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Breathing while Black

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Angry residents stopped an Adelaide City Council meeting on Monday in a bid to block a dry zone proposal that they see as a direct affront to Aborigines who use the city's main square as a gathering place. Lord Mayor Alfred Huang took refuge in his office as protesters began jeering from the public gallery, with one city resident comparing the city-wide drinking ban proposal to white settlers' early attempts to remove Aborigines.

"Why don't you just say, 'Let's investigate for three months whether we should shoot every Aboriginal person who walks into Victoria Square'?" said the head of the Whitmore Square Residents Association, Joyce Vandersman.

Aboriginal rights groups have threatened to call in the Human Rights Commission and the United Nations if the council proceeds with its plan to ban public drinking in the Adelaide CBD.

It was the council's second controversial move in as many days to try to "encourage" Aborigines to move out of Victoria Square, the fifth and largest of the pocket parks in Adelaide's main shopping and business district. Early on Sunday, the council demolished a 90-year-old toilet block in the square, claiming it was unsafe for public use because of the number of drunks and drug addicts who loitered there.

Because of the fear of public protests, the council had planned to demolish the building at 2am the previous Sunday, but delayed the demolition after its plans were leaked to the media. At Monday night's meeting, Cr Greg Mackie moved to defer the alcohol ban for three months for public talks, but that compromise also angered residents in the gallery.

Cr Mackie said yesterday he was "very sensitive and responsive" to claims of racism being made against the council and blamed the "hysteria in the mass media" for the pressure to clean up Victoria Square.

Cr Huang said yesterday that the council's objective was to reduce crime, and the perception of crime, in the city. He denied that Aborigines were the specific target. "Everyone - non-Aboriginal or Aboriginal - is welcome to use the square," he said. "But there is a lot of anti-social behavior in the city due to drugs or alcohol and some people see the city, and the square, as not being safe."

The lord mayor said the council wanted to declare the whole central city area a dry zone to try to alleviate the perception that parts of the city were unsafe. But Aboriginal groups accuse the council of being naive and of trying to shift problem drinkers out of the CBD squares and into the surrounding belt of parklands so they are "out of sight and out of mind".

The head of the Nunkuwarrin Yunti health and community centre, Polly Sumner, said yesterday that the council and previous councils were basically "not prepared to do anything constructive about solving the problem - they just want to shift it somewhere else".