Windows

Windows on to Darling Harbour. In crowded press conferences. In upmarket rooms with pastries and coffee. Bored because the meeting ran overtime. Happy because the story was actually news, for once; bound for a run. Easy work, on a platter, competent PR people, the issue of the day, petrol prices, something that affects everyone. We couldn't have been more alarmed in our own hearts, frozen from the glaciers of the past, from a thousand other stories and a life that had worn thin, the jocularity, as he smiled with plastic teeth and argued for coherence. They would never be with him again. They would never be sane. He was born with the lost twin syndrome and it was here to stay, always waiting for the phone call that never came, always thinking there was someone else there when there never was, always longing for company when there was none to be had, always making more for dinner than they could possibly eat, as if the rest of the village was likely to pop in for supper. This wasn't a village, not anymore. The snow wasn't frozen in the paddock outside. The fire wasn't burning, keeping them warm through the long winter. There were four fireplaces in his house in Redfern and none of them were functional, not to mention that coal fires were banned anyway. He had just been fined $105 for a local election he didn't even remember was on the cards. It was heavily promoted everywhere, the man told him, and he couldn't remember any of it. He found himself dazed with fury, all the arseholes have already got to me, he spat down the phone; unsaid, and you're just another in the long queue. Which of course he was, as he struggled to be polite. Smile and the world smiles with you, he pronounced, but the platitudes ran thick and fast and he could feel things going wrong inside of him. He didn't want to let go. He didn't want to escape anymore, he wanted to cling to the surface of the planet for as long as he could. There were too many things left undone; and even though that bubble of friends, the good years which had fueled him into melancholy for the rest of the days, even though in reality they hadn't lasted very long he remembered them clearly as the years that formed him. Irrevocably. The laughter clear, splattered on the street. The headaches only just beginning them. The wry twist of pain that distinguished him from everything around. When all he wanted to do was disappear. But nothing was too good, for him, for them. They awakened into a war post-Iraq, post the Twin Towers, post everything, and whatever they experienced was tiny in contrast to the great agonies on the other side of the planet. He could dream now, if not at peace. And look out the window and laugh with the others. For it was coming now, the different time. He could only last today, feel safe for today. Because tomorrow marked the beginning of a harsher time. The kids played on the Play Station and he warmed his hands at an imaginary fire place. We will all be welcome in the new tomorrow. The rapture the yanks called it. Well bless my socks; never hope to die. The bars were a remote lure in contrast to the new beginnings.

Uncle Buck

My mate Uncle Buck. Five years ago we started a community radio program called Dads On The Air. It is now the most successful community radio web site in Australia. You can see more at www.dadsontheair.com Below is a recent opinion piece for the show.

OPINION

FIVE years ago the separated fathers of Australia would have died in the ditch for John Howard.

Their faith has gone unfulfilled.

The Prime Minister took this nation to war on the flimsiest of evidence - far flimsier than the overwhelming evidence that the Family Court of Australia and the Child Support Agency, along with their handmaidens in Legal Aid and Centrelink, are in urgent need of reform.

It was five years ago that John Howard announced that he was attracted to the idea of joint custody or shared parenting and that he would initiate an inquiry on the matter. This was a vote changing issue and Howard won himself a new legion of fans amongst separated dads, second families and grandparents.

Five years on, after endless multi-million dollar enquiries and committee meetings, the bureaucrats, the lawyers, the social engineers and the liars have won the day.

The government is likely to introduce this year the new Family Law Amendment Bill promoting so-called “joint responsibility” amongst separated parents.
This is an idiotically vague notion that will give the lawyers a field day and means nothing on the ground. Intact couples don’t agree on many subjects.

Joint responsibility to do what? Choose the schools, what church the kids are going to go to?
This was the bill that was going to introduce shared parenting as the desired outcome post separation. The Bill does nothing of the kind, and will perpetuate the abuses now occurring in the family law and child support arena.

A gutless Howard government should have legislated for shared care and responsibility of children as the norm post-separation. The proposal that equal parenting should be “considered” by the Family Court will make no difference to its current practice whatsoever. The court will continue to perpetuate the discredited sole-mother custody model, with all the pain and harm it creates to parents and children alike.

In August the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs tabled its report entitled Exposure Draft of the Family Law Amendment (Shared Parental Responsibility) Bill 2005.

This shameful report followed two major inquiries into family law by the Howard government, including the House of Representatives Family and Community Services committee, led by national party MP Kay Hull, which produced the poorly written and poorly argued report against joint custody known as Every Picture Tells A Story.

The nation wide positive media attention that Howard attracted for his support of shared parenting has gone.

At the time, even that soft left bible of the chattering classes the Sydney Morning Herald ran articles promoting the common sense idea that children have a right to a good relationship with both their parents. Some of the toughest women journalists in Australia wrote opinion pieces in support of sharing the care of children after divorce.

The nation’s media had finally woken up to the disaster in their midst.

The Family Court, now one of the despised institutions in Australian history, was begun as a supposedly progressive reform by Gough Whitlam in the 1970s aimed at advantaging women. Draconian secrecy legislation made the court difficult to cover for journalists. But as well, for many years the country’s media was reluctant to cover the court because they did not want to be seen as conservative or anti-feminist.

Separated fathers groups, unfunded and politically incorrect, were bulldozed into oblivion by the countless reports from well funded feminist lobby groups, feminist academics and feminist bureaucrats.

The media black out has finally dissipated, with, predictably, the government run ABC about the last bastion of media support for the court.

All the positive coverage John Howard received when he announced his government wanted to reform child custody in this country has gone. At our expense, the Attorney General Philip Ruddock recently toured the country promoting the government’s proposed new 65 “Relationship Centres”, centres which will now add another layer for separating parents before they hit the Family Court.


Attorney General of Australia Philip Ruddock recently toured Australia peddling the bureaucratic lie that his government is implementing the most sweeping reforms to family law in 30 years. The government is doing nothing of the kind.
In his tour of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Darwin and Adelaide Ruddock was confronted with furious fathers wherever he goes.

What was meant to be a triumphal tour to champion reforms to family law turned rapidly into a fiasco.

He looked exactly like what he is: an old lawyer, poorly briefed, defending the indefensible.

By his sneering and contemptuous attitude to separated fathers, he made a whole new set of enemies. One father exiting the meeting at Cranebrook, an obscure public housing enclave in far Western Sydney where the government chose to make the announcement in order to minimise demonstrations and objections, summed it up thus: “He was a prick as Immigration Minister and he’s a prick as Attorney General”. Excuse the language, but that’s about as positive as it got.

By telling fathers that they are second class parents who do not deserve to be granted joint custody of their children after separation Ruddock delivered an insult not just to fathers but hundreds of thousands of women as well, to grandparents, second partners, second wives, siblings and everyone who cares about dads, their children and the disaster that is being visited upon them by the extremist anti-male anti-father bias of the current system.

The government chose to take heed of the so-called experts and bureaucrats and ignore the voices of parents. They are now paying the price. What was meant to be an electoral plus has simply provoked more resentment. Media coverage has been lukewarm at best.Make no mistake; the relationship centres the government is establishing as a so-called first port of call after separation will operate under the draconian secrecy provisions of the Family Law Act and will perpetuate the same anti-father bias and the same discrimination as the Family Court itself. No father can expect to be treated fairly in these Relationship Centres. Those tendering for the running of these centres, including Relationships Australia, have all put in submissions opposing shared parenting; and have therefore declared their bias up front. No father who wants to share the care of their children will be given a civil ear or encouraged to do so.In the process of touring the country Ruddock has made nonsensical claims that the Family Court is not biased against men. It is outrageous to make these claims in front of an audience of fathers and their families who know it to be a nonsense; and who's own children have been so savagely impacted by the serial bastardry of the Family Court.

The evidence that children need and benefit from having a father in their lives is overwhelming. As the man ultimately responsible for the operations of the Family Court, and the man therefore ultimately responsible for ripping hundreds of kids off their dads each week and destroying any potential for them to have a good relationship with their dads, Ruddock has in effect become the nation’s chief child abuser.Numerous individuals and groups have made the point that the Family Law Amendment Bill is a duplicitous piece of rubbish which will do the nation's children yet more harm.


Why is a conservative government promoting a far left Marxist feminist institution like the Family Court?

I think there are two major reasons.

The first is that lawyers back lawyers. Both Ruddock and Howard are old lawyers who, as they have demonstrated, are prepared to put the interests of lawyers and their mates in private practice, many of whom have grown fat from the misery of the divorce industry, well in front of the interests of the public.

The second is that the government cannot admit that the Family Court is a biased and extremist organisation for fear of class actions from hundreds of thousands of disgruntled fathers. While there have been various attempts at such class actions, they have so far been unsuccessful. A government admission of what is already common knowledge, that the court is an antiquated institution perpetuating an outdated style of feminism which portrays all fathers as oppressive and abusive members of the patriarchy would make such class actions far simpler.

In effect it is the same reason the government was so reluctant to publish an official apology to indigenous Australia: money.

While the Howard government is using the rhetoric that it supports the right of children to a good relationship with both parents, not one kid will see their dad for one extra day as a result of the new Family Law Reform Bill. Not only that; the Howard government is encouraging an even further rash of false allegations of domestic violence by including domestic violence provisions in the Family law act. The government has pandered to the propaganda of the taxpayer funded domestic violence industry. It has deliberately promoted public hysteria over domestic violence and deliberately misrepresented its prevalence. Including domestic violence provisions in the Family Law Act will not protect children. It simply means that the ideologically driven Family Court, which has no rules of evidence that translate to the real world, will be ripping kids off their dads with even further gay abandon. The Family Court must be delighted their power over separating families is being even further expanded. The Howard government has arbitrarily and contemptuously dismissed the voices of fathers and father's groups and has dismissed the exceptionally strong arguments for joint custody or shared parenting. The recommendations that a judge or advisers consider equal parenting, contained in the latest committee recommendations, means nothing when you get into the legal cesspit that is the Family Court. There is enormous community support for shared parenting not just from men, but from second wives, grandparents and from young women who, used to the notion of being treated equally, cannot understand why separated men and their children are treated so badly.

The upper classes in this country or already affecting a cultural change in favour of shared parenting, failing to see why they should waste time, money and angst on a pack of lawyers and why their kids shouldn’t be able to move freely between both their parents houses. It is the people without substantial incomes, those who are more likely to turn to welfare for support, who will be most badly affected by the government’s failures. The Howard government has blown an historic opportunity to make the shared care of children the norm post-separation. As such they are visiting the ravages of the Family Court and the Child Support Agency on whole new generations of working class fathers, their extended families and their children.

Photographers line up in the media room at Sydney airport waiting for the captain of the Australian cricket team ricky ponting and fast bowler Glenn McGrath. Put on earth to record. There had often seemed no other pont, no other raison d'etre, in the midst of the long nights, his ossifying body and soul. Now the colours, the textures of everything, were deepening. He could stand to stand without longing to be washed away. He could go out without instantly longing to drown in the crowd, to seek that magic moment at 3am when he and the dancefloor and the universe were one. Now, as years settled on him, funny little habits develped, hot milk, and despite the standard chaos of the day, a reluctance to change. These were embraced, these virtues of comfort, when all else had failed and he could no longer go back; he could simply no longer cope with the chaos of the past. That was why he clung to small platforms of stability, odd bits of routine in a not very routine world. There were still lost weekends, those days when he became everyman in the company of new friends, outposts of the infinite. Talking portals of the spiritual world.

The city had grown beyond all recognition. It didn't offer him protection anymore. He liked to play pool in the middle of the night and he watched with wonder the chaos on the streets. He hadn't seen people so messed up since the eighties. There were so many tendrils working through the place and none of them touched his heart. They could spend time together like mates. They could run round and round in circles and be missed. He could tell them what they wanted to hear and they would know no better. He could seek coherence in the bright colour strategy the city had adopted, with light dripping off every surface. There was still room for adventure; even now. And what he saw was worst decay than ever before. There was always the crying out, the phone that never rang, that marvellous friend from the past who never quite arrived. He was once again on a different shore. He moved easily between the present and the past, and would never have shared the secrets he so easily shared with strangers. He thought they could move forward and knew it was not to be. Would they hurt the ones they loved once again? Would they speak to me with clarity; or accept the carefully calculated cloak. He assumed an elaborate politeness which shielded an unkempt spirit. He sought his way through to that connection and knew it was not to be. In the middle of the night. Playing pool.

Henretta at Luna Park 

This is my daughter Henrietta, now 13. It's hard to believe she's suddenly become a teenager. She talked me into taking her to Sydney's famous Luna Park last Saturday when her brother was off at the movies with friends. Like a lot of parents, I find myself a bit taken aback to suddenly be the parent of teenagers; who are of course an entirely different species to children or adults. It was a fun day, except for some of the rides which I just find terrifying. But gone are the days when the kids thought I was God. They're more likely to think it's a serious lapse of taste if the radio drifts of Sydney's coolest station, Nova 96.9. I've been cleaning up and reorganising the house, and found the following story, which I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald, about her birth. It was called Roam Birth and was accompanied by a picture of her peering over the top of a blow up plastic globe. People who read it at the time just went, oh my God.

Here's the story, originally published July 1, 1992:

It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had more than four months worth of holidays built up, my partner and I were sick of the house we were living in, and, believe it or not, sick of Sydney.

Thus it was that we decided to take 18 weeks off and have our second child overseas.

"You'll be right, they've been having babies over there for thousands of years," the early childhood sister declared.

So we bought three tickets to Europe and four tickets back, returning with we didn't know who.

The entire adventure was given an alarming spin the day before we left when the hospital informed us that they had found an irregularity in the ultrasound - there could be a blockage in the child's kidney.

All packed and geared up to go, we contemplated abandoning the trip. But with that particular condition, rare but not unkonwn, there was little that could be done until after the baby was born.

So, with the doctor's approval, we were off.

How good it felt to be there, but with the drama of unborn kidneys looming large in our minds we skated through Spain and then Morocco.

We were travelling as a unit, and ion that there was a certain comfort, but all the time, in the natural way of things, we were looking for somewhere to nest.

Nowhere was good enough, everywhere out of the question. For a start, most places were just far too expensive to settle for months on end. Gone were the days when I was happy to sleep under cars and bridges and in cheap flea-pits, for travel was all part of a grand adventure of being anywhere but Australia.

So the money continued to disappear, Suzy grew bigger and we continued to search, in a strangely abstract way, for a place to have our baby.

Morocco - well it was cheap, it always has been.

Suzy, and Sammy for that matter, love it, all the culture shocks you could ever want rolled into one. We were crossing through the sub-Sahara with Suzy 32 weeks pregnant, up and down spectacular desert mountains, and all the time there was the thought, what if it happened here, what if it happened here?

So we were out of Morocco, through Barcelona to Bonn for two weeks with an old friend and more ultrasounds, to Amsterdam, here, please here. But no, Suzy had decided she wanted to have the baby in Greece and, seeing she was the one who was going to have to have it, that's where we went.

I didn't want to go. I had the distinct feeling I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Twenty years ago Greece was a great place to visit. Now, with tens of millions of tourists a year, they are touristed out. The fact that we were travelling pregnant with a young child wasn't a source of wonder or concern. We were simply another bunch of dumb tourists, capable of any madness.

Thus, in polluted, strike-striken Athens, we approached some personal nadir. There was no-one around to help us, no friends, no relatives. The Australian Embassy was completely useless, unable to give advice. Unlike the Germans, who could see no problem with the foetus's kidney, the Greeks could see spots and dollars everywhere.

Told that the people on Crete were very friendly and the hospitals were good, we flew there, deciding that this was it, we had to settle here, finding a charming house overlooking a beach, wait for the child to come.

Birth seemed imminent. Suzy was 37 weeks, and Sammy had been born at that time.

Of course the people in the main town of Iraklion weren't friendly at all. Yet another touristed our joint ruined by package tours. There were only two humidicribs on the whole island the hospitals, to our by now inflamed imaginations, sounded alarming.

Came t hat scene in the main square of Iraklion with Sammy clining crying to my leg, Suzy sobbed on my shoulder. "I've made a mistake, I've made a mistake.''

There was, I thought, nothing else for it but to hit the phones and head for the mother country. It wasn't our own lives we were mucking around with here.

I phoned home, got a list of numbers of the few people I still knew in England, and began ringing.

The first o answer was an old friend in Yorkshire I hadn't seen for five years. And before long, buring up even more precious dollars, we were on a KLM flight to Manchester.

Of course you're not supposed to travel on a plane after 28 weeks, so we nervously tried to conceal how heavily pregnant Suzy was. In the end no-one even noticed.

My friend Christine, good old social worker that she was, had found us a lovely tourist cottage in the Holme Valley above Holmfirth - the Bronte parsonage is 40 minutes away - and we sat inside watching the British elections on TV and waiting for the baby to come.

From being in crisis we were no in calm. It seemed as if the baby would never come.

Unfortunately we had to move from our idyllic cottage two and a half weeks later, it already being been booked previously, and we ended up in what could almost be described as a squat.

The house, owned by friiends of friends, had been abandoned for six months. There was no central heating and it was far from ideal, but finances being what they were we couldn't afford anything else.

We had been through a whole rigmarole with the local hospital, which was being transformed into a Trust Hospital, and wanted to charge us the equivalent of $500 a day up front to have a baby under the legacy of Thatcher.

Neither the Australian consulate in Manchester or the embassy in London could tell us whether we were covered under Medicare to have a baby in England. Indeed they could hardly have been less helpful. For this we pay taxes. For this we spend billions on our Foreign Affairs Department. For this we have staff stationed around the world.

Thankfully a left-wing doctor in our local village put us on to the famous midwifes of Yorkshire.

It was a freezingly bleak night, windy and puring rain outside, when Suzy said: "It's happening".

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

I poured coal on the fire and promptly put it out. I mislaid the coins for the phone box, having had them ready for weeks.

The first midwife came. She was thirtyish, very professional. A couple of hours later came Ivy, an older woman, children of her own, classic Yorkshire, you could barely understand her.

And the upshot was: they were fantastic. In the end, after all our worries, we got far better treatment than if we had stayed at home.

Henrietta was born at 1pm.

To be truthful, there wasn't the same sense of profundity as there was with the first. I wasn't staring out the window thinking of new life and the universe. I was thinking of all the practical problems, of the responsibility, that there were people dependent on me now.

While the follow-up service in Yorkshire was excellent, with a mid-wife coming every day for the first 10 days, there were other problems to come, such as getting Henrietta a passport. We must have cut a funny sight holding an 11-day-old baby up in the photographic booth of Manchester railway station. After a three-hour wait, the consul rejected the pictures anyway.

There were other problems, too numerous to mention. But finally we arrived back in Australia with a gorgeous month-old baby girl - who at the time of writing has just begun to smile.

Would we do it all again?

Not on your nelly. If you're thinking of doing it: don't.

Here we are at the notorious barbed wire of the Villawood Detention Centre. Amanda Vanstone was "cutting the razor wire" at the centre, in a ceremonial and symbolic end to the harsh detention regime that helped keep the Howard government in power. We were surrounded by bleeding lefties. We were all of a gang and couldn't be described. This is the moment, after demonstrators had been evicted from Villawood Detention Centre, when the journalists are wandering back to the visitors centre. I was an intern at your paper, I remember what you said about those disabled kids, said one handsome young chap: "Their heads flop, they sometimes dribble and they often giggle." It was one of those few moments when journalism meant anything; when all the daily crud had some positive impact. The Education Minister of the day Terry Metherill had axed the assistants for the disabled kids, some of whom couldn't do any more than move a finger; their only hope the computer technology; the only bright spots in their day the school. The headmaster had ignored the departmental protocols and let us in to film. We photographed them by climbing up into a fig tree in the school grounds. The kids were in a big circle. Then they tagged each of the kids with their disability and what needed to be done for them on a daily basis, just so they could go to school. It ran on page three of the Sydney Morning Herald with the opening line: "Their heads flop, they sometimes dribble and they often giggle". You couldn't read it without going - oh, that's outrageous. Look on and weep. By 11am the Premier of the day Nick Greiner was on radio reversing the decision. It was one of the few times when you could say, we done good. "Lock up Vanstone, free the Refugees", some determined protestors chanted. It was all good fun as far as we were concerned, added a bit of colour to what was going to be a free kick for Amanda; not that I dislike her. There are legions that hate the Howard government, it seems to be a reflex action to prove you're cool. But the years roll by and you realise life is not a university; that tyranny comes as often from the left as the right; that even here in the innner city curtains are repeatedly thrown across our thoughts. You can only think one way. You must deplore the department of immigration. You must support multi-culturalism, the official erosion of the mainstream culture. You must support single mothers and lesbian mothers and domestic violence campaigns. You must be a member of a union and you must never ever think for yourself. You must campaign for reconciliation with the indigenous population and you must support an ever increasing welfare state. They say they want diversity and they want nothing of the kind. In the narrow bands of ideology we suffer and we die. I never did dislike Amanda. At least she had a bit of personality, which was more than you could say for a lot of Howard's cabinet. I remember once, in the leadup to the Olympics, we were doing a story on the sniffer dogs She had weimeraners herself, was dog mad, and had cooked some home made biscuits for the beautiful brown labradors. When she showed up at the airport, surrounded as always by minders and press secretaries and security, the dog trainers were horrified. You can't feed them that, they said. All their training is with food, it will ruin them. She was clearly disappointed. But ever after, for years, when I spotted her at crowded press conferences, she would say across the crowd of suits that always surrounded her: "Weren't those dogs georgeous John." It was endearing, and eccentric, and perhaps her happiest days. She loved being surrounded by the boys in uniform. Immigration was too messy. And it didn't really suit her, being cast as the demon by the ever screaming left.

The news:
The protestors chanted ``Shame Vanstone Shame'' and ``Lock Up Vanstone, Free the Refugees'', familiar cries to a public grown accustomed to refugee demonstrations.But this time the cries were coming from inside the notoriously grim Villawood Detention Centre in western Sydney. And the protestors were blocking the path of journalists trying to get into a press conference to be held by the Immigration Minister and designed to highlight the government's softening stance on immigration detention. Amanda Vanstone and her minders were forced to delay a ceremonial and symbolic cutting of the razor wire until the protestors were removed from the site.The three, from the Refugee Action Coalition, got past security guards and onto the site by blending in with a mob of journalists and cameramen. ``She is not accountable, she is here for show, she is not prepared to answer the hard questions, this is a stunt,'' veteran protestor Ian Rintoul declared. After a delay of about half an hour and after being warned by NSW Police officers that they were trespassing, the protestors were escorted off the property but were not arrested.The Minister was then free to get on with her business. ``I am pleased to announce that workers have now started bringing down the razor wire at Villawood,'' Vanstone said. ``The wire will be donated to the Smorgan Steel Great Scrap Round-Up, which is raising money for bush fire brigades in NSW.'' She said the move, along with new landscaping works around the perimeter fencing, would change the look and the feel of the centre for both detainees and visitors.``I think that is a good thing,'' she said. ``It is an example of where the Government has gone further than changes recommended by the Palmer Report to improve the detention centre environment. ``The removal of the wire is a statement of good faith from the Government which I hope will be matched by people in centres and those outside who may be opposed to detention policy.''Then, as dozens of cameras flashed, Vanstone ceremoniously cut the lethal looking razor wire surrounding the centre. Former inmates of Villawood said they found it hard to believe that things were really improving. Iranian Mohsen Soltani, 35, who spent four years at the centre and is now a student, said ``the environment is shocking. Hopefully we will find peace between the refugees and the government one day. But it is far away to believe that they are improving things. Villawood is really hell, you cannot definite it any other way. Prison is better than detention.''

Washed out colours in the infinite

Meditation in the park. Washed out colours in the infinite. Creepy things happening in the distance. Phillip Bell died aged 70 at 4.15am in the hospital at Long Bay jail, utterly unlamented. 
From the high old days of the past, glamorous apartments, spectacular views, you give as good as you get. It was all cruel, infinitely cruel, we gave as good as we got, we were used as scenery and we drank like fish. 
We should have known there would be better but there never was. We came ducking and weaving and hoping for change, and the music roared into action in clouds of alcohol and smoke. It was for us to be wanted, for them to do the chase. The Granny killer's also died, do we know that, I shouted across the office. Yes, came the response, as we searched desperately for at least one of Bell's victims to comment. All the names were suppressed. I remember going down to cover the trial, which dragged on for months and which covered many a Sydney personality. The boys, now in their 20s, with girl friends in tow, in tears in the foyer. What they could never understand was why they were left. You got too old honey. Sixteen and you're done. From someone who had been the centre of a social whirl, Liberace had visited, and time had stood still; beautiful faces, scandal dripped sofas, the lads back at the pub, the tortuous drives down back streets, the money when none of us had any money. All this was gone now. At 4.15 am in a prison hospital wing. When everything had turned to ashes and there were no more boys for the boy lovers of old. The harm that had been done. The laughter that had been caught, the times that seemed as if they would never end. Not just from the hunted to the hunter, but from social lynchpin to social pariah. In the days when everything was illegal and no boundaries were set. When Sydney was in bloom in the gusty warmth of spring. When the beaches were already crowded. When the old queens were all eyes and flapping wrists and handsome faces peered from everywhere. That was the cause, the lost cause; with Tessa running the pub and letting us in early, to attract the trade. As long as we behaved ourselves. We never did, not for long. She kept a stern eye and we ducked outside and the whole city whirled around us; small stories of scandal and blood soaked lechery; and in the end, how sad was that. I went back to school and my friends went back to jail. And all those millions that Phillip splashed around, that kept him safe; all those presents he showered on his "number one" boys, all came to nothing as the world turned on its axis. A moment in Sydney history; those beautiful houses on the northern beaches, those smart apartments, those cars we all loved; the laughter we shared in a scandal not beyond reproach, but well beyond the norm, it was all gone. He died alone. And there was no one left to remember or defend the moral ambiguities; the kindness of strangers.

The news:
WEALTHY paedophile Phillip Harold Bell died in Long Bay Jail's Hospital wing at 4.15am yesterday morning from cancer after suffering months of illness.He had been visited by family and friends in the final weeks of his life. But for some of his victims, Bell's death came as welcome news. Stuart Cooper, who was one of Bell's ``boys'' on Sydney's northern beaches in the 1970s, said he was glad Bell was dead. ``He lived by the bum and died by the bum, he can rot in hell. I am glad he is dead, I just wish he had rolled against the police before he went,'' Mr Cooper, now 46, said last night.
Bell, 70, who was born into wealth and who's family owned one of the countries largest wool-broking companies, became Australia's best known lover of young boys along with the notorious Robert ``Dolly'' Dunn after an international search forced him to return to Australia. He fled Australia in 1993 and was finally extradited from a luxury home in South Africa four years later.As a well-connected multi-millionaire with lavish homes in Sydneys eastern suburbs and northern beaches, Bell showered gifts on young men who came to his attention. With all the ingredients of money, sex and power, his case fascinated the country in the late 1990s. During extensive proceedings the NSW District Court heard that Bell did not classify himself as a paedophile, that is as someone attracted to pre-pubescent children, but rather as a ``hebephile'', someone who was exclusively attracted to males aged from 12 to late adolescence. Pschologist Christopher Lennings said: ``His arousal and fantasy life is based on sexual relationships with adolescents. He tells me he belongs to a culture or social nice which accepted and supported that behaviour.'' During his trial alleged victims testified they were called ``number one boy'' and would receive more gifts than other youths in his company.
During his trial he denied that he abandoned the young men when they got too old for him. ``They lost interest in me,'' he said. ``I had my heart broken a dozen times by the moment in life when one of my heterosexual young friends have left me for his lady and abandoned me.'' Bell was jailed in 1997 and subsequently sentenced to 14 years in for 75 sex offences on 18 boys aged 12 to 15, between 1978 and 1991.The case was dutifully ignored by the gay press as an embarrassment but gripped the mainstream media. 
The only gay political commentator to weigh into the debate, well known activist Lex Watson, in an essay `Child Sexual Abuse' or `Consensual Teenage Sexual Activity'? wrote that ``the media glibly reported charges of `indecent assault' though most if not all were for consenting acts''. 
During court proceedings a number of his former ``boys'', many from broken or dysfunctional families and by this stage men in their 20s or older, became clearly distressed or cried openly. 

As a number of commentators observers noted, Bell seemed genuinely taken aback that he had caused any distress at all. Apart from a fortnight in Goulburn jail Bell had been at the Long Bay Jail's Hospital since May.
Due to the nature of his crimes, he had been in protective custody throughout his sentence. A spokesman for NSW Corrective Services said he had presented no problems as a prisoner. Bell was two years shy of completing his non-parole period, and would have been eligible for release in November 2007.

Sydney has turned into a ribboned city of traffic jams, tollways and underground tunnels. It is becoming increasingly expensive to get around. This is the M5 tunnel, where the air is thick and toxic; as if it hadn't occurred to the geniuses that built it that air quality might be a problem in a tunnel several kilometres long. The recently retired Premier of NSW Bob Carr declared, as he exited Government House for the last time, "I have no regrets". No regrets? That this city which was once so beautiful, a bohemian paradise by the sea, Amsterdam in the South Pacific, has become a cesspit of snarling yuppies. No regrets at the dozens and dozens of kids who died as a result of the hopeless state of child protection in this state - where the ideologues tromping around in their blunt shoes and f... you glasses had created chaos, ripping kids of perfectly reasonable parents, and not ripping kids of complete lunatics; always painting dad as the lunatic when half the time these kids would have been better off living with dad. No regrets that the lives of many workers had simply got worse; with low wages, shocking traffic jams and spiralling prices. I'll never be able to say no regrets; being inundated at times with melancholic angst, but at least I don't have the mind boggling simplistic of arrogant politicians pretending everything is alright when it is nothing of the kind. Carr has disappeared off the radar very quickly, unlamented by the public, who were sick of hearing him crap on about global warming when the trains didn't run on time, and apparently unlamented even by his own party. In retirement the fuss of leadership, the sycophants that constantly surrounded him, the hub bub of purpose of a practising Premier, will all be gone. No one will care anymore what he thinks about anything. He can stalk the beaches and no one will care to photograph him. He can expound all he wants and no one will listen. The public stuck in toxic and expensive tunnels will remember his legacy of a traffic choked city with rundown infrastucture. Of snarling yuppies and a desperate shallowness that was always the city's want. As Jan Morris once said, it has the feeling of a city that should never have been there, perched between a vast continent and an infinite sea, a feeling that it could be washed away at any moment. The Harbour, the Rocks, the Opera House, the Botanic Gardens, these are the beautiful parts of Sydney. But in the tunnels we see the pointlessness of our own future. We see what arrogant and incompetent politicians have done to a once great city. We smell the chemical air and long for a better place.

Here's another picture of Sam and Henrietta at Darling Harbour. I remember doing a story on this fountain when it was first opened in the 1980s. I was working at the Sydney Morning Herald. Anytime anything went wrong at Darling Harbour, if a tree died in the Chinese Gardens or a bit of pavement came loose, we would be straight down to do a negative story on it. Partly I suspectr becauise it was being championed by Labor right winger Laurie Brereton, who as Public Works minister had posted his name up all over town taking credit for projects high and low. Everyone hated him for his self aggrandisement. But this fountain was a great success, unto this day. In summer little kids play all over it.

This is a picture of me and my kids looking bashful on Father's Day down at Darling Harbour, where they kindly took me to breakfast on my credit card. It was a nice day, though the card felt a bit ill afterwards.

This is the moment when the anti-globalisation demonstrators broke through the fence at the Opera House. They were immediately contained. It was a mad grab bag of Christians Against Greed and Free the Refugees. We are angry about injustice all around the world, said one speaker. We are angry about financial and social and sexual and every other inequality. The journalists were expecting far worse. 

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Perhaps it is just the years. I still struggle with the technology. I can’t work out the most basic things. Were there cars when you were a kid, dad, the kids ask.

I’m not that old, I respond. But to them I might as well be. The idea that there were no computers when we were kids just seems impossibly ancient.

Still working it out

Still working out how to put pictures up in a blog.
This is a picture of me and my kids on fathers day in Australia.
They very generously took me to breakfast on my credit card down at Darling Harbour in Sydney.
It was a nice day, even if the credit card felt a bit ill afterwards.
Now all I've got to do is work out how to improve the quality of the picture.
Everybody else seems to be able to do it on their blogs; some of which look really smart.

Still Struggling

Got a bad cold. Still struggling to work out how to upload pictures from the computer. Just worked out I think how to download them from the phone. My 14 year old whizzkid says he's too busy getting his lunch to help. Another lovely day at the office; coming up. There are many good things, but the office is rarely one of them. We grow old we grow old, we shall wear the bottoms of our trousers rolled. Now they won't upload from the computer to the blog. I just can't work out why not.