Poverty news and poverty knowledge

Journalists and other sojourners sometimes talk about ‘venturing’ into Mount Druitt, Inala and Broadmeadows. Most, too, have learned the venturer's vernacular. The working-class outer suburbs of Australia's cities always sprawl. Country towns and rural retreats nestle. Middle-class suburbs bask. Inner suburbs hum and bustle. But outer suburbs sprawl, as if the very laziness of their hold upon the landscape tells us something about the deficient people who live in them. They are also our backdrops for despair. Scenes set, characters are found for stories about ‘mounting social problems’. Surly kids slouch against walls, smokes up their sleeves, ready for another exposé of ‘life on the wild side’.

Beyond the humdrum of graffiti-painted fences and gangs, each of these suburbs has also provided the chief illustration for stories about a looming social crisis. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the quality of journalists' stories by what a sub-editor selects as the headline. Perhaps the headline writers themselves regret some of the choices they have made over the years: ‘The Housing Commission Ghetto’ (the Sydney Morning Herald describing Mount Druitt, which it also called ‘wasteland, wantland’), ‘Lonely Outcasts in an Urban Desert’ (the Australian, also on Mount Druitt), ‘The Sad Sameness of Broadmeadows’ (the Age), and ‘Broken Suburb’ (the Australian on Inala). Bidwill and Broadmeadows' Banksia Gardens were even described as ‘The Bronx’ in the 1980s, perhaps to make Australia's urban poverty look more like the real thing.