Category Archives: News Reads

It happens even in royal marriages

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LONDON

IT WAS a right royal tantrum. The front door flew open and Prince Philip charged out.
A pair of tennis shoes and a racquet flew after him. An enraged Queen appeared in the doorway, screaming at him to stop running and ordering him back.
As a fascinated Australian film crew watched, cameras rolling, the Queen “dragged” her husband back into the chalet in which they were staying, and the door slammed. The crew had been waiting for the Queen to appear so she could be filmed looking at kangaroos and koalas, according to a new biography of the monarch.
It was March 6, 1954, and the Queen was halfway through an eight-week tour of Australia – part of a six-month world trip after her coronation. The couple was having a weekend break on the shores of the O’Shannassy reservoir in the Yarra Ranges of Victoria.
The crew had been waiting impatiently because the afternoon light was fading.
The second cameraman, Frank Bagnall, instinctively turned on his camera when he saw the front door open and so captured the memorable marital moment.
Today, it would be a world exclusive. Back then, different rules were in play. They were enforced by a curmudgeonly courtier, the royal press secretary Commander Richard Colville. He charged out “angrier than a wounded buffalo”, writes author Robert Hardman.
The senior cameraman Loch Townsend “was not about to enter mortal combat with the man British journalists knew as the Abominable No Man – or, simply, Sunshine”. Townsend exposed the film and handed it over.
The Queen soon reappeared, her serene public persona re-affixed. “I’m sorry for that little interlude,” she told Townsend, “but, as you know, it happens in every marriage. Now, what would you like me to do?”
The book, Our Queen, is being serialised in the Daily Mail in London and is due to be published on October 6. The Queen and Prince Philip start a 10-day visit to Australia on October 19.
It tells of a perfectionistic woman, who as a princess during a 1947 tour of South Africa took to prodding her mother’s Achilles tendon with an umbrella to keep the show running on time.
She has a particular stare for those who breach protocol or otherwise offend, described by one witness as “open eyes, absolutely no expression”.
She has also perfected a subtle way of intervening in political issues. The book says she received many residents’ letters over a plan for authorities to sell 1230 public homes to a private company. She wrote endless letters to the authorities asking polite but pointed questions. The residents were saved when the homes were sold for a knock-down price to a housing association.
But her temper is still sometimes on show to the royal household. She was enraged at being advised to fly the British flag at half mast at Buckingham Palace after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. One senior adviser said: “I have been scarred by the Queen.”
She became “incandescent” during a visit in 1973 by the president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko, and his wife. Mrs Mobutu had smuggled a small dog through customs and was ordering it steak from the palace kitchens. The Queen ordered: “Get that dog out of my house!”
But she also has a dry sense of humour. During one public engagement in Britain, the courtier who was meant to introduce her to a reception line had trouble getting out of his car because he was tangled up with his ceremonial sword. The monarch strode over to the line of waiting people, hand outstretched, and said: “I had better introduce myself. I am the Queen.”

First published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The couple will arrive in Canberra on October 19 and go to Perth for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. They will visit Brisbane on October 24 and Melbourne on October 26.

Sorry still the hardest word for Strauss-Kahn

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WHEN Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared on French television to speak about his sexual encounter with a New York hotel maid, ”sorry” was not what he wanted to say.

The former head of the International Monetary Fund, who has lost both that position and his place as the favourite in next year’s French presidential elections over the scandal, did admit that his part in the encounter was ”a moral failure” he would regret his whole life.

”What happened was not only inappropriate … it was a fault: a fault towards my wife, my children, my friends, but also a fault towards the French people, who placed in me their hope for change.”

But while his scripted words were placatory, his angry, closed face was not. Mr Strauss-Kahn seemed to be talking of a strategic political error rather than expressing personal contrition. For much of his soft-pedal interview on Sunday night – with a TV journalist who is a close friend of his wife’s – Mr Strauss-Kahn seemed to radiate controlled rage. He strongly denied there had been any violence in his exchange with hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo, who had accused him in May of forcing her into oral sex after she arrived to clean his hotel room. New York prosecutors dropped the case after finding Ms Diallo, 32, had lied about her life story.

Mr Strauss-Kahn said there had been no sign of injury on either herself or him. ”[She] lied about everything . . it’s in the prosecutor’s report.”

He said the same thing about French writer Tristane Banon, also 30 years his junior, who has claimed he pounced on her like ”a rutting chimpanzee” when she went to interview him in 2003. Mr Strauss-Kahn, 62, has reportedly admitted that he tried to kiss her but said on Sunday that the assault claims were ”imaginary and slanderous”.

The scandal has reverberated. The US justice system was embarrassed when the case fell over because it had paraded a handcuffed Mr Strauss-Kahn in a walk of shame for TV cameras. For Mr Strauss-Kahn, the scandal means he can ”obviously” no longer be a presidential candidate in 2012, he said. Left-wing daily Liberation published a survey in which more than half of voters hoped that Mr Strauss-Kahn, formerly seen as likely to unseat centre-right President Nicolas Sarkozy, would bow out of the race.

For French Socialists, the scandal has knocked out their best hope. This might boost far-right leader Marine Le Pen and her new-look Front National.

For French society, the scandal has meant a debate over tolerance of the sexual privacy of public figures, and over the question of whether droit du seigneur – the mythic right of a lord to bed women in his fiefdom – lives on in the behaviour of some of its powerful men. For observers of human nature, it has been wry evidence of a related phenomenon: the ageing Lothario’s dogged belief in his own eternal irresistibility.

First published in The Age.

Red rose says it all as a nation mourns

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NORWAY MASSACRE
OSLO
KHALID Hussain is living proof — if anyone should need it — that mass killer Anders Breivik is wrong about what it is to be Norwegian.
Mr Hussain joined the thousands of people who streamed quietly into the centre of Oslo to put flowers and candles outside its 17th century cathedral.
They stood mostly in silence, rain streaming from coats and umbrellas, laying bouquets on the cobblestones in a growing circle of remembrance.
Mr Hussain had come to offer a red rose; an artificial one because, as he says so practically, all the others will die soon but his will stay.
He was born and raised in Norway after his father settled in Oslo from Pakistan in 1970. Now 37 and a web designer, he speaks with the same eloquence as his Prime Minister about what the massacre and the racist ideology of its perpetrator mean for this suddenly wounded nation.
“This is a tragedy for the whole of Norway,” he said. “I just had to come here. It’s a sign of solidarity. Whenever anyone tries to harm democracy, it doesn’t matter what skin colour you are or what nationality, it’s every person’s duty to show solidarity.”
But while he recognises the political overtones of Breivik’s rantings on the internet, Mr Hussain does not think the gunman’s slaughter was primarily political. “This person is disturbed,” he said. “I don’t think any sane person could do something like that.”
Norway spent Sunday grieving for the 93 people who died. Queen Sonja arrived at the cathedral in tears and during the memorial service she and King Harald wiped more away. Survivors sobbed and embraced. Outside, parents lifted small children over the shoulders of the crowd to see the flowers so they could be part of the moment.
Henrik Vaaler, 21, visits elderly people who are confined to their homes. “They have said all their nightmares about the war have come back,” he said.
He was at the cathedral with his mother Anne, a doctor. “I have three sons and I’m just so grateful . . .” She stops, suddenly in tears, and lifts a hand to her trembling mouth.
Dr Vaaler said she was relieved the perpetrator was not found to be an Islamist terrorist group. “It forces us to think harder about ourselves, rather than channel hatred outwards,” she said.
Joran Kallmyr, of the right-wing anti-immigration Progress Party, on Sunday denied the party had helped form Breivik’s ideas, though he had once been a party member.
“He joined our party to have a platform for his ideas,” he said. “He was disappointed in our party. We didn’t fit his ideas, so he left.”
First published in The Age.

McGuinness may have too much baggage for Ireland

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IT IS NOT often that a man who wants to be president of a western democracy faces questions about whether he has blood on his hands.
But that is exactly what happened this week to Martin McGuinness, a former leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who is running for Ireland’s presidency.
Had he ever killed anyone in his time with the IRA? a reporter asked bluntly during an interview in Cork. “No,” he replied.
Mr McGuinness also denied that he had ever been indirectly responsible for people being killed by the IRA.
“I didn’t say I never fired a gun – I was in the IRA. There were battles on the streets of Derry. I’ve never run away from that,” he said.
But he has never answered for it either, and that is what troubles his critics.
Northern Ireland is at peace, the IRA supposedly disbanded, and Mr McGuinness is one of the chief architects of this new political landscape. Whether the people of the Irish republic will see fit to reward him with the position of head of state is another question, but his bold move has added spice to what had been a rather bland election.
Mr McGuinness, 61, belongs to Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone), the political arm of the Irish republican movement. Until he nominated for the presidency he was the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, a role in which he served at first beside his longtime foe, unionist leader Ian Paisley. The two had worked together to produce the Good Friday peace accord in 1998. They developed such a good public relationship, joking in front of the cameras, that they were nicknamed “the chuckle brothers”.
“There’s a lot of admiration for McGuinness as someone who was central to the peace process in Northern Ireland and none of his critics would take any of that away from him,” said Fintan O’Toole, a political columnist with The Irish Times. “He’s been a very effective player and the way he bonded with Ian Paisley and entered the executive is amazing, really.”
It has allowed Mr McGuinness to brand himself a peacemaker – and this is where O’Toole baulks.
“A lot of people have difficulty in that regard with someone who embodied the values of the IRA for such a long time and has never given a proper account of what he’s done in the IRA,” he said. “He’s effectively refusing even to discuss it, claiming questions about it are politically motivated … The point of the IRA was to kill people.”
By the age of 21, Mr McGuinness was second in command of the IRA in Londonderry. The inquiry into Bloody Sunday concluded he was probably carrying a Thompson submachine-gun that day but had done nothing to trigger the soldiers’ shooting.
In 1973, he was jailed for six months after being caught in a car with 113 kilograms of explosives and nearly 5000 rounds of ammunition. It has since been claimed that they were not intended to kill anybody.
But O’Toole said he and many others question some of Mr McGuinness’s denials. He spoke of the 1700 people killed by the IRA, 644 of whom were civilians, and the many more who were tortured or maimed.
“There are families in Northern Ireland on both sides who feel very raw,” he said. “There has never been accountability, never been a trial. No one has been held responsible for their loved ones.”
But a flash poll associated with an afternoon talk show seen as an uncanny barometer of middle Ireland found Mr McGuinness to be the favourite candidate, with 5700 votes, 200 votes ahead of the next most popular choice. He has said that he considered himself to be part of a new atmosphere: “The people of Ireland have watched the political progress that Gerry Adams and I have been at the heart of for many years.”
He has promised that he will take only the average wage, about €35,000 ($47,712), and give the rest of the €250,000 salary back to the Irish people, a move that might mollify voters resentful about Ireland’s austerity program.
Sinn Fein is well placed to harness the anger of the many people disillusioned with the establishment following the crash that brought in the International Monetary Fund, says Elaine Byrne, lecturer in politics at Trinity College, Dublin.
In the south, Sinn Fein “has always been a small party on the periphery who object to everything. There’s the Sinn Fein in power in the north which is introducing cuts; the one in the south is opposed to all cuts,” she said.
Dr Byrne also pointed out that younger generations had no personal memory of the Troubles.
O’Toole said that to many nationalists, Mr McGuinness is a positive figure. “There’s a great desire in a country going through tough times to have a hero,” he said. But there is the delicate question of how Mr McGuinness would manage the Queen. Like all Sinn Fein MPs, who want a united Ireland, Mr McGuinness refused to take his seat at Westminster, and the party avoided all events associated with the Queen’s visit to Ireland. But Mr McGuinness said he would be prepared to meet all heads of state “without exception” if elected on October 27.
One critic pointed out the issue might be whether the Queen was prepared to meet him: the IRA murdered Prince Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, in 1979.
Dr Byrne and O’Toole believe Mr McGuinness will poll well but ultimately not get over the line. Dr Byrne said he was unlikely to attract enough preferences from other candidates. She pointed out that this term of office holds special significance: whoever wins will preside over the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, the rebellion that started the chain of events that led to Irish independence.
“These are emotional things in Ireland,” she said. “It’s all very fresh in people’s minds.”

Lost, then found, the gentle baker of Christchurch finally laid to rest

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KAIKOURA

IT SEEMS Shane Tomlin, the quiet man, had a sense of the end. He certainly had a sense about the Christchurch earthquake.
That Tuesday morning, when he arrived at the bakery where he worked, he foretold it.
In a tribute from a colleague, Bev, read at his funeral yesterday: “You came to work that Tuesday and told me there would be a quake that day. You said there had been a quake in Argentina and all the whales had recently beached. And then we joked about which bench we would shelter under if it turned out to be the big one. But he didn’t get the chance.”
Within hours, Mr Tomlin became the human face of the tragedy. When the quake hit, he fell through two floors to land in a women’s dress shop. After he was pulled from the rubble, his head cradled in the lap of one of his rescuers, his dust-caked face was captured by a photographer in an image of survival that was picked up around the world.
But Mr Tomlin did not survive. He died later in hospital. Yesterday he was remembered in his home town of Kaikoura, 200 kilometres north of Christchurch.
Mr Tomlin, 42, would have hated all the fuss, his sisters told the congregation at St Paul’s on the Hill Presbyterian church. He was a gentle, unassuming man who disliked being photographed and loved quiet things: his work, his turtle, Star Trek and Doctor Who, cooking and gardening — but not flowers, only vegies. Yesterday the bright sunflowers on his coffin were arranged with humble corn, broccoli, asparagus and onions. On the back of the order of service was a close-up photograph of the turtle.
His former partner, Melanie, said: “I remember Shane as a spirited, private person who just didn’t want to make a fuss. He had a lot of love in his heart to give but I think sometimes he held it in rather than giving it out.”
He was unassuming right to the end. One sister said he had urged his rescuers, “Help the others first. Don’t worry about me. I’ll look after myself.”

First published in The Age.

Loss and faith ring out in ritual silence

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CHRISTCHURCH

MAORIS call it upoko runaka, the farewell for the dead. In Christchurch yesterday, they said, it was also much more: a ritual to heal a broken city, and to reconnect its people with the earth that has so hurt them.
It began with the local tribal chief Maurice Gray, dressed in a black suit and holding a tokotoko, a staff carved with his family’s history that is symbolic of his authority as an elder. He strode into an intersection lined with dignitaries and emergency workers and brandished the tokotoko at a small pile of broken masonry that had been taken from shattered buildings in the heart of the city.
And he began to chant, in the musical words of the Maori, in a way that carried right through the silent, ragtag congregation around him. He touched the staff to the bricks and then raised it to heaven. This was to bring peace and gentleness back to the city as the nation staged a two-minute silence yesterday to mark a week since the 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck.
He chanted again, in what he later said was a ritual to acknowledge the loss of the dead, the grief of the living and the damage wrought by the quake. He asked “for the brokenness of the universal soul of this city, which has been fractured and severed, to be remade”.
The umbilical cord that connects this world with the realm of the spirit had been severed by the destruction, he said, and needed to be reconnected. He banged his staff on the ground to communicate with the unborn child in the womb of mother earth whose movements, the Maori say, cause the rumbles and stirrings of earthquakes.
“It’s acknowledging the unborn child and the devastating effects of his actions,” Mr Gray said. “It’s saying that in spite of that, life is prevailing.”
“Do you agree with me?” he demanded of his listeners in Maori. “Yes!” they replied.
Then he stood aside to make way for the Anglican bishop, Victoria Matthews, who offered a prayer for those who walked in the valley of the shadow of death and asked God to guide the emergency workers and volunteers. The Dean, Peter Beck, read Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd”, and everyone joined in the Lord’s prayer.
Then Mr Gray returned and with others – one carrying a fern, the Maori symbol for life and death – sang a Maori hymn.
Last came Puamiria Parata-Goodall, a “caller” for her people who has the graceful whorls of traditional tattoos around her mouth. She “calls” joy for new life when a child is born. She calls sorrow and pain when the curtain between the worlds opens to allow the spirits of the dead to move on. Calling, she said later, belongs only to Maori women.
She let out a powerful cry filled with the anguish of loss. This was manaaki, the Maori tradition of embracing those who grieve.

First published in The Age.

Seismic soothsayer causes folk to quake in their boots

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CHRISTCHURCH

EVERY seismologist on the planet might disagree with Ken Ring, but he’s got the people of Christchurch talking — and he has some of them worrying.
Mr Ring, a long-range weather forecaster in Auckland, New Zealand, believes he can predict when there is an increased likelihood of earthquakes. On February 13, he tweeted: “Potential earthquake time for the planet between 15th-25th, especially 18th for Christchurch, +/- about 3 days.”
The quake that has devastated the city occurred on February 22, one day after the period he named.
Mr Ring believes the moon’s magnetic pull can help trigger quakes when the moon is in particular phases and is close to the Earth.
Christchurch residents call him “the moon man”, and some are concerned that he now appears to have had at least two accurate predictions.
Last September, he warned on radio to expect increased earthquake activity in the South Island over the following week. The next day, Christchurch had a 7.1 quake. The day after that, he predicted another one in six months.
He has now tipped the potential for another big one on or near March 20. “The wild card is how deep these things might be,” he told The Age.
Mr Ring is neither a geologist nor seismologist but says he has decades of practical experience connecting patterns with weather from writing almanacs for farmers in Australia and New Zealand. “It’s not voodoo or anything. It’s solid science. It’s astronomy.”
He said earthquakes were associated with king tides and “perigee” — the point each month when the moon is closest to Earth. This is because the moon’s gravitational pull affects not just the movement of oceans but of land. Solar influences such as sunspots could be a factor, too, he said.
He predicts that the jolts on the South Island will ease from April, “because the moon will be moving away from the Earth”.
Bill Fry, a seismologist with GNS Science New Zealand, dismissed the claims: “I believe his so-called predictions have no scientific credibility. In New Zealand, if I predict every single day of the year that there will be an earthquake, I will be correct. If I predict a magnitude-5 event every day of the year, I will be correct about 40 times a year. If you predict every day that it’s going to be Sunday, you’ll be right one day out of seven.”
Mr Fry said many claims to earthquake prediction had been investigated and proven false in recent decades, including theories that they were linked to atmospheric discharges, or that they could be detected early by animals including cows and dogs. “We can’t predict earthquakes,” he said. “I can tell you unequivocally that no one can systematically predict them.”
If seismologists could, they would. “We certainly don’t want to see 150 people die,” he said.

Teen adds tech touch to wrath of a woman scorned

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It has become a parable of the internet age: a girl, a laptop and a swath of destruction through high-profile football careers. Cyberspace is full of mocking laughter over the posting of naked photos of St Kilda footballers by a vengeful teenager – ”The Girl who played with Nick playing with himself”, she’s been dubbed, while her enterprise is ”Dickileaks”.

Meanwhile, the combined might of several powerful institutions has proved hapless, if not helpless, in attempts to silence her. Even with her name shielded, the girl’s following on Twitter had last night swollen to more than 6500 followers (up from about 200 the day before) and the hissing spat that has developed between her and some of St Kilda’s finest reached new heights – or should that be lows?

St Kilda captain Nick Riewoldt said it was hard to understand why a girl he did not know had posted explicit images of him and his teammates on social network sites.

In one image, Riewoldt is standing staring at the camera with a sheepish expression, his hands framing his genitals, while clothed fellow player Zac Dawson grins. Another photo shows Nick Dal Santo on a bed in a rapt state of self-communion. Both images have written across them in elegant, cursive script, in Santa-red ink, ”Merry Christmas Courtesy of The St Kilda Schoolgirl!”

Unsurprisingly, Riewoldt said yesterday that the publication of the pictures had caused him distress, shock and disappointment, and urged the girl to stop posting them. He claimed the photo with Dawson had been taken 12 months ago by teammate Sam Gilbert in a hotel in Miami and he had asked for him to delete it. Riewoldt, Gilbert and the club claim the pictures had later been removed from Gilbert’s computer without his consent.

If the naked boy-play was about male bonding, it has gone horribly wrong. Yesterday Gilbert had to issue an apology to the teammates hurt by the pictures.

The girl who kicked this hornet’s nest has another version of the truth entirely and appears to have, as yet, no inclination to mercy. In a series of media interviews, she said she planned to continue posting images and had no sympathy for Riewoldt, who she claimed knew her and had treated her badly.

She also said it was ”incorrect” to suggest that she had not taken the pictures herself. ”I took the photos and uploaded them on Sam’s computer and sent them across from Sam’s email address to mine,” she told The Age from Queensland, where she is on holiday with her parents.

Her Facebook profile was taken down following a Federal Court order to remove the photos on Monday. She said she had not broken the law because she still had not been presented with any court order.

”I don’t really see myself as an outlaw, more like someone who actually stands up to the football players. In a way, I guess it’s kind of bad what I’ve done, but I’m happy with it as well because I know there’s a lot of girls out there who thank me for having the guts to actually do it.”

The girl has made it clear she is acting out of revenge. She claims to have become pregnant with a child – or, in some reports, twins – to a St Kilda player, but to have lost the pregnancy to stillbirth in October. She laid a complaint and there was an investigation by the AFL and by police that found no grounds to proceed with charges.

She has said she was partially motivated by abusive Facebook messages and voicemails from footballers that she had received over the past few months.

When her Facebook site was closed, the girl went to Twitter and posted a link to the pictures.

For Gilbert and the other men, the court order to remove the photos came too late. The pictures had by then gone viral. A legal system designed for careful, leisurely consideration is flapping its black robes in consternation as it tries and fails to chase internet rabbits down their many and varied caches.

Meanwhile, the girl still sends out her 140-character messages-in-a-bottle on Twitter. Here, she complains about the burden of her newfound celebrity – ”29 radio interviews, 4 video interviews, so tired!” – and curses those who cross her with punctuation-free fluency. ”Want to know who the f—ing little snitch is that released something to the media. Can I trust no one?” she asked on December 20.

She likes Queensland and strawberry cheesecake, sings to herself ”when I feel I’m going insane”, and says to one contact, ”I’m used to being the one in control and the one that’s manipulating you, not the other way round.” She also tells one apparent critic, ”You don’t know either of us, so don’t judge.”

She earlier told The Age she was writing her autobiography – bridling at a suggestion that this might be a little early, at 17 – and is looking for an agent.

She said she was not concerned about what repercussions her actions would have on her later life. She said, ”I don’t really want to know what’s going to happen in the future. I take every day as it comes.”

Her online photo shows a lean, tanned girl in a bikini. She is on all fours in the shallows on a beach, her knees spread wide, gazing at the camera with a provocatively tilted head and the pout of a model. She describes herself as ”Athlete. Model. sex.love.fashion.power.fame.beautiful.fast.hot.smooth. strong”.

Last night she posted a video in which she said, ”I think girls should stand up more to football players. When the whole thing came out in May, I had more than 500 messages saying, ‘Can I have some of the football players’ numbers? I think they’re really hot.’

”I said ‘No you f—–g don’t, trust me, God.’ They are hot. They are famous. They do have money. I guess that’s what turned me on when I first met them. But basically I am saying to all the girls out there, unless you’ve been in a world like that before, I’m saying don’t get involved with them, honestly.”

She was unsure whether she would upload more photos, after all, she said, because she was confused about the legal hearing, but ”I am going to keep on saying what’s the truth, and I’m going to f— these footballers up, OK?”

She said ”mwaah”, kissed her fingertips and laid them gently on the camera lens.

A child of the age of narcissism, using the uncontrolled medium of the age, acting out the age-old wrath of a woman scorned.

Raw emotion brings down curtain on bushfire saga

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BERNIE Teague faced the media yesterday in the jaunty bow-tie that is his trademark. It didn’t quite go with the tears in his eyes.
In an emotional final press conference after their mammoth report on the Black Saturday fires, all three royal commissioners had suspiciously bright eyes and voices that occasionally caught on a jagged emotion. Many people touched by the bushfires found it was only when they paused from frantic activity that the reaction began to hit them. So too, it seems, with the commissioners.
They were asked if they would find it hard to let go of such an intense experience. Would they still pursue bushfire work in some other way?
Mr Teague, the inquiry’s chairman, smiled and said he was exhausted, but “I will, if Daylesford CFA will take me, volunteer to be part of Daylesford CFA, and I’ll take an interest in matters where people are minded to think I can help out”. Mr Teague has a weekender at Daylesford.
Commissioner Susan Pascoe would like to be involved in education, which is her professional background, so that “we keep in the foreground of people’s thinking both the loss of so many community members but also what might be done to prevent it happening on that scale again”.
They said many aspects of the work had moved them, including the pain of people in community consultations soon after the fires and the harrowing stories told by lay witnesses during the hearings.
Mr Teague, a former judge of the Supreme Court, said: “When you look at some of the photographs the police had to take, they were incredibly heart-wrenching. It goes back to my days as a judge when I would sit in my chambers and shut the doors when I wanted to read the victim impact statements because they were the things that hit me the most. When you come to photographs of small children, whatever the context, who died an unnatural death, it’s very disturbing.”
His voice trembled as he said: “You couldn’t help but feel that your heart had taken over from your mind.”
But Ms Pascoe said there was also much that was uplifting: “We have had the extraordinary privilege of listening to the raw experiences of people who have been through one of the most horrific experiences that life can dish up. By and large, those people responded with extraordinary courage . . . there are countless stories of putting the community ahead of themselves. [It has] certainly confirmed [a] deep vein of goodness.”
Commissioner Ron McLeod defended the inquiry’s controversial recommendation that the state replace its ageing power distribution network to prevent fires caused by electrical faults. The proposal would cost billions.
He said the commissioners were not ignorant of the money pressures on government “but essentially we were driven by a desire to make Victoria a safer place to live in . . . These man-made structures will not last forever and in our judgment, they continue to produce a very high threat in days of high fire danger.”
Ms Pascoe elaborated on the other controversial recommendation, for a government buyback of houses in extreme fire-risk areas. She agreed the inquiry had intended this to apply to “micro-sites” rather than whole towns: “They would be sites that are on ridgelines, often surrounded by gullies . . . particularly if they are within 100 metres of bush.”
She said the commission left it to the government to designate which areas should be targeted through township protection planning because, while certain known sites had been hit hard on Black Saturday, other places might also be at great risk on days with different conditions.
Asked whether they would stay to defend a house, given what they now know, Mr McLeod said: “How many people want to wager on their life? Because that’s what it really is, if one accepts that there’s a certain randomness in the way a bushfire can move over the landscape. In my view, it’s a fairly forlorn wager to hope that randomness will save you in a fire.”
But Mr Teague thought differently: “You’ve got to allow for the age factor, apart from any others, but I think perhaps if I had a swimming pool and wet blanket alongside, I might stay longer.”
Daylesford CFA captain Don Anderson allows for the age factor. Told yesterday that Mr Teague would put up his hand, he said: “Really? How old is he? We’re really looking for young blokes. I’ll have to have a talk with him, mate, but that’ll be fine, no worries.”

Daughter tells of attack on mother

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ERIN Margach is 10 years old. Yesterday she sat and watched a videotape of herself in which she told a policewoman about what she had seen the night her father killed her mother.
In the tape made four days after her mother’s death, and played to the Supreme Court yesterday, Erin, then eight, was dressed in red tracksuit pants and a white top with her hair in an alice band. She folded her hands tightly in her lap as she told her story in one long narrative with few prompts.
She started her account with the night before the killing, when her mother, Tina, and father, Paul, argued over whether to end their marriage because of her mother’s brief flirtation with another man. Her father punched her mother in the face, she said. The following night, Erin heard her parents arguing in the kitchen and her mother saying: “I’m just going to pack my bags.”
Her father said: “No, I want you to stay here.”
Her mother replied: “You are just an idiot!”
Erin’s younger sister Bree, then four, wanted to go to her parents but Erin told her, “Don’t go out because it’s only adults.” Then she heard her mother call out “Erin!” from the kitchen.
“She was yelling and screaming ‘Ah help!’ and I rushed out because I thought it was an emergency. Dad was waving a knife around and he wanted to stab her but he was missing. He must have stabbed her once or twice because there was blood everywhere, like on her arms and legs and body.
“Bree was crying really badly and she just rushed in her room and I was the only one. I was yelling out ‘Don’t!’ in a really loud voice at the top of my lungs. I thought I could rush over and pull him away from her but I was too scared because he had this really scary face on.”
Her mother “started moving around and kicking him off her and saying, ‘Get away!’ She was laying down horizontal (on a couch) . . . She kicked him in the stomach to get off and she kicked him in the hands so the knife wouldn’t go near . . . Wherever she moved, he moved, just putting the knife near her.”
When her father moved away, her mother “put her her hand on her heart to see if it was still beating . . . and she started to close her eyes and she went all white. And Dad rushed over and said, ‘What’s happening? I have to call the ambulance’.”
Erin raced into her bedroom to call her grandmother to ask her to come “really, really quickly”, but had trouble getting through. “I heard my Dad saying hello to emergency and then I hanged up . . . (I was thinking) this is just a dream, this is not happening.”
She went back to her mother in the kitchen. “I felt her head and she was, like, cold or something. I got a glass of water and just put it on her face to cool her down . . . and then I put some water in her mouth and she took a breath and when I stopped she went (Erin sighs) like that.”
The operator on the emergency line told Erin to get a towel and press it down where her mother was bleeding. “Her whole body was bleeding and I pushed down on her arms and her heart but when I was putting it in all different places she was going like that (Erin exhales heavily again).”
Erin saw blood on her mother’s face as well but “I thought if I put it over her face she might suffocate and stop breathing . . . Dad was yelling ‘Where’s the ambulance?’ and walking around and stomping and said he was about to punch something . . . Then I said, ‘Could you help me?’ but he didn’t listen. He was yelling really loud.”
Erin was composed both in her police interview and when she was being examined by remote video link in court yesterday. But on the fateful night she swung between panic and practicality in the emergency call, an audio tape of which was also played to the court. The court heard Mr Margach sob as he begged for aid, and his children screamed in the background.
The operator called Erin to the phone when Mr Margach was too distraught to take in her instructions. Erin politely said “Pardon?” or “Excuse me?” whenever she had trouble understanding the emergency operator, but screamed at her father to get the towel and screamed at her mother, “Mum, Mum, oh please!”
Erin: “The ambulance are here, but she’s not waking.”
Operator: “Erin.”
Erin: “It’s never happened to me.”
Operator: “No, I know it’s never happened to you, darling.”
Erin later told a policewoman in her interview: “I felt a little prickly from seeing all that. I felt a little bit sick.” When Erin Margach was taken to a neighbour’s house after it was all over, she vomited.
Paul Jason Margach has pleaded not guilty to the murder of Tina Maree Margach in Hurtle Street, Ascot Vale on October 15, 2004.
The trial continues before Justice Betty King.

First published in The Age.