Networking the Barkly

Earlier in the year BNP connected up with Peter Holt, then General Manager of
Outback Digital Network. We asked him how it all started and where it is going ...

I was Town Clerk at Kintore ten years ago when we first got public phones in the community. Telstra basically put the phones in but didn't provide the usual list of emergency numbers, help lines and directory assistance lines.
As a result people got very frustrated and one of the things that happened was that with the texta colour the phone box became the phone book. Everybody's number was written all over the walls of the phone box.
One other problem we had was that Telstra people didn't come out regularly enough to empty the boxes. So, people would turn up to the phone box with money and they'd put money in but they couldn't make a call. The phone would jam simply because the receiving box was full of coins.
What we want to do nowadays is involve local people in the maintenance of the phone system.
One of the other problems we had when Telstra first put in the phone boxes was them not telling people that not all the calls that they'd be making were local calls - perhaps the nearest communities were two hundred kilometres away. So, people would put forty cents in and it would last five seconds then basically drop through and they'd be needing more money.
People weren't made aware of the costing, for instance, a call to Alice Springs, five or six hundred kilometres away, was seventy five cents for three minutes.
There are a lot of things that can go wrong when people first get technology. One of the problems we had in the council office was that people would answer the phone, but they'd pick it up and not say anything.
They weren't aware of the usual protocol with phones to say hello, I'm here and say who you are. Of course the person on the other end wouldn't hear anything so they'd think there was something wrong with the line and they'd hang up and then ring back again. It took a couple of years before it was widely understood around the community just how the phone was used.
All these problems made us more aware so now, when we're talking about advanced telecommunications to communities - about video conferencing and other things - you've got to give people a chance to become familiar with the equipment first.
Training can be on a technical level but it also can be on an access level where you provide information to people so that they know how technology works. Operate it themselves for a while, see other people operating it, see the range of things you can do with it. That's part of what the Outback Digital Network is all about.
We're trying to not only provide the equipment, but also provide training to local people so that at the community end, we provide a broad service. Telstra will provide the connection to the community where there's a phone line available. Otherwise, we'll use a satellite system with whoever provides that. Telstra's connection will just be into the community, then the services that will be provided will be terminal equipment hooking into that.
The biggest communities will probably get full video conferencing access. What we'd do would be to provide basic video conferencing equipment and have a mobile set which we take from community to community with visiting medical technicians.
They'd be able to come out and do medical imagery. They'd have things like a dermoscope or an otoscope for looking down your throat or in your ear and that provides a TV sized image for someone sitting in Adelaide or elsewhere, who would then provide some sort of diagnostic input.
The people in the clinic or the technician at the site would take record of that and then advise the local medical staff. Sometimes that would mean being told to go away to the regional hospital. Other times it could be, "Well, this isn't a dangerous situation so, you need to get some treatment but it's basically not life threatening and you can stay where you are".
One of the problems we had at Kintore was that, for a community of about six hundred people, the government, through the Royal Flying Doctor Service, was paying about three quarters of a million dollars a year for medical evacuations.
Instead of money being spent on actual Aboriginal health, a lot of money was being spent for people to travel into Alice Springs. Only about twenty five percent of that was for medical emergencies - a lot of it was people going in for routine procedures, an X-ray or an ECG.
What video conferencing allows for these days is that you can actually have the 'scopes in the community. So, you can then get that service done through telecommunications so that people aren't always travelling.
You wouldn't have high-tech expensive equipment on every community. You'd have a special medical unit that did surveys of the health situation in each community. In certain places where things would seem to be a problem you'd bring those people in for eye work or ear work.
A lot of kids on Aboriginal communities are losing their hearing before they get to school. Having regular travelling technicians to 'scope ear problems would be really valuable to the community.
The problem for Alice Springs is that it can't get specialists in a whole range of areas because of the population being small. It's even worse in the communities - to get a doctor is difficult. This is a way of allowing a much higher level of medical information to come into the community so the people who are doing the work there actually have access to some other diagnostic advice.
We did a trial from the Pintupi Homelands Health Service at Kintore. We talked to Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Adelaide that had forty three specialty areas and each unit has video conferencing technology.
What happened was, each of the doctors from each region was given an hour session, some of them two or three hours, to talk to medical staff on the community and community members about what they could offer.
We found some remarkable things, like no one in the community of six hundred people had asthma.
But then diabetes, where you have fifty or sixty percent of the adult population with diabetes and enormous numbers of the children developing it.
As part of our video-conferencing trial we ran, for about six months afterwards, lectures on diabetes. Diabetes specialists from Adelaide lectured the local health committee and Aboriginal health workers on different aspects of diabetes.
After a while the Aboriginal health workers said, "What's the point of this if we're selling unhealthy things in the store and people are getting sick because they're eating that. We should bring the store managers in here".
So, we brought the store managers in and they talked to this guy and then we got some labels printed in Adelaide so the Aboriginal health workers were then able to label products in the store that diabetic people were to avoid completely and other things that they should be careful about how much they had.
It actually had a practical outcome, even though it started in a medical diagnostic area, it led onto something that no one had expected.
Another thing was that we had a substance abuse program for petrol sniffers at Yuendumu. People started to say, "We don't have any teaching materials in this area," because the Government Territory Health Service didn't have any actual treatment programs for substance abuse other than alcohol abuse.
As a result, we were able to get some teaching materials on the effects of sniffing petrol or other solvents on the brain. We used them to explain to the kids who were sent out to this substance abuse program as to basically what they were doing to themselves. That allowed local people a much better understanding of what they were treating.
This was all done through video conferencing.
One of the problems for remote area clinics in communities is having high staff turnover partly because nurses and doctors are missing out on their own personal development. By being able to link into a service being offered from, say, Sydney or Brisbane more or less, across the country, we were able to offer a local site where health professionals could go to a lecture given by a well-credentialed person from Sydney who they, otherwise, would have no chance of seeing.
The only other opportunity for personal development was by enrolling in something in Alice Springs which is obviously difficult when you're running a busy clinic. You can't go to a lecture on Tuesday nights when it's four hundred kilometres away.
The structure of ODN
The Outback Digital Network is funded from the partial sale of Telstra. There was a 250 million dollar fund called Networking the Nation, originally the Regional Telecommunications Infrastructure fund, and of that this project, the Outback Digital Network, is the largest project.
The aim is to link a hundred and twenty communities between Broome and Cairns, with just under half of those in the Northern Territory. It's the biggest project from Networking the Nation.
The idea is to look at the infrastructure that's in the communities. For a small community with no infrastructure we'd be able to provide a telephone system, often by satellite. We don't want to duplicate what has been done. Often just to provide basic phone and fax where that's there and operational.
The next step up would be internet access and the final step up is video conferencing for the larger communities.
The service that's available in the bush is very uneven. Some places have got video conferencing, while other places forty k's down the road have got a very unreliable phone system.
It tends to be that the terrestrial phone system has been laid out to link mines and other major commercial developments. So, where there's a major tourism area like Uluru - and you're on the way to Uluru - it's pretty likely that you'll have a reasonable phone connection.
Where as if you're three or four hundred k's north of there and the road's going west from Alice Springs, where the roads don't actually link to Western Australia, it's highly unlikely you will have that basic infrastructure.
What we're trying to do is plug some of the holes, improve places where there's poor service and where there is reasonable service and reasonable sized populations, we'll try and provide major hubs.
Take a place like Yuendumu that's had video conferencing. There are other communities like Yuelemu which is about seventy kilometres away, where we wouldn't put the whole range of technology into both communities.
We'd have one as the local hub so that if the Yuelemu people wanted to have a meeting or a link to the prison, they'd probably drive to Yuendumu. As this network grows and makes some profit, it becomes a commercial organisation - it's not government funded after this first phase. The aim is to sell these services commercially and then expand the network as we can. So, it's a non-profit organisation.
In Tennant Creek's case, Yapakurlangu Regional Council had a project of their own and they've come in and joined the ODN. The idea is that rather than try to have ODN as a body that creates communication solutions in all these different areas, we're an umbrella body to assist them to start their business, to get their maintenance contract, their equipment contract, their service contracts basically all nailed down first.
Training is done on a national basis, so all those universal aspects are covered through the ODN but after the three years, with the economies of scale that we get from doing it all together, we hope to hand that back to the regions and they run that as a business.
Then they'll have opportunity in the region for expanding it to outstations and smaller communities. We're not only dealing with Aboriginal communities. In some places we'll be dealing with mining communities and farming communities but usually, they're better serviced than the Aboriginal communities. Our focus is very much on the communities.
Over the last years, through Tanami Network, since the early nineties, we've trialed the whole range of service delivery options. We had a three year trial of secondary education where a teacher in Darwin gave Year 9 and 10 Maths and Science classes to Yuendumu, Kintore and Lajamanu.
We've had extensive trials with Centrelink over the years and now Centrelink has taken video conferencing as an option for their own service delivery so, it's in all their offices.
The courts in the Territory have used video conferencing quite extensively but usually between Alice Springs and Brisbane or Alice Springs and places where witnesses have gone or where coroners have been relocated to, rather than for the actual court hearings.
We're on the verge of, in the next six to twelve months, we hope to start assisting in court provision from the communities, which will obviously save the courts a lot of money. They won't have to travel magistrates plus their staff out to communities.
From the community perspective, this is to basically provide a medium for Aboriginal people to get an understanding of technology. We intend to provide internet access as well as the video conferencing.
One of the main social problems is people being away in hospital, because of the high level of sickness, and prison. So, for a lot of the old people in the community who can't travel easily, they don't get to see their relatives in gaol or their relatives in hospital so readily.
One of the things we've been able to do with Yuendumu and the four Tanami communities is have a monthly link up to the Alice Springs and Darwin gaols.
Family can just come in, take over the room for a couple of hours and we send in a list of prisoners before the link. The prison says, these guys are out on a work party, these guys are OK, so we know who's going to be there. Then really, the old people from the community operate the gear and do the link these days because they've had it for ten years, they're very familiar and at ease with it.