An entrepreneur searches for the ideal business

(Smith Journal, Volume 3)

IN October last year, Simon Griffiths walked across a stage in Melbourne and addressed his audience. It was a TEDx event, with speakers invited on the theme of ‘innovation’. Griffiths wore sombre garb – tan slacks, a grey shirt, and a buttoned-up grey jacket – his beard was trimmed and fair hair plastered down.

“Today I want to talk to you about a very serious issue, and it’s something that’s been close to my heart for a long time. It’s been in the news a lot recently and a lot of politicians have been talking about it,” he said, and then paused for effect.

“I want to tell you about how we can all save the world, using beer and toilet paper.”

Griffiths plied the crowd with many more gentle jokes over the next 18 minutes – he was on a roll with toilet paper puns – but it wasn’t long before he grazed their ears instead, with a troubling insight he’d gained while working on an aid project in South Africa years earlier.

“I realised I’d been in the developing world on and off for about ten years, and I’d seen a lot of the poverty that you guys have no doubt heard about – the 884 million people without access to clean water, the 759 million illiterate adults and the 2.4 billion people without decent toilets,” he said.

But, at the current rate of change, he figured, we wouldn’t achieve global sanitation until 2080 or literacy until 2085.

“I’m 28,” he said. “I’m not going to be alive to see that happen, and I think that’s pretty shocking. We’re leaving these problems for the next generation.”

His next observation was that all aid projects, no matter their merits, lacked sufficient investment. It is this – the funding and philanthropy – that he decided to address. And that’s where the beer and toilet paper come in.

Griffiths’ latest schemes are a bar, called Shebeen, which sells booze from the developing world and pours all the profits from each sale into projects in the drink’s source country; and Who Gives A Crap, a toilet paper brand that’ll flush half its profits into sanitation programs.

The morning we’re scheduled to meet, Shebeen is only weeks from opening, and Griffiths and his team are putting the finishing touches on a crowd-funding campaign for Who Gives A Crap.

Years of capital raising, months of research, weeks of wavering confidence, and – through it all – long days powered by imagination and passion: all of that is about to come alive.

I knock on a door in a narrow street in Fitzroy, in inner city Melbourne. Inside, several bestubbled young men are working at a long table, programming code scrolling down their computer screens.

Griffiths bounces down the stairs to meet me. In person, he’s taller, more dishevelled, and more colourful than he appeared on video. He’s wearing sparkly gold runners and a burgundy jumper patterned with half-peeled bananas. Yes, I think to myself, this is what a social entrepreneur should wear to work.

***

Rewind a few years, however, and the banana jumper wasn’t even a twinkle in Griffith’s eyes. When he was at University of Melbourne, studying engineering and commerce, he was surveying suits instead. For two years, he called and emailed and bothered McKinsey & Company, the top international management consulting firm, for a graduate position.

At the same time, he also applied for a Rhodes Scholarship for postgraduate economics at Oxford University. (He made it to the top four, but eventually missed out.)

“The application process really got me thinking about what my values were and what I truly cared about,” he explains. “I realised that, yes, I loved the problem solving and innovation work you do with someone like McKinsey, but the real outcome is that you’re helping another company to maximise their profit and perhaps they’re not doing it in a way you’re super-psyched about.”

So, when McKinsey finally came knocking with an offer, he turned them down.

“The Rhodes process made me realise I was more interested in the developing world. I wanted to use my skills to create change that I cared about.”

With friends from university, he founded Ripple.org, a search engine in which users click on ads in exchange for charity donations made by the advertisers. Then he skipped town for Durban, where he helped establish Schools 4 Schools, the Oaktree Foundation’s program linking Australian schools with counterparts in South Africa and Cambodia.

But something still wasn’t right. Working in traditional non-government organisations just didn’t appeal; the sphere of influence seemed too small.

“I could see there was a really big funding problem, and everyone was suffering from it. So I started to think about how to change the way people engage with philanthropy,” he says.

And so, Shebeen was born. Or at least, the idea of Shebeen. Another of his university friends, Zanna McComish – who now studies at Harvard Business School – dreamed it up after volunteering in Tanzania. It was going to be a slapped-up, 50-seat, ramshackle venue, replicating the bars they’d drunk at on their travels in Africa. That was five years ago.

They took the concept public in late 2009, seeking to raise $150,000. “We had a huge response and I went on Christmas break thinking, ‘That’s it, we’re going to be trading in a few months time. We’re living the dream.’ Three months later we realised that just wasn’t the case,” he says.

“Everyone says it takes five false starts to get it right and that was probably number one.”

By then, Griffiths had turned his back on a conventional work pathway, and for what? “My friends were saying, ‘What are you doing? There’s no way you can get back into the corporate world and how are you going to make a career out of this? Do you ever want to buy a house?’”

***

Griffiths shows me upstairs, past the nest of hirsute programmers, to where he lives with his partner Melissa Loughnan, the director of independent gallery Utopian Slumps. (The banana-skin jumper is the work of one of her artists, Misha Hollenbach.)

We sit at the kitchen table in the large, open-plan living room. Light refracts through a row of jars along the windowsill, and falls on the concrete floor and the kind of easy-cool artwork and artefacts you’d expect in the home of curator. While we talk, the conversations from the shared studio downstairs rise up like the background hum of a brain.

One reason for Shebeen’s false start, Griffiths speculates, is that even a few years ago, no one really knew what a social enterprise was. “We were too far ahead of the curve. Now, it’s much more common – we don’t have to explain it anymore.”

Microfinance charity Opportunity International says there’s been a decade of “explosive growth” in social enterprises overseas, but only in recent years has Australia begun to catch up. Now, it claims, the sector is one of the fastest growing in the economy.

Social enterprises come in all shapes and sizes, from non-profits in rich countries that create jobs for the long-term unemployed (say, The Big Issue), to profit-making traders in poor countries that sell products to improve the lives of the buyers (say, farm machinery that boosts yields).

The model Griffiths picked is to do business in Australia, and use the proceeds to fund “the smartest guys in the room”. To him, that means aid projects that take an enterprise approach, too.

“We don’t work with handout models,” he says. “We’re always looking at models where individuals who are customers make a purchase, or spend time working on the product, so they have a physical level of commitment.

“We want to invest in organisations that maximise their social impact, and have data on it, and can improve their benchmarks year after year.” At Shebeen, for example, buying a South African wine will help fund libraries and local-language publishing, via Room to Read, a charity set up by an ex-Microsoft executive.

Griffiths is enlivened by this new wave of business-oriented development – despite the sparkly shoes, he’s a data kind of guy – and, likewise, by the potential to secure funding by changing the way ordinary people consume.

In his TEDx talk, he cited products sold by some of “the biggest companies in the world”, including Coca-Cola’s mango smoothie, called Odwalla, which supports Haitian farmers (10 cents from every bottle sold), and a Louis Vuitton bag made with Bono and his wife – part of the company’s “Core Values” campaign – which supports African development projects.

“I think this campaign has a little bit further to go,” Griffiths observed, “but it’s pretty impressive to see someone like Louis Vuitton having a crack at consumer-driven philanthropy.”

Can this be right? Louis Vuitton and Coca Cola doing good? It’s been nagging at me, so when we meet, I ask.

“Yeah, I know. It’s Coke, right?” he replies. “But that’s what’s interesting. These guys who’ve been unethical operators are starting to think more ethically about what they’re doing.”

But for multinationals and start-up entrepreneurs alike, declaring altruistic motives won’t deter the critics – if anything, it invites extra scrutiny. Both Shebeen and Who Gives A Crap promote change by means of aid, trade and consumption – and every inch of that proposition stands on shifting ground. Griffiths has waded into the mire.

“A really tricky part of both businesses is that there are a lot of ethical conundrums and you have to figure out where to draw the line,” he says. “And that’s not easy.”

***

In 2008, Dr Paul Farmer was driving along a road in south-eastern Rwanda when he received a phone call from the Skoll Foundation (a think tank, venture fund and academy for social entrepreneurs, all rolled into one) telling him he’d been picked for their Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Farmer, the founder of an organisation called Partners In Health, is a physician and anthropologist. He has worked for many years in Haiti, Rwanda and several other countries, and was the subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 biography, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Over the decades, he’s received many awards.

But he was ambivalent about this new accolade; he felt it brought him “both honour and shame”. Later that year, he described his reaction at the Skoll World Forum, a conference run by the foundation (PDF). He “winced”, he said, “that we live in an era in which simply seeking to provide high-quality medical care to the world’s poorest is considered innovative and entrepreneurial.”

From the podium, Farmer challenged the “ideology” that the poor must always pay, in order for them to value the support they’re given. True development, he argued, would not occur without investment in public education and public healthcare. “Among some entrepreneurs, it’s not popular to talk of rights. We speak, instead, of ‘product’ and ‘brand’. Patients and students – children! – become ‘clients’ or even ‘customers’,” he said.

“We need to be aware of the limitations of any culture that sees all services as commodities and very few as rights. Let me be clear: this is not some sort of ‘anti-market’ stance. It’s merely the argument that the market alone will not solve the problems we face … we need to do everything in our power to make sure that the public sector does not shrivel and die.”

But once you’re in the mire, it’s hard to stay clean – even for Dr Farmer.

Two years earlier, Bono had fronted the launch of (PRODUCT) RED, a kind of meta-brand licensed to large companies, who donate a portion of the profit from their special RED product lines to finance HIV/AIDS health programs in Africa.

“Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands,” Bono said. “RED is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce.”

It’s the realm of the “causumer”, where you make the world better by shopping more – by buying a RED iPod and a Gap RED t-shirt, for example, or by maxing out your American Express RED card. “Has there ever been a better reason to shop?” one Amex ad asked.

In their book Brand Aid, academics Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte criticise Farmer for lending his authority to RED, as an “aid celebrity”, along with Bono and economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The causumer model, they argue, addresses the manifestations of poverty but not its origins. Corporations look good without really changing their business practices, while “consumers engage in low-cost heroism” without learning about “global production-consumption relations or the struggles of living with HIV/AIDS.”

The RED campaign has its own spoof: the BUY (LESS) website, which invites viewers to give directly to RED’s beneficiary, The Global Fund, and to other causes, without consuming anything first. Just below the website’s banner, there’s a stinging call to action: “Join us in rejecting the ti(red) notion that shopping is a reasonable response to human suffering.”

***

While we’re discussing conspicuous consumption, Griffiths gestures at a brown handbag at the top of the stairs – Louis Vuitton. “It’s Mel’s,” he laughs. “And it’s second hand.”

By his own habits, Griffiths is a conscious consumer (“I like to get as close to full information as I can, but in a relatively short time period,” he explains.) He favours second hand goods over new, and after being a long-time vegetarian, only recently began eating a little meat. Occasionally, however, he ignores the rules and just buys something he wants.

“If I didn’t enjoy consumption, I don’t think I would have ended up where I am. My main view is that people should be aware of the impact of their decisions – generally speaking, too much consumption of new goods is not a good thing,” he says. “I want to see that flipped on its head, so consumption can be more positively impactful.”

Who Gives A Crap, Griffiths’ most recent enterprise, also represents a progression in this thinking. A bar can be a great business, but it has certain limitations: some people choose not to drink; young people aren’t allowed to; and most people don’t live nearby. And some aid partners refuse to accept funding derived from alcohol sales. Griffiths has qualms too: “I’m not super excited about people coming into the venue and getting drunk,” he says. “But that’s inevitably something we’ll have to deal with.”

With these drawbacks in mind, he began to puzzle over something new – a suitable mass-market product.

One day, as he walked into his laundry, he glanced at a six-pack of toilet paper. “I had a quarter-second moment where I was like, ‘Toilet paper! And we’ll work with WaterAid on sanitation! And we’ll call it Who Gives a Crap!’” he says, his voice rising with each recalled revelation. “I called three friends and they all just said, ‘You’ve got to do it.’”

As far as causumer products go, toilet paper is the antithesis of a Louis Vuitton bag: it’s a staple, cheap and necessary. But even toilet paper comes with seriously scrunchy dilemmas.

Together with Jehan Ratnatunga – a co-founder of Ripple who now works for YouTube in Los Angeles – Griffiths developed a rigorous business plan. But the duo’s research revealed that they couldn’t turn a profit by manufacturing in Australia. When Griffiths journeyed to China to visit potential suppliers, he was shaken by the working conditions he observed.

“There was a moment where I was sitting on the train back to Hong Kong from China and I was feeling sick in the stomach, thinking, ‘We can’t produce in Australia, but I’m not comfortable producing over here. What do we do?’

“And I sat there and looked at myself and realised that 100 per cent of the items I had with me were made in China and I had no idea where any of the factories were or what the conditions were like inside them. There’s just no transparency.”

He resolved to forge ahead, but to lift the working standards in their chosen factory. “Instead of boycotting, we need to make sure companies who produce in China do it in a way that makes workers’ lives better. With the toilet paper, we can do that up front. It’s a big part of who we are as a company.”

And then there’s Shebeen: visiting every brewer would break its bank. “We’re comfortable enough to trade – brewing is a capital-intensive process, so there’s less incentive to screw your workforce – but we’re not super happy about it,” he says. “In the long-run, we’d like to understand how they work.”

***

I meet Griffiths again, a few weeks later, on location in Melbourne’s CBD. He pedals up the alleyway and brakes at the entrance to a bar – the doorway that will soon lead to Shebeen. Today, he looks more like his TEDx self – tousled hair trimmed and slicked, banana-patterns and runners forgone for a red-striped woollen knit and respectable leather lace-ups.

Inside, the architects are taking final measurements for the fit-out. They’re here, with Griffiths’ fellow Shebeen director and Melbourne bar-scene sage, Vernon Chalker, to make final arrangements with the landlord before they give the builders the green light.

The existing purple curtains and white-leather couches will be demolished and replaced with corrugated iron, smashed tiles and up-cycled stools, among other things: a carefully designed interior that Griffiths describes as “a bit of fun – derelict but really functional”.

This year, at last, their plans coalesced. After painstakingly securing more than two-dozen groups of investors, the team nabbed a sponsorship deal from spirits company Brown-Forman. All up, they raised $250,000. If Shebeen’s profits flow according to plan, they’ll transform that investment into $800,000 in donations within three years.

Another significant transaction will also occur: once the doors open, Griffiths will finally draw a wage. All these years, he’s paid his rent by tutoring at the University of Melbourne (this year, he’s been scraping by on 4 hours a week), topped up by occasional consulting jobs for other social enterprises and companies interested in social innovation – offers that have arisen more frequently of late. Somewhere along the way, the fugitive from corporate consulting acquired useful skills, perhaps even a career.

Right now, that’s all beside the point. Griffiths, Chalker and the architects are leaning over the bar, telling the landlord about their plan for a corrugated lean-to opening onto the alleyway and explaining how it will fit within the intricacies of council regulations (in short: with difficulty). They’re consumed by the details.

“We want someone to come into Shebeen, have a drink and leave – and come back again. The second time, they’ll find out what the concept is,” he explains. “We’re not banking on the guilt factor.”

Occasionally, someone from a more traditional charity challenges him about what’s doing – can he really justify selling booze for a cause?

Griffiths doesn’t mind. He just says thanks, and gifts them a bottle of Shebeen’s wine. “They’ll call up a week later, and say they realised they were being fuddy-duddies, and that yes, they drink wine anyway and they can do it in a smarter way.

“It gets them thinking about what else that means, about other products and about consumption more generally. And that’s what we’re trying to do – to open it up.”

This article was published in Smith Journal. Find a stockist near you! 

On the coming inquest into the death of Michael Atakelt

LAST Friday, the Victorian State Coroner held another directions hearing for the inquest into the death of Michael Atakelt. About one hundred people attended; once all the seats were full, they stood three deep at the back and along the side of the courtroom.

It is a year since Atakelt disappeared – he went missing late in June and his body was found in the Maribyrnong River in early July – and over six months since the coroner’s first directions hearing. The Ethiopian-Australian community continues to show up in ever-greater numbers.

The coroner, Jennifer Coate, set the date and details of the full inquest into his death. It will run for two weeks, beginning on 11 February 2013, and hear evidence from over 30 witnesses. Its aim is to establish the cause and circumstances of his death, openly and publicly.

The directions hearings, however, have a different role. The coroner went to some length to explain everything as clearly and simply as possible – especially for Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum, who has no legal representation. But directions hearings aren’t for onlookers. They’re for the coroner. They’re for the lawyers. They’re to clarify timelines, to set parameters.

The effect is an unsatisfying mix of transparency and mystery. You have a sense that nothing is being withheld, but at the same time, nothing much is revealed. The lawyers have all read the police brief – they’ve seen the evidence and they know the likely outcome.

In the seats, few people know any of that. The experience is something like whale watching on an empty sea: you wait vigilantly, scanning the horizon for fragments of truth to surface. Now and then, shapes emerge: he was involved in an incident in Flinders Lane; police records show he’d only been in custody once in the months prior to his disappearance; one of the pathologists said there may have been a needle mark on the inside of his left arm.

But the great bulk of the investigation swims just below the surface, in the minds and folders of the people at the front bench. You are confused: you know they’ve seen something, but you don’t know what it is.

When the hearing finished, we stood for the coroner to leave the courtroom and then Seyoum turned around and addressed the audience in Amharic, explaining that the date had been set for the full inquest.

Most people I spoke to afterwards had confidence in the coroner. While many didn’t understand the vast delays, or even what had happened in the courtroom just then – ‘Why do they all speak so quietly?’ one person wondered – they thought that the truth would out. Then again, some didn’t; and that lack of trust will be a problem for the frayed relationship between the community and police, until next February, at least.

Outside, Daniel Haile-Michael was handing out postcards for a play called Black Face White Mask, which he wrote with the other members of the Flemington Theatre Group. It is showing at the prestigious Malthouse Theatre in mid-July. The flyer describes it as a ‘fast paced hard-hitting comedy about what it really means to be Afro-Australian’.

Haile-Michael is studying civil engineering, but he’s also an actor, volunteer and activist. He said that his community, especially the young people, must find a way to have their voices heard. Otherwise, the tension he observes among his peers will continue to build, until someday it breaks. ‘And that’s why I’m doing this,’ he said. 

Read this article at Overland online

And here’s a link to Between two oceans, the first article I wrote about this case.

On the life and death of Michael Atakelt.

(Overland Journal, Autumn 2012)

I SIT at one end of the foyer in the Coroners Court. A young blonde woman sets herself down next to me and then addresses the two older men seated by my side. ‘I’m Sarah, from the Maribyrnong Leader,’ she says. ‘So, um, what’s happening here today?’

The men say they are here to represent the Ethiopian community and to find out what happened to Michael Atakelt. The foyer is full of people, all wanting to know the same thing: how and why did he die?

But they will not find out, not today, not for several months. Maybe never. Not an answer they’ll trust, anyway.

The Coroners Court of Victoria is located away from Melbourne’s legal district, on the eleventh floor of an ordinary office building uptown on Exhibition Street. Like an ordinary office, it has a low ceiling lined with fluorescent lights and windows shaded by venetian blinds.

Just before the hearing begins, Atakelt’s mother, Askalu Tella, crosses the foyer towards the courtroom door, with several women following close behind. She is dressed entirely in black. There are over fifty members of the Ethiopian-Australian community here, and people greet her and defer to her as she passes. I realise I am watching a procession. Next, the older men, including Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum, move in solemnly. The parents sit separately and do not acknowledge one another. The young men, Atakelt’s friends, are last to enter.

I make notes in my book about the elaborate, respectful greetings I’d seen; the confident gait of the older men; the way the young men seem to stay close to the walls. Above all, about their collective, awful misunderstanding of what will happen here today, and the sadness and bitterness that will likely follow.

I had met Seyoum that morning in Footscray, at an Ethiopian restaurant called African Town. He had printed out the jargon-ridden letter he’d received from the coroner and we tried to decipher it together. I told him ruefully that although I was no expert, I was sure there would be no answers today. He fell silent, then, and rubbed the grey-flecked stubble on his cheeks.

In the court, the seats are full and several people are standing. The lawyers speak quietly and it is difficult to understand the proceedings. I wonder about those around me for whom the language barrier is more than just legalese.

Atakelt’s parents sit at the long table before the bench. Tella, the mother, has an interpreter. Seyoum, who speaks English with fluency, appears to comprehend little. Twice he stands to talk or ask about the facts of his son’s death. The state coroner, Jennifer Coate, makes sure he sits near the interpreter, too. She speaks slowly, explaining that this is a directions hearing: its purpose is to fix timelines and identify interested parties, nothing more.

It is five months since Atakelt went missing, and nearly four-and-a-half since his body was found in the Maribyrnong River. The next directions hearing will be in April, another four months away.

After the hearing, I meet with Hannah Fesseha. She is nineteen and is studying Arts, majoring in criminology, at the University of Melbourne. She grew up in Altona Meadows in the western suburbs. In the months since Atakelt died, Fesseha and other young African-Australians (‘about four or five – it fluctuates, depending on exams’) founded IMARA Advocacy, a group aiming to speak on behalf of young people about issues such as racialised policing; Imara is Swahili for strength and resilience, she explains.

I ask about the hearing. ‘Nobody really thinks it would take this long just to find out how he died,’ Fesseha tells me. ‘I think that’s the first question that everybody wants answered: how? And it still hasn’t been answered.’

***

At 2 pm on Thursday 7 July, a fisherman saw a body floating on the Maribyrnong River near the Raleigh Road pontoon and called the police.

Three photos were posted online in the Maribyrnong Leader that afternoon. One image shows the river, wide and shimmering, with luxurious houses built on the hill in the distance. Another, from the reverse angle, reveals traffic banked up on a low bridge nearby. In the foreground, a police car has pulled up on the walking path that divides the grassy foreshore. There is a small, rumpled square of white material close to the water’s edge. Legs stick out from beneath that pale blanket, angled down the bank, back to where they came from.

Michael Atakelt was twenty-two years old. He arrived in Australia from Ethiopia in 2006. Recently, he had been saying with a friend in Footscray while he studied English at Victoria University. He had been missing for eleven days after being held in police custody overnight. At the scene, the homicide squad determined that the circumstances were not suspicious, and the local police were assigned the investigation.

I began researching this story in mid-August. At the time, the family and the community were expecting the autopsy results within weeks. They did not arrive. By late October, Tamar Hopkins, the principal solicitor at the Flemington and Kensington Community Legal Centre, who was acting for the mother, was perplexed. ‘It’s a very, very slow process, but I’m really surprised we haven’t got any medical documents back yet,’ she said at the time. ‘I don’t know what is happening.’

With the help of the Ethiopian consulate, the family had organised an independent autopsy, but those results were also delayed without explanation.

The delays – from the police, the coroner and the independent forensic pathologist – have been viewed with a combination of disbelief and distrust by many people in, and connected with, Melbourne’s African communities.

The detective from the Footscray station assigned to the case has compiled a brief that is well over 500 pages long, but because the matter is before the coroner the police cannot speak about their findings. Based on reports at the time, as well as public comments by the family and police, this much is known.

On 26 June, the night before he went missing, Atakelt was locked up for drunkenness. The police were called to a fight, in which he received a superficial injury around or above his left eye. After being questioned and held for about five hours, Atakelt was released from the Melbourne Custody Centre. His girlfriend, Elsa Giday, saw him and then he disappeared.

In the days that followed, his mother called and then visited the Footscray police station several times, but her request to file a missing person report was not successful until 6 July. The next day, the police called Tella in to inform her that her son’s body had been found. It is normal protocol for police to visit the next of kin at their home. Seyoum was at work as a security guard in the Collingwood public housing estate when, at about 7:40 pm, some friends arrived to tell him his son was dead.

Fesseha heard word of the body in the river that day. ‘It spread really quickly,’ she explains. ‘The community might be fragmented, but when something like this happens they pull together.

‘The immediate response was that the police have something to do with it. How far, or how much, we don’t know. But the general consensus was that the police had some involvement.’

By coincidence, in the days between Atakelt’s disappearance and the discovery of his body, the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) had released its review of the investigative process for deaths associated with police contact. The report noted that these deaths must be investigated ‘in such a way as to give the public confidence that the circumstances … will be subject to the highest levels of scrutiny’.

Broadly, the OPI endorsed Victoria Police’s approach, which is that the homicide squad investigates, not the local police. But it warned that police must be careful making public statements before investigations are complete, because they invite ‘perceptions of bias’.

In early December, nearly five months after Atakelt’s body was found, Stephen Fontana, the assistant commissioner for the north-west metro region, fronted a public meeting at the North Melbourne Community Centre. It lasted for nearly four hours.

Fontana apologised for the unusual way Tella had been informed of her son’s death and ascribed it to a lapse in judgment. He explained that, while he could not go into detail, there was ‘no evidence to suggest Michael was murdered’ and ‘nothing in this case to suggest that police were involved’. Officers never considered this a death associated with police contact.

‘We have followed exactly the procedures we do for any other death of this nature and we won’t be changing that,’ Fontana said. He had total confidence in the detective from Footscray and in the oversight role of the homicide squad and Victoria Police’s Ethical Standards Department.

But without details, his assurances seemed only to convince the listeners that the investigation had been pre-empted. One by one, men from the Ethiopian-Australian community stood and accused the police of corruption. Some stated flatly that the Footscray police had killed Atakelt.

After about an hour, an articulate man took the microphone. He thanked the police for attending, and his reasonableness made his assertions all the more shocking. ‘The family and the community believe Michael was murdered and dumped in the river,’ he said. ‘Now, who did this, we don’t know. Justice and justice and justice has been mentioned. This investigation must be continued until the murderer has been found.

‘I have been a community worker and community leader. We have been trying to have a good relationship with Footscray police station, but over time it has been getting worse and worse. Why does the police insist that the Footscray police has to investigate?

‘The perception is very important. The community believes the Footscray police will not do the right thing. The fear in the community, I can tell you, is very, very high. They think the police, especially Footscray, are going to finish us; they’re going to kill us. That may not be factual, but the fear is there.’

When the man translated his comments into Amharic, the audience – until then impassive – broke into applause.

What does it mean, I wondered, when an entire community loses faith in the police force? The situation had ignited questions of existence. ‘It’s not just that we’re going to be discriminated against in the way the police exercise their powers,’ Fesseha had told me. ‘It pointed towards something deeper, even more problematic – that a mother could be treated in that way.’

***

Over 250 people had attended an earlier public meeting, held in July, the week after the body was recovered. At that meeting, too, Fontana and other police officers sat at the front of the hall and responded to questions.

Among the speakers that day were many young men who complained of constant harassment by the police. Atakelt’s friends said that he had been questioned ten times in the month before his disappearance, but that no charges had been laid and that he did not know why he was stopped so often.

I was introduced to one of those men, Hakim Abdulwahab, at the Coroners Court. Another day, we meet at a pub in Fitzroy. He is tall and slender, with close-cropped, tight black curls. He speaks gently, almost swallowing his words. ‘Walking along, you get stopped. Walking with a friend, you get stopped. I ask for my rights, but the police, they don’t care. They fully understand the fact that no Africans can fight police and press charges. So they can do anything, say anything. It’s very hard to afford private lawyers, so African communities, they don’t complain – they complain to each other.’

Abdulwahab is twenty-seven. He was born in Ethiopia and arrived in Australia seven years ago. As our conversation continues, I recognise a sense of resignation, a heaviness that burdens his laconic manner.

‘The police, they are actually building insecurity into the youngest of us. That’s what’s happening now: you see a police, you don’t know what the hell is going to happen to you,’ he says. ‘It makes you feel like shit when you think everyone is equal in this world and you actually run for freedom to here. I’m scared of police, like I’m scared of police back home.’

Just after Atakelt’s death, Abdulwahab was acting as a link between some of the young men – ‘the youngsters’, he calls them – and the older leaders, encouraging friends to come forward if they knew anything, and urging them to be patient.

The situation, he says, could have become violent. ‘In this case, something really crazy nearly happened in the African community – really crazy. We have to calm all the youngsters down. They want to go on strike, they want to yell out. Most youngsters, they are pissed off with police.’

At that time, something crazy was happening in England. In early August, five days of wild riots began after a peaceful protest by the family of Mark Duggan – a twenty-nine-year-old black man who was fatally shot by police in Tottenham – was kept waiting outside a police station after asking to speak to a senior officer.

In a study of the reasons for the unrest, the Guardian newspaper and the London School of Economics interviewed 270 rioters. Overwhelmingly, they nominated policing and poverty as the two most important causes. One journalist noted that race ‘was never far from the surface of the first-person accounts of rioters. The most acute sense of a longstanding mistrust was among black interviewees.’ Those interviewed were eight times more likely than an average Londoner to have been stopped and searched in the previous year.

In Australia, there is no official data on the frequency or subjects of police stops. But a local report on racialised policing released by three community legal services in 2009, called ‘Boys, you wanna give me some action’, offered a similar caution to the Guardian’s study: ‘policing practices render visible social divisions to do with race and poverty’.

The researchers interviewed thirty young African-Australians from three different regions in Melbourne. Almost all said they had experienced police violence, and the rest knew people who had. The report contained frightening complaints, including two participants who said they had been beaten and dumped by police. The authors concluded that over-policing was ‘a central feature of the young interviewees’ lives’.

A number of social workers and lawyers in Melbourne’s west told me similar stories. Chantelle Higgs, who worked for many years in Braybrook with young men from refugee backgrounds, says few people trust the police complaints systems, the Ethical Standards Department and the OPI.

‘I tried to help young people voice their concerns with the OPI, but there’s never been any follow-up,’ she says. ‘They were far more interested in allegations of corruption than assaults or disproportionate use of force on young people, which tells you that the mechanisms in place for grievances don’t work for marginalised young people and their families.’

Resentment of the Footscray police is not new. ‘My perception, from the work I was doing out there, is that there was a pretty bad culture. Young people would be systematically targeted, and incidents would escalate rather than be diffused, which would further criminalise them,’ Higgs says.

But where community leaders and youth workers witness over-policing, the police speak of over-representation. Assistant Commissioner Fontana has been the police spokesperson for this case, fronting the public and private meetings and doing the media. A member of the force for nearly forty years, he is trim with rosy cheeks and a scrupulously shaved head. He gives the impression of a man who presides over jovial but orderly family barbecues.

When Fontana took over the north-west metro role, he was taken aback by the figures that came across his desk. ‘When I say we have got an over-representation of African-Australian youth involved in certain crimes, I mean we have,’ he tells me. ‘At one stage I could attribute about a third of a certain crime category, a robbery-type crime, to African youth. And that’s a real concern, because the crimes are violent, and it wasn’t just one or two youths committing them, but groups of up to nine or ten youths at a time committing a crime on a person.’

In this context, he says, questioning young African men is not racism – it’s just part of routine policing. ‘Part of our job is just to talk to people and it’s not about them having done something wrong. It isn’t to target anyone; it’s about knowing who lives in the area or what they’re doing.’

After Atakelt’s death, a strange story was circulating about an Italian man who had lured several young African-Australian men into his car with the promise of cash-in-hand work at the Victoria Market, only to drug them, drive them to the Maribyrnong River and attempt to sexually assault them. It was said that the police hadn’t bothered to investigate the victims’ complaints.

But when the police tracked through their records, they found the matter was several years old. ‘We fully investigated and we’d actually charged the person responsible. However, it didn’t go ahead because the victims subsequently withdrew their statements,’ Fontana says. ‘But it is still going around the community that nothing was being done. It presents a challenge for us – how do we keep those lines of communication open?’

Abdulwahab, however, says he has spoken with several people who had encountered the Italian man, and he claims the man is still loitering. He won’t make a formal statement. ‘I wouldn’t report anything that happens,’ he told me. ‘What for?’

Despite his leadership when Atakelt died, Abdulwahab concluded that the community meeting was a waste of time: emotionally painful, for no result. Shortly afterwards, a good friend committed suicide. Abdulwahab withdrew from his youth work diploma. He did not bother attending the second meeting, in December. He’d been trying to put me in touch with other young people in the community, but then he, too, stopped answering my calls.

***

This has become a story about a community’s right to exist – its need to understand and to be understood – but it is also a story of grief. Tella’s lawyer explained that she did not feel able to talk about her son. She and Seyoum are divorced; Atakelt had refused to see his father.

After several months working on this story, I know little about Atakelt; my attempts to meet his friends have amounted to unanswered calls and long, fruitless waits in strange locations. I don’t know how he lived, what he loved, or what, if anything, he feared. Often, I refrain from asking: it is too soon. Sometimes in my notes I wrote only his initials, because it felt inappropriate to use the full name of this man I never knew.

But in the public meetings and private discussions that have followed Atakelt’s death, people have spoken with renewed urgency about the struggles of living here – not only policing, but also the broader challenges of settlement, which are similar for many migrant groups: learning English and finding work; bridging the gulf between societies and generations; coping with shifting gender roles and, very often, family breakdown.

One social worker told me I should write about something else. ‘This will turn out to be another negative news story about “Africans”,’ she said. ‘Why doesn’t anyone write positive news stories?’

And yet, within all this sadness and misunderstanding, I do encounter fragments of good news. One spring day, in torrential, tropical rain, I ride to the City of Melbourne’s Multicultural Hub for a forum on racial profiling coordinated by IMARA Advocacy. Fesseha, who was so forthright and articulate when we spoke one on one, freezes at the prospect of standing before a small group of peers. The day is split into sessions on media, community issues and policy reforms. Most of the two dozen attendees straggle in late. As with any activist group, the meeting ends with a plea for involvement – for help making a short video and preparing materials. On the flyer, Fesseha and others had written that they want to foster the ‘emergence of a new generation of African-Australian leaders’. It was time to be heard, they said. ‘Spread it through the grapevine; we’re conscious.’

Another day I catch the train to Sunshine and meet Girma Seid, a social worker with the Centre for Multicultural Youth. For the last two and a half years, he has been running the Brimbank Young Men’s Project which works with people who arrived here as teenagers, like Atakelt did, and who have since become lost: young men who have walked out on family and school, can’t get work and clash often with police.

Instead of waiting for these men to come into the service, Seid went out and sat with them in the park. ‘I was not welcome the first day I went – or the second or the third for that matter – but in time, if you show them you’re trying to do something, they listen,’ he says, and breaks into a smile. ‘They’re really good boys, to be honest.’

Seid moved here fifteen years ago, but he was an adult when he arrived and already spoke English. ‘Resettlement is not easy, but for the young people, there is a double strike,’ he says. ‘When they come, they are very, very ambitious to pursue their education, get a good job and have that dream life, because this is Australia. When the reality kicks in, that is when they come to a stop.’

Negotiating the family’s demands to uphold tradition, as well as the need to be part of Australian society, he says, is like being pushed and pulled ‘between two oceans’. The evaluation of Seid’s project, after two years, had been encouraging: he has been in contact with fifty men over that time, and many have begun to re-engage with society, in some way. This year, he will focus on employment.

Fontana also wants to make change. He has a list, pages long, of issues that have arisen from the public meetings, beginning with the need for an information kit for new communities and the formation of a trusted advocacy body that could bring complaints to the police.

As part of the young men’s project, Seid held joint camps with the police, including role-plays, with ‘police officers acting like young people and young people acting like police’. Many community workers argue that these kinds of engagement activities worsen over-policing, by adding another layer of contact and surveillance. But Seid says the camps have formed ‘a kind of bridge’ between participants.

‘Since then, from what we hear, there have been no incidents in the Footscray area between the police and the young people involved. Actually, the police have become friendly and the boys feel treated well, respected. You see that tension decreasing – it’s a slow process but we can see a significant change.’

***

In early January I meet with Seyoum again, at the restaurant in Footscray. There are men lined up at the counter, drinking short, sweet coffees and speaking in Amharic. The walls are orange and there is a neon blue mosquito lamp in the centre of the ceiling.

Seyoum is clean-shaven and he looks several years younger. ‘It is for the new year,’ he explains, ‘for a better year’. His presence is lighter than on previous occasions. I recall him at the second public meeting, when he wore sunglasses as he spoke and appeared unhinged by grief. He had received the coroner’s autopsy only two days earlier, which, after a five-month delay, had finally revealed drowning as the cause of death. He rejected the finding and described in terrible detail the wounds he had seen on his son’s body, speaking words such as ‘corpse’ and ‘inner flesh’ and ‘pocked’ and ‘pus’. Sitting one row behind, Tella had closed her eyes and held her head in her hands.

In the restaurant, Seyoum’s friend, who is a taxi driver, joins us. When he learns I’m a journalist, he shows me photos of Atakelt’s dead body on his mobile phone, images taken the day before the funeral. I’ve seen these photos once before, on the day of the coroner’s directions hearing, but it’s no less shocking the second time. A tremor takes hold of my limbs, momentarily. I have to look away and then I look back and my mind goes blank, except for the knowledge that someone has died, someone’s son, a young man, and for a moment the air inside seems thicker than water.

‘How can they say straight away there is no suspicious circumstances?’ Seyoum asks. ‘Is the water a knife? Or is it a shark’s bite? If they had said, okay, we are investigating, I would be happy.’

The friend puts his phone away and begins telling stories about police racism instead: the time he reported a crime – he’d seen some young black men throwing a bottle through a window – and the cops asked if he had sent them to throw the bottle. ‘Why? Because I’m black and they’re black?’ he says incredulously. ‘Why?’ Or the time when he tried to report some of his passengers, and the police fined him instead. He’s outraged by these encounters, of course, but he’s learned to accept them. He diagnoses the situation: ‘The young ones, those who grew up here, or went to school here, they learnt that everyone is equal, and they swallowed it,’ he tells me. ‘That’s the problem.’

The weight has descended on Seyoum again, but he is a moderate man. In Ethiopia he had been a civil engineer and then, for a time, an intelligence officer. His father was a judge. ‘I am not after the killers. I’m not after anyone. I just want to know the truth,’ he says. ‘I cannot bring my son back, but he should be the last. He wasn’t the first, but he should be the last.’

There is another photo of Michael Atakelt on the internet. It is the one that accompanies each article in the Maribyrnong Leader. He looks fit and strong and full of attitude; his earphones hang from the neck of his green t-shirt and a red cap is slung way back on his head. The photographer snapped him mid-gesture, making a v-sign with the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

For now, it is not possible to speculate on why or how Michael Atakelt died, but only to hope that there are answers, and that those answers will be understood.

Follow this link to see the article in Overland. An edited extract of this story was published in The Age. Here is another short piece I wrote about the Coroner’s directions hearing and a news story about the hearing itself in February 2013.