footpaths and brought in tables and chairs and trees in pots. They started pop-up cafes and shops, and painted temporary bike lanes on the street.

In the process, they broke all kinds of council rules. But people loved it. Their “guerrilla art” idea has spawned a movement: in the last two years there have been 41 Better Blocks held all across the United States.

Mr Roberts is visiting Melbourne this month as one of the keynote speakers at the Sustainable Living Festival, which began yesterday and runs until February 24.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

“By doing all those things, we created a more humane environment, and that made more people come out and use the space,” he says. They created permanent change, too. Many of the zoning rules have been scrapped, and some businesses have stayed on.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s Dallas or Australia or Bangladesh, we all enjoy sitting outside drinking a cup of coffee and watching a musician play. We all love strolling through outdoor flower stands,” he says. “They’re universal things.

Mr Roberts was an IT-consultant and musician. Then, ten years ago, he and his wife visited Europe. They were astonished by the vibrant life of the cities: the bike riders and buzzing markets, the street-side cafes and public plazas where old people lingered with their grandchildren.

He returned and saw with new eyes the concrete freeways and barren footpaths of his own city, and resolved to make them “more like Paris”.

His first project was an impromptu art show, called Art Conspiracy, in an abandoned, boarded-up theatre. It happened fast: the artists painted one day and sold their canvases the next. Unexpectedly, 700 people showed up to see the old theatre back in use.

Next he set up a website – the Oak Cliff Transit Authority – promoting the reconstruction of the old tramcar that used to run through town. He was the only one in the “authority”, but no matter. A journalist wrote about it, and other enthusiasts joined in. Their crazy plan has come true: the city is actually building the tramcar line. With the help of a large federal grant, construction should be finished by 2014.

Then, a couple of years later, Mr Roberts founded Bike Friendly Oak Cliff – even though he didn’t own a bike at the time. “We just said, ‘We’re the bike part of town’, and it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he explains. “With time, people started buying bikes, and people who liked bicycling started moving into the area.”

He’s got three tips for would-be urban activists: show up to your local community groups; give your event a name; and set a date and publish it – that way you’ll be forced to make it happen.

“The projects have been successful because we commit to quick action and get local people working together to make a better place,” he says. “Even if it’s temporary, people keep talking and they say, ‘Why don’t we fix this street permanently?’”

Read this article at The Age online