Chinese crystal meth ‘tsunami’ forces Melbourne addict sanctuary to close after nearly 50 years

On a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne, a pretty blond woman in her early 20s skips happily down the stairs of a rundown hotel before stopping mid-flight to throw her arms in the air and announce with mock theatricality: “Twenty-three days clean!”

At the foot of the staircase, she hugs twin sisters Rose Banks and Yvette Kelly, who smother her in embraces and words of congratulations and encouragement before she waltzes out through the doors into an uncertain, peril-strewn world.

For Banks and Kelly, the scene is just another small, human episode in the remarkable lives they have led for almost half a century, running the Gatwick Hotel – Australia’s most famous and controversial halfway house for drug addicts and the homeless.

“Didn’t she look beautiful?” Banks says afterwards, with a smile, as she sits in the hotel’s tired-looking wood-panelled reception office. She reflects for a moment and then adds, “Mind you, she can be a real handful and a half when she’s on the stuff.”

With its paint-peeling doors wide open to the unwanted and addicted, the Gatwick is – depending on your world view and financial stake in the neighbourhood – an oasis of compassion and humanity or an unwelcome magnet for the dregs of society. Now, however, it has just weeks left before it closes its doors for the last time – and one potent ingredient more than any other has forced them shut: a rising tide of crystal methamphetamine, known colloquially as Ice, smuggled in from 7,500km away, in southern China.

Over the past decade, the drug made in illicit factories in Guangdong has flooded into Australia, and Melbourne’s St Kilda suburb is at the heart of an epidemic that is tearing families and communities apart because of the narcotic’s devastating effects.