Extract from ABC News
A bunch of kids crowd around an old Indigenous lady, waiting for their supper.
Tonight, it is kangaroo tail, cooked on campfire coals in aluminium foil.
"One each, all the kids get one each," the old lady, Aunty Dulcie Nanala, tells the kids, handing out pieces of flesh from her position seated next to the campfire.
"This is how we do when we take you kids out, we share what we kill."
Feeding a swarm of hungry kids is a daily experience for Aunty Dulcie, who has lived her whole life in Balgo, a remote Indigenous community and former Catholic mission in Western Australia's Kimberley region.
She usually cooks her supper on a campfire, in part because she likes being outside with her family gathered around the fire, speaking in her native Kukatja language.
But she is also outside because she has an enormous number of people staying with her in her rundown, three-bedroom house, including her mother who is in her 90s.
She counts nine who live with her regularly, but that number often swells if there's a funeral or cultural business on in Balgo.
"I got my grandkids around and my sons and daughters around," she says.
"We all eat the same meal, what I cook for my mother, and they are happy for that."
Aunty Dulcie receives a disability pension, which she says is $400 per fortnight, and makes some money selling paintings she produces in the community's art centre, Warlayirti Artists.
As the rest of Australia struggles in the cost-of-living crisis, the pressure is mounting in this remote corner of the country.
"Cost a lot of money to keep buying food for each day ... the cost of things is getting more and more," Aunty Dulcie says.
Not every family in Balgo is able to feed their family, Aunty Dulcie notes.
"They have to struggle, a struggle to get food for their families and our families," she says.
"When my kids are hungry, they know where to come. They see me sitting next to the fire cooking — I want my kids to be happy."
Freight costs driving up prices
Balgo has one shop, the Wirrimanu Community Store, owned and operated by a local Indigenous corporation.
It is the heart of the community.
On a Saturday morning dozens of people linger around the front, chatting with friends and family.
It stocks most things one might need in a remote community: car batteries, fishing gear, shoes, fridges, toilet paper, diesel (for $3.37 a litre) and a wide selection of food (at alarming prices).
Most of the shop's stock comes from Darwin, a trip of almost 1,500 kilometres on some of Australia's most inhospitable roads, according to manager Peter Klein.
"Freight costs, on average is about 30 per cent, then there's always a fuel levy on top of that, that's currently at 25 per cent," he says.
The fuel levy fluctuates with the price of diesel, which is affected in part by what is happening geopolitically around the world.
Mr Klein has seen the levy as high as 35 per cent.
The shop is a small independent business, which has some disadvantages.
It often buys fresh fruit and vegetables from Broome, a bit more than 900km away by road.
But because of obscure quarantine rules, the produce gets trucked to Balgo via Adelaide and Alice Springs, adding thousands of kilometres to its journey, all of which the shop must pay for.
"Being such a small operation, it's not worth it to the suppliers and the producers to put in for the qualifications [that would allow for direct freight]," Mr Klein explains.
The stock it does buy is usually more expensive than what it costs the major supermarkets, because of the size of the order.
"Any small business is tough," Mr Klein says.
"Everything comes back to volumes at scale. If we were doing a lot more in sales, then we could negotiate for stronger trading terms."
Mr Klein says larger supermarkets can often negotiate 14-day trading terms with suppliers, so they can sell their goods and make a profit on it before they need to pay for it.
Trading terms like that aren't available to the Balgo shop, but even if they were it would do them no good.
The shop gets one truck in per fortnight with goods and has to order and pay for everything three weeks before they can get it.
Coca-Cola, tobacco top sales
Like many remote Indigenous communities, there are many people with chronic health issues in Balgo.
Diabetes is rife, and there are dozens of people from Balgo who are forced to live in larger centres like Alice Springs or Kununurra to receive regular dialysis.
Mr Klein's shop sells meat, fresh fruit and vegetables for what it costs to buy and freight it to Balgo, which Mr Klein says means a loss for the business after taking into account other costs like staff wages and electricity.
But even making a loss, the shop still needs to charge $28 for a large pumpkin.
Mr Klein says price is not the only deciding factor in what people buy from his shop.
"We sell almost eight times as much confectionery than what we do fruit and veg," he says.
"Our number one selling product is Coca-Cola. We sell more of that than anything.
"A third of our sales are in tobacco. It's crazy."
Asking around the community, there is little interest in restricting sales of unhealthy products.
But one man, Eric Moora, says he wants to see limits on what is sold.
When the ABC meets Mr Moora for an interview, he is eating the leg of a bush turkey he and some friends have killed the previous night.
"I grew up in Balgo eating bush tucker with the old people. People when they eat bush tucker will be strong and healthy," he says.
"We need to stop the Coke, not selling Coke in the shop today. We gotta try to get good drinks, no sugar.
"[It's] making people sick from the Coke. Like, diabetes, all that. Too much sugar."
The corporation that owns the shop has a board of local Indigenous directors.
It is run by kartiya, or non-Indigenous CEO, David Whitelaw, who says there would be little appetite in the community to limit what the shop can sell.
"It's a supply-and-demand business, so we need to meet those needs of our community," he says.
"We provide a lot of information around nutrition and we're very supportive in terms of our pricing to make sure that our healthy produce is at a very competitive price.
"But it's an essential need of the community to provide for all of the conveniences that you would see in any other township or city in Australia."
'No evidence' freight subsidies would curb costs
The cost of food in remote communities was examined by a parliamentary inquiry in 2020.
It found no evidence of widespread rorting in shops, but plenty of complaints about the cost of items in remote parts of the country.
But despite many submissions to the inquiry urging a subsidy for remote freight, the committee disagreed.
"We rejected the idea of subsidising freight costs because we didn't think it would be effective," committee chair Julian Leeser, whose electorate spans the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney, said.
"We thought there was no guarantee the subsidies would be passed on — in fact, they could end up inflating the cost."
Instead, the committee wanted a real-time price monitoring mechanism.
Mr Leeser maintained such a mechanism would help in a place like Balgo, where digital communications are poor and the distance to a competitor shop is vast.
"One way to increase public confidence that [price gouging] is not happening is to increase transparency, so that remote communities that are often out of sight don't remain out of mind with those people who are charged with supervising and regulating," he said.
That recommendation was merely noted by the Morrison government, not accepted.
A spokesperson for Assistant Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCarthy says the Labor government is waiting on another report about what can be done to reduce food prices in remote communities.
She says a draft strategy should be released for public comment by the end of the year.
For Aunty Dulcie, government subsidies on freight to remote communities like hers would make a huge difference.
"It should; the freight from the truck and from the planes, the government should help," she says.
"We want that to be cheaper. But it's the freight — we've got to buy the freight."
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