ABORIGINAL HEADBANGING - PART 1The Most Metal Town in the Whole Wide World Is Wadeye
WORDS AND PHOTOS BY JONATHAN WEST
At the beginning of 2008, the Australian national news reported on a small, isolated Aboriginal community deep in the Northern Territory, aka the middle of nowhere, aka Satan’s Asshole, aka East Bumblefuck.
Violent riots had erupted between two of the town’s largest gangs and for a moment it looked like the Australian Army (because there really is such a thing) was going to have to be brought in to settle the fighting. But what really blew us away was that the town, which is named Wadeye (pronounced “Wad-air”), was split up into gangs named after heavy metal bands. There were the Judas Priest Boys, the Evil Warriors, and the Slayer Mob. We immediately dropped everything else we were working on and embarked north from Melbourne to Wadeye to see it for ourselves. Nothing could have prepared us for what we found.
| In Wadeye, over half of the town’s population is under 20 years old. Couple this with the fact that there wasn’t a high school in town until a few years ago (even now, the attendance record for both primary and high school is under a third) and you have a lot of bored kids roaming the streets with fuck-all to do besides fuck about. The community’s solution? Hire a “kid wrangler” who drives around town in a flatbed truck with a cage mounted on it, rounding up errant kids. When that didn’t accomplish anything, they built a swimming pool and instituted a “No School, No Pool” policy. Things looked up for a while, but then the school began to burst at its seams. Teachers were breaking down and the classrooms were too small to cope with the influx of students who wanted to be able to swim. The new solution? Encourage less kids to come to school. Welcome to Wadeye. |
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