12 May 2003 David Timber I Mile Dam

I got a visit from Sue Carter yesterday. She’s the member for Port Darwin.

The first thing she did, she gave me a lot of pamphlets about lot of stuff been going on around Darwin lately. Mainly the ‘itinerant problem.’ Something for me to read. Then she started talking about how it’s been, had I been talking to government lately about what’s gonna happen here? I said no, never heard anything from anyone, even the govt. Then she said ‘do you have any problems’. I said yeah, ‘we got some problems, some of the powers been switched off, these toilets here, that communal laundry and washing machine, the powers been switched off there for over a year now. I said that to her and she asked who’s in charge. I said Bernie Valadian. The ADF chap. And I said he’s been in the paper recently, he’s funding’s been cut by ATSIC.

She was just pretending she didn’t know, we went around and I showed her. She asked me ‘if I was to go leave here would I go back to Daly River?’ Now that’s something really hit me cause first, she doesn’t know I’m from Daly River cause I never told her that. I don’t know here she got that information from? I said I’d probably see what happens here first, not saying anything.

How would she feel if I ask her to go back to the state she comes from? You know, that was a bit… I didn’t expect that and I felt a bit like ah shocked when she said that.

We talked about that we do the CDEP workers ourselves. We maintain the grounds and all that keep it tidy. And that was it actually.

She left and said something about we’ll talk to Bernie and see what we can do about the power problems we’ve got here.

I had a visit from her before, last year in regards to Longgrass people and itinerants.