2 days Ago By Jack Latimore, Justin McManus
′′You know how white man got that ‘cow jumped over the moon’? Well, Aborigine here got curlew and moon Dreaming. What happened is, the curlew had two babies, a boy and a girl, but he used to walk out at night,” Frank Shadforth says, standing at the headwaters of Seven Emu Creek in the Northern Territory’s Gulf Country. He’s sharing the creation story of this sacred site with two Aboriginal girls in their early teens.
“Moon was watching curlew, see. First night, curlew wouldn’t go far. So, second night the moon come down closer.
Curlew went out a bit further. Third night then, curlew went too far, and moon snuck down and grabbed those two babies. Babies screamed! And curlew raced back.
Moon and curlew have big fight then. Curlew managed to grab the baby boy and then threw him in the thick grass. But the moon managed to grab the girl.
Away he went! But he was so angry with curlew that he threw a big rock back at him. And that’s what happened here.” Shadforth gestures towards a rocky terrace, where a gentle stream of spring water flows.
Below the spring, a wide, glassy pool is filled with native fish. The old man points out the archerfish, sooty grunter and bony bream to the girls. He mentions there’s a freshwater crocodile lurking somewhere among the reeds and water lilies near the opposite bank.
Red earth and pandanus pines line the water’s edge. The girls listen closely. They are taking part in Shadforth’s Jarrdimba Bayamuku (Strengthening the Children) diversionary program.
Bella*, 14, is staying at Seven Emu instead of spending time in one of the NT’s residential youth justice facilities, while an educator referred Alice*, 13, to the program. It is one of several initiatives designed to support Aboriginal young people at risk of repeat encounters with NT police and the youth justice system. Bella starts to retell the story in her own words, but before she can finish, Alice jumps in, excitedly launching into another tale about three birds on her mob’s Country near the NT-Western Australia border.
Shadforth chuckles, his eyes twinkling beneath the battered, curled brim of his dusty black ringer’s hat. The girls’ reactions are the liveliest they’ve been since they arrived at the station a few days ago. The excursion into the back paddocks of the 4300-square-kilometre Seven Emu Station has also involved lessons in bush foods and bush medicine.
So far, Bella and Alice have heard about the antidotal properties of kerosene grass for goannas bitten by snakes, the topical healing qualities of sandalwood, and how emu berry treats dysentery and dries a runny nose. Shadforth has pointed out bloodwood trees, and waved at skeletal stands of native firs and fruitless pandanus palms. The blood gums have stopped bleeding and the stinking turtle, which he says used to burrow on the flat beneath the pine canopy, are fewer each year.
The native bee and the flying fox have gone missing from the area, too. The girls have soaked it all in, but the afternoon has been long, and their burst of energy and enthusiasm evaporates quickly. When the small group returns to the Toyota, they eschew the cabin and climb directly into the utility’s tray.
Hunkering down around a spare tyre, they pull their oversized hoodies into tight apertures and retreat into their phones again. As the Toyota crawls past earth plinths of termite mounds and scraggly clusters of screw palm, Bella flicks through her photos app, worrying after friends and family members back in “TC” (Tennant Creek), while Alice listens to her favourite hip-hop artist, Lisi. Shadforth’s daughter Marissa steers the Toyota around powdery banks of bulldust along the remote track while her father points out otherwise indiscernible things among the vast scrubland.
She stepped into the role of co-ordinating the Jarrdimba Bayamuku program at her father’s request after working for the Borroloola town council for 12 years and part-time at the local school. “It probably takes four or five days before they’ll start opening up,” she says. “You struggle getting them out of the rooms for the first week.
The problem is, by the time they really start opening up, they gotta go back again.” But everything on the station happens in its own time. Things are ready when they are ready and happen when they happen.
“It’s been that way on this Country since long before it was known as Seven Emu,” Shadforth says. Marissa explains that it’s only the second time the program has hosted girls, but the station has accommodated boys for close to 30 years, providing them with mentoring, connection to culture and hands-on experience in fencing, mechanical repairs and working with livestock. Initially, the troubled kids came to Seven Emu from extended family groups in Burketown, Doomadgee, Borroloola and other smaller remote Aboriginal communities around the gulf and the territory’s Tablelands region.
Then in 2018, after repeated approaches from Territory Families, Housing and Communities – the government department responsible for young people detained in youth justice centres – Shadforth agreed to enter a five-year partnership to provide the program to at-risk Aboriginal youth from across the NT. About 75 young people have attended short-term and long-term camps under the Jarrdimba Bayamuku program since three kids were placed on the station for five months during a pilot run in 2019. The pilot revealed logistical issues around having the kids stay at the station during the difficult wet season, so a decision was made to permanently reduce the length of the program, and develop a 10-day program for kids aged 10 to 17.
“Kids who’ve been through the 10-day program can come back and do the longer one, too,” Marissa says. Those considered to be at risk of future or ongoing contact with the territory’s youth justice system are referred into the program by child protection workers, educators, parents and relatives, before a panel assesses the eligibility of the nominated young person. The option of a diversionary program isn’t available to any young offenders who have committed serious crimes such as rape, arson or causing serious harm, and is only available to offenders twice before they are considered unsuitable.
“They’re pretty good when they get out here,” Marissa says. “You show them respect and love, and they’ll give it back to you. You make them feel at home, like they’re part of the family, then they got manners, and they respect you.
I think it’s that they have an adult listening to them because they don’t often get that where they come in from.” The kids take on daily responsibilities, which include doing their laundry, cleaning up after themselves, and eating meals together in a common room. Small chores may be assigned around the station’s homestead, such as helping prepare meals.
And at the right time of year, there’s also the potential to help with the cattle muster. So popular is this experience at the station that some participants return to Seven Emu voluntarily after their diversionary program concludes. “We sort of said to Territory Families, ‘Why knock them back? They want to come back.
So, give them all the support you can,’” says Marissa. “’Cause if they don’t come back, where do they go?” Maxton was 15 when he first came to Seven Emu, but has returned twice to work under Shadforth’s son, Clarry, who manages the station’s livestock business. Dressed immaculately in a western-style vivid green work shirt and pressed denims, Maxton props against a steelyard rail, watching two other young station hands and Clarry’s sons breaking in horses before the big muster in coming days.
“I didn’t know anything at all until I come here. Mechanic, fencing, piping, fixing them water pipes that flow around here, mustering – I learn that here,” Maxton says. “But I still need to learn.
I want to have a car one day. Sit in my own house, in my own chair. Have a family to take care of.
” After Maxton’s first visit to Seven Emu, Marissa found him a job at a shop in Borroloola, where Maxton soon found a girlfriend, before returning to school. Now 17, Maxton is a hired station hand and a program mentor at Seven Emu. “I didn’t want to come here.
When I was on the street, I felt like I was part of the street. I thought I wasn’t going to get used to this sort of life. It’s good, though.
” Other troubled kids like Patrick, 15, still arrive at Seven Emu through old family networks. Originally from the Timber Creek region in the Top End, Paddy grew up in Charters Towers, Queensland, until his grandmother asked Shadforth to take him on at Seven Emu because he was running amok at school. After hard riding an alarmed mare in the breaking yard, Paddy wanders over to the steel rails and reveals that he is descended from a line of working cattlemen.
His long-term plan is to follow his grandfather’s path, he says, and eventually work station to station across western Queensland, the gulf, the Top End, all the way through the top of Western Australia, and maybe right down the west coast too. But first he’ll stay at Seven Emu, he says, until he becomes a “horse whisperer and a bullock whisperer”. “I want to see myself like my grandfather – a man with all trades, having a smile on my face when I’m walking around.
Just doing my job, just working,” he says. “My grandfather was a hardworking man. Seven Emu, it’s changing me into a man.
” The former NT Labor government’s multimillion-dollar investment in culturally appropriate diversionary programs came after the shocking 2017 of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, which found that young people encountering the territory’s youth justice system were subjected to excessive use of force, inappropriate restraints and solitary confinement. At the time, 100 per cent of the children in juvenile detention in the NT were Aboriginal. The commission recommended sweeping reforms.
Despite the significant investment, the number of Aboriginal youths in detention continued to climb under the Labor government, driven largely by harsh bail laws introduced in 2021. The numbers hit record highs in 2022 before recently dropping, though only slightly below the widely criticised 2017 detention rates. The numbers in detention this year have varied between 24 and 47 youths.
This steady trend, along with the new NT Country Liberal Party (CLP) government’s “tough on crime” stance – which includes lowering the age of – has many worried about the future of culturally based diversionary programs. There’s growing concern that these vital initiatives may be overshadowed or cut in favour of strict measures included in the CLP’s bail law changes. Responding to the CLP’s plan to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10, the NT Children’s Commissioner Shahleena Musk urged the government to reverse its decision.
Musk’s comments followed those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Katie Kiss in October 2024, when she said the NT government’s planned legislative amendments condemned First Nations children to “a lifetime of abuse, deprivation and disadvantage”. “Our children are disproportionately affected by the failing ‘tough on crime’ approach, which only serves to perpetuate racial profiling and negative stereotyping,” Kiss said. During parliamentary debate in October, a startling statistic emerged – almost every child in detention is Indigenous, just as in 2017.
After the legislative bill passed during the CLP government’s first sitting, the former NT Labor government’s attorney-general and minister for Aboriginal affairs, Chansey Paech, told this masthead that although it was early days under the new regime, there was a feeling within the territory’s Aboriginal communities that the government was using the criminal justice system as “a way of racial control”. “People feel like all the law reform is targeted at Aboriginal people,” he said. “We need kids on Country, learning.
Not locked up in youth detention centres.” But Gerard Maley, the NT’s deputy chief minister and minister for corrections, said the changes “aren’t about any one group of people”. “This is about keeping Territorians safe,” he said.
“The government is committed to respecting and integrating cultural practices within correctional programs. Facilities will offer culturally appropriate services, including access to elders, cultural education, and programs that address specific needs of Aboriginal prisoners. “This plan and our measures will allow us to intervene in a child’s life sooner, and get children into meaningful intervention programs to turn their life around and stop young people falling through the cracks.
” Maley said the government would enhance across the territory through a new tender for mandatory diversion programs that courts could order young people to complete as an alternative to detention..
