By BEN COLLINS.
Fitzroy Crossing’s public pool is being opened at midnight on welfare paydays in an effort to protect teenagers from alcohol-related abuse, and to prevent them from engaging in petty crime.
It is almost midnight after a baking, 40-plus degree Friday in the central Kimberley town of Fitzroy Crossing, and the temperature has barely dropped below 30 degrees Celsius.
Despite the late hour, the hot blackness of the night echoes with childish whoops and laughter.
More than 40 children, mostly aged from 10 to 16, are making their way across town, drawn by the promise of fun, games, and a cooling swim.
Chapter 1: A midnight refuge
The program is an initiative of Royal Life Saving WA’s Aaron Jacobs, who manages the pool in the majority Indigenous Kimberley town.
“There’s always been an issue with a lot of youth walking the streets at night time, sometimes getting up to no good,” he said.
“So I just wished to provide them with a good supervised and safe spot to be, and hopefully be a good mentor.”
He says the kids have embraced the program.
“We do fruit for laps, which is a program run by Royal Lifesaving Society, and we might have a game of aqua-basketball,” he said.
“I’m really happy they’re here, in a sense, because they’re off the street.”
Earlier in the evening, the large crowd of children were madly chasing a football through pools of light in a park next to the dusty Great Northern Highway, with Broome more than 400km in one direction, and Halls Creek just under 300km in the other.