Fire in the house!

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Karen Kissane

In her new book, Karen Kissane tells how the Black Saturday fires changed forever not only the lives of those involved, but the way Australians see the bush.

IT WAS never the Sparkes’ plan to have Bron and the kids stay for a fire. A pregnant Bron had evacuated with Lola in 2006, and they were prepared to leg it this time, too. Now, Dominic was two and his big sister, Lola, 4. Bron had packed a few things, just in case. They were keeping an eye on the Kilmore fire via the CFA website but saw no reason to worry yet.
It had started more than 40 kilometres away and seemed to be running directly south, in a line that would bypass them, though Bron was uneasy at the speed it seemed to be travelling. Sometime in the late afternoon they walked halfway down their Kinglake block. It overlooks Strathewen and has views all the way to the city. They wanted to see what was happening with the Kilmore fire but they saw a puff of smoke much closer to home.
“Where is that?” Bron asked Shane. She thought it might be further away, in the little township of Doreen, but it was Strathewen.
Evacuation now seemed out of the question. The Kilmore fire was in the Mount Disappointment forest catchment to the west, which meant they wouldn’t feel safe taking the main road west out of Kinglake. The eastern road out, via St Andrews, was narrow and winding and would be a death trap if anyone should happen to crash and block it. They felt encircled by danger.
The official bushfire advice promoted by the CFA under the policy colloquially known as Stay or Go told them not to get into a car at the last minute, and the spot fire in Strathewen made this the last minute. It was not their choice, but they would have to stay and defend with their children.
Shane began jogging towards the house. Then the situation hit him and he began to run. Inside, he tried to call 000 and his adult son, whose girlfriend lives in Strathewen. He couldn’t get through to either number.
Bron ran back to the house with the children and rang her parents to let them know fire was in the area. “We’re at home. There’s a fire coming. We’ll be OK,” she reassured them. She didn’t tell them she loved them but that was the real reason for her call. She got herself into work overalls, heavy-duty navy cotton, and dressed the children in the protective clothing she had packed months ago in the family’s “fire box”: jeans, long-sleeved tops, leather boots. She had to squeeze Dom’s soft little feet into boots he had outgrown last winter. Protection was more important now.
Bron wasn’t panicked but she was worried. She remembered she had asked Shane to put up a spare piece of cement sheeting on the window of the spare bedroom, which faced west. They were renovating and he’d wanted to use it to fill a gap underneath one of the eaves. He’d been irritated by the way his wife and children had constantly seemed to get in the way of him getting that small job done. Now it was Bron who would be annoyed if it hadn’t been put up over that window. She thought, “If he hasn’t done it, I’ll bloody do it myself.”
He’d done it.
Bron began filling the bath but Shane told her to empty it so the run-off would fill the 44-gallon grey-water tank outside. The bath was half-empty when the electricity died, and he realised they would not be able to refill it. Shane cursed himself for a fool: “I’ve put the water we needed inside, outside. What have I done?” It was a bad moment but there was nothing to be done about it.
Shane knew these were their last few minutes of calm before the storm. Even the wind had dropped. Lola had picked up on the tension and was running around in anxious circles. “I don’t want it to be dark,” she cried out. They took the children to the door briefly and they all looked out at the orange glow in the sky. They could hear a distant rumble.
Shane had listened to the radio obsessively during the 2006 fires. One piece of advice had stuck with him: “Whatever you do, don’t let the fire frighten you. If you are caught in a fire, the noise will be sensational and terrifying and don’t let it get to you.” He warned the children, “It’s going to get louder and louder.”
Until now Bron had been running on formal advice, such as the dot points in safety brochures and the fire education she had received. As she looked at her small children and wondered how to prepare them for what she knew would be a horrifying ordeal, it was not dot points that came to her but a story. She remembered a novel by Bryce Courtenay, Four Fires, in which a young volunteer firefighter turns up at a farmhouse when a fire is approaching to find a frightened mother with her child. He gets them woollen blankets and explains in clear, simple terms what will happen.
Bron drew a breath.
“We’re going to play wet tents in the lounge room,” she told the children. “I’m going to put wet blankets over the top of you. It’s going to be very noisy, very dark and very scary, but you need to stay under the blankets and you’ll be OK. Just do as I say.”
By now Lola was frightened. She had fallen silent. Bron tried to tie wet towels over their heads but they ripped them off. They didn’t like a wet blanket over them either because it was too heavy. In desperation Bron tried Lola’s old cot blanket. It was two metres long and made of soft cream wool edged with satin ribbon. She put a rug under them on the floor and put the wet baby blanket over the three of them, singing nursery rhymes to help make it a game and to keep her voice calm. The distant thunder rolled closer to them. Shane stayed on lookout, pacing back and forth from one window to the other.
It went black; darker than night. There was a roar and bangs: loud, explosive, repetitive bangs, like a 44-gallon drum being dropped and rolled over bumps. Shane looked out the back door and saw trees at the bottom of the block catching fire. The flames were at least as tall as him, and he was nearly 180 centimetres. He figured the wall of 30-metre eucalypts at the bottom of the driveway would explode. Then small bushes close to the house caught alight. He thought, “We’re in the middle of a fire now. This is dead-set bushfire. It’s not going to miss us.” There was a sound as if a bomb had been dropped in the backyard, ker-boom! The house shook as if it had been hit, and the windows glowed orange with flames and glowing firebrands. They could hardly hear each other’s screams over the howl of the hurricane outside.
Shane dashed around the front and saw the garden and the veranda flickering with flames.
He knew he should check what was happening in the pitched roof of their Californian bungalow. He climbed through the manhole to find embers flying in through a slotted air vent and smouldering on the fibreglass insulation.
Again he cursed himself, this time for not having closed the vent.
The fire was still roaring and sparks showered through the gaps of the capping on the corrugated iron roof, as if a dozen angle-grinders were at work. Up in the roof, Shane gagged on thick black smoke heavy with chemical fumes. He got out and closed the manhole, telling himself, “I’ll put that fire out later.”
The frenetic Shane, pumped with adrenalin, darted into the kitchen and saw that flames had come in through gaps left by the renovation. A nylon parachute they had been using as a partition was alight. He tore it down and shouted, “Fire in the house! Fire in the house!”
One kitchen window pane fell out with a crack. As if the sudden change in air pressure was sucking glass out of its frames, every other window followed, the bangs of the initial cracking followed by smashes as the glass hit the floor. Bron had put the children in the centre of the lounge room to keep them as far from the windows as possible but the kitchen opened on to the lounge — they were effectively in the same room as the tongues of flame racing up curtains and licking at the walls trying to get a grip. Within seconds the kitchen was well and truly on fire.
The children couldn’t see the flames because their heads were covered by the blanket. Bron and Shane grabbed them and retreated to their last place of refuge: the spare bedroom with the cement sheeting across the window. As they slammed the door behind them Shane began to panic. He said, “This is not saving the house. There is no CFA going to help us. We’re screwed!”
Terror was like a medicine ball that they passed between them. While one was holding it, the other could function normally.
Now Shane had the medicine ball and Bron was cool and commanding. The room was well stocked with coats. “Get that one and put it at the bottom of the door,” she ordered. “We’ve got to seal it as much as possible.”
He hadn’t yet accepted that they were about to lose everything. He tried to open the door slightly to peek out and assess whether they would be able to escape through the front of the house but Bron, terrified that any crack would let in smoke or flames, screamed, “Don’t open the door!”
Bron lay on the floor with the children, a floor rug underneath them and the baby blanket over their heads. The blanket seemed to filter the air and they breathed more easily under it but Bron was anxious about Dom.
He was hysterical with fear, kicking and clawing and screaming. She feared he would break away from her into the darkness or that he would suffer from smoke inhalation because the screaming meant he was gulping toxic air. The smoke blinded him and the noise deafened him so he couldn’t see or hear his mother. He was lost in the dark, dreadful terror of the small child who had no words for this. She lay on top of him to keep him low. He screamed and writhed beneath her. Lola had moved beyond panic. She sat next to her mother, utterly still and silent. Shane was on all fours nearby.
He knew that the higher he was, the worse the air would be, and that he should stand only when he needed to. He took only shallow breaths and tried desperately to think of options: “How the hell are we going to get out of this?”
He realised this front was not going to pass in 10 minutes. It was still roaring as loudly as ever outside. This bushfire was more ferocious than anything he had been led to expect. It had been only five or six minutes from the time they realised they were in the middle of the fire to finding themselves cowering in the last safe room. A timber door lay between them and the flames devouring the lounge room and kitchen. A cement sheet on the window was the only thing protecting them from the firestorm outside.
On one level Shane felt fine: his body was working, he could stand up, he could breathe. He couldn’t think of what to do because the house was going up but the fire was still raging outside. He didn’t know it then, but he was waiting for a cue.
He needed something to prod him into action.
Bron could feel the floorboards under her legs getting hotter and knew the fire was under the house. Fire was now above them, below them and on all sides. “How can my children be a part of this?” she thought despairingly. “How can we be here? There’s nowhere to go. Beam us out of here!”
Lying there sheltering her children, she gave up. “We’re going to die of smoke inhalation,” she said flatly. For her, it was a simple statement of fact.
For Shane, this was his cue. He had no idea, as he would put it later, that “Bron was past the use-by date”. Her pointing out the brutal truth pierced his passivity, and his mind leapt into action. He realised three things in quick succession: that they had to get out of the house or they would die; that this was the point of no return; and that he needed to find out what they would be faced with outside.
In slow motion, heavily, reluctantly, he felt the window that was covered by the cement sheet: the glass was painfully
hot to the touch. He slowly opened it.
“This is death that we’re facing,” he
thought. “I wonder how much it’s going to hurt?” He said to Bron, “We’ll go outside.”
“Where?” she asked.
He envisaged what lay outside that window. A narrow concrete path led 10 metres to two large galvanised water tanks, one with 19,000 litres of water and the other with 11,300 litres. He decided they would open the valves and flood the path, which was 15 centimetres below the grass line. “We’ll lay down on the concrete path and cover ourselves with the blanket,” he said.
He grabbed the still-screaming Dom and gripped him between his legs as he punched out the cement sheet. Then, with his son in his arms, he vaulted through the window. He realised the half-metre space between the water tanks was a better option. The second he got there, he turned on the tap and soaked the child. Everything around them was alight except the water tanks.
He turned and was aghast to see there was no one behind him. He pushed Dom into mud and ran to the window, yelling, “Where the f— are you?”
“I don’t have Lola!” Bron shouted from inside the house. Even though the window was open, the smoke still left it impenetrably dark in there. She couldn’t touch or see her daughter, and Bron wasn’t going anywhere until she had Lola. She felt around and finally reached the frozen girl. Bron had trouble putting the blanket over her daughter’s head because she was trying to hold Lola with one hand and wrestle with the blanket with her other.
While she was doing that she took in a choking lungful of smoke. Coughing and spluttering, she realised, “If that happens again, I’ll pass out.” She remembered the safety instructions on aeroplanes that warn parents to fix their own oxygen masks first so they can save their children. It was hard, knowing that Lola would be taking in the toxins, but Bron put the blanket over her own head and got to the window with her daughter. A little hand reached out to Shane.
The four of them sheltered between the two tanks in a space just large enough for Bron to crouch with her children held tight against her, still under the baby blanket. On one side of the tanks the house was completely ablaze. On the other side of the tanks, two metres from where they were huddled, two blackwood trees were on fire. A ute on the nearby road had gone up and embers whizzed through the air. Shane stood with his back to the radiant heat of the house and used a hose to pour water over himself and his wife and children.
Tiny coals burned through his overalls and left him with cigarette-like burns on his backside. Bron took water into her mouth and put it into Dom’s mouth like a mother bird with a fragile chick. At one point Shane looked back at their home and said, “Kids, say goodbye to the house.”
They obediently peeked out from under the baby blanket. The roof was on and the frame was standing, so it was still recognisable as the shape of a house but the walls and the interiors had gone. The children took in the ball of flame. “Goodbye,” they said.
They had been there for nearly an hour when Shane saw a patch of blue sky. It reminded him of the moments of heavenly radiance in old Charlton Heston movies. He felt a burst of relief. “Shit, we’ve made it! Unless we do something really stupid or something terrible happens, we’ve made it, we’re out of this.” Shane looked over at the now incinerated ute that had been abandoned on the road and saw his own red van nearby with parking lights on and the keys in the ignition, just as he had left it in case a quick getaway was needed. He went over to it and made another find: his video camera was undamaged on the seat. He talked all the way back to his family as he filmed:
“Well, folks, here we are, I can’t believe what’s happened. Believe it or not, the goddamn Volkswagen’s made it, the Volkswagen’s made it. Here’s our front door . . . here’s our supply shed . . . here’s the only thing that matters . . . We survived!”
He swings the lens around to his wife and children crouching between the big metal tanks. The film shows Bron beaming with relief under the blanket, now grey with smoke and flecked with embers. On her lap is Lola, her face hidden by sodden strands of hair. Way back under the blanket, barely visible, is Dom. His baby-big head hangs forward with shock and exhaustion like a flower that is too heavy for its stalk. The blanket drapes over the three of them like a veil. It is a Black Saturday Madonna and children, covered with ash and framed by corrugated iron.
This is an edited extract from Worst of Days, Inside the Black Saturday Firestorm, by Karen Kissane (Hachette), $35

Earth, wind and fire

Posted on August 7, 2009 by Karen Kissane

THE Black Saturday fires created 120 km/h winds, snapping trees in half. They created their own weather, triggering storm clouds and lightning strikes that started more fires. They fuelled flames that leaped 100 metres into the air and fireballs that barrelled ahead of a front and landed with explosive force in farmers’ paddocks.
And they fed on their own fury and destructiveness. The fiercer they became, the more strength they drew from the heat, wind and energy they had spawned.
The science behind them has been explained by fire behaviour expert Kevin Tolhurst in evidence to the Bushfires Royal Commission and in a report he produced for the inquiry on the physical nature of the fires that day.
Dr Tolhurst is senior lecturer in fire ecology and management at Melbourne University. He says the Black Saturday fires were unique in three ways: the speed of ignition, the intensity of the flames and the way they spread in ”pulses”, with prolific spotting up to 35 kilometres ahead of a front.
The Black Saturday fires were similar to previous Victorian fires in that they were at their worst following the cool change late in the day. The drop in temperature brings relief to baking cities but the associated change in wind direction can mean horror in country areas.
Cool changes ”turn the flank (side) of a long and narrow, cigar-shaped fire, driven by strong northerly winds, into a fire front several kilometres wide”, Dr Tolhurst says. ”Typically, about 80 per cent of the total area burnt occurs after this wind change.”
When five firefighters died at Linton in 1998 it was because a cold front turned a seemingly benign fire with flames less than half a metre high into a blaze with flames 10 metres high, he says.
On Black Saturday much of the bush was dried out from more than a decade of drought and 11 days of temperatures over 30 degrees. This meant it was easier for embers to bring fuel, such as bark or leaves, to kindling temperature of about 300 degrees.
They did not have to smoulder for long periods to dry the fuel because the fuel was already desiccated. Dr Tolhurst says the speed with which embers ignited spot fires was unique to February 7.
Even mountain ash and rainforest areas, usually moist, had been dried out.
”Normally you wouldn’t have a chance of trying to ignite or burn those areas . . . (but they) are the areas where the greatest fuel accumulation occurs so when they do burn, they burn with great intensity.”
A fire burning fiercely interacts with fuel, air, its own spot fires and the energy it produces to create a self-sustaining system. The more it consumes, the more it can consume.
The fires that day also set a record for spotting distance, due to the prevailing winds and the winds and heat the fires created.
The Kilmore fire on Black Saturday developed a smoke plume about 5200 metres from the ground and a huge white pyrocumulus cloud 8500 metres off the ground.
The plume acts like someone sucking on a straw, Dr Tolhurst says. As air rises into the plume, more air is drawn into its base. This vacuuming effect pulls on the thousands of surrounding spot fires, encouraging the burning areas to come together and form a whole, and drives the direction of the fire front. The formation of the pyrocumulus cloud adds further heat to the smoke column and reinforces the updraft of air.
If the atmosphere is unstable, it is easier for a parcel of warm air to rise. Thunderstorms develop in unstable atmospheres because warm moist air rises readily and forms thunderclouds.
Late on Black Saturday, pyrocumulus clouds developed into a fire-induced thunderstorm that produced lightning strikes and small fires in Melbourne’s water catchment forests, including the Upper Yarra and Britannia Creek catchments.
Bushfires create their own winds when air is whipped into the convection column at ground level.
”In the 2003 fires in Canberra, we saw the fire tornado that was a result of that convective effect,” Dr Tolhurst says. ”In the fires here on February 7 we saw trees snapped off – down at the Bunyip Ridge fire, for example, where the winds would have had to have been in the vicinity of 120 km/h or more.”
Fire whirls, balls, flares and willy-willies of flame are moving air filled with combustible gases, ”and the quickest way for these to rise is to actually spin in the same way as a tornado or willy-willy would rise by spinning. When it has got combustible gases in it, we get a fire whirl.”
A lot of people on Black Saturday saw ”fair dinkum fire flares or fire balls”, he says.
”The fuels were so dry and the temperatures were so high, the rate at which the volatile gases were given off was much quicker than normal, if you like, and so the likelihood of getting black smoke and these parcels of unburnt volatiles moving through the air is much greater.”
Those parcels of gases need to mix with air to ignite and often travel long distances through the fire zone before igniting when they hit fresh air at the edge of it. ”You only need to go down to Southbank to see the gas flares in front of the casino there. It is the same phenomenon. We see it separated from the source, and it won’t last, but it is there.”
Many people have described the noise of the fires that day as being like the rumble of dozens of freight trains or the roar of hundreds of jet engines.
That noise is not heard until the front is upon you, says Dr Tolhurst. Video of Marysville just before the fire showed it still and quiet, with hardly a flutter of leaves in the trees, because prevailing winds and the winds of the bushfire cancelled each other out. ”Often as the fire is approaching things will go calm,” he says.
Many things make up the roar of the fire front: ”One is just the strong winds associated with the fire, with updraughts and so on, so that you get the thrashing of leaves and twigs and branches and other material. You don’t even need much wind. The fire actually bursts the cells of the plants . . . the crackling of the cells as they explode with the heat from the fire is quite deafening.”
The Black Saturday fires burnt out 300,000 hectares and produced flames that leaped 100 metres in the air and had temperatures of up to 1200 degrees . ”The energy of the fires was equivalent to more than 1500 atomic bombs the size of the one used at Hiroshima . . . but bushfires release their energy in a ‘storm’, not a ‘blast’,” he says.
”The total amount of heat released from the fires on Black Saturday would have been sufficient to provide the total energy needs for all Victorian domestic and industrial use for a year. This energy was released in just a few hours.”
Dr Tolhurst told the commission the fires that day showed up holes in scientific knowledge and, therefore, in the advice given to the community.
Video around one fire observation tower showed severe flames for an hour and strong radiant heat for five hours in total. Dr Tolhurst says this phenomenon of ”areas of fire” that burn for long periods has not been studied adequately and is not reflected in fire advice that tells people they can shelter briefly in houses while a fire front passes quickly over.
Areas of massive spot fires that can burn for hours, rather than a passing front, are not captured well in scientific models or in training, he says.
”If a fire is only travelling at a maximum of five or 12 km/h per hour, why do so many kangaroos get killed, because they can travel much quicker than five or 10 kilometres an hour? It’s because they basically get surrounded by fire; they get engulfed in an area of fire. So we need to actually change our conceptual framework and follow that up with research that fits that pattern.”
THE RED STORM THE THREE STAGES OF FIRE
1 Directly under the smoke plume and driven by a northerly wind: This is the fastest and most intense phase. The fire burns out relatively quickly but could still last for an hour. This kind of blaze destroyed Humevale and Strathewen.
2 To the left (or east) of the left-hand flank: This kind of fire will affect an area for a long period of time. The area could be struck by firebrands coming from high up in the air and travelling long distances. Running fires could go on for two hours or more but the process is more gradual, and its intermittent nature may leave people confused or disoriented. This kind of fire attacked Kinglake and Pheasant Creek.
3 After the wind change: The long flank (side) of the fire turns and becomes the front. There is a massive release of embers and spotting is prolific.
Areas that were previously in clear air will fill with smoke with little warning. Spotting may occur five kilometres ahead of a front that is now 20 kilometres long. The danger of getting caught, surrounded by fire, is very high. This happened in Marysville, Buxton and Flowerdale.
SOURCE: DR KEVIN TOLHURST, MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY
EFFECTS OF SMOKE INHALATION
A million microscopic particles can enter your body in a single breath. The tinier the particles, the greater the threat they pose. A human hair is 70 microns wide.
15 MICRONS AND LARGER Half of particulates inhaled lodge in the mouth, nose and throat.
Possible effects Dryness, irritation, inflammation, chronic runny nose, nasal and throat cancers.
5-15 MICRONS Particles are deposited in trachea, pharynx and air passages in lungs.
Possible effects Breathing difficulties, cough, aggravation of existing heart and lung disease, influenza, bronchitis, lesions and lung cancer.
5 MICRONS AND LESS Tiniest particles penetrate the alveoli where lungs perform gas exchange. Some are removed by cells called macrophages; many will remain permanently.
Possible effects Pneumonia, emphysema, reduced blood and oxygen flow, loss of macrophages and alveoli.
COUNTDOWN TO A CATASTROPHE
THE MURRINDINDI FIRE/ FEBRUARY 7 2009
2.57pm DSE spotter Colin Hind at Mt Despair tower sees start of fire at Murrindindi mill. Phones regional district officer at Broadford DSE.
3.06pm Operations manager and crews arrive about 3.30pm.
3.30pm Mt Gordon spotter Andy Willans tries to call Marysville CFA captain Glen Fiske to warn him town under threat. Cannot get through.
Calls local Pauline Harrow instead.
3.45pm Alert message issued that fire burning in Murrindindi area and moving S/E direction.
4.30pm Andy Willans reports spotting in Narbethong.
4.45pm First urgent threat message for Narbethong issued by DSE (crossposted on CFA website 10 minutes later.
4.47pmWarning announced on ABC.
5pm DSE air observer flies over blaze and says there is fire “all around Narbethong”.
5.27pm Urgent threat message issued for Marysville. “The communities of Narbethong, Marysville and Buxton can expect to come under direct attack from this fire. Healesville residents are advised to remain on high alert.”
5.34pm ABC broadcasts threat message for Marysville.
5.45pm – 6pm Map predicting fire would hit Marysville produced in the IECC.
6.20pm Spot fire in Marysville (before main fire).
6.30pm South-westerly wind change hits, Narbethong and Marysville spot fires merge.
7pm DSE office on fire (partially destroyed).
Fire contained by 6pm, March 5 2009
KILMORE EAST FIRE/FEBRUARY 7 2009
11.49am Kilmore East fire reported to CFA.
12.33pm Infrared “linescan” of fire area taken by aircraft.
12.40pm Awareness warning for Wandong and Clonbinane.
2.25pm Alert message for Wandong.
2.40pm Urgent threat message for Wandong.
3.05pm Urgent threat messsage for Hidden Valley 3.18pm First time a threat to Kinglake is mentioned on radio. “Kay” from Kinglake calls 774 ABC and reports smoke in the sky, believing it is from a fire at Kilmore. “If I didn’t know about those fires I’d say we’re about to be hit by a wall of flames.”
3.53pm Urgent threat messages issued for Whittlesea, Hidden Valley, Heathcote Junction and Upper Plenty.
3.30pm Fire spotting into Pheasant Creek and Strathewen.
4pm-5pm Spotting starts in St Andrews.
4.01pm 774 ABC broadcasts urgent threat message for Whittlesea and Hidden Valley.
4.10pm Kilmore ICC drafts an urgent threat message warning for Clonbinane, Mt Disappointment, Kinglake, Heathcote Junction, Upper Plenty, Humevale, Reedy Creek, Strath Creek.
4.24pm Seymour RECC asked to distribute the Kilmore message through its fax due to problems with communications.
4.24pm 774 ABC radio reports fire is south of Kinglake escarpment.
4.35pm Alex Caughey at Seymour RECC sends out the Kilmore urgent threat message to IECC and others (message inexplicably goes missing, never appears online).
4.35pm Urgent threat message issued by CFA for areas including Whittlesea, Humevale, Arthurs Creek, Nutfield, Eden Park and Doreen.
4.43pm CFA spokesman mentions Kinglake is under threat in an ABC radio interview. First official threat warning on ABC about Kinglake.
5.20pm Kilmore incident controller Stuart Kreltszheim asks for urgent threat message stating communities from Kinglake to Flowerdale will be directly affected to be issued (Kinglake West, Pheasant Creek, Wandong, Wallan, Humevale, Kinglake, Glenburn, Flowerdale). Strathewen never mentioned.
5.35pm Map predicting fire spread produced at IECC based on 12.33pm linescan. Predicts that by 9pm fire could hit Kinglake, Pheasant Creek, St Andrews and Smith Gully to Diamond Creek.
5.40pm Kinglake-Flowerdale urgent threat message sent.
5.50pm Kinglake-Flowerdale message “reviewed” 5.55pm Urgent threat message for Kinglake and Flowerdale appears on CFA website. First time Kinglake mentioned online.
6pm – 6.30pm Fire hits Kinglake 7.44pm CFA chief officer Russell Rees interviewed on 774 ABC radio.
Says fire is “putting enormous pressure on areas like Kinglake West and Kinglake”.First published in The Age.

Hearth of darkness

Posted on November 29, 2006 by Karen Kissane

The killing of Julie Ramage put family violence on the public radar. Two years after her husband was sentenced to 11 years’ jail, Karen Kissane asks whether anything has changed.
SHE looks to be a strong young woman, with a confident walk.
But as she sits in Melbourne’s Magistrates Court she leans her face into her hand, her shoulders bent, closed in on herself.
When it comes time for her to give evidence, her voice is steady and deep, but in the silences while the magistrate considers, she draws shaky breaths.
Her former partner has threatened and assaulted her many times, she says, including once trying to strangle her.”
He has told me he’s going to get me, he’s going to kill me. I am watching my back all the time.”
She says pleadingly, “I can’t live like that!” Her former partner already had many breaches of intervention orders to his credit, so the magistrate does not hesitate to extend her order. Out of the witness box and back in her seat, the young woman weeps with relief as it is written out. Asked if she has any questions, she says: “So the next time I find cigarette butts on my balcony, I should ring the police instead of cleaning them up?” Magistrate Anne Goldsbrough answers: “Family violence is about power and control and making people feel frightened.”
She suggests the young woman get legal advice about applying for victim compensation, perhaps to pay for the locks on her home to be changed, or for counselling. She arranges for her to talk to a support worker about a safety plan, and suggests she contact her local police station’s family violence liaison officer.
As the supervising magistrate for family violence and family law for Victoria’s magistrates court system, Goldsbrough provides one-stop shopping for troubled families.
She tries to tread lightly among the powerful emotions and painful experiences that parade through her courtroom daily. Usually she does not read aloud the accusations written on the court forms in front of her. “There can be allegations of rapes, of a husband bashing his wife’s head against the fridge in front of the children, knives drawn, doors broken down.
That doesn’t need to be read out, once adopted in evidence.
This process is hard enough for people as it is.”
The issue that used to be swept under the carpet has hit the headlines of late, with claims of family violence now whizzing around the celebrity circuit.
Heather Mills, the estranged wife of Paul McCartney, says that he beat her and once stabbed her with a broken glass. Closer to home, Michelle Downes, a former wife of late racing-car driver Peter Brock, recently claimed that their marriage was marked by frequent beatings – and that they began on their honeymoon.
And next week it will be the second anniversary of the sentencing of Jamie Ramage, the Balwyn businessman who strangled his wife Julie on the familyroom floor. The case put family violence on the public radar in a new way, as a phenomenon that is not confined to an underclass but that also plays out behind neo-georgian facades in leafy suburbs.
Has anything changed since then?
Public awareness is higher; the United Nations organisation Unifem expects to sell up to 400,000 white ribbons for this year’s Men Say No to Violence Against Women campaign. The campaign began on Saturday with White Ribbon Day and will run for 16 days, finishing on December 10.
But, at first glance, police figures suggest the problem in Victoria is worse. Last year the number of assaults reported in homes was 11,259, a 29 per cent rise on the year before.
(The overall number of family violence reports was 29,162, an increase of 5 per cent). There was also a 72 per cent rise in intervention orders sought by police over family incidents (to 4523). Family violence incidents in which police laid charges rose 73 per cent (to 5185).
The Government and the Victorian Community Council Against Violence say the surge is not due to an explosion of violence in families but to a code of practice for police that was introduced in 2004. It is based on two principles: that offenders must be held accountable, and family members kept safe.
This has given more victims the confidence to complain, and given police the ability to intervene more effectively, says Candy Broad, who was last year appointed by Premier Steve Bracks to coordinate a whole of government approach to family violence.
She says there were political risks attached to beefing up the response: “It’s a doubleedged sword. Once you put the spotlight on it, reporting goes up, and then you’re asked, ‘So what are you doing about it?’ But it is important to put those increased reports into the context of a very large level of under-reporting. It’s estimated that only about 20 per cent is reported.”
The new code allows police to apply for an intervention order on a victim’s behalf, and police now initiate 50 per cent of intervention orders statewide.
Broad says: “This is in recognition of the fact that the women are frequently conflicted.
They just want the violence to stop and for the family to stay together.”
Police also have new powers to remove an offender from the family home and hold him in custody while they seek an intervention order. Women’s advocates had long criticised the injustice of a system that left some women and children no choice but to leave the home while the offender remained.
Women who were surveyed consistently said that they did not want to have to go to refuges with their children. So the Government’s commitment last year to an extra $35.1 million across several departments also included money for basic emergency accommodation for men forced to leave the family home.
Other measures include the trial of family-violence magistrates courts in Heidelberg and Ballarat – which can order men to attend counselling – and special family violence lists at Melbourne, Sunshine/ Werribee and Frankston courts.
A “common assessment tool” has been developed; a standard questionnaire that helps people such as police, doctors and teachers to make a call on whether individuals in a family are at risk.
There are still problems. At a recent luncheon organised to raise awareness of family violence, Julie Ramage’s family lawyer, Caroline Counsel, told Police Commissioner Christine Nixon that there are still failings in the force. Nixon acknowledged that change takes time.
After the luncheon, Counsel said she had a client whose former partner breached an intervention order to stay 100 metres away from her, coming “so close that there was not even a centimetre between his fist and her eye. He gave her a black eye.”
When the woman went to police, still wearing her bruises, she was discouraged from pursuing her complaint.
Counsel says: “They said to her, ‘Do you realise this will tie up your life for three months, and your life will not be your own?
You don’t really want to do it. He won’t do it again.’ And my client said to me, ‘Well, why did I bother with the intervention order?’” Others point to gaps in after-hours help and in longterm psychological support for women and children who have been traumatised. Researcher Debbie Kirkwood wrote a recent report called “Mind the Gap” that found that too often women trying to flee have nowhere to go because incidents are most likely to happen at night or on weekends, when normal refuges are not open to newcomers.
Sister Angela Reed is the coordinator of Mercy Care, one of only two after-hours emergency refuges in Melbourne. It runs on donations and volunteers.”
Women who come to us, less than 2 per cent return home,” she says. “Women who go to motels, 50 per cent return home.
That in itself is an argument that (putting women in motels after hours) is not an adequate response.”
Broad says that a crisis line is available to give advice to victims 24 hours, seven days.
Magistrate Goldsbrough often finds that both the woman and the man can be confused about what constitutes crossing the line. “Some defendants still assert that it’s a ‘family or private matter’ when brought to the court. There are women who don’t consider that threatening to kill the family pets if she leaves, or destroying property each time she tries to separate, can be considered family violence. There are mothers whose faces are pushed into cars at children’s contact time, who are spat on, threatened, and called highly offensive names in front of the children. And he will say, ‘But I didn’t touch the children!’ You explain to him that violence in front of the children is violence to them.”
In 2003-04, police recorded 25,577 children as “present” at family violence incidents in Victoria. In 1525 cases, it was the child who was the direct target.”
We now understand that if family violence occurs in the presence or the hearing of a child, it actually changes the way the child sees its safety,” Goldsbrough tells a father who has just been ordered not to be aggressive when visiting the home of his former wife and child. She suggests that he contact the Men’s Referral Service to help change his behaviour: “You can feel angry, but you can’t act angry,” she tells him. “Will you phone?” He shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
Karen Kissane is the author of Silent Death: The Killing of Julie Ramage.
LINKS
· www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/cas
· www.unifem.org.au

First published in The Age.

TRUE BLUE

Posted on November 8, 2006 by Karen Kissane

FOCUS – Election 2006: A TALE OF TWO SEATS
In the final part of a series profiling the safest conservative and Labor seats, Karen Kissane visits the blue-collar heartland of Melbourne’s north – the ALP stronghold of Thomastown.
TONY FIERA is a working man, with a working-man’s derision for politicians with soft hands. They do not understand the realities of a life for men like him and his father-in-law, who spent his working life pouring concrete.
“John Howard has been telling people, ‘You should work longer years, after 65.’ Do you see any people working concrete after 65? They can’t. Mostly their knees and back go; after 55, they’re gone. If you are a person like John Howard, you don’t have to retire. But ask him how many times he’s put petrol in his own car in the last few years.”
Says Tony’s wife, Carmel, equally scornful: “Or dug holes!”
They look at each other and laugh, remembering. Tony says, “We saw him on TV the other day, trying to plant something with a shovel. He could not even scratch the surface. He had no idea.”
The Fieras are an Italian-Australian family who live in a yellow brick-veneer house in Fawkner. Tony, who has a reserved manner and an analytical mind, was born in Sicily and came here in 1984; the exuberant, hospitable Carmel was born in Melbourne of Italian migrants. They have three teenage children, Matthew, Maree and Laura, with whom there is a lot of boisterous banter. They also have a loyalty to Labor that is based more on their world view than on their satisfaction with the party’s performance at either state or federal level.
It is not a loyalty that has been entirely inherited by their children. Their son Matthew, 18, likes to throw mischievous grenades into the conversation at regular intervals but he is not joking when he says that at the next federal election, “I’m going to vote for good old Johnny. Howard’s doing all right at maintaining the country. We’re not living in a country that’s falling apart.”
Matthew’s parents take this news with equanimity. They believe the kids should be allowed to form their own views. Laura, 13, says she has no interest in politics yet but Maree, 16, shares a bit of her mother’s cynicism, at least about the federal leaders: “John Howard is not doing good, like in the Iraq war, and Beazley – it seems like he’s just really desperate to be prime minister. So they both don’t seem good; I really wouldn’t vote for either of them.”
The Fiera family’s mix of political attitudes illustrates many of the phenomena political scientists describe in research about why Australians vote the way they do: the loosening of ties to parties, the passive benefit to an incumbent leader, cynicism about the role of government and politicians, and the primacy of self-interest over altruism.
The Fieras are a typical family in the state seat of Thomastown, the most strongly pro-Labor electorate in Victoria. It contains the northern suburbs of Fawkner and Reservoir and parts of Epping, Lalor and Thomastown. It is Victoria’s safest seat, needing a swing of 31.75 per cent to fall to the Liberals.
Thomastown is the home of the migrant success story, despite its higher-than-average unemployment and lower-than-average income levels. According to Batchelor, 49 per cent of his constituents were born overseas, with Italians, Macedonians and Greeks making up the biggest ethnic groups. They are mostly working people – “they are production workers or transport workers, typically”, says Batchelor. But the seat has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the state, with more than 80 per cent of adults either owning their own home or paying it off.
“They have worked very hard, often in low-paid jobs – labouring jobs, not high-tech jobs – but nevertheless they have placed very great importance on personal security and having a home,” Batchelor says.
Tony Fiera, 52, has certainly worked hard, at first in factory jobs and now in the warehouse and at the front counter of a company that imports Italian machinery for making wine and traditional food such as salami. In his free time, he brews his own beer and grows his own tomatoes in his backyard. Tony came from a soft-left family in Italy and has always voted Labor in Australia but has no idea whether most of his friends and colleagues share his views.
“You cannot tell, here,” he shrugs. “It’s not like in Europe. In Europe, politics is a topic in everyday life. Everybody every day is talking about it. Here, you only hear about politicians and politics when it’s time to vote, the time when you see them shaking hands and kissing babies.”
Carmel’s parents were Labor voters but she takes little interest in politics because she is cynical about it: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for. It’s still the same. Nothing much is going to change.” When she has to pay attention, when she is heading for a voting booth, “I ask Tony, ‘Who are we voting for today, love?’ … Tony’s got more patience for it. I haven’t. It’s all confusing.”
Tony disagrees: “It’s not confusing. If you know what’s happening then it’s easy.”
Carmel protests: “I still don’t know who to believe – ‘Is it true, or is it not?’ ” This does strike a chord with her husband. “The first thing you learn as a politician is to lie. (Both sides) don’t tell you the truth. They cover up for each other and they give jobs to their friends and they try to make it easier for themselves … (Look at) the wheat scandal.”
Such perceptions could be one reason for the widespread lack of interest in politics reported by many researchers. “An awful lot of people have tuned out of politics,” says John Armitage of Auspoll.
Social researcher Hugh Mackay agrees. “This is the era of political disengagement. I have noticed over the last five years an incredible reluctance to talk about politics. I think it’s because people are preoccupied with too much change, too much uncertainty, so we insulate ourselves and focus on renovations and the kids’ schooling.”
Along with this disengagement has come a softening of Australians’ party loyalties. Workers such as the Fieras used to be “rusted-on” Labor voters; now, particularly in growth-corridor electorates, it is not uncommon for people to vote Labor at the state level and Liberal at the federal level. “There is a 15 per cent gap in the support for Bracks compared to Howard in some Victorian seats,” Armitage says.
Matthew Fiera fits this category. He is growing into an “aspirational” voter; he has just bought his first car for $12,000, half of which he paid for out of his own earnings from a part-time job (his parents matched his savings dollar for dollar because they wanted him to learn that he has to work for his goals).
Matthew is doing his year 12 exams. He aims to be a civil engineer and jokes that by 30, he wants to have made his first million and to own a high-rise apartment at Docklands and a car for every day of the week. “Everything comes with hard work,” is his mantra.
Despite his support for Prime Minister John Howard, when he votes for the first time in the state election on November 25, Matthew says he will probably vote for Bracks. “He is doing a sufficient job at the moment and I see no need for a replacement. Besides, there’s nothing in particular that attracts me into voting for Baillieu.”
Matthew’s preference for political stability is also part of a more widespread phenomenon, according to Hugh Mackay, one that benefits an incumbent political leader. “Australian electorates, both federal and state, are notoriously inert,” he says. “They are very reluctant to make changes. Going back 50 years or more, it’s extremely unusual to see a one-term or even a two-term government.”
At the same time, though, in another way Australian voting patterns have become more fluid over the years. Brian Costar, professor of Victorian parliamentary democracy at Swinburne University, says we now have more swinging voters. This is assessed by research in which voters are asked whether their identification with a particular party is not very strong, strong, or very strong.
“The big fall is among people who used to say ‘very strongly’. They’ve fallen from 33 per cent in 1967 to 18 per cent in 1990, which is the latest figures I’ve got,” Costar says. “Whereas people who say that they are ‘not very strongly’ identified has risen from 23 per cent in 1967 to 35 per cent.
“So party identification has weakened over the past 30 years but not as much as in other countries such as the US and Britain and parts of Europe.”
Even Tony Fiera, who has always voted Labor, is feeling jaded about his party. “I think that here in Victoria Labor has become a little bit slack. It just blows with the wind. It does nothing so that it cannot make mistakes … They charge us tax like everybody else, but in return I would like to see social things like roads or schools.”
The Fiera children go to a Catholic secondary school, Penola College, not for religious reasons but because Carmel and Tony did not have faith in the academic standards of the local state high schools. “We should not send our kids to private school,” says Tony irritably. “What’s the reason? The public schools were not good enough.” Agrees Carmel: “They’ve slacked off. And there’s more rules at a private school, and they give them goals and values.”
BUT Tony’s disaffection does not extend to contemplating voting Liberal in the state election. “Baillieu, what has he done? He’s worse than Jeff Kennett. Jeff Kennett had good ideas; if he kept his mouth shut, he would still be premier, but the problem with him was he did not appreciate what he had.”
Tony Fiera did not like many of Kennett’s reforms, though: “He didn’t do any good for us. He took away two days of public holidays, sold the schools, and holiday loading was struck off, and so was civil court claims if you had an accident.”
Carmel is worried about the effect industrial relations changes are having on family life. She and Matthew and Maree all work at Kmart part-time (jokes Tony, “We’re taking over Kmart, starting at the bottom!”). Carmel, 43, likes her job and is chuffed that she has been chosen to run the store’s Christmas gift program for poor children. But she says that when she was young there was much more time for family life: “Now, with this seven-day trade, there’s nothing. I’m working on weekends and so are the kids, so you can’t say, ‘Right, let’s have a family Sunday together’, like the old family lunch or picnic. We have to write it on the fridge, ‘What time are you working?’ ”
They may not put it quite this way, but the Fieras have a strong sense of social justice. It’s as if their traditional Italian attitudes about the importance of family and community are projected onto the broader canvas. Matthew, asked about what worries him most, says without hesitation: “Probably the lack of understanding in the world, the inability to see eye to eye. There’s so much war, so much hatred. If the world keeps deteriorating the way it is now, I can’t even imagine bringing up my kids and trying to explain why (terrorists) take so many lives.”
For Carmel, the most troubling thing she sees on television is Third World poverty. “All those poor countries, these poor kids with flies eating them and no food and no housing and no clothing. Nobody should be in that situation.”
Closer to home, Carmel worries about society’s failure to care for its seniors: “They should have more nursing homes for the elderlies, look after them. They have done so much, sacrificing their lives, working in Australia.”
Tony agrees: “Respect for the oldies comes first of all, but governments don’t take care about you after you finish paying tax. They use you and then throw you away. If you don’t have super or savings, they make you live on about $15,000 a year – if you can. There are all these dirty hospitals where you have to wait six months for an operation. Older people, they need more care.”
So, here’s the big question: given all these concerns, do the Fieras vote for what is good for themselves and their loved ones, or do they vote for the greater good? Is there a place for altruism?
Carmel says with determination, “Family first. It would depend on how it would affect us and our children.”
Young Matthew, like so many teenagers, would like to have his cake and eat it too. “I would be altruistic,” he grins wickedly, “as long as me and my family are part of that group (that would benefit). I would vote for the common good, provided we’re in it.”
THOMASTOWN
SITTING MEMBER Peter Batchelor, (ALP), Transport Minister
SWING REQUIRED 31.75 per cent
KEY FACTS
– $700-$799 median weekly family income (state median $800-$899).
– Highest proportion of people speaking a language other than English at home (65.6 per cent, state average of 20 per cent).
– The seat with the highest proportion of people with no qualifications (68.4 per cent, average 53.7 per cent).
– 10 per cent unemployment (state average 6.8 per cent).
SOURCE: THE VICTORIAN ELECTORAL COMMISSION and 2001 CENSUS DATA.

First published in The Age.

CONSERVATIVE, NATURALLY

Posted on November 7, 2006 by Karen Kissane

Focus
As the major parties scramble over marginal seats and woo undecided voters, most Victorians’ political views are set – they are conservative or Labor. In the first of a twopart series, Karen Kissane profiles the safest conservative seat in the state, Lowan.
THEY were childhood sweethearts, the Easticks.
Christine and Robert went to school together in the little Wimmera town of Nhill. They started dating when they were in year 8 and year 9 respectively. They went their own way for a bit but ended up back together and married when she was 19 and he was 21. It wasn’t unusual back then, not in the country anyway. “A lot of people in this area were the same,” says Chris.
That was 28 years ago, a time when young people did not have to leave town to find a job, or to find a life partner; a time when it was possible to thrive by living pretty much as your parents had done. Until this year that approach has worked well for the Easticks, both from local farming families, who now have four daughters and work 4500 acres (1820 hectares). Farmers talk about distances in kilometres and fuel in litres but they size up their precious land in acres, the way their fathers did.
Some things are best done the traditional way.
Like voting, for instance. Rob Eastick votes National Party and always has.
He sees voting conservatively as part of the natural order for country people. “I don’t know a farmer who votes Labor,” he says. “Here, you’re born with it in your blood.”
Christine says she knows little about politics so she simply votes the way her husband and her father do. “We’ve just always been National Party. I don’t go looking at Labor’s ideas because I probably wouldn’t understand it very well, and I’m happy to vote how farmers like to vote. That’s really all I go by.”
Times are changing. Forty years ago, 23 per cent of Australians said they had no strong identification with any political party. Now, it is looser, with about 35 per cent saying they have no party loyalty. But the vast majority still vote steadily in one direction. Their politics is part of their identity and their way of seeing the world, whether they think of themselves as “political” or not.
In Victoria, there are 26 seats outside the Melbourne area but probably only 13 could truly be called “rural”.
Generally, farmers vote conservatively, although a couple of rural seats – Narracan and Ripon – swung to Labor in the rural backlash election that ousted Jeff Kennett.
The Easticks are, politically speaking, typical of the seat in which they live. Nhill is in Lowan, the largest and the most conservative electoral district in the state. It stretches from the Big Desert to within 10 kilometres of the coast and includes the wheat-growing area of the Wimmera, the wool-growing western district, and the towns of Horsham and Hamilton. Its population is one of the oldest and most Anglo in Victoria; Lowan has almost no residents from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
Nhill has 2000 residents and sits on the Adelaide-Melbourne highway.
Its shire, Hindmarsh, produces 90 per cent of Victoria’s ducks and 10 per cent of the state’s grain and oilseeds.
Labor would need a swing of 17.09 per cent to win Lowan, which has always been staunchly right wing, moving only from Liberal to National in their various incarnations.”
When you walk down the street of a country town, you realise that regional Victoria doesn’t look all that different to how it looked in the 1950s, in terms of faces on the street,” says Brian Costar, professor of Victorian state parliamentary democracy at Swinburne University. “The immediate thing that hits you is the lack of ethnic diversity.
And, therefore, issues that have moved people in the cities don’t always move people in the bush. There has also been a youth exodus from the country, so it is left with a really skewed older age group, and the aged are more politically conservative than the young.”
And finally, he says, there is the fact that social networks in rural areas, despite the distances involved, are tight: “The effect of what’s called in the jargon ‘voter contagion’ – that is, friends and neighbours – is very powerful.”
Locals call Nhill and surrounds “the bush” but there is little greenery. Trees are sparse, planted like straggling sentinels on roadsides or around the rim of paddocks. The land is flat and brown.
Many country towns are dominated by a big church on a hill; in Nhill, the biggest buildings are the fat silver silos that hold the grain. Across the baking heat of the main street wafts the smell of real baking – the toasted muesli that is a mainstay of one of the big local factories, Lowan Whole Foods, which runs three shifts a day. Nhill is keeping afloat despite almost a decade of drought partly because of jobs at Lowan, Luv-A-Duck and other “valueadding” industries in the area.
The Eastick property, a wide white house sitting in the middle of a stand of box and gum trees, is about 10 kilometres from Nhill. Politics is not much of a topic for discussion in the Eastick home, they all agree; it is a very distant hum in the background of their lives.
Rob, a genial man with a dry sense of humour, keeps up; he listens to John Laws and Richard Stubbs on the radio while he is out on his tractor. Christine, who is quieter but whose questions are sharp, has no interest in politics. She worked at a bank before having children but is now busy running the family and the local junior tennis and is treasurer of the district tennis association.
Danielle, 16, has started watching the nightly news because she recently had a work-experience stint at a Melbourne television station but says the issues just kind of wash over her. Breanna, 14, says of politics, “I don’t get them, and I don’t like them. They’re boring.”
The principal of Nhill College, Neville Trotman, says locals generally don’t talk politics much: “I think for country people it’s work and play. You work hard, and then you try and enjoy yourself.”
Christine Eastick has always worked at home, for the sake of the children, but she thinks she might have to get a job outside the farm if things don’t improve soon. This is a time of year where Rob usually takes pleasure in strolling through his wheat crops and letting his hands brush the heads of the laden stalks; when his canola is so high that he has to walk on tip-toe through the fields to be able to see over it.
Not this year. This year he will take nothing to the silo. What little grain he gets will be kept for seed for next year in the hope rain will come then. He has a barley paddock with no heads on the stalks; an oat field that is a sea of dirt; a wheat crop that should be topping the fence but which sits at a stunted 10 centimetres. The canola that should be head-high is barely off the ground.
It has cost him $450,000 to sow these crops – $100 an acre. “It’s an enormous loss,” he says, shaking his head.”
Enormous. We live for next year now.
This year’s gone. What else can we do?
Go to the casino?” He grins. “No. We’ve already gambled our money.”
It’s a joke, of course. The Easticks are careful people, like most farmers. Their property is big by the standards of the area but their comfortable house is modest when compared with, say, the grandiosity of McMansions in suburban Melbourne. In the good years they have done what farmers have done for millenniums: bought more land.
More recently, sizeable crops in 2001 and 2003 allowed them to stash a bit of money into farm management deposits.
Rob says, “It’s about being lean in the good years so you can be comfortable in the bad years. But we won’t be comfortable. I’ve never had a loss like we will have this year.”
Along with thrift, self-reliance is a key value in the bush. Rob Eastick is captain of the local CFA. When locals rolled a car up the road recently, it was he and his team who turned out to rescue them.
It is these beliefs – being careful with resources, taking responsibility and giving back to the community – that underpin Rob’s political views and, therefore, his family’s.”
Labor always seem to have plenty to spend,” he says critically. “They’re not conservative. Farmers are conservative people. They have to be.”
Look what happened in the Cain-Kirner years. They got the state in all sorts of trouble; debt. Kennett came in, yo, bang, ran a profit, got heaps of money in the kitty. And I think Labor is spending Jeff Kennett’s money still ¿ They’ve just found another $800 million they didn’t know they had.” He smiles.”
I don’t know who their accountant is.”
SO THE fact that Nhill boasts a new 32-bed hospital, and a new fire station and police station, and that his daughters’ state school has been dramatically rebuilt and expanded – well, that cuts no ice with Rob Eastick. He cannot imagine ever voting Labor. He concedes that “the Labor Government’s probably been good for the town”, and he likes Steve Bracks, but he thinks a conservative government could be better relied upon to “put a few dollars away”.
Rob Eastick votes for men whom he believes share his experience of life. “(Local Nationals member) Hugh (Delahunty) is an ex-farmer, and Bill McGrath before him was a farmer. Jim McCabe before him was a Liberal politician and a farmer. They understand.”
But he admits that he is not happy with the state Liberal Party. “Ted Baillieu is the new fella on the block, isn’t he? They don’t seem to have ¿” he pauses, searching for the words.
His wife supplies them: “A decent leader.” Rob nods and says, “You need to have a charismatic type. Like Paul Keating. He was just a good bloke on the wrong side. I think for a political party to be very successful they need a great leader, and the opposition here haven’t had one since Jeff Kennett ¿ He could have still been there if he hadn’t been so damn arrogant.”
The Easticks’ two younger daughters listen intently from across the big kitchen table, never interrupting to put their own views or ask a question. Their two older sisters have moved out of home: Lisa, 21, is at university in Warrnambool, and Jenna, 19, has qualified as a personal trainer in Melbourne.
Sixteen-year-old daughter Danielle, asked about her likely preferences, smiles shyly and says she will probably vote the way her parents do. “They know what’s right; you know, what’s best for us.”
The influence of parents’ political views is a stronger factor in how people vote than either income or gender, according to John Armitage of Auspoll.”
US research has shown that in normal times, about two-thirds of people will inherit their political values from their parents,” he says.
This is how it works in families like the Easticks, where both parents share political views. Where parents are divided, it becomes more interesting.”
If the parents are split and they are upfront about it with their kids, the daughter will follow the father and the son will follow the mother,” says Costar.”
No one knows why.”
There is a strong sense of the country- city divide in Nhill. Farmers you chat to almost invariably give you a lecture on how city folk are too extravagant with water. There is also a sense, when talking to the Easticks and other Nhill locals, that country people feel they don’t rate high on government handout lists.
During the week the media are full of new announcements of money for drought relief. Is there a contradiction between the Easticks’ dislike of big-spending governments, and the fact that farmers need buckets of government money to back them up in hard times?
Rob Eastick looks at his wife. “Have you seen any in our bank account?” he asks drily.
Says Christine, “No, but I suppose we haven’t applied for any. There wouldn’t be too many around this area that have had any.”
Rob chuckles. “You have to pass ‘exceptional circumstances’ criteria, although after this drought that will be easier to do. But so far, it’s been hard.
My brother-in-law is up in the Mallee and they’ve had a lot worse ¿ and they couldn’t get it either. It comes down to assets. But you can’t eat assets, you can only borrow against them.”
The biggeset worry on Rob Eastick’s mind is one that he knows no government can help with. He spends a lot of time thinking about succession. His family have worked the area since the 1890s, and now he is the only male Eastick in his generation. He would hate to think his family’s generations of work will end in strangers’ hands.
But local farms are having trouble not just with water but with their young, whom they are losing to the cities.
Rob Eastick has told his daughters that whoever keeps her surname after marriage can have the farm. He has encouraged his youngest, Breanna, to think about whether she would like to take it on. Breanna loves the outdoors and harvested a load of wheat when she was still in primary school. “I like being on the farm,” Breanna agrees.”
But I don’t know yet whether I’ll still like it when I’m older.”
Says Rob, “Nothing would give me more pleasure than for one of these kids to perhaps marry a nice young local fella but even the local boys aren’t stopping.”
Earlier, his wife Chris mentioned that they might sell up completely if all the girls move away. Rob had dived in to say he couldn’t bear that prospect: “I could sell the land I’ve bought, but I don’t think I could sell this piece where we’re sitting now. It’s where I was brought up, where I was born, it’s the original Eastick property.”
Now, it is again Chris who prods him about unwanted change: “If we’re talking a long-term drought, and there’s no money in farming, would you still feel that way then? Would you want your daughter to take it on?” His answer is out almost before she has finished asking: “No.”
LOWAN
SITTING MEMBER Hugh Delanhunty (National Party)
SWING REQUIRED 17.1%
MEDIAN FAMILY INCOME $700-$799
KEY FACTS
– 26.5% employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing (Victorian average is 3.5%).
– Lowest population density in the state, with just 1.5 people per square kilometre.
– 17.2% are aged over 65 (Victorian average is 12.7%).
– Just 2% were born in non-English-speaking countries (Victorian average 16.8%).

First published in The Age.

Finding hope in a healing place

Posted on September 16, 2006 by Karen Kissane

RECOVERY
It has taken many years for Ian Gawler’s holistic approach to helping cancer patients to take hold. But his methods are finding currency among conventional medical practitioners – and helping thousands of people deal with their illness.
PEOPLE are gentle with each other here. A couple married for more than 40 years kiss before even the briefest parting. A husband caresses his wife’s hair as she lies propped on a mattress and pillows on the floor at his feet, too weary to sit up. Her slender arm rests on her rounded belly, which is curved as if it is carrying a baby rather than a tumour.
No one here has to be told that life is fragile, and loved ones precious.
The word cancer comes from the Latin word for crab, that little creature that scuttles so quickly and so unobtrusively across a landscape. The word has also become a metaphor for anything evil that quietly spreads and destroys. Here, in a room of 40 people it has touched, it has many names.
A Kiwi nurse-artist calls her ovarian tumour “Jenny Craig” because of the sudden, dramatic weight loss it has caused. Another woman, a mother of three, found that the real name for her “slight cough” was advanced lung cancer. Helen Emmett, who has two small children, one only a year old, discovered that the name for that odd lump in her groin was stage-three melanoma (skin cancer).
Her doctors never did find the primary site of Emmett’s cancer. “One in 20 people with melanoma don’t have a primary,” she says crisply, with the clinical distance of one who has had to repeat this many times. “Melanoma can be as small as a pin prick, or actually live under the skin. It’s quite scary.”
When doctors talk to her about her condition, she says, “Everything is ‘unfortunately. . .’, ‘unfortunately . . .’, ‘unfortunately’. . .” But Emmett is only 38, and she desperately wants to see her children grow up. So she has moved heaven and earth and family arrangements to get here, to learn how to fight her illness from Ian Gawler, “the fella in a dress” (his own words) who is living proof that it is possible to stop the C-word becoming a sentence.
It is 25 years today since Ian Gawler set up his first cancer support group, which took off after he announced its inception in a story that The Age ran on its front page. In the decades since then, 15,000 people have directly used his cancer services, and more than 75,000 have attended his programs in healthy lifestyles, disease prevention and meditation. He has written four best-selling books, including what patients here call the “cancer Bible”, You Can Conquer Cancer.
Gawler began as a voice in the medical wilderness, arguing that diet and meditation could arrest and even cure cancer at a time when conventional medicine dismissed such therapies as quackery that offered false hope. The years have seen conventional medicine start to adopt some of his strategies: “You go into most of the major hospitals these days and they’re running groups, they’re running meditation, they’re talking more constructively about diet and exercise, and they’re recognising the power of the mind,” he says. “I think GPs have moved a great deal in terms of adopting a more integrated approach towards medicine and a more holistic way of dealing with cancer specifically.
“But I think in oncology it’s been incredibly slow and very disappointing. People diagnosed with cancer are still being told by their cancer specialist that what they eat doesn’t matter, and (cancer specialists are) not addressing lifestyle issues. My view is that these things should be part of the first cancer consultation, like they are with heart disease and diabetes.”
Gawler is tall and lean, his elongation emphasised by the full-length tailored kaftans he has adopted since losing a leg. He has a lined face that looks melancholy in repose but which often breaks into flashing smiles over small ridiculous things that take his fancy. When they are not occupied with his crutches, his graceful hands move expressively as he talks. He is not always easy with small-talk one-to-one but when he is leading a session his words flow effortlessly. He intersperses advice and the findings of medical research with daggy jokes and powerful anecdotes about the healing of former patients that have the impact of parables.
Gawler is therapeutic director of the Yarra Valley Living Centre in Yarra Junction. Also working with his team is his wife, Ruth, a GP with an interest in natural therapies who has a post-graduate qualification that equips her as a counsellor.
Gawler could have found no more serene place to set up shop. His centre nestles in a cleft of land out of sight or sound of any road, with undulating paddocks and kangaroos in front and bushland full of the calls of magpies, kookaburras and bellbirds behind. The most beautiful room, the meditation sanctuary, is an airy hexagonal space with windows that look out into treetops. It has taken on an air of stillness, like a chapel, as if it has absorbed the peacefulness of the people who have calmed their minds in it. In this program, which ended on Thursday, participants at the first meditation of the day often closed their eyes to a misty morning and opened them 40 minutes later to sunlight streaming through the eucalypts. Nature offers its own metaphors for transformation.
Most people here have been told that conventional medicine cannot offer them a cure. The mood in the first couple of days is low; people are reserved, tired, anxious, aching. Belinda Irvin, 35, looks worn and is fretful about her pain; her breast cancer has spread to her bones and she limps along with the aid of crutches. Her mother, Nell Deeth, has a face set in lines of anger and sadness. In the past three years Deeth has buried her husband, and lost her mother and sister to cancer. She would be shaking her fist at the gods if only she had the energy, but that is all taken up with caring for her sick daughter and her daughter’s two active children.
Michael Allis, 68, is one of many here who talks about how frantically busy his life had been before he got sick. His wife called him Action Man because he never stopped. He says: “Cancer got my dad, and it got my brother as well. I thought cancer would never catch me because I was too fast for it.”
Gawler talks in one session about the Type C (cancer-prone) personality. Such people need the liking and approval of others to the point where they have trouble saying no, and trouble accepting the help of others. Their self-esteem is propped up by externals, such as a significant relationship or a successful career, and they can fall into profound hopelessness if they lose one of these things because their sense of self-worth will go with it. “This isn’t the sole cause of cancer, but often a significant event (of this kind) has occurred about 18 months before the cancer is diagnosed,” Gawler says.
Seeing is believing and seeing him is, perhaps, a central part of the Gawler experience for cancer patients. Before the first session, a couple of the patients on this program wondered anxiously between themselves about whether they would meet the legend himself. To the observer, their awe seemed uneasily akin to a desire to touch the hem of his kaftan, as if mere proximity to the master would have its own magic. But Gawler drily resists being enthroned in guru-dom, despite the fact that his life story – and his kaftans – would fit the template perfectly (see box).
In the first session, he says, “In each one of you, the outcome will depend on a whole lot of factors. It will be lovely to get cured of cancer so that you can look forward to dying of something else. If you were coming here hoping to learn the secret of keeping alive forever, there’s a real possibility we will disappoint you on that one.” Preparing for a mindful, peaceful death would also be part of what they would learn: “I think dying well is important too.”
They learn a lot about pragmatics: how to analyse the medical statistics related to prognoses, the importance of the enzymes in vegetable juices, the gentle exercise that can be done even by those with low energy and painful scarring.
Science is now starting to back some of Gawler’s philosophies. New research has found that for a woman with primary breast cancer, exercise for half an hour to an hour a day halves her risk of dying of the disease, and there have been similar findings for bowel and prostate cancer.
Recent findings also back Gawler’s insistence on the importance of vegetables in the diet. “For women diagnosed with primary breast cancer, having a high level of carotenoids in their blood – which is a direct measure of how much vegetable they are eating – reduces their risk of recurrence by 40 per cent,” he says.
Other lifestyle factors are beginning to emerge as significant too. “Lack of sunlight has been implicated in cancer, with up to 30 per cent of all breast cancers diagnosed in Europe now thought to be attributable to this. The link with sunlight is through its effect on vitamin D, which affects the immune system.”
The people here learn how to relax in meditation, and how to use imagery to fight their illness. Gawler believes that it is in deeply relaxed states that healing occurs. He also teaches practical exercises for managing negative emotions such as anger, guilt, shame and fear. Many of the people here find themselves doing painful emotional housekeeping, sometimes about hurts from very long ago.
To those sceptical about the mind-body connection, Gawler points to the placebo effect (under which about one-third of people given a sugar pill and told it is medicine will improve) and the pointing-the-bone effect (under which Aborigines who believe they have been ritually sentenced to death will waste away and die). He teases patients about being positive about eating healthy food, even the green juices that taste like lawn cuttings: “If you say, ‘Oh shit, not another salad!’ you lose the placebo effect.”
Something else happens here, something hard to put into words. Maybe it’s about the openness of people who are facing what really matters; maybe it’s the compassion that pain brings. But by the end of the course, the people who arrived here isolated in their silos of suffering have melded into a group that is peaceful and warm and trusting. The chat is friendly and intimate, the humour frequent, the general feeling one of loving-kindness. It envelopes you.
The previously wilting Belinda Irvin is incandescent, lit up with happiness. Now she is on only one crutch because her pain has been reduced by meditation exercises. She feels she has finally let go of painful feelings about a family member that had been gnawing away at her.
Her mother, Nell Deeth, looks calmer and happier too. She says she had an experience in meditation that startled her, because “I’m a very down-to-earth sort of person.” Deeth saw a river of light that seemed to radiate energy. She was frightened the first time it came; the second time, she realised what to do with it. “I deflected it across to Belinda.”
Belinda says that while she was meditating beside her mother, “I saw a white light coming towards me and a person in it looked at me and grabbed my hand, and energy went through my whole body. And he said, ‘everything’s going to be all right’ and that I was going to be OK. You don’t believe these things until it happens and then it’s ‘shit, it works!’ ”
Her mother nods. “We don’t want to go home. This is a healing place.”
Karen Kissane is a senior reporter.
The Ian Gawler story
IAN Gawler was 24, a decathlon athlete and a veterinarian when he was diagnosed with a savage bone cancer called osteogenic sarcoma in 1974. His right leg was amputated from the hip. Ten months later, he had a bony outcrop of cancer protruding from his chest. He had radiotherapy and chemotherapy but was told he had only a 5 per cent chance of being alive in five years time, and that he probably had only weeks to live.
He began meditating under the guidance of Melbourne psychiatrist Dr Ainslie Meares, who said that by the time Gawler came to him, he was coughing up blood flecked with sand-like particles of bone from his lungs (his cancer created excessive bone tissue). “That means he was very close to death,” Meares told the ABC.
Gawler meditated for up to five hours a day, travelled to faith healers in the Philippines, radically changed his diet and practised positive thinking exercises. In 1978, he was pronounced free of cancer and his remission was reported in the Medical Journal of Australia. There have always been conventional doctors who point to his conventional treatment as the probable reason for his cure, and Gawler believes that it contributed. But he is convinced that the alternative paths were crucial, and that this approach can work for others. Quoting Meares, he says, “A thing only has to be done once to show that it can be done.”

First published in The Age.

Gripping diary captures pivotal moment in Australian history

Posted on September 2, 2006 by Karen Kissane

IT WAS the day after the massacre at the Eureka stockade. The rebellious diggers were shocked and subdued. In his goldfields diary, 19-year-old Samuel Lazarus wrote that they “will bear a great deal before they will risk a repetition” of “the blood-stained lesson” they had been given by government troopers.
But, that night, a lone digger fired once into the troopers’ camp. The soldiers responded with a volley of 50 or 60 musket shots, fired indiscriminately among the miners’ tents.
Wrote young Lazarus the next day, Friday December 5, 1854: “Among the victims of last night’s unpardonable recklessness were a woman and her infant – the same ball which murdered the Mother (for that is the term for it) passed through the child as it lay sleeping in her arms.”
Another young woman “had a miraculous escape. Hearing the reports of musketing and the dread whiz of bullets around her, she ran out of her tent to seek shelter – she had just got outside when a ball whistled immediately before her eyes, passing through both sides of her bonnet.”
Lazarus’ historic story is now for sale. His original hand-written diary, which runs from September 1853 to January 1855 and vividly recounts the events leading up to the stockade and its aftermath, will be auctioned on Tuesday.
Now yellowed with age, the journal was written in a modest stock notebook of the time. It is expected to sell for up to $80,000, said Jonathan Wantrup, of Australian Book Auctions, but the market for historical artefacts was hard to predict: “It might sell for three times that or half that.”
When he wrote it, Lazarus was a young schoolmaster newly arrived from England. He was in Ballarat with a business partner and a tent that could hold 600 people, with which he wanted to set up an auction house on the goldfields.
He was an intelligent, literate man with a wry turn of phrase, a contempt for the Irish and a fine sense of what he thought of as British honour – something he thought had been disgraced by the cowardice of the troopers’ assault on the stockade, in which even unarmed men and those surrendering had been slaughtered.
He did not witness the attack himself but meticulously recorded the tensions leading up to it and what he saw when he walked through the gruesome scene later in the day.
He had witnessed the earlier burning of the Eureka Hotel and the flight of its landlord, Bentley, whom a corrupt magistrate was protecting from being charged with the murder of a well-respected digger named Scobie.
Writes Lazarus: “A short time before the (hotel) was set on fire Bentley sprang on a horse and galloped away without coat or hat . . . with a yell of rage the diggers pursued him . . . he rushed past me in his flight and I think I never saw such a look of terror on a man’s face.”
Sympathetic though he was to the diggers and their burning sense of injustice, Lazarus was still judicious in his assessments. Of a petition demanding the release of diggers charged over the hotel violence, he writes: “No man in his senses can believe for a moment that the Governor will recognise the word ‘demand’ in a petition – it is easy to guess the result.”
Mr Wantrup said it was rare to get such an eyewitness account, particularly in a nomadic community, as mobile populations were notoriously poor record-keepers. “It’s also rare to get participants’ accounts of any event that show such a degree of objectivity and intelligent judgement.”
Weston Bate is a historian who wrote a two-volume history of Ballarat including the book Lucky City, which describes Eureka.
He said Lazarus’ story was valuable because there were only a handful of eyewitness accounts of the aftermath, “and a lot of them are reminiscences (written later) rather than diaries written at the time”.
He believed Eureka itself was important because it marked a crucial turning point in Australia’s sense of its own identity. “Eureka is the beginning of Australia’s understanding that it doesn’t have to behave the way the English gentry would have liked it to behave . . . Eureka was more about injustice and civil liberties than it was about mining licences,” he said.
Samuel Lazarus was also present at the other key historic event of his century: he was foreman of the jury that found Ned Kelly guilty in 1880.
Historians have debated whether the jury foreman was him or another Samuel Lazarus of the day. But Mr Wantrup said family documents showed that Lazarus’ son, Julius Samuel Lazarus, wrote to his son in 1944 confirming that his father was foreman at the Kelly trial.
That son – Samuel’s grandson – was the architect and photographer Hugh Frankland, who had changed his name from Hubert Samuel Lazarus.
The diary’s history is a story in itself. It remained quietly in family hands until 1982. Then it came to the attention of Keith Ridout, a mobile librarian. He was chatting to people in Cann River about what a shame it was that a local family had burnt all the diaries of an elderly relative who had died.
The people he was speaking to showed him their little piece of history, Lazarus’ diary. It had come to them through a relative, but they were not his direct descendants, Mr Ridout said.
“I suggested the State Library should at least know about it, but they didn’t want folks to know they had it. I persuaded them to let me send it down to the State Library and allow it to be photocopied, as long as I didn’t let the library know their name or where it came from.”
In 1996, the diary was sold to a Queensland collector through Christie’s for $38,000. It is now being sold by the collector’s estate.
Jock Murphy, manuscripts librarian at the State Library, said it would be sad if the diary went to an overseas collector, but that outcome might be unlikely because of cultural heritage legislation.
On whether the library might bid for it, he said, “We will just have to see how it works out.”
A gruesome day
SUNDAY DECEMBER 3RD
A large body of soldiers were entering the gully leading to the camp with three dray loads of dead and wounded . . . I guessed at once that the military had made an attack on the Eureka Stockade, but I did not guess that Englishmen in authority had made such a savage and cowardly use of their power.
I entered (the stockade) and a ghastly scene lay before me which it is vain to attempt to describe – My blood crept as I looked upon it. Stretched on the ground in all the horrors of a bloody death lay 18 or 20 lifeless and mutilated bodies – some shot in the face, others literally riddled with wounds – one with a ghastly wound in the temples and one side of his body absolutely roasted by the flames of his tent – Another, the most horrible of these appalling spectacles, with a frightful gaping wound in . . . his head through which the brains protruded, lay with his chest feebly heaving in the last agony of death. One body pierced with 16 or 17 wounds I recognised as that of a poor German whom I have often joked with. Newly-made widows recognising the bloody remains of a slaughtered husband – children screaming and crying around a dead father – surely the man that polluted the early dawn of a Sabbath’s morning with such a deed of blood and suffering must have a stony heart if he does not think with keen remorse on the desolation of many a widowed heart his merciless work has left. But this sanguinary carnage, revolting as it is to the mind, is not half so sickening as the savage wanton barbarity of the troopers. Did not turn their swords on armed men, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men . . . (A) trooper galloped up to Mr Naslam (reporter for one of the papers) and ordered him to join the government force. He . . . gave an excuse (which was strictly true) that he was unwell, when the wretch at once levelled his carbine and shot him in the side. Not content with this wanton barbarity he handcuffed him and left him on the ground weltering in his blood. Another man . . . awoke by the firing, went out of his tent in his shirt and drawers and seeing the savage butchery going on cried out in terror – “for God’s sake don’t kill my wife and children”. He was shot dead.

First published in The Age.

Beware the queen bee

Posted on August 12, 2006 by Karen Kissane

OFFICE POLITICS

KAREN KISSANE

The Devil Wears Prada is the buzz of the film world, but female bosses like the powerful magazine editor it portrays aren’t just celluloid creations.
“The details of your incompetence do not interest me. Tell Simone I’m not going to approve that girl she sent me for the Brazilian layout. I asked for clean, athletic, smiling; she sent me dirty, tired and paunchy. And RSVP yes to Michael Kors’ party, I want the driver to drop me off at 9.30 and pick me up at 9.45 sharp … Also, tell Richard I saw all the pictures that he sent for that feature on the female paratroopers and they’re all so deeply unattractive. Is it impossible to find a lovely, slender, female paratrooper? Am I reaching for the stars here?”
Meryl Streep as magazine editor and fashionista Miranda Priestly in the film The Devil Wears Prada.
REVENGE is meant to be a dish best served cold, but The Devil Wears Prada is hot. It is a chick-flick about a she-devil editor at a top fashion magazine. One day she decides to take a chance and hires “the smart fat girl” as her junior assistant.
The perfectly normally endowed new staffer finds herself in an office of ridiculously thin women (“I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight,” says one) who are forever erupting into cries of “Prada! Armani! Versace!”
Even more ridiculous are the demands of her imperious mistress: “Find me that piece of paper I had in my hand yesterday morning,” or, “I need 15 skirts from Calvin Klein.”
What kind of skirts?
“Please bore someone else with your … questions.”
According to Time reviewer Richard Schickel, “Streep is, predictably, a marvel as Miranda, flapping her wings, nipping at her perpetually frightened flock, hissing her contempt for their frightened ways.”
The film is based on a book of the same title by Lauren Weisberger, a former assistant to US Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who is widely believed to be her model for Miranda Priestly.
In a show of stylish defiance, Wintour attended a preview screening dressed in – mais oui! – Prada. The film is due out in Australia next month and is already an American box-office hit.
The immaculately turned-out Wintour once had a cream pie hurled at her face by animal protesters who were angry that her magazine promoted fur.
The character of Miranda Priestly is a pie in the face for women in leadership positions who have had to battle the stereotype of the powerful woman as dragon lady, bitch and ballbreaker. The film also plays on the idea of the catfight, a phenomenon dear to the hearts of unreconstructed men who like to believe that, deep down, women dislike and back-stab each other.
Real female bosses don’t act like that, surely?
In fact, painful as this might be for the sisterhood to admit, some do. Female lingo has long had a name for it, too: such a woman is a queen bee.
It is true that both water-cooler wisdom – the views you get in a straw poll in an office – and social science research suggest that women managers tend to have a more caring and sharing approach to managing staff than men do.
In organisations where women made up at least 30 per cent of the top three ranks of management, according to a study by Professor Colleen Chesterman at Sydney’s University of Technology, staff said they found their working environments more congenial, collaborative, goal-focused and people-oriented as a result. They also believed women could manage in tough times and were prepared to make hard decisions such as cutting staff and rationalising budgets.
Professor Leonie Still, of the Centre for Women and Business at the University of Western Australia, says male managers tend to take charge (problem-solving, delegating, influencing upward). Female managers take care: supporting, rewarding, mentoring, networking, consulting and team-building.
“He would rather be taking a client or a boss out to lunch,” she says. “He builds relationships outwards, looking for the next promotion. She prefers to look at maintaining relationships within the team …”
But it is difficult in organisations where female leadership has not reached the “critical mass” of 30 per cent.
In stressed, competitive workplaces dominated by men, even the women managers adopt a hard-edged macho style, according to research on high-tech companies by Professor Judy Wajcman at the Australian National University. “Some of the women identified with women, but other women feared being ‘tainted’ by being seen to be interested in women. It’s fear of discrimination. It’s as if they were telling the men, ‘I’m not like them, you can trust me because I’m in a different category,’ ” she says.
Meredith Fuller is a counselling psychologist specialising in career development. In her practice, Fuller sees both the queen and the workers she has stung.
What drives her? “She often has a great sense of entitlement, which can come from having been daddy’s princess. The entitled princess’ strategy is flirtatious and seductive, with a high edge of manipulative anger. She will play the cutesy game. She’s charming and witty but when she’s not turning it on, she’s full of rage. Men want to help her and don’t understand why other women don’t like her. She has an enormous saccharine smile but she will hunt out anyone who’s any good, work them like a dog, hide them away, present their work as her own and get rid of them. It’s search and destroy.”
The second kind of queen bee is desperate to prove that she is better than everyone else, “and that can come from a childhood that left her with poor self-esteem. Rather than feeling entitled, this woman is a bitter and twisted competitor. Her game is usually, ‘I’m going to be a better boy than the boys. I’m going to look fantastic and I don’t care who gets punished in the process.’ It’s all about her, in a very narcissistic way, and she can be very aggressive, intimidating and scary.”
The queen bee sees her problem as the tiresomeness of others in her hive: ” ‘I have got these idiots working for me! They’re all hopeless! They’re all envious of me, passive aggressive towards me, they are all out to get me, they are so resistant!’ She perceives herself as someone who’s a real star, who’s special, and isn’t it tragic that there are so many mediocre people in the world and they all happen to work for her?”
Fuller says that underneath her apparent arrogance, the queen bee is desperately insecure that she is not good enough and that she will be found out. “Some go to the extreme of fearing they will end up a bag lady on the street. They are so afraid they will collapse that they encase themselves in a suit of armour; you know, the ones who’ve got the $10,000 suitcases and the $3000 shoes? They talk about their accoutrements as being their secret weapons, so that they can walk into the awful meeting with bravado: ‘I’m sassy, I’m brilliant, no one’s going to mess with me.’ ”
As actor Lily Tomlin says – the trouble with the rat race is that even if the woman wins, she’s a rat.
But women who aren’t rats won’t stay with women who are. Katherine Milesi, a partner at accounting firm Deloittes, says she has a friend at another company who has just resigned because of a queen bee. “She was interfering with this person’s time outside work, constantly contacting her outside of work hours. She made it very difficult; she was demanding and controlling. This person had very strong feelings about having to take action; she doesn’t have another job to go to.”
Executive recruiter Kathleen Townsend, who helps in the hiring of chief executives, general managers and managing directors, says this sort of behaviour is rare. The importance of people skills is now much more recognised than it used to be: “The Gordon Geckos and other people who were standing on others to get to the top are increasingly less attractive to companies.”
She has occasionally struck “tolerance of appalling behaviour and massive egos”, which was associated either with creative enterprises such as movies or with some big-billing partners in law and accounting firms whose ability to attract revenue was highly valued. But they went through junior staff quickly, and tend to be found out now by the relatively recent practice of the exit interview.
It is only when women become leaders in large numbers that we will learn how much dysfunctional female behaviour is personal to the individual, and how much is a response to the power dynamic of the individual workplace.
In her research, Professor Leonie Still found that when the tables were turned, junior men could behave manipulatively with women bosses: “The man will flirt and flatter and play the submissive male to get what he wants, then he will go around and boast to everybody that he can get anything out of the boss – and there’s always a sexual connotation to it.”
For Professor Judy Wajcman, the question is not so much whether men and women manage differently, but the way in which women are judged more harshly for doing what men do.
“When men are decisive, they are seen as strong, directive managers. When women do exactly the same thing, they are seen as ambitious and hard.”
They are also less easily forgiven for blunders, according to Elizabeth Bryan, president of the NSW branch of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
They tend to be cautious managers because they know there is little margin for failure for them: “If a woman makes a mistake, you get very, very quick judgement – ‘She couldn’t hack it, she couldn’t handle it.’ You just don’t get the same thing with males, they’re just not criticised in the same way,”she says.
There will undoubtedly be chats around the water cooler about The Devil Wears Prada.
Women on the defensive can always quote Meryl Streep on where she found her inspiration for the role of uber-bitch Miranda: “I thought of all the most wilful studio honchos I know, mostly men.”
How to avoid the sting – If your manager is a destructive queen bee …
1: Never be alone with her for important exchanges. She will lie in the form of “not remembering” what you remember about what was decided.
2: Transparency is your weapon because secrecy is hers. If you find yourself shafted by her in a meeting, say sweetly in front of colleagues, “I am really confused that you said that, because I thought we had agreed that this and this was happening.
Can you help me understand what has happened here?”
3: Counter her attempts to undermine by dividing and conquering and working individuals very hard, by talking to colleagues and finding support. Don’t allow yourself to be isolated by self-doubt.
4: Be protective of your privacy. Make sure not to leave your work open, because she will look over your shoulder and her eyes will “vacuum” your desk.
5: Stay calm. Many staffers who must answer to queen bees tolerate illtreatment for months and then explode over something minor. She will turn this into evidence of your emotional instability.
6: Protect yourself with records. Write confirming emails after verbal exchanges and cc others; always print out and keep hard copies of communications.
Source: Meredith Fuller, counselling psychologist in career development.
WHAT WOMEN SAY
LOUISE ADLER CEO, Melbourne University Publishing
LOUISE Adler often quotes American author Nancy Kline in speeches about women and business: ‘Invited into the seats of power, we agree largely to leave behind and devalue our women’s culture. We respond with ‘Thank you, I accept your invitation to enter the boardroom and agree to put all my energies into … lying (and call it diplomacy), into obsession (and call it loyalty), into exploitation (and call it resourcefulness), into conquest (and call it reward), and into control (and call it power). I will not cry or … expect tenderness …’ “I think that’s women’s experience. But I take the view that women can lead differently, that they don’t have to behave in the way men do.”
ELIZABETH BRYAN, NSW branch president of the Australian Institute of Company Directors
“YOU need a critical mass of women to create a woman-friendly environment. In a lot of professions, the graduates are over 50 per cent women. By the time you reach managerial and professional status, about 44 per cent are women. The next stage up is executive management and that drops to 10 per cent women. CEOs are only 2.3 per cent women. It’s fear of female power. Most of the senior women come up through support roles, where they are not seen as a threat. But you probably won’t get a woman running the core business of the company. As soon as you are a line manager, you have real power and are therefore a real threat. Before we get real change we will have to have lots of women, not just the occasional extraordinary one.”
KATHERINE MILESI, partner with accounting and consulting firm Deloitte
“THERE is still some degree of reticence in women about putting themselves up for promotion, particularly from senior manager to director, and from director to partner. Often it’s because they are starting on a family and don’t believe it’s possible to have a family and be a partner at the same time. About 12 months ago, a couple of people had a word in my ear, and they changed my mind about that. I have a part-time partnership; I have every Friday off because of my children. When you are first in management, it’s certainly a learning curve asking people to do things for you. Women will often be a little bit more apologetic – ‘Can you do this as a favour for me?’ rather than ‘This needs to be done and can you do it?’

Health experts weigh in on … OBESITY

Posted on July 22, 2006 by Karen Kissane

DIET DEBATE

KAREN KISSANE

As we get fatter, the push is on to define obesity as a disease rather than a lifestyle choice.
THE patient was very fat, of the kind that doctors call “morbidly obese”; so heavy that her weight was likely to shorten her life. When she came to Dr George Blair-West for treatment, he did not weigh her or put her on a diet. He talked to her about her feelings.
He discovered that her mother had died when she was five, and her father had been a distant man. She felt food gave her the comfort and nurturing she did not have as a child: “Food came to have a very special meaning in her young life.”
Buried even deeper in her mind was another fantasy: that the sooner she died, the sooner she would see her mother again. For this woman, merely being told that obesity was damaging her health had no effect, because part of her did not want to live.
Blair-West, a psychiatrist and author of the book Weight Loss for Food Lovers: Understanding the Psychology and Sabotage of Weight Loss, says: “People have to stop thinking of obesity as a self-discipline problem. It’s a complex psycho-physiological problem more akin to an addiction.”
For Dr Joe Proietto, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at Melbourne University, it is biology that has determined the fat person’s destiny. Psychological problems are a result of his or her obesity, not the cause of it.
“Severe obesity always has a physical cause,” he says firmly. “Moderate obesity is likely to be epigenetic (involving a change in which certain genes are switched on or off). And being mildly overweight is purely environmental.”
It’s a debate that has big implications for the mind, the body and the national health budget. Should obesity be regarded not just as a product of poor lifestyle, but as a disease in its own right?
This week the Federal Government announced a $3 million national nutrition survey in which thousands of Australian schoolchildren will be weighed and measured. Tasmanian Liberal Senator Terry Barnett has also suggested extending Medicare rebates to cover treatment of obesity as a chronic disease.
Traditionally, obesity has been regarded as an unhealthy condition and as a risk factor for other illnesses, but has not been seen as a disease in itself. The push to relabel it has gained great momentum in the world’s fattest country, America, where 65 per cent of adults are now overweight or obese.
In 2002, the US Internal Revenue Service ruled obesity a disease, allowing Americans for the first time to claim obesity-related health expenses such as surgery and weight-loss programs. In 2004, the US Medicare system also accepted that obesity is a disease.
In Australia, there is a push to follow suit. Here, adults got fat first (50-60 per cent are overweight or obese) but children are now following (25 per cent). In the last 10 years, the proportion of overweight children has doubled and the proportion of obese children (6 per cent) has tripled.
Most alarmingly, one in five preschool children – aged only three or four – is now overweight. Some experts have warned that the resulting diabetes, cancer and heart disease could bankrupt the health system.
Many people view an individual’s obesity as the result of a lack of willpower: too much time vegging out on the couch, and too many Bridget Jones moments with a box of Milk Tray.
Health Minister Tony Abbott has previously resisted calls for the Government to introduce bans on junk food advertising, arguing people are fat not because of advertising but because of poor diet and lack of exercise, and that the responsibility for children’s eating behaviour rests with parents.
But the more we find out about fat, the more simplistic that approach seems to be. Studies of identical twins suggest that up to 60 per cent of the predisposition towards obesity is inherited. Other studies have found that Darwin had it wrong; it does not take generations to produce genetic changes.
The way genes are “expressed” – rendered active or inactive – can be permanently affected by environmental factors within a single generation. This process is known as epigenetics. Proietto tells of a Dutch study which found that women starved in the first trimester of pregnancy (due to famine conditions during World War II) were more likely to produce children who would become obese. Another study found that women who ate too much during the first trimester also had fatter children; so did fathers who had started smoking in childhood.
Infection might even play a role: an experiment with chickens found that those infected with a common human virus, AD 36, became fatter even though they were fed exactly the same amount of grain as uninfected chickens who remained lean.
Children are more likely to be obese if they get less than six hours sleep a night, or if they were bottle-fed rather than breast-fed (one theory is that obesity among adults is partly due to the popularity of formula-feeding 50 years ago).
Proietto says rats that are starved in experiments and then given a normal diet become fat because their bodies’ long-term response to deprivation is to overeat.
“That diet early in life triggered something that not just made them obese at the time but then led their bodies to defend that obesity.” This would help explain why people who lose weight usually put it back on again.
It is now being speculated that genes affect not just metabolism but eating behaviour, such as cravings and sensations of fullness. Obese people have a resistance to the chemical leptin, Proietto says, which is created by fat cells, and sends signals to the brain about when to stop eating.
But the medicalisation of obesity has its opponents. Naomi Crafti, a lecturer in psychology at Swinburne University, says we are unnecessarily pathologising fatness.
“We are focusing on obesity rather than on health. Obesity is a risk factor for a number of illnesses, but it doesn’t mean that everyone who is obese will get those illnesses, and many people who are below the obesity level still do poorly because of poor diet with high sugar and fats. Obesity is just a descriptive term; it’s not an illness.”
Crafti says about 25 per cent of people with obesity do have a psychological problem known as binge-eating disorder, which is like bulimia without the purging. They gorge to cope with feelings such as sadness or anxiety. But many obese people have relatively normal diets and stay heavy because their metabolism has changed after years of fad dieting.
Dr Rick Kausman is the AMA’s spokesman on eating and runs the Weight Management and Eating Behaviour Clinic in Melbourne. He also condemns dieting. “I have spent 18 years listening to tens of thousands of people talk about their relationship with food,” he says.
” Almost every single person has said that 50 per cent, sometimes 80 per cent, of their eating is not related to hunger. They eat because they’re happy, sad, tired, bored, just in case they get hungry later, because their parents told them to finish their plate, because they are confusing hunger and thirst.”
Diets have told them to follow rules rather than attend to signals from their bodies, he says: “That paradigm doesn’t work and makes things worse.”
So, obesity is complex, it’s damaging and it causes great unhappiness. But does that make it a disease?
Dr Rob Moodie, the CEO of VicHealth, says: “If you rip apart the word – ‘dis-ease’ – then it probably is. Some do call it a disease. The World Health Organisation says obesity is a complex and incompletely understood condition.”
Obesity’s definitions are a bit shaky, he says: one researcher studied the All Blacks after rugby union’s World Cup and discovered that none of these powerfully built men had a body mass index in the normal range. There is also a question about whether obesity’s health problems are a result of weight or lack of exercise, fruit and vegetables.
There is no doubt that much obesity is lifestyle-related, the response of the human mind and body to what is, historically speaking, unaccustomed ease and plenty. This can be helped or hurt by the man-made environment. Urban design that makes it hard to walk, play or ride bicycles is known as “obesogenic”.
Blair-West points to one study of two towns in which differences in facilities and livability were associated with inhabitants of one place being an average of 30 per cent fatter than those of the other.
One Melbourne University study found that people living in disadvantaged areas weighed, on average, three kilos more than those in rich neighbourhoods. Even those with high incomes weighed more if they lived in disadvantaged areas, and the poor weighed less if they lived in affluent areas. Researchers said this pointed to the importance of neighbourhood characteristics, such as the number of parks and residents’ perceptions of safety.
While this suggests that public policy could help prevent obesity, it does not suggest it should be regarded as an illness. But proponents of the disease theory point to the way other lifestyle-related health problems, such as smoking and alcoholism, were much more effectively treated once approached as addictions rather than weak moral choices.
Boyd Swinburn, professor of population health and researcher into obesity prevention at Deakin University, says the major driver for relabelling obesity a disease is to make consultations claimable under insurance.
“In many ways, the ‘disease’ push is a political response. I think it’s a legitimate one if the end goal is to get improved care and management for people who have obesity.”
Melissa Wake, associate professor of pediatrics at the Royal Children’s Hospital and the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, worked on the study that found that one in five preschoolers was overweight. She says the disease debate is not the central question.
“The distinction between disease and condition is an arbitrary one. It doesn’t get to the point, which is that we need to deal with this.”
LINKS
– www.vichealth.vic.gov.au
– www.weightlossforfoodlovers.com
BINGE-EATING DISORDER
About one-quarter of obese people have binge-eating disorder, which is characterised by:
· Recurrent episodes, at least two days a week, of eating significantly more than normal in a two-hour period
· Eating rapidly
· Eating when not hungry
· Eating alone because embarrassed at how much one eats
· Self-disgust, depression or guilt after eating
SOURCE: SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGYFirst published in The Age.

The person you called is switched off

Posted on May 22, 2006 by Karen Kissane

With mobiles, laptops, BlackBerry, email … we’re available everywhere, 24/7. The costs are solitude, focus and our boundaries. Will we ever do things in person again? Karen Kissane reports.
ONCE upon a time, not so far away, telephone business was conducted at desks; formally, in an office, by people fully dressed at the time. Such an old-fashioned concept. Now, it is possible to be in a toilet cubicle listening to a mobile phone ring in the next stall. Even more remarkably, it is answered by its owner, who then has a dignified conversation with an unsuspecting work contact – despite the indignity of the moment at her end.
Everyone has a story about the intrusiveness of the mobile phone: of the boss who rings while his employee is on a family holiday; of the young woman who embarrasses a bus full of people by her loud argument with a friend; of people on trains who bray into their phones about personal topics ranging from their love lives -“I said to him …” – to the state of their innards – “Yeah no, the doctor reckons …”
For the workaholic, the constant contact offered by a mobile can become an emotional umbilical cord and his relationship with his phone can compete with his real relationships. A Sydney organisational psychologist, Grant Brecht, tells of one couple who came to see him at the wife’s insistence. They had taken a “holiday” together, only to have the husband bring along two mobile phones and spend at least six hours a day talking about work on them. “But my wife is my first priority,” he told Brecht in the first session.
What price this noisy revolution, with its demands for everyone to be available everywhere, 24/7? How do we pay for the convenience of being able to keep tabs on the children while we are at work, and tabs on work while we are with the children? What is happening to solitude, attentiveness and the boundaries between public and private in the age of mobiles and BlackBerries, SMS and email?
One price is a decrease in down time. James Katz, in his book Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, warns perpetual contact means “those who treasure respite may find themselves pressured to replace otherwise excusable isolation with productive tasks. Once … being on board an airplane excused an executive from having to interact with colleagues. No more, for the fax and phone even follow at six miles high.” Worldwide, he says, more people now own a phone than a TV.
The inability to detach from the workplace, whether the pressure comes from the individual or the employer, is a factor in the steady rise of anxiety disorders, Brecht says: “People are burning out with the pressures of work and not being able to get away from it.”
Long work hours are also inefficient. Brecht says English research found people can work at 100 per cent efficiency for only 45 hours a week. The next 10 hours they worked, they fell to 50 per cent efficiency; for any hours after that, 25 per cent efficiency. He says workers who are always available on the mobile and who ring overseas at all hours to check international markets “work hard, but not smart”.
Leisure time is also increasingly important because the pace of work has increased; letters that required action took days to arrive, but emails and text messages demand attention within minutes. “People need time to process the bombardment of communication.”
There is also the question of what electronic communication does to the quality of interactions; does it increase the likelihood of being in touch with everyone, but intimate with no one? A psychologist, Evelyn Field, says: “It’s not a good trend because it doesn’t improve the quality of the friendship or relationship. It just becomes more ‘busyness’. People can be very busy while not doing anything, and people can be communicating electronically and not getting closer; just doing it for the sake of it. It’s almost as if it’s a defence against anxiety.”
She says electronic communication is limited because 90 per cent of human communication is non-verbal. “Body language is 55 per cent, 28 per cent is voice, and only 7 per cent is words.” Shy teenagers who focus largely on communications such as SMS, chat rooms and emails “miss out on what you would feel, hear, smell, sense, pick up in your gut instinct. It’s not good for the development of social skills”.
In workplaces, adults are doing the same thing, Field suggests: “Get off the computer and walk next door and say, ‘Look, I was a bit upset when you said that about my report. What did you mean by it?’ instead of sending some flame email. I think we are losing that ability to confront, or to say, ‘That was really nice, I appreciated it.”‘
Both Field, author of a book called Bully Busting, and Rosalie Pattenden, a senior counsellor with Relationships Australia, have found electronic communications are being enlisted by bullies and obsessives in pursuit of their quarry. Field says teens can sit in their bedrooms and send nasty messages to peers about which their parents know nothing. Pattenden says: “In family violence, when I am working with a couple where he has become obsessed and jealous, she will turn on her phone to find 33 messages from him … It has given people with very poor personal boundaries an opportunity that wasn’t there before to harass people.”
Even for normal families, though, the intrusiveness of the mobile can have negative consequences. The American researcher Noelle Chesley, from the University of Wisconsin, has studied the way technology blurs the boundaries between work and family. Analysing data about 1958 people in a “career couples” study, she concluded there was no evidence of negative consequences of computer use. But “persistent communications use … is significantly linked to increased distress and decreased family satisfaction, as well as increases in negative work-to-family or family-to-work spillover in individuals”, she said. Chesley also found a gender difference in the consequences of mobile phone use: both men and women said it resulted in work spilling into family time in ways that were destructive, but it was only women who reported family spilt over into work in ways they found stressful. She suggested this might not be such a problem for the next generation. “Teenagers expect to be connected 24/7, and tend to be avid and enthusiastic users … The question of ‘blurred boundaries’ may become an irrelevant one for the next generation of workers, spouses and parents because they cannot imagine life any other way.”
Clare Lloyd, a PhD student at Newcastle University, is studying how Australians aged 18 to 35 use their mobile phones. She says the mobile is linked to a sense of agency in the world, their identity and their social power and influence. “I’ve heard people say when they get a text message, ‘Somebody loves me!’ just because someone is thinking of them. A quick emotional response happens that links clearly straight into their sense of identity.”
Is this why teens who can ignore a ringing landline will leap to answer their mobile? There is a greater sense of urgency about a mobile, Lloyd says: “For a start, it’s because it’s your ring tone; the home phone is for a number of people, but because your mobile phone number is not publicly available, you know they are trying to get you.” She agrees “there is a silent time we have less of” now, but adds: “This is not forced upon us; we choose it.”
The mobile phone is likely to become more, rather than less, indispensable. According to Chris Althaus, the chief executive officer of the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association, Australia has 18 million subscribers and the coming generations of phones will have so many features “there will be almost nothing you can do on your computer that you can’t do on your mobile phone”. This will include, for example, scanning your mobile over a meter to pay for parking. As for feeling invaded, “At the end of the day, you can hit the on-off button,” Althaus says.
As a psychologist, Brecht’s advice is to leave your mobile at home when you go on holidays. In the pithy phrasing of the generation Y and its phone junkies, “Yeah, right.”

OR SWITCHED ON … AND LOVING IT
* THE TEENAGERS
NICOLE NOY got her first mobile when she was 12. She asked her parents for it so she could call them if she was invited to a friend’s house after school at the last minute.
“And I asked for it because I wanted to text people,” she says.
Now 15, she sends about 50 short messages a week, many “just comments and stuff about what’s happening with my friends, like what happened today”.
Her friend Claire Garratt, 14, asked for her phone last year when she was becoming more independent about her activities, “like walking home and going to places”. She also uses it to keep in touch with her friends and to take digital snapshots of them. “Pretty much everyone has one.”
Eighty to 85 per cent of teenagers in years 7 to 12 have mobile phones, according to a 2004 study by the Australian Psychological Society. Most of the 258 adolescents interviewed (57 per cent) got their first mobile at 13 or 14 years old. The main reasons for buying a phone, cited by parents and adolescents, were safety and contact with parents.
Most teenagers in the study (79 per cent) reported making few mobile calls per day, with 39 per cent making no calls most days. Text messages were more popular: 27 per cent send one or two a day, 26 per cent three to five a day, 8 per cent between 6 and 10 a day, and 6 per cent sent more than 10 daily. In the frequent-use group, 1 per cent sent more than 20 text messages most days.
The study found mobile phone costs were not a major source of conflict in families, although a third of teens said they often used credit quicker than they were supposed to, and many said they had to spend more money than they would like because their friends expected them to reply to each message.
But they can run into problems, says a spokesman for the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. He says there has been a big increase in complaints by adult phone owners, and by parents of teens, about the cost of “premium SMSs” from companies selling ringtones, horoscopes or other services. The bills can run into hundreds or thousands of dollars.
But Nicole is on a plan with a cap and Claire is on a plan that she has to pay for out of her pocket money, “so if I go over, I have to pay more”.
Does that keep the bill down? “Sort of. I try!”
Karen Kissane

* THE EXECUTIVES
YOU always find him in the toilet at parties – alone, except for his Blackberry.
Graeme Samuel, the head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, tries at first to argue that he does not use his Blackberry when he is out for dinner. There is a guffaw in the background, and the man in the car with him – Ian Smith, of public relations company Gavin Anderson and a fellow Blackberry addict – says: “No, you just go into the bathroom.”
Samuel laughs and confesses it’s true. If he’s out socially and needs to check phone messages or emails or news, he takes off for a private moment with the little machine that is an office in a pocket.
“We all do it. People must wonder if you’ve got a physical problem, to be going to the bathroom every 15 minutes,” he says. Samuel also gets out of bed at 2.30 every morning to check the 60 or so news clippings that will have landed in his Blackberry. His body clock wakes him at that time anyway, he says, so he uses the wakefulness for half an hour to get across the day’s developments, think through responses and email any colleagues who need warning of issues. Then he goes back to bed until 5.30am. “I’ve got myself prepared for the day. I know what’s coming through. If I get an early-morning call from the media, I am well prepared,” he says.
But Samuel does set limits on the torrent of electronic communication. His work mobile number always goes through to a human answering service that pages him with messages. He can then decide whether to respond in person or direct the call to a colleague. “It wouldn’t be possible in the role I have got otherwise. You would get calls day and night.”
Smith also says the Blackberry helps him stay on top of things, but acknowledges the downside of its pleasures.
“The danger is that you become obsessed. I have been accused of that by my better half. There was an infamous moment a couple of months ago, about a quarter past 12, when my wife woke up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said ‘Nothing’, which was not technically true because I was sending an email to someone. It’s sort of like being a naughty schoolboy, having a lolly in class and not wanting anyone to see you.”
First published in The Age.

Karen Kissane

Journalist and Author

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The person you called is switched off