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.