Utopia: Aboriginal elderly sleeping on ground with dogs amid calls for improved aged care – ABC Online

Updated July 05, 2017 17:32:27

Her paintings have been exhibited in Paris, London, New York, Tokyo and Milan. But in her old age, renowned Aboriginal artist Kathleen Ngale lives on a mattress outdoors, unable to walk, kept warm during cold desert winter nights by about a dozen dogs who sleep alongside her.

Ms Ngale, aged about 87, lives at Camel Camp where she was born, an outstation in the remote Utopia region of Central Australia, about 260 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs.

"I sit here hungry sometimes, and we sit here with nothing," she said in Anmatyerre via an interpreter.

"My leg is no good I just wait for little bits of food and I can't go and wash myself when I feel like it."

Her relative Rosalie Kunoth-Monks has deplored her living conditions and is calling for improvements to be made to aged care for the elderly Aboriginal people of the region.

"She is lying with the warmth of the dogs on that mattress," Ms Kunoth-Monks said.

"How she's living now, you would not put your worst enemy through that ... It's a slow death."

She said Ms Ngale was rarely able to shower or have her bed linen changed, and her husband, aged also in his 80s, was her primary carer.

Ms Ngale's granddaughter Denisa said she was occasionally visited by a nurse from the Urpantja Clinic, located about 50 kilometres away, and that there were weekly deliveries of soup.

"If there is aged care, this old lady should be able to have a wheelchair, she should be able to have her clothes washed," Ms Kunoth-Monks said.

"There should be a laundromat here where they can wash, they don't mind putting in two dollars or whatever and doing that.

"But we are at the absolute lowest level of poverty here at communities like this."

The Federal Government funds the Barkly Shire Council, headquartered in Tennant Creek about 400km away, to provide aged care services in Utopia, a region consisting of 16 homelands and outstations spread out over several hundred kilometres.

The service chiefly consists of meal deliveries, which are provided daily in the main homeland in Arlparra, but drops off to once every few days in the remoter areas, as there is only one full-time worker and a few part-time local staff funded to cover the region, acting CEO Chris Wright said.

"Not just aged care, but all the services we're expected to provide in that particular community are just not adequate," he said.

"Our base problem is just simply the nature of the community it's big, it's widespread, there's huge distances to travel, and the conventional funding models don't fit that particular community.

"I guess the opportunity is to figure out, 'okay, how can services be more adequately provided to a community of outstations that are as far as 150 miles apart?'"

There are about 15 aged people effectively sleeping rough in the community, including a 92-year-old woman living in a humpy, said Michael Gravener, CEO of the Urpantja Aboriginal Corporation.

"It's total impoverishment, total disempowerment, and they should be honoured as some of the greats of this country, being the oldest-surviving owners of this amazing country," he said.

"It's just sad that we've neglected those people."

Mr Gravener said entrenched poverty and a lack of funding made it difficult to improve circumstances for Utopia's residents.

"We're dealing with people who are told to get up and work, to get on with their lives, who live in absolute poverty, absolute homelessness, chronic overcrowding, and we're [saying], 'hey, you've got to get your act together and come and live like us'," he said.

"The reality is, if you haven't got the basics to start with, you're not going to get anywhere.

"Things like housing, food security, someone caring decently for them. They'll criticise people like the carers for Kathleen but if you're impoverished yourself, how are you going to do that?"

He said Aboriginal people living on homelands had been found in studies to be in better health than those living in cities or regional hubs, but said they needed more support to continue to do so.

"Homelands have never been given an opportunity to survive or to grow because they're always being given little bits of funds, and you can't do that," he said.

"You can't keep playing catch-up when you want to develop into a productive, sustainable, economically viable, socially viable community."

He said Ms Ngale's living conditions needed no embellishment: "It's shocking enough as it is, she shouldn't be like that," he said.

"She should be living in the homeland, she should be given the best of care and respected for the person she is. She's a unique Australian."

Mr Wright said the elderly of Utopia were living where they wanted to be, on country.

"I understand [Ms Ngale's] living on the veranda, that's where she wants to be, that's fine. People have their choices and apparently her choice is to live in the way that she lives," he said.

He said there was "definitely" the opportunity for her to be brought to Arlparra to spend time at the aged care centre.

He said that despite its issues, the region was unique, and services should be bolstered for the homelands rather than centralised in hub communities.

"It's a stunning place; I can understand why the elderly want to stay on their homelands, because it is special," he said.

"We're talking about Australia's original people, I think they deserve the respect and the resources to be able to continue to live on what is their customary land."

Topics: aged-care, community-and-society, government-and-politics, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, alice-springs-0870, darwin-0800

First posted July 05, 2017 06:36:10

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Utopia: Aboriginal elderly sleeping on ground with dogs amid calls for improved aged care - ABC Online