rural life in oz

Adrian Keefe MA [Deakin]
Grafton Street
Tabulam 2469
Engaexperience@gmail.com



Mr Thomas George MP
Lismore


Dear Mr George

Again I write to you for your intercession in a matter that looms as great a social malady as any I can imagine for us rural communities.

It combines suicide with the lack of public facilities such as transport. Tabulam is a focal point and an example of this malady.

Last year we buried young Jacob Staveley. He hanged himself out of despair. Centrelink hounded him. In order to pacify Centrelink he drove everywhere to find work, often in an unregistered vehicle as he had not the means to pay for registration.

The Jubullum community out here have no footpath to connect them with Tabulam. They cannot at will summon the community vehicle to take an individual or family to town or to visit others in other communities. They end up driving, often without a licence, and more often in unregistered vehicles. The seeds of criminality begin this way, from despair.

My son manages a shop in Casino. He has a daughter in Coffs. He is paying off a car so that he can get to work from Rappville to Casino and to bring his daughter up from Coffs to Rappville for alternate weekends.

Last year his employer held a Xmas party at Yamba. My son slept in his car rather than drive home inebriated. However, when breath tested the following day, he was over the limit.

By definition any driver who is DUI and requires a car to get to work and to perform employment duties has lost the ability to be employed. The subsequent pressure from dependants is enormous. Thus drivers break the law by continuing to serve their social and family responsibilities.

It is the legal condition which fails to consider the social condition. It is the foundation for suicide in our rural communities. This is common knowledge and has been academically researched until the proverbial cows come home. My own post graduate studies into the rural condition reveal a growing
sense of anomie among our young people.

I see it every day out here. Yesterday I shook your hand as I alighted from the REX plane; you were standing near my wife with whom you earlier had spoken. You and I often have travelled down and back from Sydney. Our paths had met when you responded so effectively to my letter years ago to prevent the burning of long grass by the SES in Tabulam.

I am 65 years and I have to go to China, Oman and Bangladesh to find employment. No one will employ an educated older person. In order to stave off my own sense of anomie I find an area where I might feel useful. I certainly do not feel useful in our own society. And I share this negativity with many of my fellow rural citizens.

But back to the point: I was shocked to find my son had succumbed to his own dreadful anomie and I fear for his … I dare not say it. He has his degrees from years of self sacrifice and study but all that is open to him is the shop he manages in Casino. And he needs his licence to drive the car which he needs to pay off, and he needs his employment to fulfil his responsibilities to his young daughter in Coffs. And initially he tried to do the right thing by sleeping in his car and not driving it after boozing in Yamba with his workmates.

Young Jacob Staveley, who hanged himself last May at his home near Tabulam, was my son Oliver’s best mate.

I need your perspicacity at its brightest, Mr George, to rectify, if possible, a condition that is itself a paradox. Surely, the legal system is to allow for quirks and vicissitudes in life itself. A reading on a breathalyser need not be indicative of an illegal act and should not necessarily and automatically lead to a result which sets off a chain of events that lead to such awful conclusions as the one that saw young Jacob Staveley take his own life.



With respect



Adrian Keefe
5th March 2010