Category Archives: News Reads

City divided as a symbol laid to rest

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IN THE age of reality TV, anybody can be a celebrity. And in the age of modern electronics, anybody can film one – never mind the manners. Just ask Kim Nguyen, who sat prayerfully through a funeral service that was foreign to her while ordinary people she had never met tried to snap her with still or video cameras held in the palms of their hands.
Her front-row position, with son Khoa and others, protected her for the first part of the service. But when the crowds lined up for communion and blessings from the priests, a throng developed in front of her.
Dozens wanted to express their condolences in person, but some had also come for the spectacle and were keen to immortalise their own small fragment of it. It took several minutes of quiet but firm instructions from presiding priests to hustle everyone back to their places.
That’s what happens when a person becomes a symbol for a cause; when a family’s tragedy has been media fodder for weeks; when incense swirls over the coffin the way controversy has swirled around the person inside it.
While those in the cathedral celebrated the life of the convicted drug smuggler they believed had been reborn on death row, many outside it were angry at the attention Nguyen Tuong Van’s case has drawn.
“Bill from Broadford” told the ABC announcer Jon Faine yesterday: “I’m absolutely disgusted by this hysterical worshipping of Nguyen . . . One-minute silence, praised by lawyers, attendance by politicians at the funeral, for a convicted drug criminal? . . . People are just conveniently skipping over the consequences of the actions of these people. They’ve done it for greed and profit and they don’t care how much suffering they bring back to Australia. So why should they be treated like they’re war heroes?”
A taxi driver ferrying a passenger to the church service was similarly irritated. “I got sick and tired of hearing about it in the media,” he grumbled. “He knew what the rules of that country were. You do the crime, you do the time.”
But the issue for many in the cathedral was that Nguyen was not allowed to do the time but was hanged at 25. His death – or the cause of fighting the death penalty – yesterday attracted an extraordinary cross-section of Melbourne: Hindus in saris, Muslims in veils, a Catholic philosophy lecturer, an Orthodox priest, a Buddhist monk in saffron robes.
Irene Wilson, a grandmother studying theology, had travelled 350 kilometres from Mount Beauty for the service. She said she wanted to “pay my respects to Kim and Khoa and Bronnie and Kelly”, and to show that Australians have a sense of compassion and mateship.
“Australians have put their hearts on their sleeves as people of conscience,” she said.
Reta Kaur, an ethnic Indian who came to Australia from Malaysia, said she was there to protest against state-sanctioned violence and said Singapore was “a city of stone with hearts of stone”.
Polish migrant Stan, who did not wish to give his surname, said, “He was a young man, and he made a mistake, of course, but it’s too strong a punishment. There are people who smuggle tonnes of heroin and are never punished for it.”
It is probably fair to say that Melbourne has not seen this kind of mobilisation against the death penalty since the demonstrations against the hanging of Ronald Ryan, which took place in 1967. Ryan’s funeral, though, did not allow for public rallying; he was buried in unconsecrated ground near the Pentridge Prison hospital with a brief 10 minutes of prayers. The only mourners present were his priest and his jailers. Like Ned Kelly – the other son of this state who is famous for finishing his life on the gallows – Ryan was Catholic.
In a strange twist, so was Nguyen. His family are Buddhist and they attended a Buddhist service for him in Springvale on Tuesday night. But Nguyen had converted to Catholicism on death row in Changi prison, and he was farewelled yesterday with all the pomp of an establishment Catholic: one cathedral named for the patron saint of Ireland, 23 priests dressed in the white robes Nguyen had requested, and even a bishop, Mark Coleridge.
The death notices and the order of service for his funeral listed Nguyen’s first name as Caleb, the name he took for himself when he was baptised. It means bold and courageous, Father Peter Hansen told the congregation.
Nguyen had been “the baby on death row”, his friend Kelly Ng told the congregation.
Lex Lasry, Nguyen’s QC, said Nguyen had changed enormously in the time he faced death. “He was no martyr. He was no hero . . . But in the last two years, selfishness gave way to selflessness, lies gave way to truth and indulgence gave way to spirituality, and anyone watching that couldn’t help but be moved by it.”
Kim Nguyen dabbed her eyes with tissues through most of the service. Mr Lasry’s wife, Elizabeth, sat beside her, stroking her arm or shoulders in comfort. When it came time for the unfamiliar prayers, Mrs Nguyen held her hands in prayer position and bowed her head, accepting whatever it was that this culture and religion were offering her.
In the same procession, a man with an Irish face struggled to keep his lower lip from trembling. A Mediterranean grandmother bent to kiss the coffin, wiping away a tear. An Indian man came up to accept a blessing.
Nguyen’s death has done more than unite many Australians against the death penalty. It united them in their sense of what it is to be Australian.
Applause for man ‘dear tomany’ NEWS 2
OPINION Chris Ellison NEWS 15
ONLINE Watch video footage from the funeral service at theage.com.au

First published in The Age.

The precision of ritual in the gallows’ shadow

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ON DEATH ROW
Those who have witnessed a hanging say they are changed for life, writes Karen Kissane.
IN HIS final days, Nguyen Tuong Van will get the best care Changi Prison has to offer. He will also be weighed and measured with clinical precision to help calculate the length for the rope from which he will hang.
If his treatment mirrors that of those who have gone before him, Nguyen is now living in strict isolation in a cell measuring about three metres by three metres. He has a toilet and a mat for sleeping, but no bedding and uses a bucket for washing. He is not permitted to go out for fresh air or exercise.
Next week, his status as a man close to execution should win him special concessions: food of his choice (within the prison’s budget) and extra visits from relatives. And a visit from the hangman, who will check his weight and measure the distance from Nguyen’s neck to the floor before going away to make his calculations according to a bureaucratic manual, the Official Table of Drops, published by the British Home Office in 1913.
Singapore is believed to use “the long drop” method, which is meant to be the most merciful. The correct length of the rope for a particular individual is crucial to the “success” of a hanging – if success is defined as a quick death with little suffering.
Normally, only jail staff and a doctor are present at executions in Singapore, although others, such as a minister of religion, may be admitted at the discretion of the prison superintendent.
Nguyen’s senior lawyer, Lex Lasry QC, has applied to be a witness at the execution, along with fellow defence lawyer Julian McMahon.
“We’ve taken the view that, for our client’s sake, we’ve requested to be present at his execution,” Mr Lasry said yesterday. He has not yet heard from Singaporean authorities whether they will be allowed to attend.
Mr McMahon declined to discuss how he felt about the prospect of witnessing such an event. “Our focus at this stage is on what’s best for our client.”
Mr Lasry said he had been told not to attend by a lot of friends. “I’ve been cautioned about the consequences of it. People just think to be present at something like that would be a horrible thing and that inevitably there’s going to be a consequence – and I think they have Brian Morley in mind.”
Mr Morley, 69, was one of 12 journalists to witness the execution in Melbourne in 1967 of Ronald Ryan, the last man hanged in Australia.
Mr Morley said he had had some “indirect contact” with Mr Lasry. “He’s read all my stuff on Ryan so he’s mentally prepared for it.”
But all the preparation in the world could not insulate a witness from the shock of the moment, Mr Morley said. “He will still be very traumatised by it. I believe that if the premier of the day and his cabinet had witnessed Ryan’s execution, they would have abolished capital punishment on the spot.”
Mr Morley can still remember every detail “in vivid technicolour” and it distresses him to talk about it. He does so because, in the instant that Ryan fell through the trapdoor, Mr Morley became convinced that the death penalty should be abolished everywhere.
The journalists had gathered in D Division of the old Pentridge jail, keyed up by a string of public protests and intense political debate over the hanging. “It was a little bit like being in the press box at the MCG for the grand final – nervous excitement at the big story to be covered,” Mr Morley said.
A manacled Ryan was led by a hangman in welder’s goggles along a catwalk six metres above them. A green canvas sheet hid the area below the gallows’ trapdoors. Ryan turned to face the media before the cap on his head was pulled down into a hood covering his face.
“Then the hangman leapt back and hit the lever and he dropped immediately out of sight. There was an enormous clang as the trapdoors banged and all I could hear was the creaking of the rope, like a rope in a gymnasium,” he said.
Mr Morley had gone in with an open mind about the death penalty, but “for me it was a total emotional shock; so callous, so dreadful, so horrific . . . Everyone was traumatised, everyone who saw it. My wife said I was a real mess for a long time afterwards.”
Journalist Tom Prior was another witness. He was not available yesterday, but his wife said he had gone to Ryan’s hanging believing in the death penalty “because dead men never offend again”. He, too, converted to opposing it “in that instant. It changed him totally. He has spoken to his children and to me a lot about that.”
The Ryan hanging was traumatic for everyone associated with it, despite the dying man being hidden behind a screen. When the mechanics of process have failed, the result is even more gruesome.
“If the rope’s too long, the forces build up as the body falls and the person is decapitated,” said Tim Goodwin, anti-death-penalty co-ordinator with Amnesty International. “If it’s too short, it doesn’t break the neck with sufficient violence and the person chokes to death over a longer period.”
There are other variables, he said, such as the importance of placing the knot of the noose just above the jaw under the left ear “in order to crush the vertebrae in a particular way and snap the neck. If the person moves at the last moment, it can cause the knot to be dislodged and it doesn’t have the desired effect. Then the person can slowly strangle to death.”
If all goes according to plan, the dislocation of the vertebrae and damage to the spinal cord render the person unconscious almost instantly. The broken neck while hanging leads to “comatose asphyxia” – lack of oxygen while unconscious. Brain death follows in about six minutes and whole-body death in about 15 minutes. Some people exhibit muscle spasms while they are hanging.
“There’s nothing about this that’s pretty,” Mr Goodwin said. “It’s a brutal and gruesome death.”
Singapore has people who cannot stomach execution. It has been reported that the current hangman has been difficult to replace, as two prison officers trained to take over each froze when it came to pulling the lever for “the real thing”.
So shortly before dawn tomorrow week – Friday is the day for hangings in Singapore – the hangman who has done the job for 46 years will handcuff Nguyen and lead him on his final short walk to the gallows, a few metres from his cell.
As the rope is put around Nguyen’s neck, the executioner will say what he always says: “I am going to send you to a better place than this. God bless you.”
Nguyen will be hooded. At 6am precisely the hangman will pull the lever, the trapdoor will open and he will fall to his death.
The hangman will be paid $A312 for services rendered to the state of Singapore. — With GARY TIPPET

First published in The Age.

A town farewells three small brothers

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IT WAS such a quiet funeral, despite the number of people who came: 120 in the sweet little country church, another 400 or so on plastic chairs under the spring sunshine outside.
People sat still and silent, even though the crying began long before the service did, with women wiping tears from eyes reddened for hours.
But at the end of the funeral service, the church exploded with the Farquharson boys’ favourite song – Holy Grail by Hunters and Collectors. The music thumped with life as 12 young men in dark suits rose from the congregation and walked grimly towards the three small white coffins, ready to carry them out. Then there came another sound: a high, thin wail. Bereft mother Cindy Gambino was keening for her boys.
The coffin of her eldest, nine-year-old Jai, was carried out first. Then the smaller casket of his middle brother, Tyler, 7. And then the heart-rendingly small box in which lay Bailey, the baby, who was 2. Each had his own small bouquet of red roses and baby’s breath.
Behind them staggered their mother in a long black dress, her face contorted with grief. She leaned heavily on the arm of her ex-husband, Robert Farquharson, the man who had driven the car in which their three children had died. He stared straight ahead with a dazed expression.
The rest of Victoria knows these children for the way they died: drowned in a dam after their father’s car veered off a road as he was returning them from an access visit on Father’s Day. All three were later found to be free of their seatbelts and child restraints, and police think that Jai might have struggled to release his brothers before they died.
Police have questioned Mr Farquharson about the circumstances of the crash, which left no skid marks on the road. The car was found to have its engine and its lights turned off. Mr Farquharson told police he had a coughing fit and blacked out, waking to find himself in the water. His ex-wife’s family have told media he was a wonderful father and that this was a terrible accident. His ex-wife spent the first few days after the crash sedated in hospital for shock and grief.
Yesterday, at St John the Baptist Catholic Church in Winchelsea, mourners heard of the boys that their family knew. Family friend Wendy Kennedy gave the eulogy. Jai “was generous, like his father; he always wanted to look after his younger brothers”. He was a footballer and a cub scout and had a red belt in karate. He loved acting out moments from movies – “it was always the adult jokes he liked, the ones he shouldn’t have understood”.
He also loved money and was happy to earn some mowing his Poppy’s lawns, but preferred the “Tattslotto chair” on his Sunday visits to his grandparents’ house, where he would raid his grandfather’s chair for the change that had fallen from his pockets through the week.
Tyler had his mother’s grin and loved hot dogs and mudcakes and his grandma’s vegie soup, strained. His mother said of him, “Have food, will travel”. He was a joker, best known for his cross-eyed faces and the plastic dog poo he hid in his grandfather’s bed.
Little Bailey called the family dog “Woofy” and the family cat “Puss”. The cockatiel was simply “my bird” and would sit on his shoulder while he fed it cereal. Bailey was old enough to protest against anything he didn’t like with “This is quack, mum!” When told that that was naughty, he would play his strongest card: “But me just a baby, Mum!”
Outside the church, as the three coffins were loaded into two hearses, Cindy Gambino and Robert Farquharson clung to each other. His lower lip jutted out and trembled as he struggled to contain his distress. Several times he hugged her in a helpless kind of way as she gazed blankly at the hearses, as if she could not comprehend what she was seeing.
They both looked shocked and disbelieving to find themselves in a world without their children.

First published in The Age.

A spell in the country, a weekend Pottering around

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THE long-legged coyote man had an animal tail hanging from his tail. The male witch had an ankle-length velvet cloak. The man who called himself Pixie looked like Braveheart.
“You should have been here yesterday,” he said. “My face was painted with woad” – the blue herbal dye the Celts used in warfare to terrify the enemy.
The 24th Mount Franklin Annual Pagan Gathering was held on an extinct volcano near Daylesford at the weekend.
This was worship at its freest. Today’s paganism is a religious smorgasbord encompassing Wiccans and witches (who are not the same thing), pantheists, who call on ancient gods and goddesses of Greece, Rome or other cultures, and many others whose self-selected beliefs defy categorisation. (Paganism and modern witchcraft does not involve satanism, with witches pointing out that Satan is a Christian figure).
Common to many pagans is the use of “the wheel of the year” to link ceremonies to the seasons, a belief that the divine is both feminine and masculine, and a conviction that sacredness is centred on the Earth and the four elements of earth, air, fire and water.
The Mount Franklin festival is held each year on the weekend closest to Halloween. It recognises Beltane (“bright fire”), a festival that celebrates the fertility of earth and animals.
Pagans believe it is a time when “the veil is thin” between the mundane and supernatural worlds, an uncanny moment when the air is filled with spirits.
On Saturday night they lit and encircled a bonfire, which symbolised the increasing power of the sun, and invoked the lady of the moon and the lord of the sun. Yesterday, 15 men and 15 women danced ritually around a Maypole. When it was tightly wound with red and green lacing, they “read” its weave to try to foretell what the coming year would bring.
Many children were among the 230 campers, and medievalism mixed with modern domesticity: a blue hatchback parked among the tents had a sign offering “Mead for Sale”.
On weekdays, Pixie is John Biggs and works in a plant nursery with disabled people. Male witch Morphix is Paul Franzi, a youth worker for kids with drug and alcohol problems.
And the man with the coyote totem is Josh Orth, a medical scientist. He says he has adopted the coyote as his symbol because the animal is “playful, energetic, wild and free”.
Several people at the festival declined to be interviewed, saying they had lost jobs before when their employers found out. But there are signs of a dawning acceptance of alternative religion. Nicole Good says she is one of four pagans who have been registered as civil celebrants.
At the end of all the interviews, this reporter’s hand was aching from a tight grip on the notebook. What did witches recommend for arthritis?
Forget spells and chants and magical balms. The answer came in a pragmatic chorus: “Deep Heat!”

First published in The Age.

Joe Korp goes to meet maker

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

First published in The Age.

Myer, how the rules of the retail game have changed

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

First published in The Age.

Children, friends mourn Maria Korp’s love

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

First published in The Age.

Mother’s tears of rage after wife-killer verdict

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

_With Peter Gregory

See also Honour Killing In The Suburbs

First published in The Age.

Election 2004: Lazarus just keeps on rising

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

First published in The Age.

ELECTION 2004: Prime minister takes history in his stride

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

First published in The Age.