Victoria 52 WEEKENDS AWAY

Immerse In The Yarra Valley
1548 Melba Highway, Dixons Creek, 3775
(PO Box 481,Yarra Glen, 3775)
Phone (03) 5965 2444 Fax (03) 5965 2441
info@immerseyourself.com.au
www.immerseyourself.com.au
There is a large triangular tub with spa jets in the bathroom. It looks inviting until you turn around and see the note on the wall reminding you to be careful with water; it is the country, after all, and there is a drought. So much for the weekend of guilt-free indulgence. There is still something hedonistic about the showers, though, which have to be taken in the middle of said large tub, leaving you feeling rather like a statue of a nymph in a fountain – a fountain open to private viewings, as the glass in the bathroom doors leaves little to the imagination of whoever happens to be sitting in the adjoining living room.
The gripes end there. This cottage suite at the Immerse spa in the Yarra Valley is a cosy nest for those who wish to venture no further, with a luxuriously fitted out bedroom, pleasant sitting room and small balcony, perfect for the consumption of trashy detective novels and endless cups of tea in the sun. A short stagger up the path is the spa, where prices about 40 per cent higher than those common in town will buy a pummelling massage or a gentle facial, as well as more esoteric services
(I shall go to my grave wondering about the red wine bath and the aromatherapy salt glow). The restaurant has imaginative brekkies and standard yuppie dinners (salmon fillets and sticky date pudding).
It is all very pleasant and urban middle-class; a bit of city luxury dropped into the countryside. This is what is happening all over the Yarra Valley, where modest farms are interspersed now with wineries and flash restaurants.
Immerse has its own paddocks behind the vineyards where you can have a walk that leaves you suitably mud-encrusted. But for a real rural experience, try the parklands and footy oval of the nearby town of Yarra Glen. The younger sheilas might be picking their way delicately through the mud on high heels, but the rest of the locals are made of sterner stuff. They stand rugged up in coats and scarves, eating pies and sauce and roaring abuse and encouragement; several of the players have pot bellies; the utes have kelpies in the back.
Now that’s a weekend in the country.
Cost: various weekend packages available, from $240 a double per night. This reviewer’s package, $549 a double per night (includes cooked breakfast; $50 spa pass; wine tasting and bottle of wine; two-course dinner for two with wine; full-day winery tour with Yarra Valley Winery Tours, including lunch).
Distance: 65 kilometres (an hour’s drive) from Melbourne.
Accommodation: guesthouse with five double rooms (two king, three queen)
and a two-bedroom cottage (sleeps six).
Features: spa with beauty and massage treatments, cafe, gourmet picnic hampers, cellar-door wine-tastings.
Nearby: Yarra Valley wineries and restaurants, national park, ballooning, the Healesville animal sanctuary, Maroondah Dam.
Bookings: two months ahead.
Children: in the cottage only.
Wheelchair access: yes.

First published in The Age.

Mother’s tears of rage after wife-killer verdict

Julie Ramage’s mother wept silently on her husband’s shoulder yesterday when she heard the verdict: “Manslaughter.” But she was unable to stifle her sobs as the jury left the courtroom. And she was unable to restrain her rage as she left, passing her son-in-law, the man who had killed her daughter.
“Bastard,” she hissed.
His head was bowed, as it had been since the verdict was announced. He did not reply.
After two days of deliberation, a jury of seven men and five women had concluded that James Stuart Ramage should not be convicted for murder over the killing last year of his estranged wife, Julie, who had separated from him a month earlier.
The defence had argued that Ramage should be convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter because Julie had provoked him with verbal taunting and gestures in the moments before Ramage “lost it”, punched her to the ground and throttled the life out of her on their family-room floor.
The prosecution had argued that she would never have taunted him because she feared him – he had been verbally and physically violent to her before.
Outside the court, her distressed parents called for the law of provocation to be ditched.
“I just feel that there’s no justice,” said her trembling mother, Patricia Garrett. “Any woman that’s in a relationship where she feels threatened, I tell her not to stay for the sake of the children. Get out . . . My daughter stayed for the children, and she’s paid the ultimate price: she’s dead.”
She said Julie’s teenage son and daughter “have got no mother now”.
“I’m just devastated. She would not have provoked him . . . My gentle daughter . . . She knew he was a violent man. She would never have provoked him. And that law should be thrown out.”
Julie’s father, Raymond Garret, argued that his daughter would never have knowingly allowed herself to be alone with her former husband, and that she had gone to the family home on the day of her death only because she had been told a builder would also be there to discuss renovations with her.
He said: “All those people that were close to her always told her, ‘Never be alone with him. Be in a public place . . . It could be very dangerous.’ ”
Mrs Garrett said that her daughter had shared her fears of her husband’s violence, but that her family and friends had not been allowed to talk about this when giving evidence. “We weren’t allowed to say what she told us. That’s hearsay. He can say she said anything and that’s allowed. Now how just is that?”
Julie Ramage had long feared her husband would “lose it”. She had left the family home when he was on an overseas trip, worried that there would be terrible scenes if she had to tell him in person that she was moving out.
She had enlisted friends and family in her plan to “let him down gently” – to allow him to believe for a while that she might come back to him in time – because she feared he was not ready to face the truth. And she had written him a firm but generous letter when she left: “If you do care for me, please let me go without a horrible fight, for the kids’ sake. Let’s prove to them that we are better than all the other separated couples that we know.
“I could hate you so much for some of the things you have done and said to me over the years, but I also understand that you are a good person and that you work hard and, most importantly, that you love our kids very much.”
Their daughter Samantha, now 17, told the Supreme Court: “She was worried he might be angry. That he would do something to try to hurt her, like kill (her) horses or steal the horse float or control the money . . . or maybe be violent towards myself or her.”
And Samantha cited another reason for her mother’s softly-softly strategy: “She didn’t want to kick him while he was down.”
The Ramages had seemed to have the perfect middle-class life. At the time of the killing he was 43, handsome and strong; she was 42, pretty and charming and kind. They had a son at Scotch and a daughter at Lauriston.
Their two-storey Balwyn home was being renovated and they owned a holiday house near Lorne. He drove a Jaguar, she had a Mini-Cooper and they shared the family Fairlane. They had joint assets with a net worth of $2.6 million.
But at lunchtime on July 21, 2003, the bourgeois dream ended in the dirt, in a shallow grave off Arthur’s Creek Road near the Kinglake National Park, after Ramage – a hard-working, conservative man, his business partner told the court – lost his temper and killed his wife. He told police he strangled her with his own hands.
She fought him a little, he said, but not for long.
Prince Charles, gazing upon Diana’s dead body, is reported to have asked, “How did it come to this?”
James Stuart Ramage, it seems, did not pause for reflection. He made no attempt to revive his wife or call for help. He dragged her body out to the family garage and packed her and a shovel into the boot of his sleek Jaguar. He got a bucket, tea-towels and detergent and cleaned her blood off the floor.
He packed himself a change of clothes and gathered up her handbag and mobile. He took her car and parked it 700 metres from the house near a restaurant they both used. And then he drove, for nearly an hour, to a remote patch of bushland. On the way he tried to lay a false trail: he called her work and her mobile, as if he were looking for her.
On a patch of private property, he dug a hole and put her in it, then covered the newly turned soil with branches and bracken. A few metres away he dug a second hole, where he buried incriminating evidence, including the bed ruffle that – in a continuation of the dark domestic motifs that ran through his crime – he had used to wrap her body.
On the way home, in a move that might have been scripted for a black, black comedy, he stopped at the Reservoir workshop of Acropolis Marble to discuss the granite for the bench in his renovated kitchen/family room – the one in which he had just strangled his wife. Staff said he was calm and pleasant, if a bit fidgety with those deadly hands, as he debated how best to join the side panels.
So, how had it come to this? The defence painted Ramage as a pitiable figure; a man who had found the last few weeks crazy-making, who had been duped, who had been clinging to false hope, who had been desperately trying to remake himself and his home in an attempt to get his beloved wife to come back.
He had talked obsessively to friends and to his son, Matthew, about what he might do to win Julie over. He had written himself lists of things to do, said Matthew, including one instruction that “I must relax and be more carefree”.
Matthew, now 19, told the court: “I spent four weeks with Dad every night going through everything he could do to improve himself.”
James Ramage had seen four different counsellors, and taken his wife to two of them, in the hope of salvaging their marriage. His lawyer, Philip Dunn, QC, told the court: “He tried to work on his spiritual side, which someone had told him about,” so he booked into a course of 16 meditation-relaxation sessions.
He was anxious and not sleeping; both his children testified that they had found him weeping at night. Mr Dunn said: “He’s on an emotional seesaw, he’s all over the place because he’s not being told the truth.”
Julie Ramage, meanwhile, had blossomed. She was no longer with the controlling man who had chosen her clothes, dictated her haircuts, and forced her to sneak money out of their accounts to pay for her horses. She was no longer limited in her contact with family and friends, her identical twin sister, Jane Ashton, told the court.
“She had the freedom to come and go. I saw more of her in that last six weeks than I had seen of her in the months before. She was happy. It was as if a weight had been lifted off her shoulders,” Mrs Ashton said.
But Julie remained wary of her husband, she said, for fear that if he got angry he would be violent towards her.
Prosecutor Julian Leckie, SC, told the court that there had been a (undetailed) violent incident early in the marriage, and that 18 months before the separation Ramage had pushed his wife out of bed, and that he had broken a glass in an argument – which left his wife feeling intimidated.
She was not so intimidated that she could not have two affairs behind her husband’s back while they were married, the defence argued.
And Mr Dunn pointed to her latest lover – a man she met after she separated from her husband – as the reason she might have abandoned her long-held caution and finally told Ramage the truth. She had told several people that she wanted her new relationship out in the open and “didn’t want to lie any more”.
James Ramage told police that he killed Julie after she had told him she didn’t care about the renovations and made a “wank wank” gesture; after she had told him the marriage was over and she should have left him 10 years ago; and after she told him that sex with him repulsed her, and that she had found a new man who was much nicer.
On the basis of this alleged exchange, and on the basis of the confusing messages Ramage had been getting about whether the separation was final, the defence argued that his crime should be reduced from murder to manslaughter because his wife had provoked him.
As the burden of proof was on the Crown, it was up to the prosecution to prove that the alleged provocation had not taken place; Ramage did not have to prove that it had.
He had turned himself in to police late the night of her killing after having dinner with his son, contacting his daughter, and speaking for three hours with lawyers.
A distressed Mrs Ashton yesterday said after the verdict that the jury had not been allowed to hear evidence that Ramage had once broken his sister’s nose in an attack. She said the outcome meant that the legal system was telling women that it would not protect their right to leave their partners in a safe and civilised way.
“James Ramage has shown no remorse . . . The claim that my sister provoked him allows him to exonerate himself and blame her for his loss of control. Provocation carries with it the assumption that a man has a right to punish his wife if she defies him.”
Justice Robert Osborn remanded Ramage for pre-sentence submissions on a date to be fixed.

_With Peter Gregory

See also Honour Killing In The Suburbs

First published in The Age.

Election 2004: Lazarus just keeps on rising

The Verdict
For resilience, ambition and determination, there is no match for John Winston Howard, writes Karen Kissane.
He was centre of the national stage on Saturday night, beaming from the podium with his family as 800 party faithful roared their delight at Lazarus’ fourth coming. But come Sunday morning, Prime Minister John Howard was just another worshipper at the prayer service at his local evangelical Anglican church in Sydney. Well, almost.
All the important events of this small community were raised: a baby’s christening, a parishioner’s illness, the 132nd birthday of the beautiful sandstone church, which has an Australian flag and a Union Jack mounted near the altar. The Prime Minister, in his turn, got a share of the attention in the prayers of intercession: “We pray for Mr Howard and his newly elected team, that in his elation and sense of humility he will look to You and to Your ways to lead this great country so that justice and mercy for all will be his ambition, as they are Your ways . . . but also (that he be) aware of the needs of so much of our world and (be) proactive to meet those needs.” Presumably the PM joined the rest of the congregation in their “Amen”.
Leaving the church, a cheerful Mr Howard declined to speak to reporters, other than to say that he had been phoned the night before by both US President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “They rang me and congratulated me and I had a brief discussion with each of them.” He would spend the rest of the day talking to a few people and “taking it a bit easier”.
He could well afford to. He has joined a pantheon of rare prime ministerial successes; only Bob Menzies and Bob Hawke share with him the winning of four elections.
“This is a truly historic achievement,” he said on election night. “You have to reach back to the ’60s (to find an incumbent government that) has increased its majority on two successive occasions,” he said, referring to his hero Menzies.
Mr Howard has probably won control of the Senate. He has also strengthened his dominance over the party’s internal critics by virtue of his sheer success.
It will probably take at least two elections for Labor to claw back Howard’s comfortable majority. The man who spent so many years in the wilderness, the pollie who couldn’t win a chook raffle, now appears to have an unassailable hold upon the nation’s leadership.
Before the last federal election, an eye-rolling Paul Keating is reported to have said of Mr Howard: “The man must have been hit in the bum by a rainbow at birth.” In fact, John Howard’s luck – and his ill-luck – have come in alternating bursts. As a boy at Canterbury Boys High School, he could not muster enough votes to become one of 25 prefects. As Opposition leader in 1987, his electoral hopes were stymied by the machinations of the Joh-for-PM campaign. In 1988, a poll reported that “John Howard appears to be a leader without any kind of voter mandate. He is neither liked nor respected . . . We can only question the potential inherent in a leader (of whom the) strongest perception is that he’s boring.”
In 1989, his own party dumped him as leader. Asked then if he could make a comeback, he said: “That’s Lazarus with a triple bypass – I mean, really.” But his wife, Janette, had said in 1987 that she never doubted they would make it to the Lodge: “I think it is our destiny. He told me he’d be prime minister the first time we met. He will be, wait and see.”
Now his party is hailing him as the greatest conservative prime minister since Menzies, who served 15 years, five months and 10 days as leader of the nation. There are similarities between the two, agrees Paul Strangio, a political historian at the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University.
“Both of them struggled early on, and their ascendancy has been built on three main pillars: their ability to manage the economy, their superior ability to look after Australia’s interests in dark and threatening times, and their forging of constituencies. For Menzies, it was ‘the forgotten people’; for Howard, it’s been ‘the battlers’.”
Howard has more appeal for the battlers than Latham, argues Professor David Flint, a leading monarchist and one of the party faithful celebrating at the Wentworth hotel on election night. “I think a lot of rank-and-file Labor supporters have voted for John Howard . . . Traditional Labor voters are very conservative.”
Dr Strangio agrees: “Labor has a problem in reconciling its two constituencies: those who are middle-class, liberal and cosmopolitan, and the more traditional working class.”
Gerard Henderson, author of a history of the Liberal Party called Menzies’ Child and a former chief of staff for John Howard, yesterday summed up the Prime Minister’s appeal this way: “He’s not at all charismatic, and he can be a bit boring. But you know where he stands and he doesn’t surprise you because there’s a degree of consistency (in his attitudes) that goes back 30 years.”
Mr Henderson believes the Government would have had to blunder seriously to lose this poll, given the state of the economy. So did this election fall like a ripe plum into Mr Howard’s lap?
Dr Strangio says that, in fact, it is possibly the first election win that Mr Howard can claim to be all his own: he won in 1996 because of public loathing of Paul Keating; in 1998, with the GST, he fell over the line and came close to being a oncer; and in 2001, critics argue, the outcome was affected by the Tampa and the children overboard affair. This time, Howard’s stance was “Here I stand, I can do no other,” says Dr Strangio. “In the end, he basically stood on his record . . . and he won handsomely.”
What does the PM promise for his fourth term? In his election-night speech he returned again to his core values, his love of country, the strength of the economy and his decisions to send Australian troops to East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq.
“This is a proud nation, a confident nation, a cohesive nation, a united nation, a nation that can achieve anything it wants to,” he said; a country that he passionately believed “to be a beacon of democracy and tolerance and hope and achievement all around the world”. He said this election had always been about one thing: who Australians best trusted on security and the economy.
John Winston Howard is determined and resilient, as any reporter who has panted after him on one of his early-morning walks will attest. His gait and speed are deceptive; like that of elderly marathoner Cliff Young, it appears unremarkable, almost awkward, but he sets a cracking pace that forces followers into occasional little trots to keep up.
His walk on election morning was along his usual route, which takes in views of the Sydney Opera House, Luna Park, and the Harbour Bridge. On this walk, as in his political life, critique did not sway him. He did not slacken his stride when he reached the graffiti chalked at intervals on the pavement below his feet: “Vote for the forests”; “WMD – Where are they?”; “Free children in detention”; and “Howard throws the truth overboard”.
He knew where he was going and he paid no mind.
On election night, that honed political judgement was proved right.

First published in The Age.

ELECTION 2004: Prime minister takes history in his stride

John Howard’s day started with nerves as he faced becoming the second longest-serving prime minister, writes Karen Kissane.
Perhaps it was because he’d had a bad night. Prime Minister John Howard yesterday postponed his scheduled 6am power-walk, emerging at seven to lead the media pack up the hills and down the dales of Sydney’s Kirribilli. He confessed to butterflies in his stomach, and later said he had slept fitfully: “What would you expect?”
He had seen that morning’s polls, and one of them gave credence to his claim – incumbent upon leaders on election day – to underdog status: “I think they tell a picture of a very close result.” He then took off on what was either his last morning walk as prime minister, or his last before walking into the history books as the longest-serving prime minister since Robert Menzies.
He was not left wondering for long. The Prime Minister watched the result unfold from his official home, Kirribilli House in Sydney, with his wife Janette and children Melanie, Tim and Richard. Richard had flown home from Washington, where he has been working on the election campaign of US President George Bush.
At 7.05pm, Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Kroger told Channel Nine that in Victoria there was an early swing to the Liberals in every one of the state’s 37 federal seats. By 7.15, Labor Senator Robert Ray predicted that it would be almost impossible for Labor to win the election, and that it was likely to emerge with fewer seats than before.
By the time the official Liberal function began at the Wentworth Sofitel Hotel at 8pm, many of the invited 800 family, friends, key advisers and donors who had begun to trickle in were confident they were headed for a party rather than a wake.
Former Liberal Senator Michael Baume said Mr Howard’s campaign tactic of “pointing out the risks of change” had proved right.
Would this latest win make the PM’s position in the party room unassailable? “He was already invincible.” NSW Liberal Party director Chris McDiven agreed: “He is unassailable now for as long as he wants to be prime minister.”
On his power-walk that morning Mr Howard’s pace was, as usual, unrelenting, and his tracksuit was of the requisite dagginess, with a patriotic twist: the fluorescent yellow jacket had a green “Australia” and the stars of the Southern Cross on the back. On his walk, as in his political life, critique did not sway him. He did not slacken his stride when he reached the graffiti chalked at intervals on the pavement below his feet: “Vote for the forests”; “WMD – Where are they?”; “Free children in detention”; and “Howard throws the truth overboard”. The chalked opposition may have been extensive but it was in a form that George Bush’s “man of steel” could literally walk right over.
Mr Howard did not get off quite so easily when he arrived mid-morning at Putney Public School, in Sydney’s north, to cast his vote in his home seat of Bennelong. He was met by his daughter, Melanie Howard-McDonald, and her husband Rowan, who were in jeans and Liberal T-shirts handing out how-to-vote cards. Mr Howard kissed her and said effusively, “Family support – fantastic!” His wife and sons were not with him.
As the PM democratically took his place in the queue, he ignored a woman who shouted from the back of the crowd in broken English that he did not rescue countries that did not have oil to protect them. Then another lone female voice began warbling an angry ditty of the kind PMs do not enjoy as background to their media moments: “Shame Howard shame, you have cheated on the game.”
As the singer launched into encores, Mr Howard’s efforts at innocuous chitchat with reporters were suddenly re-energised. A reporter asked if this would be the last time he voted for John Howard. The PM gave a tight smile: “You never rest, you guys, do you?”

First published in The Age.

ELECTION 2004: Generous PM talks of years ahead

SYDNEY. John Winston Howard entered the Wentworth Hotel in Sydney to a triumphant piece of musical kitsch of the kind that would signal a happy ending in a Hollywood movie. He brought with him his beaming wife, Janette, in peach and pearls, and his children. He was too tactful to say it, but backslapping supporters in the room had no qualms: “The sweetest one of all!” one roared.
Mr Howard had more grace. In a generous, confident and impassioned speech, he thanked the nation for its vote of confidence and made an almost prayerful vow to rededicate himself to the Australian people. Australia stood on the threshold of a new era of achievement, he promised. “The rest of the world sees us as a strong, successful nation . . . We are a nation that is respected by the world because we are prepared to stand up for what we believe in.”
He promised never to forget that governments are elected to govern for the people who voted for them and those who voted against them.
He thanked the Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, for his loyalty and his Treasurer and would-be successor, Peter Costello, for Australia’s strong economy, “the strongest economic conditions that this country has arguably experienced since World War II”.
He did not mention Iraq directly, but made several references to Australia’s willingness to stand up for democracy, and pointed out that “on this very day the people of Afghanistan have had an election, and that election has been made possible by reason of the fact that a number of countries, including Australia, were prepared to take a stand for democracy and to take a stand against terrorism”.
Earlier in the day, he had postponed his 6am power walk, emerging an hour later to lead the media pack around Kirribilli. He confessed to butterflies in his stomach, and later said he had slept fitfully: “What would you expect?”
He had seen that morning’s polls, and one of them gave credence to his claim, incumbent upon leaders on election day, to underdog status: “I think they tell a picture of a very close result.” He then took off on what was either his last morning walk as Prime Minister, or before walking into the history books as the longest-serving prime minister since Robert Menzies.
Mr Howard’s pace was, as usual, unrelenting, and his tracksuit was of the requisite dagginess, with a patriotic twist: the fluorescent yellow jacket had a green “Australia” and the stars of the Southern Cross on the back. On his walk, as in his political life, critique did not sway him. He did not slacken his stride when he reached the graffiti chalked at intervals on the pavement below his feet: “Vote for the forests”; “WMD – Where are they?”; “Free children in detention”; and “Howard throws the truth overboard.”
Mr Howard denied that he saw the fine, sunny weather as a good omen: “The first time I was elected to Parliament it poured rain, in 1974, it was unbelievably wet.” Was he superstitious at all? “Oh no, not quite. (But) I occasionally carry a gold watch that my father carried through the First World War.”
He was not left wondering about his place in the history books for long. The Prime Minister watched the result unfold from his official home, Kirribilli House in Sydney, with his wife Janette and children Melanie, Tim and Richard. Richard had flown home from Washington, where he has been working on the election campaign of American President George Bush.
At 7.05pm, Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Kroger told Channel Nine that in Victoria, there was an early swing to the Liberals in every one of the state’s 37 federal seats. By 7.15pm, Labor Senator Robert Ray predicted that it would be almost impossible for Labor to win the election, and that it was likely to emerge with fewer seats than before.
By the time the official Liberal function began at the Wentworth Hotel at 8pm, many of the invited 800 family, friends, key advisers and donors who had begun to trickle in were confident they were headed for a party rather than a wake. They paid more attention to the wine and the tempura prawns than they did to the TV screens running election news; they knew it was all over, red rover. They were as one for the first time only when NSW State director Scott Morrison took the stage at 9.30 to ask them for silence during Mark Latham’s upcoming concession speech, “out of respect for our opponents”. He was greeted with jeering laughter.
Former Liberal Senator Michael Baume said Mr Howard’s campaign tactic of “pointing out the risks of change” had proved right. Would this latest win make the PM’s position in the party room unassailable? “He was already invincible.”
NSW Liberal Party director Chris McDiven agreed: “He is unassailable now for as long as he wants to be Prime Minister.”
Leading monarchist Professor David Flint said this could not be guaranteed: “I can’t see him facing a challenge, but economics don’t always go up.”
What now . . .

First published in The Age.