Modernity’s paradox: Fatter, sicker and sadder - Part 1

In a moving and insightful piece of journalism, The Australian’s Christine Jackman, took readers beyond the monstrous crime that ended Chloe’s life into the lifeworld that she had inhabited all too briefly. Her essay recalls the higher forms of Victorian era slum journalism, which explored the realms of urban abjection and recorded them with humanity and empathy.

Jackman enters the Lansdowne netherworld to find and interview Chloe’s playmates: just some of the many children that live with their parents in the tightly-packed, poorly-ventilated trailers and cabins that crowd the caravan park. The children knew well the tawdry reserve where Chloe had been found because their parents had declared it off limits. It was a magnet for prostitution and drug dealing where Council workers would regularly find up to 150 syringes a week buried in the sand beneath the playgound’s swings.

“Dave”, a father of three children under the age of three, was interviewed. He fumed with helpless anger at the impossibility of keeping kids safe in a sinkhole of drugs, pollution and quietly smouldering rage. Jackman observes, “Beneath this father’s fury is a deeper, brooding resentment at the powerlessness of life on the fringes of Australia’s wealthiest city”.

Dave speaks of entrapment, of not being able to access even the scruffier private rental market that thrives in parts of Sydney’s middle-west. He and his family have been told that they will wait at least six years for public housing in the area. The heartless contradictions of contemporary post-welfare Australia are revealed when his partner, “Cara”, informs Jackman that the family could move almost immediately to a public dwelling in Dubbo, but the move would send them even further backwards: “…Centrelink will cut our (unemployment) payments because you can’t move to an area with less jobs”. The long shadows of Victorian poor laws and their brutish prosecution of the “undeserving” continue to darken the lives of Australia’s urban poor.

Lansdowne, like many other similar urban welfare camps, is the last stop before outright homelessness. It provides none of the conditions for a healthy and happy life. In Dave’s words: “There’s nothing here, mate”. The politics of choice seem to have side-stepped Lansdowne’s 1,000 residents: “…we’ve got no choice”, laments Dave. Jackman writes, “The only shopping centre within walking distance boasts a liquor store, a Chinese takeaway and a McDonald’s - but the fruit and vegetable shop has closed down”. The problem of transport poverty is highlighted: “Those without cars must rely on the local service stations for ready supplies - but often must dodge another sort of trade on their way to pick up milk”. Jackman inscribes her sad portrait of Chloe’s life and death with this epitaph:

She was an innocent battling to thrive in a world where the fresh and the natural are constantly under siege from the jaded and foul.

Australia’s cities are peppered with “jaded and foul” places that are home to countless numbers of children and youth. The little we do know about these new urban poverty spaces was powerfully summarised recently in a study by researchers at the Urban Frontiers Program at the University of Western Sydney. In 2001, 62 per cent of households in caravan parks earned less than $500 a week, compared with an Australian average of 29 per cent. More than 4 in 10 park residents were in rental stress, paying more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. Some 80 per cent of residents had no post-school qualifications.

We do not yet properly know the extent or precise character of these new urban netherworlds. Our social scientific understanding of them is poor because such knowledge seems to attract little political or policy interest. It seems you can know too much in the “Clever Country”.