One death, many stories

The jury in the trial over David Hookes’ death this week heard widely differing accounts of that fateful summer night, writes Karen Kissane.
JONATHON Porter didn’t see what happened to David Hookes at the end. His view was obscured by the rest of the people in the rowdy group walking down a St Kilda street on that warm summer night. But he did hear what happened, he told the Supreme Court this week.
“(There were) feet scraping the ground and then the sound of fist hitting flesh and then the sound of ” – his voice broke – “then the sound of a breaking bone.” Porter had no doubt about that sound; as a physiotherapist with the South Australian cricket team, he had heard bones break before. As for the punch: “It was very loud, I could hear it from a distance . . . It sounded much louder than me striking my fist in my hand.”
He raced forward to find Hookes, Victoria’s cricket coach and a radio broadcaster, lying on his back. His eyes were open but his pupils unresponsive. Porter cleared Hookes’ airway and laid him on his side. When Hookes’ thready pulse disappeared, Porter prepared to start cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. It was unnecessary, he told the court, as the ambulance had arrived. Standing in the witness box, Porter wiped away a tear and clasped his trembling hands together. All his efforts had been in vain; Hookes, 48, died from head injuries the next day.
It is undisputed that the man who struck the fatal blow is Zdravko Micevic, now 23, then a security officer at the Beaconsfield Hotel where Hookes had been celebrating a Victorian win in a one-day match against South Australia with a group of friends.
The group included Victorian cricketers Michael Lewis and Robert Cassell and Cricket Victoria staff Shaun Graf and Greg Shipperd, as well as South Australian batsman Darren Lehmann and coach Wayne Phillips. The three women in the group included the then girlfriends of Hookes and Lewis.
But there is much dispute over the events leading to the deadly punch in the face; in particular, the truth about the curious incident of the brawl in the night-time. Did it happen, or did it not? And if it did, does this mean Micevic, who is charged with manslaughter, threw the punch in lawful self-defence, as his lawyers claim?
There are two widely differing sets of accounts about Hookes and his cricketing group’s behaviour on that night, January 18, 2004, and in court this week senior cricketing figures faced accusations about lack of truthfulness.
At one point, defence barrister Terry Forrest, QC, said to Shaun Graf,Cricket Victoria’s general manager of cricker operations: “I suggest to you, Mr Graf, that you are not being entirely frank with us?”
Graf replied: “Mate, I can tell you, I swore on the Bible and I’ve been telling the truth.”
The general thrust of the cricketing group’s story is that they behaved well but hotel bouncers were unnecessarily rude and aggressive and forcibly ejected Hookes for no good reason. The security staff continued to harass him all the way up to a corner of Cowderoy Street, with friends trying to intervene to release him and promising repeatedly that they were leaving. The prosecutor, Ray Elston, SC, says Micevic threw the fatal punch just as Hookes was about to get into a car to leave.
The defence paints a different picture. Lawyer Terry Forrest claimed that Hookes was abusive to security staff in the hotel and resisted ejection, and that “two ladies launched themselves” on to the crowd controller who tried to march Hookes out of the hotel in a headlock. The defence says the cricketing group was cursing loudly in the street and that they resisted being moved on. Forrest said evidence would be led that residents of the street at one point saw a brawl between two men in their 40s while a group of younger men stood around them.
The defence case is that bouncers were merely trying to keep the peace and usher the troublesome group away from the hotel, and that a belligerent, defiant Hookes punched Micevic twice before Micevic – a former amateur boxer – struck back.
The contradictory assertions begin with accounts of the call for last drinks by security staff about 11.30pm. Both sides agree that a bouncer approached Hookes, who was drinking with an intoxicated Sue-Anne Hunter, then girlfriend to cricketer Michael Lewis. (Hunter and Lewis had had a row and Lewis was waiting for her in a car outside).
Hunter and another woman present, Tania Plumpton, told the court that the bouncer said: “Tell the bitch to skol her drink.” Hunter told the court that she said nothing in reply, but that Hookes told the bouncer that that was no way to speak to a lady.
Defence counsel Forrest gave the court a different account. He said the crowd controller had courteously asked the two to finish their drinks but that Hookes’ response was to tell the bouncer, “F— you”. The bouncer replied, “Look, mate, there’s no need for that, just move outside”. And Hookes then said, “Do you want me to repeat myself? F— you. F–k you.” It was only then, Forrest asserted, that Micevic took hold of Hookes.
It is common ground that Hookes was grabbed and marched out the front door, but the issue of involvement by others is in dispute.
According to the evidence of bouncers and other staff, a woman threw herself at the back of the bouncer ejecting Hookes and women were screaming loudly during the ejection.
Plumpton, a “cricket nut” and long-time fan of Hookes, denied that she had broken the tips of her fingernails because she tore off a crowd controller’s tag when trying to free Hookes from his hold. She also denied slapping the bouncer’s face. She agreed that she had tried to pull the bouncer’s arm away, however, in an attempt to ensure Hookes could breathe safely.
Hunter said she did not recall whether she had “launched herself” on to a bouncer in the bar or how her glasses had been broken. Hunter said she had not heard swearing or seen fighting outside the hotel and had no memory of walking up the street to where Hookes was felled. She did not recall telling security staff that she would sue them.
Forrest asked her: “From the time that you are in the bar area of the hotel until the time that you see Mr Hookes lying on the roadway you have a complete state of amnesia?”
“Correct . . .”
“Alcohol was a factor in your presentation on that evening, wasn’t it?”
“That’s correct.”
“But your recollections of what you say were offensive about the security men are quite specific, aren’t they?”
“That’s correct.”‘
“Is it the case that you do not want to tell us what occurred in Cowderoy Street?”
“That’s not correct.”
Forrest questioned Lehmann about a Sunday Age article in which he had said that he had blocked out of his mind various events of that evening.
Forrest said: “So if there is evidence to this court that you were involved in the application of physical force on the security staff within the hotel you deny that?”
“I would deny that, yes.”
“Is that something you may have blocked out, Mr Lehmann?”
“I don’t think I’d forget that, no.”
Several members of the cricketing group said they had not heard Hookes threatening bouncers outside the hotel with the loss of their livelihood. According to Forrest, Hookes had yelled: “You listen to the radio tomorrow. Your heads will f—ing spin. You don’t know who I am. I’m going to close this place down. You’re f—ed. You won’t have a job tomorrow.”
But Phillips agreed that Hookes had resisted leaving because he wanted to stay and “argue the toss”, and said he had heard some reference to the effect that Hookes would try to have the business closed down by giving it bad publicity on the radio.
Graf said he had not heard this. In cross-examination, Forrest asked him: “You, Mr Graf, during this entire evening, you don’t see one aggressive act from the cricketing group or hear one aggressive word; is that the position?”
“Correct.”
But several cricketers and bouncers testified that there had been much pushing and shoving and bad language by members of both groups as the security officers tried to move the group away from the hotel.
Plumpton said that at one point she had her hands on a security officer’s chest when he leaned over her and threatened Hookes: “He said that David was a smart-arse and that he was going to effing-well kill him.”
Hookes had been close to being saved. His girlfriend Christine Padfield had run for her car and pulled it up near the group and yelled at Hookes to get in. Plumpton climbed into the back seat first. By the time she got there, Hookes was on the ground.
According to the cricketing group, he did not make it to the car because bouncers would not let him be. According to Forrest, it was because he again stayed to argue the toss.
Hookes’ widow, Robyn, and her two adult children sat in the front bench of the court nearest the jury each day this week. Robyn Hookes sometimes watched and sometimes averted her gaze from the witness box as the other woman who had loved her husband told of her ill-fated attempt to save the man in both their lives.
The trial continues before Justice Philip Cummins and a jury of six women and six men.

First published in The Age.

Joe Korp goes to meet maker

ONE of the first hymns at Maria Korp’s service last week had been Ave Maria. For the funeral of her husband, Joe, the man accused of having plotted to murder her, the choice was equally apt: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me . . .”
A gentle veil was drawn over the ugly months that led to the end of Joe Korp’s life – out of compassion for him, for his family, and especially for the youngest child he left behind.
Damian Korp, 11, sat drawn and spent, shadows under his eyes, in the front row of the church where he had only last week farewelled his mother. The orphan boy had been brought in through a side door of the church to protect him from the waiting media.
Joe Korp’s brother, Gust, wearing a Collingwood scarf with his dark suit, played chief mourner. He lit the candle to begin the service, and stood briefly at the lectern to speak.
His eulogy took only a minute. He talked of his brother’s love of sport, especially cricket and basketball, and how he would go anywhere any time to organise a basketball game.
“He brought joy to a lot of Victoria,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got to say.”
It would have been a difficult service for a civil celebrant. What could safely be said about a man who had been outed, in a blaze of national publicity, as an adulterer, an internet-sex swinger, and an accused conspirator in a plot to murder his wife? About a media manipulator who had committed suicide on the day of his wife’s funeral, reportedly leaving behind a videotape and autobiography to be sold to the highest bidder?
But Father Justin Woodford, the associate priest at the Catholic Church of Our Lady Help of Christians, in East Brunswick, was not at a loss. He was able to turn to God. He reminded the 120 or so mourners – fewer than came to farewell Maria – that Joe had been photographed for a newspaper holding a crucifix. “Joe also knew crucifixion,” he said. “He knew pain and sorrow . . . We pray that he be embraced by a compassionate God, but also by a compassionate people.”
He said the judgements made by people were often harsher than those made by the courts, and suggested there was only one being in a position to know the truth: “He knew all sorts of people but, in the end, there was only one person who knew Joe inside and out and back to front, and that was his God.”
The service was at noon. Father Woodford would not have heard that, in this case, the Supreme Court had sheeted home a harsh judgement that Joe Korp bore a considerable moral responsibility for what had happened to his wife.
But here, Joe Korp was mourned. His younger sister, Val, whom he had wanted to speak at his funeral, stood to read a poem she had written, much of it strangled by her sobs.
“You’ve been the best big brother,” she told him, and: “We knew you were suffering, but we didn’t know your mind . . . Rest in peace.”
As his parents, his siblings and his three children by two marriages stood beside his coffin at the end of the service, Father Woodford read a letter from Damian. “I will remember . . . how you taught me to play basketball, how you taught me to use the computer . . . I’ll remember you because you are my Dad.”
Throughout the service, women sat with eyes closed and tears stealing down their cheeks. To an outsider, who knew him only through “Mum-in-the-boot” headlines, perhaps the strangest twist in the Korp case is the realisation that Joe Korp was deeply loved.
Maria Korp’s coffin had been wheeled out of the church. Joe Korp was raised on the shoulders of his brothers and friends, and carried high and proud down the aisle. In his wake, more than a dozen black-clad women, led by his mother, Florence, clung to each other.
A woman’s voice drifted over the mourners: He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

First published in The Age.

Myer, how the rules of the retail game have changed

Department stores the world over are struggling to keep up with a shifting shopping culture
IT BEGAN with a young Russian Jew named Simcha Baevski, a migrant boy with a thick moustache and a penetrating gaze who arrived in Australia in 1898 to join relatives running a business in Flinders Lane. Soon afterwards “Simcha” became “Sidney”, and Baevski changed his surname to Myer (from Meir, the middle name of a dearly loved brother who had died).
The new names rolled more easily off Australian tongues, and the change is probably what cemented Myer’s name in the local slang. “More front than Baevski’s” doesn’t have the same alliterative charm as “More front than Myer’s”.
But the store with Bourke Street’s wide frontage was some years away. The business that would grow into the southern hemisphere’s largest department store began with the opening of a small drapery shop in Bendigo.
It was in 1911 that Sidney and his brother Elcon moved to Bourke Street. In 1914, their shop was expanded into an eight-storey building. In the 1930s that building took on the art deco look now so familiar to Melburnians; Sidney Myer began a huge building project to refurbish the front of the store in an attempt to relieve the suffering of mass unemployment. His generosity during the Depression was one of the main reasons Myer became such a big part of Melbourne. He fed thousands of hungry people, including 11,000 at one Christmas dinner at the Exhibition Buildings.
Myer defended his financial “recklessness” over the building project, saying: “If only half the great businesses . . . of this country would do what I am doing, the Depression would be over in a week.”
His vision extended to business as well as philanthropy. It was said that when he introduced his Monday Star Bargains, the traditional washday routine of thousands of women changed. His genius for display revolutionised store design and his ideas were copied in England and America.
After his death in 1934, the store that he founded grew into a chain of 70 retail outlets, and the name he adopted as his own became a household word around the nation. But Myer passed out of the family’s control in 1985, when the public company known as The Myer Emporium Limited was taken over by the Coles supermarket chain after protracted sharemarket wrangling.
It was always going to be an awkward marriage. Coles was a budget operator whose slogan had once been “nothing over 2/6”, while the matronly department store’s strength was that it attracted a wide range of shoppers. It boasted, “Myer is Melbourne”.
But Myer, like department stores the world over, is now struggling. Retail spending in big generalist stores is slowing as consumers turn to small specialist shops, budget chains and warehouse outlets such as DFO. Analysts say Myer has problems: too many stores, stores in regional centres where farming communities have little discretionary spending, and a labour-intensive structure with large overheads.
Myer stores have had several makeovers in an attempt to maintain ground. At one point, following an American trend, merchandise was packed high and densely and staff were cut. (Shoppers loathed it.) Merchandise was consequently distributed more airily and staff levels increased but to little avail. The flagship Bourke Street store – a landmark in many Victorians’ childhoods because of its Christmas windows, a tradition begun in 1956 – is criticised as being simply too big for today’s shoppers.
Stephen Ogden Barnes is the program director for the Australian Centre for Retail Studies at Monash University. He sees Myer as a victim of a global trend. “Department stores these days are probably the hardest retail game to be in,” he said. “They have very low profit margins and plenty of things that can go wrong, like having to order a year in advance and being dependent on fashionability. It doesn’t take much to chip into profit margins if things go wrong.”
He said that department stores that did well had gone either up – or down – market. “If you stay in the middle of the road, you’re going to get run over,” he said.
TALE OF TWO RETAILERS
COLES
– George Coles and his brother open their “nothing over a shilling” variety store in Collingwood in 1914, with a staff of six.
– The Coles family open a bigger Collingwood shop promising “nothing over 2/6”.
– Opens its first city store in Bourke Street in 1924.
– Four years later, GJ Coles and Coy – with eight stores and annual turnover of more than 500,000 pounds – floated on stock exchange.
– Expands to Sydney in 1928 with turnover topping 1 million pounds.
– Opens first supermarket, in North Balwyn, in 1960. By 1968, it has 100 New World supermarkets.
– Rapidly expands across Australia, adding specialty liquor, fast food, footwear and fashion stores as well as Kmart in 1980s, with Coles’ net profit topping $100 million for first time in 1984.
MYER
– In 1911, Russian migrant Simcha Baevski, aka Sidney Myer, buys a drapery in Bourke Street Melbourne, after running two stores in Bendigo.
– The company opens the three-storey Store For Men in 1920.
– Sidney Myer, at height of Depression, donates 22,000 pounds to provide work for jobless married men on Yarra Boulevard.
– Flagship Bourke Street store completed in 1935 as it stands today.
– Launches first “Christmas windows” in 1956 with Olympic theme and opens Sidney Myer Music Bowl in 1959.
– Opens first Target store in 1970 and adds other stores quickly, including Country Road fashion chain in 1981.
– Pulls off coup with purchase of NSW’s Grace Bros department stores.
COLES MYER
– In 1985, the two Melbourne-bred retailers merge to create giant corporation boasting $10 billion annual sales, 1518 stores and 139,000 staff.
– The new corporation expands further into nearly all areas of retailing

First published in The Age.

Children, friends mourn Maria Korp’s love

DAMIEN Korp has been an altar boy at the church where his mother’s funeral was held yesterday. He is familiar with ritual and its implements. So, at the end of the Requiem Mass to farewell his mother, the priests handed over a golden censer on a chain to Maria Korp’s 12-year-old son.
The priest had just read out a farewell letter the boy had written to his mother. He loved her soft cuddles, he said, and her cooking, and the way she helped him with his homework. But most of all, he loved the way she had loved him. And he would love her forever.
A small, thin figure in a dark suit, his spiked hair the only concession to his youth, Damien took the vessel with care. Then he gently swung it towards his mother’s coffin, the sweet clouds of incense blessing her abused, long-suffering body and swirling around him like a mist. The enormous spray of cream flowers on her coffin – chrysanthemums and lilies – had already been crowned with his love: a necklace he had made for her himself before she died, each bead chosen with care. The boy returned the censer to the priest and stood back, wiping his tears.
There had also been a letter read out from his stepsister, Maria Korp’s daughter by her first marriage, Laura de Gois, 27. She thanked her mother for making her who she was today, and especially for teaching her how to stand on her own in the world. She also promised to carry her mother in her heart forever. She stood beside Damien as the final prayers were said. She, too, lost a parent as a child; her father died of a heart attack when she was nine.
About 200 mourners, including an aunt of Maria’s who flew out from her birth country of Portugal, attended the service at the Catholic church of Our Lady Help of Christians in East Brunswick, the church Maria Korp attended when she wanted an evening service. The five celebrants included two priests from her local parish of Greenvale, as well as a priest who had attended when “the horrible drama” began.
The gentle service contrasted sharply with the ugliness that had preceded it. In February Maria Korp was found strangled and left for dead in the boot of a car near the Shrine of Remembrance. She then spent nearly six months in hospital in a chronic vegetative state. In a move that renewed the right-to-die debate, the Public Advocate decided that Mrs Korp’s feeding should be stopped. She died nine days later, aged 50.
Maria Korp had been strangled and dumped by Tania Herman, 38, who was having an affair with Maria’s husband, Joe Korp. Herman, who has been sentenced to nine years’ jail, claims that Joe Korp put her up to it. Korp, 47, is on bail for attempted murder, a charge he denies, but one that might soon be upgraded to murder now that Maria Korp has died.
Last weekend he held his own “farewell to Maria” with candles and prayers in their now-empty $1.3 million dream home, watched by relatives and a newspaper journalist and photographer invited to record the occasion. Korp did not attend yesterday but his brother Gust and other family members were present.
This was a funeral notable not so much for what was said as for what was not said. The eulogies did not touch on murder or adultery but spoke of Maria as a cheerful, outgoing woman who always had a kind word for everyone; a woman who faithfully practised her religion and who cared deeply for her children.
One priest touched on her church community’s anger at the way Maria Korp had been portrayed in the media; they had protested to a local newspaper over it. Everyone knew that Maria Korp was a good woman, the priest said.
Another priest said that Maria Korp had always striven for love, even though it cost her dearly.
Leaving the church, her two children stopped beside her coffin. Each released two white doves. Laura de Gois’ face lightened as her first bird fluttered to freedom. Damien’s face did not.

First published in The Age.

Rocking the boat

Encounter – THE AGE SATURDAY INTERVIEW
KAREN KISSANE TALKS TO JENNY WARFE   The co-ordinator of the Blue Wedges coalition against dredging in the bay returned to her childhood home for a quiet life. She got anything but.
JENNY Warfe was born in a small local hospital across the road from Dromana beach. Her mother told her that the nurse who delivered her had sand on her feet because she had just returned from walking there.
Warfe herself spent all the warm months of her childhood on that same beach, playing in the curve of its bay with her brothers and a brood of cousins while the aunties knitted and chatted in deckchairs nearby. That beach was the edge of her world, the landscape of her childhood dreaming.
She left it, as you do, to enter the adult world; she studied, trained, moved interstate and had a string of serious jobs behind large desks surrounded by lots of people. Until she got sick. She doesn’t say how sick, or what her ailment was, other than to clarify that she is not facing a death sentence. But the setback made her stop and think, and what she found herself thinking about was her childhood beach. She decided, she says dryly, that she would rather die in Dromana than behind a desk.
She quit the big job and moved home, hankering for a quiet life. She found the perfect setting for it: a low, wide 1970s bungalow on a ti-treed block set into a hillside, with sweeping views of treetops and her beloved beach (Dromana is about 90 minutes south of the city on the Mornington Peninsula). From her deck she can also see the nearby roof of her childhood home, where her father and one of her brothers still live. But the second half of the equation – the quiet life – has not eventuated.
Warfe is working 80 hours a week, fielding 100 emails a day and managing an incessantly ringing phone from her dining table, which is littered with paperwork and laptops. She is the co-ordinator for Blue Wedges, the umbrella group of strange bedfellows who have united in a desperate attempt to stop the Port of Melbourne dredging millions of tonnes of silt and rock from the bottom of Port Phillip Bay. The State Government says it is an economic necessity, that without it Victoria will lose jobs and become a second-rung international port. Warfe fears it will be an environmental catastrophe.
The group suffered a big setback when it lost a Supreme Court challenge to a smaller trial dredge, which began this week. From the timber decking that runs along the back of her house, Warfe photographed the large pale clouds of sand that stained the blue surface of the water around the dredge.
It is this cloudiness – technically known as “turbid plumes” – that she dreads. Speaking wearily with her head resting on one hand, she launches into yet another explanation of why sand and silt in the water, and coating the plants and sponges on the bay’s bed, would be dangerous.
“The whole food chain of the bay is reliant upon light, and plants producing their own photosynthesis and nutrients, and higher-order organisms feeding off that. There is a nitrogen-cycling process that goes on in the bay because of all the little organisms; they filter the waste in the bay and turn it into nitrogen, which is the main component of the air we breathe. The bay provides this incredible service by this really delicate balance of an ecosystem that depends on how much light is in the water.
“If there isn’t much light in the water, if it’s cloudy (from dredging), you run the risk of the whole thing spinning out of control and tipping into a poisoned state. In areas around the bay you could have algal blooms, or in the worst possible case” – she sighs heavily – “as the (State Government) panel hearing said, the risk of a baywide catastrophic incident has not been sufficiently eliminated. If things went as badly as they possibly could, that whole ecosystem in the bay could tip over. And, however much money you threw at trying to correct that, you wouldn’t be able to bring it back to how it was.”
She argues that the cloudy water that would kill off small plants and organisms would also damage the small fish in the bay upon which three of our main tourist attractions rely: dolphins, sea lions and penguins. For example, if toxic sediments at the mouth of the Yarra are stirred up and kill off the anchovies that spawn there, this might damage the penguin colonies that rely on the anchovies.
“Until I got involved in this campaign, I didn’t realise that 20,000 penguins from Phillip Island rely on Port Phillip Bay. They make a three-day round trip into the bay to feed and then go back to Phillip Island again to feed their chicks. If there’s not enough anchovies there . . .”
A small woman, Warfe wears her thick, honey-tinted hair loose in the unstyled abandon of the ’70s, but she wears her doggedness discreetly, behind the diplomatic front of the experienced bureaucrat. In the job she threw in to return to Melbourne, she had a staff of 100 and a budget of $25 million and the often-fraught task of administering hearing services for the Federal Government (she is an audiologist by profession). It was excellent training for her current gig, she says cheerily – constant interruptions, too much to do, big issues to cope with – but she does rather miss having staff to whom she can outsource problems. And that $25 million budget. Blue Wedges has never had more than a couple of thousand dollars in the bank.
“We’ve got about $1000 in the bank now. And a bill for $1000 for the pamphlets for the last rally. Contrast that with the Port of Melbourne Authority, who have access to taxpayers’ funds to print their glossy brochures and put on their information nights.”
It’s a battle that has been likened to David and Goliath, or more prosaically, as she points out, The Mouse that Roared. Does she think they have a hope?
“Yeah!” she yelps, as if startled by the idea of doubt. “Of course! Because we are right! I just think common sense and reason have to prevail.”
She will not be drawn on the group’s future tactics – perhaps it has yet to decide them – except to say that it is time to become more structured, dividing up and assigning roles such as fund-raising and media management, and that Blue Wedges is still considering whether to appeal against the Supreme Court ruling. But she is wary of pouring too much time and energy down the legal route. “We have to keep the ability to be reactive. I’m not attracted to being locked into the legal system.”
It could be argued that the very fact that the group still exists as a group is a triumph in itself, consisting as it does of people who would normally be at loggerheads, such as deep greens who are opposed to the whole capitalist system and commercial fishermen worried about their livelihoods.
Monash University marine biologist Simon Roberts says Warfe and her brother Len have held the group together because they have not played power games and listen to the different concerns of all parties. He says Warfe “is morally very sound. She’s genuinely altruistic and is there because she feels she has to protect something. She’s not putting herself up for the sake of kudos. She’s not power hungry at all.”
Asked to name her weakness, he nominates the flip side of the same quality: the fact that she is not a charismatic speaker who demands to be the centre of media attention. But, he says, while a pushy personality might have made a bigger blip on the public radar, he or she would not have been able to maintain the fragile unity of the group.
Warfe herself doesn’t see it as fragile and nor does she believe that her personal qualities have held it together. The members’ fear for the bay is a unifying factor that overrides all other differences. Looking back, the only thing she would have changed about the group’s strategies was to “go harder” earlier, “come out with economic arguments sooner than we did, rather than talking about it in isolation as an environmental issue”. She believes that dredging risks destroying local jobs already based in the bay in the fishing and diving industries to increase profits for foreign shipping companies. How can the dredging be necessary, she asks, when the Port itself estimates that its business will quadruple by 2030 either way?
Her chief opponent in the debate, Port of Melbourne chief executive Steve Bradford, says he believes Warfe is misguided and “has not understood our debate”. But, he says, he has found her unfailingly courteous. He says Blue Wedges had more success early on and that some protesters’ actions, such as sailing surfboards dangerously close to the dredge, have been seen by the public as misguided.
Warfe, in her turn, says that the Port has moved into “shutdown mode” to try to deprive the debate of oxygen and accuses it of releasing “sanitised” information. She has been waiting nine months to see the results of toxicity testing from the Yarra, she says.
She is used to the role of thorn in the side; at her previous workplace she was often told she was like a broken record. She was politicised by an English teacher in her teens, who once told her class that they always had the right to question. “From that time on I’ve always felt like having a say, or at least thinking a bit differently . . . I was probably a bit like that in the organisation I worked in. I always liked to pose an alternative view on the executive.”
She looks over with her direct gaze. “There wouldn’t be any change in society if people didn’t challenge things. We’d still be sending kids up bloody chimneys.”
Warfe is adept at side-stepping difficult questions (she received media training as a bureaucrat that included the advice, “Don’t answer the question they ask; answer the question you want to answer”.) So she will not be drawn on what it will be like for her if Blue Wedges fails.
But there is no doubt that this experience has changed her life. After years as a single woman, she has a new partner, Queenscliff diver Len Salter, whom she met at the panel hearings into dredging. He strode up to her one day thrusting his mobile at her and demanding that she speak to the person on the other end of it, who wanted to know something about the issue. He recently moved in with her, and they did this interview like a couple, her talking about the beaches and him describing the bright corals, sponges, fishes and caverns in their depths.
Her beloved bay has thrown up a different kind of happiness for her now.
MILESTONES – JENNY WARFE
BORN
· Boxing Day 1954.
1976
· Completes a Bachelor of Science at La Trobe University.
1977
· Trains as an audiologist at Melbourne University.
1977-1988
· Works in Melbourne as a pediatric audiologist, a manager of hearing centres and a trainer of other audiologists. Moves to Sydney to work with Australian Hearing.
2000
· Retires to Melbourne after a health problem.
2003
· Attends first public meeting of 20 people that would develop into Blue Wedges.
LINKS: www.bluewedges.org
www.channelproject.com

First published in The Age.