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Letter 353
How a Remote Australian Town Nearly Ran Out of Food
Many isolated Indigenous communities are dependent on fragile supply chains. This year, floods made that dramatically clear.
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The road to Lajamanu in the Northern Territory in Australia.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times
By Julia Bergin
May 10, 2024, 3:37 a.m. ET
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The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, a reporter based in the Northern Territory.
Driving through Central Australia can be a battle with dust, floods, fires, collapsed roads and network failures. And when the cargo is food, even a minor setback can have serious repercussions.
The remote Indigenous community of Lajamanu was set up in the Northern Territory by the Australian government in 1949. Dozens of people, already displaced from their traditional homes, were moved there from another community about 350 miles away because of overcrowding and water shortages.
Today, Lajamanu has a population of about 800. Like many other remote communities in Australia, it is sustained by a single store that sells everything from food to diapers to washing machines. The store is supplied once a week, sometimes every two weeks, by truck drivers who have to contend with the region’s harsh conditions and treacherous infrastructure.
For the first few months of this year, the only road into Lajamanu was cut off by a combination of record rainfall, storms and flooding. The regular deliveries stopped, and stocks of food, water, medicine and other essentials began to dwindle. The community, said Andrew Johnson, a Warlpiri man and Lajamanu elder, was suffering, particularly from the lack of food.
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“No strength, no energy,” he said.
Under government policy, the store should have been prepared for such an outcome, given the predictability of the annual wet season. As things got worse, residents and suppliers repeatedly appealed to the government of the Northern Territory to declare an emergency.
More on Australia China Lifts Tariffs: In a sign of easing tensions between Australia and China, China said that it would lift the tariffs it placed on Australian wine more than three years ago. Happy-Go-Lucky No More: After enjoying decades of prosperity, the country’s citizens are suffering from a high cost of living, a choppy labor market and rising inequality. Gender Discrimination?: An artwork at the Museum of New and Old Art in Hobart, Tasmania, is accessible to “any and all ladies,” according to the institution’s website — and precisely zero men. Does it break discrimination laws? Looking for Chinese Spies: Australia passed foreign interference laws in 2018 amid rising concerns over covert Chinese government meddling in Western democracies. The first case tried under the laws has raised questions about the breadth of the regulations.
“The silence was deafening,” said Alastair King, the head of the Arnhem Land Progress Aboriginal Corporation, or A.L.P.A., a nonprofit organization that operates the Lajamanu store and others in remote communities. “They didn’t respond, didn’t tell us what it would take to declare an emergency and didn’t tell us why it was not declared an emergency.”
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