It is raining and cold in Tjukurla, remote Western Australia.  Jimmy Brown kicks at a narrow sheet of corrugated iron under which there are some dirty blankets. A mother and baby have been sleeping there. "Look at how we're living," says the' Pintubi elder. "It's no good."  Brown is chairman of the Kiwirrkura community and spokesman for a group often seen as wild mysterious bush people. At times this has worked in their favour. But not now.

Regarded by some as Australia's greatest ethnographic treasure, the Pintubi were the last group of Aborigines to encounter white Australians, in the 1950s, and became known internationally as the Last Nomads when nine ragged people walked into the Kiwirrkura outpost in October 1984.

There they met white people for the first time and effectively abandoned one of the toughest existences imaginable.  Brown, 58, who had his first white encounter  in 1956, maintains--------from fires seen in the distance and occasional signs of life ----- that several Pintubi people still roam at will in the Lake Mackay district.

Now. he says his people are nomads once again. "Refugees, you call it," he says.

With two successive years of heavy flooding at Kiwirrkura, a community just across the. border from the Northern Territory, the people are off their land and do not know when they will return. After a calamitous four-month odyssey being shipped around the outback as a group, in the care of various agencies yet out of control, the Kiwirrkura people decided several weeks ago they'd had enough.

Liquor and violence had taken a heavy toll.

Now, rather than accepting the goodwill of outsiders, the Kiwirrkura people have scattered to communities across Western Australian and the Northern Territory, to live with relatives and await news of when or if their still-flooded town will be, built again.

They have^-gone to Balgo, Port Hedland, Tjukurla, Mt Newman, Wiluna and Alice Springs. Some are in jail, some are drunk. Most are fine but all are effectively homeless.

Having cast themselves out of Morapoi for the sake of their sanity, people are wandering, having difficulty accessing money, uncertain of their futures.  Some are worried that this is the end of a famous clan. Brown is just worried about his people. "Anybody got an idea?" he asks.

"When you flood, you gonna go a different way? I want everyone together. But it's pretty hard. We've gone like cattle. Like cattle being driven into fence. That's not a good story."

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COMMENTARY:    KIWIRRAKURA..... ANOTHER DIASPORA?

Whenever the subject of Reconciliation comes up we hear "Oh well, I don't have to say sorry because I wasn't born when the Aboriginal people were being deprived of their land.  I can't be held responsible for what my ancestors did, can I?"

After reading the above report we can no longer claim that as an excuse because the whole terrible scenario is being replayed right now in the remote north-west Australia.

What's our excuse this time mate!

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