The Maholian Way - Part Two: The Maholian Way in the lives of two

Robert Salter

Carla and her children lived in Lynvale, a public housing estate on the outskirts of the city of Delaney. The Lynvale estate was built in the 1970s when industry was expected to move into the area. But the factories never came, and so houses intended for factory workers and their families instead accommodated single parents, new immigrants, and people with mental illnesses, drug addictions and criminal histories. At the time they moved in Carla’s son Josh was 15 and daughter Emily was 12, and Carla had just escaped a violent marriage. She could not afford to buy a place or rent privately and, given the lengthy waiting list for public housing, Lynvale was the best she could do. It didn’t take her long to realise why nobody who had any other choices lived there. As she put it:

There was graffiti everywhere, and the rubbish, you wouldn’t believe it. Not just paper and plastic and things like that. There were syringes lying around, old car bodies, washing machines, fridges. And drug deals being done right before your eyes. After the druggies had scored they’d often just lie around, or wander around the streets and parks. The rest of us stayed inside most of the time and hardly spoke to anyone. We were pretty scared of the dealers because people said they carried weapons.

There didn’t appear to be any clubs or places to meet. Often Carla would hear loud arguments between residents, and police seemed to be constantly investigating crimes and disputes. She soon learnt that you couldn’t order a taxi or a pizza because once you said you were from Lynvale they refused to come. Buses ran to the nearest shopping centre – five kilometres away – every ninety minutes during business hours, but not at all on evenings or weekends. The only shops on the estate were a few small ones in a scrappy strip where bored teenagers hung out on bikes and skateboards. Residents’ washing machines were always breaking down and took ages to be repaired or replaced, and there was no laundromat on the estate. Very few residents had any kind of paid work.

Carla had no friends in Lynvale and didn’t know how she might make any. As she described it, this meant that:

I spent a heap of time watching daytime TV, or I’d take a bus down to this hotel that had pokies, and kill time feeding coins into a machine. I hate to think how much money I wasted. I remember, I used to sit there and watch other people and wonder about their lives, trying to pluck up courage to talk to them. But I hardly ever did.

Her Supporting Parent Benefit wasn’t enough to cover necessities, let alone gambling. For a while she tried to find a job, but as she hadn’t finished school and had no recent work experience employers didn’t seem interested in her, so she gave up looking. And given her negative feelings about her schooling the idea of doing further study was just too daunting to consider.

As well as all this, Josh was beginning to be a real problem. He hadn’t handled his parents’ separation very well, and after access visits with his father he would be surly and abusive, and pushed Carla on several occasions. He was also in trouble at school – misbehaving, getting poor marks and truanting – and lately there had been incidents of binge-drinking, marijuana smoking and shop-lifting. If that wasn’t enough, his disrespect for Carla was starting to influence the behaviour of Emily, who until then had always been good-natured and cooperative.

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