Malaemie Fruean
People’s lives are in those homes, people living there 20 or 30 years…
I don’t live in Minto, I’m one of the service providers. I’ve been working in the area for about eight years. I’ve coordinated a lot of the Outreach programs there for TAFE and community projects, in particular youth-at-risk. My children go to the school in the area so I wear different hats.
Minto is just one of the areas that I work in. Most of my work is in housing estates but I have a special passion for Minto and its people. As a service provider, the redevelopment will have a huge impact. Whoever thought of the idea, “We’ll just bulldoze these homes down and then we’ll give you all new ones?” Peoples’ lives are in those homes. People living 20 or 30 years in the area, to just be stripped like that. As a service provider, what does that do for us? We’re there to provide a service for the community. Well they’ve just relocated half the community.
On a personal level, we know many of those families that have been moved out. Maybe they’ve got nicer gardens but who sat down and talked to them about the emotional impact on them? Did anyone think of the impact of saying “I’m going to take you out of Minto and I’m going to put you in Airds.” You’ve just gone and plonked a family right in the middle of a community where there are rivalry and territorial issues happening.
I want to share with you something about young Jeremiah Faraimo, the young man who was stabbed in the area. We were close to this boy, as were other people. When that incident happened we got phone calls from all sorts of people. There were grave concerns that the Minto youth were going to riot because of what happened to their friend.
When this incident happened and we were at the hospital when that boy died — along with other service providers, and not just as service providers, because this became what we call whanau, a family thing — the media came. They were filming boys just going to school. And you would watch the TV and it said, “Gangs of boys looking for revenge”. They were going to school! They weren’t looking for revenge!
We had the opportunity to sit down with these boys, talk to them, as with the school. The Sarah Redfern School played a major role in this. It sat down with the youth and helped them deal with some of this grief, with this anger. Those are real things. We were able to access our recording studio and bring them up here. They had set up counsellors for these boys but the boys said, “We don’t go to counsellors”. We just saw our recording studio as a resource and we said come on up and express what you have to say through music.
Within a two week frame, they developed the ‘Sub Sounds’ CD in memory of their friend who passed away. Twelve tracks were made, and in that CD they were talking about what they were dealing with. In a strange way, that was their counselling session, in the recording studio. While we had them here, they were writing lyrics and they were expressing. Some would cry and that was okay. We cried together. We were able to tell them that to show love and respect for their friend, they should turn away from what the media wanted them to do.
What happened in Macquarie Fields and Redfern, in Cronulla, Minto was no different. A young Polynesian boy lost his life through a confrontation. That was dynamite waiting for an explosion. People say nothing happened but those feelings were just as real for these young people as it was in Macquarie Fields and Redfern. I’m proud of the Minto community. They would go up to the site where this incident happened, light their candles, sing their songs and parents came and sat around and sang and cried with them.
Everytime I hear about these other riots, I say to these boys that when Jerry died, it was a recipe for the same scenario. But they can hold their heads up proud because that didn’t happen.
Charlene Thomas
Charlene: My name is Charlene Thomas, I currently live in Ambervale. I’m 24 years old and a mother of two children
Fadia: And what’s your relationship with Minto?
Charlene: I lived in Minto for 13 years. I watched it change, especially Minto Mall. We watched it when it was just getting built, then renovated and now how there’s hardly any shops there. We lived in Housing Commission. The house I used to live in, in Calton Way, has now been knocked down. I love Minto, that’s all I can say.
Fadia: Tell me about the house you used to live in. Describe it.
Charlene: It was just like any other Housing Commission house I suppose. My mum looked after it though. It was a well kept home, always clean. The back yard had a gum tree in the back of it — I don’t know why they build houses around trees. It was a two storey house, me and my mum and my sister lived there. I moved out of there when I was about 13 and I started living with my grandparents.
Fadia: Tell me about your old street, your old neighbours and stuff like that.
Charlene: Alright, in Minto, Calton Way, that was the street I lived in, all my friends lived at the end of the street, like it was a long street and it had a cul-de-sac out the back and one of my best friends used to live right at the end — we used to ride our bikes up and down there, pick each other up from school and all that sort of stuff.
Charlene: And there used to be an alleyway to go through, like to go to my other friend’s house and we used to go and play in the reserve there. And, my neighbours, two of my neighbours were really quiet. The other neighbours were loud [laughter] and there were domestics all the time — I don’t want to go too far into my teenage-hood.
Fadia: Where did you use to hang out?
Charlene: Centennial Park, down at the netball courts, that was just near the train station — me and my mates used to go and hang out there. We got up to some mischief I have to say, but you know, you grow up and then you learn about the mistakes, or from the mistakes you make and you hope to god that your kids don’t make the same ones.