Elena Jefferys

I have got a collection of the first string of editions of Gibber on the slide and I will be going through them. I haven't really picked out a true representation of the content. What I have picked out is possibly the more controversial pieces which we believe are the type of material that the Juvenile Justice Department doesn't like. Before I begin, I want to say thanks to the Australia Council for bringing me over here and stuff and Quay Connections for organising it and also a quick thanks to one of Gibber's friends, Brian Adimargo, in Western Australia, who helped us get our overheads together and also a big - I come from the Nyoongah land in Western Australia - I want to bring a big welcome over to everyone here from the Nyoongah people and a big hello and welcome to the locals here who have welcomed us so warmly. Thanks.

Gibber magazine began as the idea of one woman, Fleur Ginane, from a community, who is based very heavily in a community in Western Australia, was at the time my community, who had been wondering for a long time what could be done for disadvantaged youth in Perth. She began working in the parks, streets and in hang-out areas where street kids in Perth go, collecting art and writing for the first edition of what she was going to call Gibber.

The first edition was a photocopy dummy that she used to convince other agencies, like youth, arts and welfare groups, that Gibber was a good idea. The first group to come on board was the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, they gave major support of sponsorship and a free office. Then the Lotteries Commission provided us with a computer, in 1994, which is still our only computer, and the Australia Council and Arts WA provided us with the initial funding. The publication is registered and has come out every 2 months since it began. This is the cover of the first edition that was actually printed. It says:

I'm stuck in this place with my sad, sad face
There's nothing I can do
Some day I'll be free and maybe I'll come to my senses
and stop jumping fences

That's a piece by Troy on this side. The other side is a piece by Louise Narrier, Locked Away. I might not read through that one but the picture over the top is by a young kid called Little John, 'we rule the right, to walk the streets at night'. This has been an ongoing issue in WA which I will explain more as we go through.

The top of that overhead has been lost but I think it's pretty important. I think it was Margaret Seares who said something about truth this morning. This poem has lost the top but it says something like - the perspective of the kids that we're working with and definitely Gibber is not one of grasping any sort of idea of mainstream truth or reality or any of that. This is something I think is pretty important about the project. This is a poem dedicated to the streeties of Perth. A lot of the stuff that we get is stories from one group of streeties to another or from inside and outside the detention centres. That's Lee, the second - after Fleur, Lee was on the board at Gibber right from the start. She came on board to work with it and I worked with Lee for some time but then she went away.

Gibber provides a creative space for marginalised, disadvantaged, and street present, youth to express their ideas in a valid print media form. We run workshops anywhere young people hang out, in youth centres, service centres, crisis care housing and through agencies who support our project. We used to receive funding to do our workshops but now sometimes we do them for free and sometimes, if the agency can afford it, they will pay us, and that means that sometimes we can pay our workers and sometimes we can't.

This is the second edition of Gibber, which is about doing time and being in gaol. Juvenile Injustice is a piece about spending time in prison. We publish the magazine at a place which has given it to us at cost, a family publishing business in Northbridge, which is where the support community of Gibber lives. Then it's distributed straight back to the young people who have produced the magazine.

The third edition is on getting wasted and drugs. Down the bottom here it says about drugs for sale, "Drink yourself silly." This is a bit of a dreaming piece about the lost children, being lost from the communities to lives of drugs and crime on the streets of Perth. It says, "Sniffing Torlene". Gibber has addressed some of the really difficult issues. Torlene is a really big issue on the streets of Perth and doesn't get that much attention but pretty much our whole first drugs edition, a lot of it, was about torlene. It's interesting to see how the culture changes, because in our latest drugs edition heroin is the most prevalent drug talked about in that one. On the streets, down the bottom it says:

Running around everywhere with nothing to do but get in trouble with the police for stealing, sniffing and drinking - Who cares? - No one but yourself.

We have had our financial ups and downs at different times, we have received funding support but have also operated on raised funds and without any pay at different times, as a volunteer organisation. We have got a really concrete support community, which is really lucky and it's the only thing that has kept the project going, I reckon, that there is a cohesive community which is there to support the project and was when Fleur began it and stuff like that. When the volunteer work needs to be done, it just gets done, so thatıs pretty lucky for us.

We gather information and support from also our sponsor organisations and we have gotten different types of assistance from them at different times. Our relationship with government departments and government policy has changed a lot over the lifetime of the project and that's mainly what I will be explaining today. I hope that I don't run too much over time but I'm going to go in detail through our contact with the Juvenile Justice Department.

This is the Nyoongah edition, one person's depiction of Aboriginals moving into the city, trying to get some space in the city. When Gibber began, one of the main sources of the material was the juvenile justice detention and remand centres. Gibber did regular workshops inside, we were going in about once, twice, sometimes three times a week to the different detention centres. In order to maintain a good relationship with the Juvenile Justice Department, we had to pass all material that was produced inside the detention centres through the Juvenile Justice Department before we printed it. So that meant we had to fax it all to them, anything we had collected from inside, and the censorship rate from the JJD was between 70 and 90 per cent and for more than one edition they would say no to everything and we would have to go back through our material and send it to them again.

Specifically, any material that expressed too strongly that living in gaol was bad or that drugs were anything but evil was censored. The relationship began in 1994. This is our graffiti edition.

It was on 26 March 1996 that Darryl Carmody, who was our prescribed contact at the Juvenile Justice Department, phoned us up out of the blue one day and said that, unless we were to tone down the content of the magazine, we would no longer be welcome in his remand centres, which meant all of the centres in WA and that was all the information he gave us.

So we wrote him a letter requesting a written response, questioning his motives and powers, and this letter was circulated to our support community people in WA Alcohol and Drug Authority, Youth Legal Service, Step One, which is a youth project, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth Inner City Youth Service, Dona Warnock, Christabel Chamarette, and Jim Scott, who are all members of parliament, Magazine in Victoria, Yirra Yaakin Aboriginal Theatre, the Civil Liberties Council of WA, the Nyoongah Alcohol and Substance Abuse Agency, and Dr P.J. Formentin, who's the head of Youth Studies Department at Edith Cowan.

We also circulated it to all the Juvenile Justice Department superintendents and teachers that we had ever had contact with, Dave Paterson, Myra Robinson, Jeff Enoch, Maureen Chipp, Karen Clulow, Glenys Mulvaney, and Colleen Doig. As a result of that we were invited to a meeting of the detention centre teachers and Darryl Carmody to discuss the issue with him. Before we went to the meeting he made it clear to us in a letter that there were three areas of concern coming from the Juvenile Justice Department. These were, number 1, their policy of no swearing, no drug or crime talk in detention; number 2, a lack of what they termed as "standards and excellence," that's a quote from their letter.

The example they used that was of a high enough standard and excellence which contained no swearing, drug or crime talk was the exhibition that the WA Juvenile Justice Department sent to Austria of desert art in early 1996. They sold big pieces of desert art for huge amounts of money. From a Gibber angle, and something that our board has had firmly in our own base is that our main problem in encouraging detainees in certain genres of art over other genres of art has been that none of the teachers are native to that region of the style of art but they're teaching it anyway. The second thing is that the detainees aren't native to that region either, so what we have got is white teachers teaching Nyoongah kids western desert art techniques. The kids can't go anywhere because they're in detention every day for months and months.

There's heaps of Aboriginal art groups in our state that have had huge problems with the way that desert art is taught in the detention centres for some years now; so we didn't agree at all with the letter that they sent to us or the examples that they were using. So at the meeting we had with the Juvenile Justice Department and Darryl we presented all the teachers with copies of our specific letters of support specifically written addressed to them. These were from associate professor in fine arts at the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts at UWA, David Bromfield, Youth Legal Service, Christabel Chamarette, who was an MLC at the time, Perth Inner City Youth Service, Sarah Miller, who's the Director of Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Lois C. Best, who's one of our supporters, and Ananda Barton, who's a board member and supporter.

The first response that we had was that Darryl accused us that these people had never read Gibber and didn't know and we had somehow - I don't know - convinced them to write letters about something they didn't know about or something. Then the second response was a handwritten complaint letter from one of the teachers, Jasmine, about our workshops. The complaints were that we wore inappropriate clothing - and these were all numbered and everything - that we had inappropriate communication for an educational institution and it was contrary to policy because we weren't allowed to talk about crime. The third thing is that we were collecting poetry and artwork that was produced in the detainees' spare time whereas we were supposed to be taking things only from the actual workshops. This is what they had a problem with.

Teachers apparently having to step in constantly and regulate and censor the use of swearwords during conversations and also on paper. Number 5, "the graffiti edition," which is this one, "perpetuated the notion that graffiti is okay, therefore that edition was philosophically opposed to the policy of the centre, the detention centre." Number 6, our treatment of the work, specifically this cover, which they didn't like at all and they thought that 'any googar' didn't make any sense and so that's really bad and also the fact that we mentioned the names of young people in our credits page which is also against JJD policy that young people be completely nameless. From inside to outside the detention centres they're not allowed to have any identification about spending time inside.

"The language of Gibber is "offensive"; about returning originals late from agreed times with teachers; and point number 9 which I think is the best, "Neither Fleur nor Lee ever held a workshop in my classroom," yet Fleur regularly scouted my room for art and poetry for Gibber which was actually the kids' room where they did their art.

So the outcome of this meeting which was long and tiresome was that Gibber could hold workshops and could use material from the detention centres but it would be at the discretion of superintendents and teachers involved. This meant that all the work collected from the detention centres was first of all censored by the teachers before we took it out of the classrooms and secondly by the superintendent before we left the building. The censorship rose to about 95 per cent so we would collect 10 pieces and be able to walk out with only one and sometimes none.

I will give you an example of the way in which work was censored. I will describe one of the later workshops that we did. This particular one was at the discretion of - a white teacher had allowed us to come in and do a workshop but it collided with her desert painting class because they had another exhibition in Europe or something so all the kids were being told to "hurry up and finish your desert paintings." The painting students had chalk drawn for them on a canvas and the actual colours and it was written in the areas as to what dots, what colours went where and they had to sit there in groups and the teachers were behind them doing it as well, "Quick," you know, "finish your stuff. We've got it get it out, over to this place," or something.

No-one was leaving until the dots were filled in. That was the situation of that class that day and the teachers were all helping. There were about six or so students who had already finished their dot paintings who were allowed to participate in the Gibber workshop and we had our own tables to work from. Lee was working with some of the kids and myself and two students started to work on a montage of drawings which was for the cover of the Loved-Up edition which is this one here. I did a draft mock-up with these boys and then they worked on it quietly themselves to do finished versions of the design.

Lee worked with some other students on creative writing. Just before we left a regular contributor - and this happens a lot. Just before you leave a workshop a kid will go, "I've just got this thing, I don't know where it came from but here's a poem," and it's this huge poem saying all about their feelings and stuff and it's really full-on and obviously something they have worked on a lot, so that happened to us that day. A regular contributor gave us a poem from his own collection. This poem described how dole night he would always hide in his room because his mum and her boyfriend would always buy speed that night and it would always end up in a fight.

It was a pretty short poem just describing how dole day was the worst day of the fortnight for him. The teacher took that piece away from us and didn't give it back to Travers at all "because the kids shouldn't talk about their parents like that." Then on our way out the superintendent took most of the pictures from the Loved-Up cover because they depicted sex and he felt it was inappropriate. The guys that drew the pictures were 17. One of them in particular had 2 months left to go in the juvenile detention centre and then had another 4 years in adult prison before he could get to see his girlfriend and is not allowed to talk about sex and had his own art about that taken away from him.

So that was the sort of thing that we went through all the time. We tried really hard to comply with the new boundaries of the Juvenile Justice Department and we put no swearing and no crime or drugs talk in this edition. I'm just going to go through a couple of pictures. There's a picture by Brad Sargent. Society, Don't Let Them Get You, that's another picture by Brad Sargent. We often receive copies of things that have been printed before. This is a pretty popular one. We often receive it back in the mail as a hand-drawn copy of it that someone will resubmit. This is the Life Is edition. We get a lot of stories from kids writing about their friends who have died. I'm not sure how this guy, Scott Gordon, died but he was a bit of a legend for kids.

It was on 12 August 96 that Anne Gilmour, who is the Manager Education Services, Ministry of Justice, so that's both adult and juvenile prisons, posted us a letter and I will quote for you what the letter said: "It is with regret that I have to inform you that they" - the senior people in that division including the minister - "have made the decision to discontinue links with Gibber. The feeling is that as a government body entrusted with the care and welfare of the young people in their charge, Juvenile Justice is open to serious criticism should it continue contributing to and receiving the magazine. While Gibber print policy of encouraging alienated youth to express publicly their innermost thoughts and emotions has merit, it is a teacher's responsibility to manage that expression in terms that are community appropriate and acceptable."

That was the end of Gibber's official involvement in the Ministry of Justice. Actually we weren't that surprised when it happened and not that surprised that Gibber's policy might be incongruent with that of the Juvenile Justice Department in WA.

That's our multicultural edition. We worked with a lot of refugees, political refugees during that edition. This is something that the Juvenile Justice Department hated. What they circled was the word "cunts" which I think is pretty interesting. We have lost the bottom of that unfortunately. Can people read that? The bottom of it is that mistrust was placed upon the ancestors of my time years and years ago.

The sort of censorship that we face from the Juvenile Justice Department is something that is overt. It is not surprising that the JJD doesn't like young kids who commit crime and take drugs and live on the streets. That was not a surprising thing to us. I guess what is more surprising a lot of the time is the fact that people don't recognise that this censorship is alive all the time. If Gibber didn't exist the people that we have contact with wouldn't have an outlet. They don't have an outlet. Most of the time they don't actually have an outlet at all.

We receive also a lot of covert censorship that comes from our own funding bodies and our own supporting organisations. This is a picture of a protest that Gibber helped or some of the Gibber people were at a really long time ago. I don't know if people know it but it's illegal to be under 21 and on the streets of Northbridge or Fremantle in Perth, Western Australia after 9.30 at night unless you're with someone who is your guardian, ie your parent or someone who is your legal guardian. The police can take you in overnight just because you don't have your legal guardian with you after 9.30 at night any night of the week.

This was repromulgated. This has been a law since about the turn of the century. It was repromulgated by the Court government as Operation Sweep. This is what this is, Put the Brooms Away, some young kids protesting and then it changed its name to Operation Family Values which is go out with your family or stay home, so it's pretty full-on and Richard Court is really full-on. Not many people know about this stuff. If you're a street kid in Perth you're basically in the lock-up or something like that so when this all happened kids were being pushed as in 1995, sorry, it was in 1994, Operation Sweep was repromulgated and kids were pushed out of the cities back into the suburbs.

I have just got a few overheads I wanted to show you. There's just one more slide. Just about censorship, it happens in a really non-active way by simply not allowing certain groups access to resources or any sort of mainstream coverage. For Gibber, art on demand and censorship of certain kinds of work are the result of a lack of understanding of our target group and what the project is like and we face that a lot from our own funding and support organisations. Many groups, ranging from our state arts funding body, which is Arts WA, to the Artrage Fringe Festival, which is one of our supporting organisations, have placed lengthy and ill-informed demands on the project in order for us to keep their support.

We're told again and again not to print illegal graffiti pieces and that if we do it's going to get us in trouble. People are happy with pictures but not words when it comes to graffiti art. I don't know what it is about some people who can't read graffiti but some people seem not to be able to read graffiti and that makes them really uneasy that there's a 24-page magazine. They don't know a single word in it. They can't read it but to the kids it's really meaningful. This is their art, this is their language, this is them talking to each other. But funding bodies don't - our state funding body and Artrage and people like that - don't really like it.

Our target group can't be "trusted." "Graffiti is vandalism," and stuff like that and our business plan has been unsatisfactory for Arts WA for the past two times we have applied for funding as Margaret says because she was still in her role as the head of ArtsWA in January and February when they turned down our funding grant at that time. So my last slide is the only advert that anyone has ever paid us proper commercial rates for which is, strangely enough, Tana and they call themselves Shoe Polish Leather Colour Spray because they don't want to say they sell spray cans. Strangely enough, our kids buy a lot of shoe spray. We got paid properly for that.

I'm just going to run through these overheads really quickly as a walk through the Gibber space. This is the alleyway that we turned into a graffiti art alleyway. The first time we had a night there the kids went completely crazy and bombed the whole area with We Love Each Other at Gibber and no-one seemed to be able to read it but thought it was really, really bad so instead we turned it into a graffiti art alleyway to try and stop the bombing and it did quite successfully.

This centrepiece is by the main crew that we work with, the KAW crew, Kids at War, and their slogan is Fucked and TRC which is Terminate Richard Court. That's a better one there, Kids at War, Full Uncut Terror. That's a long shot of the alley which leads up to our office, thatıs KAW firmly on the balcony there. The nature of our project has been open and accessible to young people and not afraid of printing what young people write. As a result we feel we receive all the flak and criticism that's generally aimed at young people as a broad group. We become a target for society's mistrust and blame towards young people. Lots of organisations in Perth do not want us and have made it very clear they just don't want us around there any more.

We're lucky that we have got fully and partially qualified arts workers and welfare workers and as the project has got older people in our own community are getting older. I will be 24, my God, and then I will probably leave at some point really soon and there will be younger people in my community that will take over and that's why Fleur and Lee left as well. I think that's really, really important. We have got a really strong network of supporting organisations, young people and professionals on our board as well and as members, as subscribers, in our meetings and that has seen us through so far with attacks that we face.

Anyone in the community who works with at risk youth in Western Australia, they all know the importance of Gibber because the kids hang out for it to arrive and they hang out for our workshops and it's really, really important to them. It's really important to them that Gibber keep publishing. We receive letters and phone calls and comments of support all the time. One thing I wanted to do today - that's another one from the KAW crew that says Amanda, that's his girlfriend's name - is ask for people here to subscribe to us. It's only $20 for a year. You get a Gibber every time it comes out. It will be posted to you and you will be able to see the magazine and see what it's up to.

This is an artist from Wollongong who's living in Freo at the moment for a little while. His tag is Keno. This is the rest of the alleyway. Our friend Inspector Moss. I think that's something that sums up what a lot of the Gibber kids think sometimes, There's Nothing More to Say. Thanks.