Fuel, Cars and the Geography of Petrol Sniffing

Abstract

The petrol which kids and adults are sniffing, well it's really bad. It makes people Ustless, and will make you sick. It will burn you away, your lungs, liver, brains, heart, eyes. Tell them immediately to stop, you mothers, fathers and anyone else. The PoUce and the Council have said [this]. Your children, and your sibUngs, tell them off quick. They could increase in number, and their breathing could be impaired from sniffing. If they sniff all the time it will increase. Petrol isn't milk, cool drink, or water, no - it belongs to motor vehicles. You aren't a car, no you're a person. Take it easy, drink water, cool drinks, milk.1 Inhaling petrol fumes in order to achieve a euphoric mood is usually discussed as a form of social pathology - after all, it is a deviance made more ilUcit and peculiar because the substance (petrol) is not intended, or designed, to be a drug; its real purpose lies elsewhere. The intensification of the drug-using activity we have come to know as 'petrol sniffing' was intimately Unked to the exponential rise in Aboriginal ownership of vehicles and the availabihty of petrol. Ironically though, it has been the fuel itself in a modified form that has, in the end, helped to curb the practice. This essay provides a brief ethnographic review of sniffing and the unanticipated consequences of automobiUty. Many of the ideas here draw on original anthropological fieldwork undertaken by the author in several parts of remote Australia.2 Most people are surprised to learn that the deliberate sniffing of petrol has been reported among Aboriginal AustraUans for more than 60 years. Two prominent Aboriginal men, the late Charles Perkins and Bob Randall, recalled that, as children in the 1940s, they had experimented with petrol sniffing at the institution known as The Bungalow in Alice Springs.3 Apart from this specific report, a folklore of sniffing has become established, attributing its origins to imitative behaviour in which Aboriginal people were said to have copied the activities of American servicemen stationed on northern coasts during World War II. Verifying this rumour is difficult; there are no official reports of servicemen inhaling petrol fumes.4 Perhaps it is worth remembering that American servicemen were said to be responsible for the advent of glue sniffing in the United Kingdom as well.5 In Australia the first written documentation of the practice dates from 1950, when a report noted that Aboriginal people were sniffing petrol on the Co bourg Peninsula, a tract of tropical land north-east of Darwin. Historians know the peninsula because it was the site of two failed nineteenth-century British settlements, at Raffles Bay and Port Essington. The petrol being sniffed on this occasion was not sourced from cars - it came from a sawmill that had started operations in the 1920s and which employed Aboriginal men from the surrounding region. These men were accompanied by their wives and children. In 1950, a government patrol officer found that some of the 'natives' were 'disposed to inhale the fumes' of the petrol powering the mill, and he locked it up out of harm's way.6 When these people returned to their communities - mostly dotted along the coastline to the east of the peninsula - those who had been experimenting with sniffing the fumes took with them the knowledge they had acquired. They had learned that petrol fumes could make you see and hear imaginary things - an experience not felt before. These returning workers inadvertently sparked the diffusion of a substance use that spread across Arnhem Land 'like fire' (as one local Aboriginal man put it), which was to cause angst, despair and death in the decades to come.7 Using petrol as a drug is not confined to Aboriginal people in Australia, but is part of a global landscape of drug use. It seems inevitably to be a fringe drug - a substance used by a subset of young people who are themselves a minority group within a society. …