KIMBERLEY MAN COOKS FOR BROOME'S HOMELESS
As Broome faces storms, heavy rain and flooding, many residents have been staying home as much as possible, trying to avoid the wild weather. But Nyikina man Neville Poelina has been out on the streets, distributing meals of curry and rice he’s cooked for Broome’s homeless population.
“The weather we just had is full on. I gotta feed my Countrymen around here,” Poelina told Ngaarda Media’s Tangiora Hinaki.
“I'm assuming that us people who are fortunate enough to stay in a house, our bellies are full. But this time of the year, I like to feed homeless people around my town.”
Mr Poelina has seen that Broome’s homeless population have been doing it tough in the stormy weather. “It’s very sad,” he said. “When I went looking for them the other night, they were hiding away in places where they could get away from the wind and the rain.
“When you have to hide away from the wind and rainy weather like that, you don't have time to hunt.
“I can't give them any accommodation, but I can help them make it through this bloody terrible time.”
Mr Poelina believes that homelessness in Broome is becoming more common, due to alcohol restrictions imposed across the Kimberley.
“At one stage there, the government and a few people thought that they had stopped the alcohol and the domestic violence in Fitzroy and Halls Creek, because they put a restriction on the alcohol. But they didn’t really fix the problem. They shifted the problem,” he says.
“See, Broome’s a tourist town. And Broome is a town where tourists won’t enter if they can’t buy alcohol. So here in Broome we don’t have that alcohol restriction, so everybody's moving to Broome to look after their habits.
“You just can't cut the tap off of somebody's addiction. You need to bring them down slowly … There’s a hell of a long road to rehabilitation.”
Mr Poelina believes the government has created new problems by putting in place alcohol bans.
“You shifted the alcohol to another town,” he says. “You made [parents] abandon their children and you made the grandparents look after the kids now. How can you win my vote?”
Mr Poelina’s love for helping others comes from his parents, who he misses at this time of year.
“I'm very fortunate to have grown up with an amazing mother and father,” he said. “They had a lot of love for the world and a love for everything. they didn't like people to be worse off than them.
“At Christmas time they would invite all the homeless people to our house for Christmas. And in the weathers like this … they’d go out in the poor weather and they’d find people and bring them back into our house and let them sleep on our verandah and they’d feed them until the weather cleared.”
As a skilled fisherman, Mr Poelina also has an important fishing tip for those around Broome.
“In this big flooding in Broome now, our wastewater, our sewage is all overflowing and floating into the ocean,” he warned. “So I wouldn't eat any bloody fish in the 50 kilometers radius around Broome for the next two months.”