When he sniffs petrol, he says, he sees black shapes and hears odd sounds, like muffled noises made under water. Frank is 24 and says he cannot give up petrol sniffing because he suffers withdrawal headaches. A long-term sniffer, he eats little and his clothes billow from his small body. He is beginning to show the ravages of petrol inhalation and is unable to remember much of his life. The difficulties he has in coordinating his limbs suggest he may already be suffering the lead-induced brain damage that will eventually close down the sniffers' ability to breathe.
Home is an abandoned house on the community's outskirts, which they share with dogs and pigs.
Inside, one of a small group of elder women who have not abandoned the sniffers tries to feed a baby from a pot. A dog competes for the food. A young girl, perhaps seven or eight years old, stirs awake beneath blankets blackened by dirt and an old woman strokes her, bewildered by the sniffers, it seems, but still there for them. All of the usual descriptions of filth and degradation apply here in abundance, though it does little good to labor them. Ivy, Frank, Floyd and the others are the faces of the petrol-sniffing resurgence crippling some desert communities in Central Australia and about which a federal parliamentary inquiry heard last week.