Tag Archives: Women

‘Perceived’ affair provoked husband to kill, court told

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ERIN Margach, 8, had promised to read a bedtime story to her little sister, Bree. When her mother called from the kitchen for help, Erin went to answer.
She found her father, Paul, with her mother, Tina, who was bleeding to death from multiple stab wounds. The moments that followed were captured on a taped 000 call that was played yesterday in the Supreme Court.
“Put that eight-year-old on the phone!” the operator barked at Paul Margach, who was begging for help for his wife but crying so hard he seemed unable to take in the operator’s instructions.
Erin, who had been screaming in the background, took the call. “You keep quiet. You listen to me if you want to help your mum,” the operator commanded. “Go and get a towel, quickly! Put the towel where your mum’s bleeding.”
The operator tried to keep Erin focused while the child swung between calm and hysteria. At one point Erin screamed, “Mum, Mum, oh please!”
“Come on, you have to hurry!” said the operator. “Are you doing the right thing?”
“Yes, I’m doing it,” the child said.
As the tape was played yesterday, Paul Jason Margach sat sobbing in court. An engineer formerly of Hurtle Street, Ascot Vale, he has pleaded not guilty to the murder of his wife on October 15, 2004.
The Margachs had met when Tina was 16 and married when she was 21. The marriage had begun to unravel, the court was told.
Prosecutor Boris Kayser said Mrs Margach, 36, had gone to Swan Hill with girlfriends the weekend before her murder. There she had met a man with whom she danced and chatted, but there was no sexual contact.
Margach, 38, had been suspicious about his wife. He installed a recording device on their home telephone. He accused his wife of having an affair with the man. Mrs Margach denied this and said she did not want the marriage to end.
In a conversation taped from the home phone that was played in court yesterday – “a voice from the dead”, said the prosecutor – Mrs Margach said: “I can’t communicate with Paul. It’s like we have hit a stalemate . . . It’s just humdrum, boring, I can’t be bothered and he feels rejected.”
She said she was “a bit flirtatious” with the man in Swan Hill but it had gone no further. Of her husband, she said, “I love him to death.”
Mrs Margach said she was bewildered by the intensity of her husband’s anger.
According to the prosecutor, on the night of the killing, Mrs Margach had found her husband weeping in Erin’s bedroom and telling the child about the marriage break-up. Mrs Margach remonstrated with him “for talking like that to an eight-year-old”.
Margach followed her to the kitchen. He later told police that his wife had said the marriage was over, saying “I don’t want a baby, I want a man!”
He said his wife picked up a knife and they struggled over it, and that she told him, ‘I did f— him and I enjoyed it’.
He told police he stabbed her because he found out she was having an affair.
Margach’s lawyer, Christopher Dane, QC, said his client had not intended to kill his wife because only moments earlier he had told her she could stay in the house and that he would move out.
Mr Dane said there was no claim that Mrs Margach had actually had an affair in Swan Hill, but that the case centred on provocation and perceptions of infidelity: “Is there a difference, in a degenerating relationship, between actual and perceived (infidelity)? If you believe it, then that’s what’s driving you. If you have got it wrong, does it matter?”
Mr Dane said Margach was guilty of manslaughter, not murder.
The case continues.

First published in The Age.

Still jobs for the boys, Guv’nor?

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The new governor is a good bloke, but still just another of the blokes.
MELBOURNE has racism. You often hear it from taxi drivers. It can show itself coarsely in the oaths of cricket crowds or delicately in the poisonous patter of dinner parties. The veils of Muslim women can be torn off in the street, and they and their children can be spat upon by strangers.
But Melbourne is also a town that turned out in great numbers to support one of its wayward sons who came from an ethnic background, Nguyen Tuong Van, the Vietnamese-Australian drug runner recently hanged in Singapore. A town, like a race, is as complicated and contradictory as the individuals who make it up.
Melbourne is now a place where several of the most eminent citizens are men from ethnic backgrounds. The Premier, Steve Bracks, comes from a Lebanese family; the Lord Mayor, John So, is Chinese-Australian; and the head of the AFL (probably the most prominent role of the lot in such a footy-mad city) is Greek-Australian Andrew Demetriou. This week it was announced that our new governor will be Professor David de Kretser, a renowned scientist who migrated from Sri Lanka to Australia when he was nine.
It is an impressive line-up in the tolerance-and-diversity stakes. It sends powerful messages about the kind of place Melbourne is – or wants to be. Migrant parents can have some faith in the prospects for their children. Institutional racism is, at worst, muted, and public discourse is civil. The media treated de Kretser’s family history as a heart-warming tale of migrant triumph, not as cause for disdain.
This city has its racial tensions – ethnic soccer riots come to mind – but we have seen nothing like Sydney’s race-based pack rapes of Australian girls by gangs of Lebanese-Australian youths. The week of the Cronulla riots, both Skip and Lebanese young people in Melbourne received text messages urging them to gather at beaches to fight. They ignored them. It was the rival text messages urging a peace rally that won a turnout. Melbourne is a more tolerant place than Sydney.
Researchers suggest this is partly because Sydney has developed closed ethnic enclaves but Melbourne’s ethnic communities are more mixed up together and more scattered among WASP communities.
That’s just another way of saying that migrants in Melbourne don’t feel as “locked out” as those in Sydney. As the world saw with Paris, it is that sense of being shut out – literally, in terms of living in a ghetto, and metaphorically, in terms of not having opportunities – that fuels racial violence.
So it’s a good thing that our Premier continues to attend to multiculturalism, one of several reasons he chose de Kretser. Racism is like a disease; it requires regular vaccination and the maintenance of herd immunity to keep it at bay.
All of this makes it almost shabby to pick holes in Bracks’ appointment of de Kretser, who seems a lovely man and an excellent candidate. I feel like Oliver Twist, asking timorously, “Please sir, can I have some more?”
Because this most worthy line-up of eminent citizens might be ethnically diverse but it is still strikingly monochrome in one respect: it has no women. Is it true to tell migrants that anything is possible in this new land? Or must we in all honesty confine that promise to their sons?
The argument that there aren’t enough women with appropriate professional backgrounds doesn’t wash any more. Science, academia and the professions now have many women in their 50s, and not a few in their 60s, who have the qualities Bracks said he was looking for: independence of mind, an ability to relate to the broader community in a non-partisan way, and humility.
In New Zealand, the Prime Minister (Helen Clark), the Governor-General (Silvia Cartwright) and the head of the largest company (Theresa Gattung, Telecom) are all women.
Cartwright once said she thought intelligent women wanted three things in life – marriage, children and career – but that most could have only two of the three. This, of course, is because behind almost every great career man with a family is a woman who runs it for him. The great career woman is less likely to find a partner whose own sense of purpose is linked to supporting her.
Public appointments of men with ethnic backgrounds are not new. What would break the mould is a qualified woman who was also a single mother, or who had spent years away from a high-powered career to raise her children, or who even – mercy on us all – never married at all. Maybe she could be a woman who also represents multiculturalism or indigenous Australians.
Because women will never “have what it takes” as long as part of what it “takes” is a wife.

First published in The Age.

RU Serious?

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ABORTION
As politicians argue about whether the abortion pill should be available, women in country Victoria can’t get legal surgical abortions now. Karen Kissane investigates the cloak of disapproval in the bush.
OUTSIDE the big city it’s another country, and they do things differently there. “Anne” knew this. She expected that small-town life would be a big change when she moved to Castlemaine. But she did not realise quite how much of what she took for granted in Melbourne would be left behind.
Two years ago, she had an accidental pregnancy. Her contraception had failed. She was in her early twenties and felt that neither she nor her relationship were prepared for parenthood. She turned to the nearest big town, Bendigo, to seek an abortion. She called the rooms of a private gynaecologist and was told that termination would not be possible anywhere in Bendigo and that she would have to go to Melbourne. “I was pretty taken aback,” says Anne.
She was even more taken aback when, having organised transport and somewhere to stay, she arrived at a Melbourne abortion clinic on the appointed day to find that she had to negotiate her way past half a dozen protesters waving placards and posters. A man and a woman challenged her with, “Do you realise this is the size of the baby you are killing? How can you do this to your baby?” Says Anne, “It was like being accosted by paparazzi. You have to step aside; you have to walk around them. It’s really awful. And I am certain that this abortion clinic is where a lot of country women end up having to go. You don’t have many options if you don’t know people in the medical industry in Melbourne.”
What happened to Anne is not unusual: if a woman who lives outside Melbourne has an unwanted pregnancy, she must nearly always travel to the capital if she wants to end it. Thirty-six years after a Supreme Court decision opened the way for legal abortions in Victoria, it remains near impossible to get one in country areas except in one or two centres such as Mildura.
The lack of availability of surgical abortions may well have remained hidden had not doctors renewed their calls to legalise the abortion pill mifepristone (also known as RU486), which is banned in Australia. That led Victorian Liberal MP Sharman Stone, the member for Murray, to suggest that RU486 might help rural women. She has threatened to cross the floor on the issue if there is no conscience vote allowed when the Democrats try to change the law later this month. “I feel very concerned about the number of women and girls who have to go to capital cities now,” she said. “It’s a very traumatic, expensive, complex process for them. If you’re only 13 or 14 with no family or community support, you can imagine how traumatic that is.”
But Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott, who has opposed RU486, says there are potential health problems with the drug that mean it will never be “the answer to a country woman’s prayer”.
While opposing sides bat claims about the pill’s safety back and forth, there are broader questions. Given the reluctance of country hospitals and doctors to provide surgical abortions, (in some cases, individual rural doctors and pharmacists have even refused to provide the normal contraceptive pill), what chance is there that they would make mifepristone available even if it were legal?
There are still no abortions in Bendigo, despite the fact that it is a town of just under 100,000 people serving a wider catchment area of 300,000. “The Catholic church looms large on the hill overlooking the city,” says one health worker who has lived there. “It has one of the largest Catholic cathedrals in Australia.” She is one of several people interviewed for this report who claimed that local strongholds of Catholic opposition to abortion have influenced the health policies of state organisations in several rural areas.
Dr Christine Tippett, senior vice-president of the Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, was disbelieving when she first got a message from The Age asking her views on the lack of abortion in the countryside. “I thought, ‘This can’t be right!’ ” But after phoning rural colleagues, she confirmed that there was little access to the service.
She says many country gynaecologists refuse to do the procedure on moral grounds – “A lot of them are practising Catholics” – and that the strong Catholic heritage of cities such as Bendigo and Warrnambool means there is opposition to abortion “within the organisations. I think that does influence it quite significantly”. It is one thing for an individual doctor to decline abortions for personal moral belief; many would accept that as legitimate. Tippett says it is a stance the college respects, and any of its trainees who conscientiously object to abortion are not expected to participate. But some sources have told The Age that Bendigo has specialists who are willing to perform elective abortions but cannot get access to theatres at the publicly funded Bendigo Base Hospital. “If you try and get a theatre (for abortion) you won’t get it except on medical grounds,” says a local health source.
A spokeswoman for Bendigo Hospital confirmed that it does no abortions and said this was simply because “it is not our policy and we have never done them”.
Tippett says, “I think gynaecologists in Bendigo are aware that in fact they are not encouraged to do terminations. It’s something made clear to them.” How? “These things are often very subtle, aren’t they?”
She says the college represents many diverse views and cannot have a stance on the rights and wrongs of abortion itself, although “clearly we believe that women should have access to termination of pregnancy”. Nor can it comment on state hospitals that do not permit the procedure: “We can’t dictate to hospitals what they do. They are autonomous bodies funded by a state department.”
There is a strange kind of silence about the lack of rural abortion. Several women’s organisations and health services are reluctant to speak on the record for fear they could further entrench opposition to it. One woman who worked in Gippsland health services for many years believes that previous waves of anti-abortion demonstrations might have contributed to the current lack of services: “About 10 years ago there were big protests outside hospitals that were doing this kind of work. I think that sort of thing has a greater impact on practitioners in country towns than it would, perhaps, on people in an abortion clinic in Melbourne. I would suggest that that has been part of why they are not done any more.”
Country life is different. It is not just patients who are subject to the conforming pressures of their neighbours’ social monitoring. A health specialist based in Melbourne says the conservatism of rural towns can defeat even the best-intentioned doctor. She tells of a doctor who opened up a bulk-billing practice in a town in the Goulburn Valley. “He started it for the good of the community but he was ostracised by his peers. His capacity to stay and raise his family and live his life there was destroyed. The same sort of shunning can happen over abortion procedures.”
Some doctors argue that the need to go to Melbourne is a blessing in disguise for rural women, who fear that their confidentiality is not safe in areas where everyone knows everyone. Bendigo GP Dr Ray Moore says that, in 27 years of referring women to Melbourne, he has only known one patient to protest over not being able to have an abortion locally. “It’s still a small-town environment and, whilst confidentiality is something that we all uphold, people in small towns know how that environment works, and most people would prefer not to have their termination here.”
Moore believes that for RU486 to become readily available, even if it were legalised, “there would have to be quite a sea change in rural environments”. Doctors would have to be willing to prescribe it, chemists would have to be willing to dispense it, and women would have to be willing for local health workers to know their situation. Others argue that the lack of rural abortion services, both surgical and medical, is a serious problem. “It’s dreadful. If you don’t have much money, it’s often unachievable,” says Deb Parkinson, research worker with North-East Women’s Health. “Often you have to go down to Melbourne the day before so that you can have counselling, so you have accommodation costs. Many women want to take a friend or family member with them. There are transport costs and often about $200 of medical costs that’s not covered by Medicare.”
There is limited access to public hospital beds for abortion even in the city. The associate director of women’s services at the Royal Women’s Hospital, Dr Chris Bayly, says the hospital gets many more requests for abortion as a public patient than it can meet. The hospital does about a sixth of the state’s procedures. Monash Medical Centre is the other large city provider.
According to figures released by the State Health Department under a recent freedom of information request by The Age, Victoria had 19,590 abortions in 2004. Of those, 14,805 were done privately and 4785 were public patients. At one private provider, the Fertility Control Clinic in East Melbourne, between a third and half the procedures are for women from the country, according to the clinic’s psychologist, Dr Susie Allanson.
Angela Taft is the national co-convener of the women’s health special interest group of the Public Health Association of Australia. “Given that we know that the majority of people are in favour of access to termination, (any refusal by country hospitals that have willing doctors) is gatekeeping. It’s disadvantaging rural women based on religious discrimination. We would be keen to have the Health Minister examine any such blocks,” she says.
A spokesman for State Health Minister Bronwyn Pike says she believes that hospital services should be determined on the basis of medical issues and not ideology. He says the minister had been unaware of any problem in Bendigo and would raise the matter with the hospital. She would also ask the Maternity Services Advisory Council to look at the issue of provision of abortion services in the region. Pike supports RU486 being made available “and is concerned that Tony Abbott is blocking it for ideological reasons”.
The drug was banned in the first place in a political trade-off. The Federal Government wanted the support of Tasmanian MP Brian Harradine in 1996 for the partial sale of Telstra. Harradine, a conservative Catholic, extracted a promise to ban RU486 as part of the deal. Unlike all other drugs, which are approved or rejected after medical assessment by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, RU486 can be imported only with the permission of the Federal Health Minister, Tony Abbott. With his own MPs this week threatening to cross the floor on the issue, Prime Minister John Howard said yesterday he is considering allowing a conscience vote on overturning the Harradine amendment.
Tippett is doubtful legalising the drug would make a significant difference because any doctor prescribing it must have surgical back-up. “I don’t believe the availability of mifepristone is necessarily going to make abortion more available . . . You would need practitioners who themselves are prepared to do abortions and a community that supports them.”
She says that otherwise women who had taken the drug could find themselves in an emergency wards in which staff opposed terminations.
But Dr Bayly believes mifepristone might expand the availability of abortion in the country. Emergency hemorrhages would be rare, she says; most women who needed to have the procedure finished surgically would have plenty of time to get to a large centre.
“There are compelling reasons to legalise it: it is a safe, proven method that many women prefer.”
THE LEGAL GREY ZONE
ABORTION and “child destruction” remain in the Victorian Crimes Act 1958, which makes it illegal to “unlawfully administer any poison or unlawfully use any instrument with the intent to procure miscarriage”.
In the case of child destruction, one cannot “unlawfully cause (a) child (capable of being born alive) to die by any wilful act”.
The meaning of “unlawfully” was determined in 1969 by a Victorian Supreme Court judge.
The “Menhennitt rules”, as they are known, say that an abortion is not unlawful if a doctor honestly believes on reasonable grounds that the abortion is necessary to preserve the woman from a serious danger to her life or her physical or mental health.
Doctors have used this interpretation to give women abortions for social and economic reasons on the basis that they might suffer depression or other emotional problems if forced to continue with an unwanted pregnancy.
HOW RU486 WORKS
RU486, or mifepristone, induces miscarriage by blocking the hormone progesterone, which is needed to sustain pregnancy.
It is administered in a clinic. The patient later takes a prostaglandin called misoprostol, which causes contractions in the uterus and helps tissue to pass. The process is like a spontaneous miscarriage and is usually complete within a few hours. There is pain and bleeding for a few days and the patient must return for check ups.
In about one case in 20, the abortion will be incomplete and the woman might need a surgical procedure finish the termination.
A COUNTRY PRACTICE
NORTH-EAST HEALTH (WANGARATTA HOSPITAL) Serves 70,000 people. Rarely does abortions; only two in the last seven years, both involving severe foetal abnormalities. “Neither of the obstetricians here are keen to do them,” says director of nursing Chris Giles. Women go to Albury or make a three-hour trip to Melbourne.
LATROBE REGIONAL HOSPITAL (TRARALGON)
Serves 228,000 people. “We don’t have any doctors who do elective abortions,” says spokeswoman Jenny Ginnane. “It’s up to the visiting medical officers whether they choose to do an operation and currently we don’t have anyone who chooses to do them.” Abortions “in extreme circumstances” do occur but very rarely.
MILDURA BASE HOSPITAL
Serves 57,500 people. Elective abortions are performed at the hospital, says spokeswoman Emma Pepyat. The only limitations are those imposed at doctors’ discretion or by legislation. Mildura Hospital is publicly funded but managed privately by Ramsey Health.
BENDIGO HEALTH
Serves 300,000 people. “We don’t do them at all,” says spokeswoman Bronwyn Wheatley. “It’s not our policy to do them. The reason we don’t do them is because we have never done them.”
BALLARAT BASE HOSPITAL
Serves 200,000 people. Did not return calls.

First published in The Age.

Birth mother

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Sheila Kitzinger has spent decades pushing natural birth. But the scalpels are still out, writes Karen Kissane.

A woman at Sydney Airport heard that Sheila Kitzinger, the high priestess of the natural childbirth movement, was expected to arrive at any moment. “I know her books,” the woman said. “Tell her she’s a liar. She says you can push them out so easy; it’s not like that at all.”

What does Kitzinger say to women who are wheeled out of the labour ward wanting to burn her book – or her?
“They’ve got to be angry with somebody and I suppose I’m as good a person as anyone because I can take it,” she says, with unruffled British calm.

“I do a lot of work with women who’ve had distressing experiences in childbirth and they feel they’ve been cheated, and that it was so awful that it must be the women who write books about childbirth who cheated them. But of course it isn’t, because we know that birth can be beautiful and exultant.”

Kitzinger is credited with having done more than any other activist to change the way hospitals treat women in labour. She has written more than 20 books on birth and female sexuality including Pregnancy and Childbirth, which has become the pregnant woman’s bible since its publication in 1980.

She is in Australia for a conference of the National Association of Childbirth Educators in Sydney this weekend and to speak at the Australian Breastfeeding Association in Melbourne next week.

Her message has never changed. It is simple but, for the medical profession, confronting. She says women should resist medical intervention during birth unless it is truly necessary. She accuses technology-focused hospital systems of disrupting women’s emotional and physical flow in childbirth, which she sees as a psychosexual process akin to lovemaking in its natural rhythms and its need to unfold spontaneously.

She warns that one medical intervention leads to another; a mother who is induced, for example, is more likely to need pain relief and therefore more likely to be unable to push out the baby without forceps or a caesarean. She says that mothers angry about the natural childbirth ethos “tend to say, `Thank God I was in hospital, and thank God I had my labour induced and thank God I had my uterus stimulated and had an epidural because look at all the other things that went wrong.’ And, of course, they went wrong because one thing led to another”.

Kitzinger, 74, is often described as grandmotherly. She wears her hair up in a soft bun, has a face that creases into myriad kind wrinkles when she smiles and is warm and charming to interview.

But there is matriarchal steel beneath the soft demeanour. She never raises her voice but she rarely concedes a point. Doesn’t the fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, which repairs the torn insides of African women left incontinent by obstructed labours, suggest that non-intervention in childbirth is catastrophic for some women?

“It’s not just a question of looking at non-intervention,” she says briskly. “It’s a question of looking at the conduct of the whole second stage of labour. Throughout that part of the world there is tremendous emphasis on `Push push push, come on try harder, you can do better than that, mother!’ ”
But she agrees that women in the Third World have too few caesareans and those in the First World have too many.

Kitzinger has undoubtedly been a major influence on mothers and midwives for several decades. Most big Australian hospitals now offer “birth centres” in which midwives try to support natural childbirth.

Partners or friends are allowed to stay with a labouring woman, and it is not uncommon for women to arrive at hospital with “birth plans” detailing their preferences for treatment during labour.

But there is also evidence of ways in which the movement is failing to get its message across. Caesarean rates in much of the Western world have risen steadily and, in Australia, one in four babies born this year will arrive via caesarean section.

In 1991 Australian caesarean rates were 15.7 per cent for public patients and 21.8 per cent for private. The latest figures, for 1999, showed that 19 per cent of public patients, and 30 per cent of private patients, had caesareans. In some private hospitals – the kind nurses nickname “caesars palaces” – the rate is well over 50 per cent.

“I don’t know how they can justify that,” Kitzinger says tartly. “(It’s about) fee for service, more money for obstetricians and anaesthetists.” She says the World Health Organisation suggests a justifiable rate is 12 per cent.

But what of doctors’ claims that educated private patients pressure them for caesareans: for convenience, or supposed safety, to keep their vaginas “honeymoon tight” or, as some critics put it, “because they’re too posh to push”? What if the increasing rates are partly about a distortion of Kitzinger’s long-held goal: women exercising their freedom to choose the birth they want?

The debate has been too value-free, she says. “We have been talking about choice in childbirth as if we are talking about breakfast cereals on a supermarket shelf; as if each choice was equally valid and free.

“I think this is cheating women and misleading women, and I think an analysis of choice needs to be made.

“The medical system . . . is advertising caesarean sections as the safest option for the baby, and any woman that isn’t being selfish is supposed to choose it because it’s healthier for the baby. And there’s absolutely no evidence that this is the case.”
In fact, she says, babies born by caesarean are more likely to have breathing difficulties, possibly because they have not been stimulated enough by the hard contractions of the birth canal.

She is dismissive of claims that doctors operate because they fear litigation: “Of course it’s an element but what are they saying? `These women are getting uppity? These women are suing us? If they didn’t do that, everything would be all right?’ It’s somehow blaming women.”

Kitzinger’s next book, due out in May, is an expanded edition of Pregnancy and Childbirth, with more information about studies of the consequences of interventions. “There are all sorts of research findings to consider that are evidence-based, and I would ask women to look at them,” she says

Is she dismayed by the fact that so many smart, sassy women don’t? Take American feminist Naomi Wolf. She was shocked by her experience of a bad birth in an American hospital. Nothing happened the way Wolf thought it would. She was put on a drip to speed up her labour; staff watched the foetal monitor rather than her; they terrified her with threats of surgery and her labour stopped.

She finished up lying naked and cold on an operating table, watching the reflection of her emergency caesarean in glass doors opposite as people worked up to their elbows in her body, “a cauldron of blood”.

Wolf later told an interviewer, “I feel absolutely staggered by what I discovered after giving birth. Birth today is like agribusiness. It’s like a chicken plant; they go in, they go out.”

If anyone should have read up beforehand on the politics of childbirth, it was Wolf. What does this say about the childbirth movement’s failure to get its message across? And how does Kitzinger feel about younger feminists discovering, as if for the first time, the need for a crusade when Kitzinger has been waging it for decades?
Kitzinger says Wolf asked for support with her book on motherhood. “I found it awkward at first because I didn’t want to attack Naomi,” she says of a meeting they had over the issue. “It was a real experience for her, and a very painful one. And I wanted to take her in my arms and say, `Good for you. You’ve done something with this awful experience. But I don’t agree with what you’re saying.’
“I think her whole interpretation of it was just looking at the facade. She thought women were being misled about how awful birth was.” Kitzinger believes Wolf had post-traumatic stress disorder. Kitzinger is speaking on distress after childbirth at the Sydney conference tomorrow. She now spends much of her working life with such women, through a birth crisis helpline she has set up in Britain. “I don’t tell them anything; I listen to them. They often say they felt raped, or they look at what was done to them and say they were treated like meat on a table.”

She says that medicating such women with anti-depressants only makes them worse. “With depression, you wake in the morning feeling grim, unable to face the day. When you’re suffering post-traumatic stress, you’re in a state of permanent alarm; you have panic attacks, you might not be able to walk past the hospital, you can’t bear to see anything about birth on television. And flashbacks are a central part of it. That’s different from depression.”

Kitzinger is a social anthropologist who began studying birth in different cultures because the male academics at Oxford ignored women’s lives – “and Margaret Mead (the pioneering US anthropologist) encouraged me”.

She has five daughters and wrote part of her first childbirth book on a notepad that rested on the back of her baby, Polly, as she lay on her lap being burped.

Three of her five daughters are lesbians, which Kitzinger says suggests she has done something right as a mother, “that three women in the family could make such a powerful decision in their lives”. Previously she has suggested that the girls grew up comfortable in a women’s world because they were thrown back on each other as she and her husband Uwe, now a research fellow at Harvard, were so busy with their work. She and her husband are about to take a holiday in Bali to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

The marriage has been successful partly because they have usually lived on different continents, she says, smiling. “And when he is at home he’s a very keen sailor, so he’s out in his boat, and I don’t like housekeeping on a boat. And anyway I don’t like having a skipper in charge of my life. So I tend not to go on the boat.”

Looking back on her life’s work, she believes she can point to progress, but it is uneven, she says. “Midwives in Britain are so much more aware; I can’t handle the number of hospitals who want to send midwives to my workshops. And we still have home births in Britain. In the Bath area, it’s 16 per cent home birth and in part of Devon we’ve got 22 per cent home births.”

And it sounds as if British activists have been more successful than Australian ones in harnessing political will for the cause.

“Another thing we have is an inter-party parliamentary committee (that advises the government on childbirth issues). We are giving an award to the unit in Britain which has increased its home birth rate most in the last two years. And we’re asking units to see how well they can do in promoting normal birth (in hospital).”

Her eyes light up with wicked delight that the system will be subverted to the goals of its critics. “The award will be presented by the Minister of Health. It’s official.” And she laughs.

Sheila Kitzinger will speak informally on birth and breastfeeding at Gasworks Park in Port Melbourne on Wednesday at 11am. Bookings 9555 5135.

Karen Kissane is an Age senior writer.

Delivering the facts

“Normal” birth is far from the norm.

Only a minority of first-time mothers have no intervention, according to a study of 171,000 low-risk women by the University of Technology Sydney.

Sally Tracy, researcher at the Centre for Family Health and Midwifery at UTS, said: “Less than one quarter of public, first-time mothers and one-fifth of private patients give birth without intervention.” The study found that labour was induced or sped up for one in three public patients and half of private patients, while between a quarter (public) and a half (private) of women used spinal anaesthesia. One in three public patients and half of all private patients received an episiotomy (a cut to the vagina).

Dr James King, obstetric epidemiologist with the Royal Women’s Hospital, says Australia’s caesarean rate would now be about 25 per cent, and women have more depression and more problems adjusting to motherhood after caesareans. But he says there are fewer damaged babies than 30 years ago, because doctors no longer allow long and arduous labours.

First published in The Age.

Meet Virginia, the woman some love to loathe

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A newsreader’s mid-life craving for motherhood has struck a raw nerve. Karen Kissane reports.

When Virginia Haussegger wrote about her grief at having missed out on motherhood in her race to a career, she did not expect a flood of responses.

Strangers in the street have said they felt sad for her (“Tears welled up in my eyes and I had to walk away”). She has had more than 70 letters and e-mails, a mixture of the savage and the sympathetic (“Even a few saying I’m praying for you”).

Many confirmed that she was not alone. “I had one woman who I’d worked with over 10 years ago almost in tears over the phone, saying I had no idea how much her story mirrored mine.”

Haussegger has also heard from parents with daughters her age who worry that they might never be grandparents because their daughters see motherhood as a second-rate option.

Haussegger, an ABC news presenter in Canberra, has been a TV journalist for 15 years. Two weeks ago she ignited a furore with an article in the opinion pages of The Age that blamed her “feminist foremothers” for the fact that she was childless as she was pushing 40.

Haussegger wrote that the women who had inspired her to believe that a career would be her greatest fulfilment in life had not warned her about her biological clock – the way her fertility would fade after 35 – because “they were all knocked up” by
their 20s.

The result, wrote Haussegger, is that women like herself who finally realise they do want children find that their chances of conceiving are slim.

Haussegger says she and her partner are reluctant to try IVF because the success rate is low. “As my brother said, `If you were a horse, Virginia, would you put money on you? Nah’.”

The response in articles and letters to The Age has been mixed. “They say the first sign of maturity is when you stop blaming everything on your parents. Grow up,” advised one reader tartly. “As for the biological clock – that didn’t suddenly drop out of the sky in 2002.”

Others pointed out that feminists have always written and talked about motherhood, which was devalued long before the women’s revolution. Still others have written Haussegger off as another gen-X whinger given the world on a platter but still bleating about the menu.

Haussegger herself has been fending off overtures from family-values conservatives who assumed she was a voice in their camp. “One radio commentator said I was a victim of Nazi feminism,” she said.

“I said no, I don’t feel I’m a victim. Certainly I’ve been a beneficiary of feminism. The point I was making about women in my generation is that somewhere along the line we have picked up a message that was devaluing of motherhood.”

She says she is now finding baby “hunger” intensely painful, “to the point where I find it very hard to look at babies. I find it very hard to look at happy family situations. I find I often have to turn away”.

Haussegger is shocked by how primal the longing is, so fundamental that it is beyond rationality. “It goes against everything I intellectually believed. I thought (deciding on motherhood) was about choice, but what I have found is that it chooses you.”

Her ache has not been eased by the sometimes bitter responses to her article about how motherhood corrals women. One woman wrote to The Age that motherhood had left her, at close to 50, with no job, no degree and no superannuation.

Another wrote that there were days she wished she had never had her children: “Can children redeem life’s pointlessness? If I can just get a leg up on this pile of laundry, nappies and paracetamol bottles to contemplate that metaphysical horizon, I’ll get back to you.”

Haussegger says she knows how hard it is to raise small children because she has watched sisters and friends do it. But she believes the fact that women still talk this way about motherhood says something about how society treats mothers. “Women have to make choices that are dramatically life-altering,” she says.

“By and large (parenthood) only causes ripples in men’s lives. It causes tidal waves in women’s careers . . . The sheer truth of gender is that women are forced into `either-or’ choices in a way men are not.”
Haussegger says that in her youth she did not absorb information about the biological clock because she was convinced she would never want children. Some of this resistance, she acknowledges, was because she was determined her life would be different to that of her mother. Her grandfather would not let her mother have a career, and she went on to raise six children.

Later, Haussegger learnt that television current affairs had little room for mothers. At one job interview, the prospective boss told her, “You employ all these women and before you know it they want to go off and have babies.” She says that as a result of her article, one family of five sisters, aged 22 to 32, is discussing how they must plan to fit children into their lives.

DEAR VIRGINIA …

Some of the e-mails sent to Virginia Haussegger after her article in The Age.

I just wanted to say how much I appreciated the piece and how I heard what you were saying – I heard some of the pain and I thought it would be dreadful to write such a thing and not at least have that acknowledged. These are painful discoveries.

My heart went out to you because you are exactly where I was a little over 11 years ago. Now 11 years later, my daughter playing in the background as I type this, the nameless emptiness has disappeared.

You are in my prayers for a little one.

What a perverse perspective, and how very petulant of you. I would expect as much from my 15-year-old.

Virginia, though the past cannot be undone I believe the future is full of possibility and hope.

Stop acting like a spoiled, immature brat and start aiming your darts where they belong. Show a bit of backbone.

First published in The Age.

The nuns’ story

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COVER STORY

Karen Kissane

Carol Hogan found the hardest thing about being a nun was the absence of beauty. She loved beautiful things – her degree had been in fine arts – but her spartan convent had nothing as worldly as paintings or flowers and few books. Hogan herself was no picture, in a shapeless black dress with her hair pulled back under a frilled mobcap. Her mother was appalled the first time she saw her this way. “Darling, you do look dreadful!” she cried, and burst into tears.It was 1953. Hogan, then 22, had been on a predictable path until that point, her twin goals being an education and a husband (“preferably a doctor!”). She was far from shy or retiring. “When we were at uni we didn’t count our marks. We counted our parties and boyfriends; I went to seven balls with seven different guys in seven different weeks.”

But then she realised that she felt the mysterious pull she defines only as “the call of God”. She decided not just to become a nun, but to withdraw from the world by entering the kind of order with the most severe regimen: an enclosed convent.

For the next 12 years, her every moment was dictated by the mediaeval rhythms of monastic life. She spent six hours a day in the convent chapel, praying and singing hymns and psalms in Latin. Much of the rest of the time she baked altar breads. She never went out except to the dentist.

She did not speak except for one hour in the evening, and even then: “We were not allowed to talk about ourselves; oh, my Lord, no. No intimacy at all, except with Jesus. At one stage we had chooks, and I think we had cats. I remember thinking to myself, ‘If we don’t stop talking about the chooks and the cats I’ll scream’.”

Life was so ordered that the search for sins to confess became the week’s creative challenge. In desperation, she laughs, “One of our sisters used to confess ‘vain and idle and useless thoughts’.”

Hogan is still a nun, but today she lives by herself, wears civvies, preaches feminism and is the chaplain for international students at Melbourne University. She has prepared a stream of students for baptism in the Catholic Church; she has also counselled several on how to accept their homosexuality.

To outsiders, says Perth theologian Jan Gray, it looks like nuns have bungee-jumped from mediaevalism into modernity. Has it been a good thing? “Yes!” says Hogan. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

The speed of the revolution in their lives, which saw seven centuries of tradition overturned in less than a generation, far outstrips the rapid workplace change the rest of the community finds so dizzying. But the world continues to change faster than they do and the social and theological changes that led to the sisters’ revolution also mitigate against their continuance.

These include the understanding that exploration rather than denial of the self is important for spiritual growth; the resistance to institutional authority calling the shots or mediating one’s relationships, including the relationship with God; and the growing independence and life choices of First World women.

Orders of nuns in Australia are in a decline that for many, verges on extinction.

This has implications for the religious, cultural and social mores of the 27 per cent of Australians who call themselves Catholic. It has implications for the huge network of schools and hospitals that nuns set up across the nation, which were formerly staffed and managed largely with their free labor.

And it has ramifications for nuns themselves. What is it like for those who continued as “brides of Christ” even after the turmoil of the 1960s that caused so many to leave?
What do they make of their legacy and the parts of it – involvement with stolen children, abuse of orphans in institutions – that do not survive moral scrutiny today? And has their devotion to a religious ideal and their celibacy been made less meaningful by the fact that either God has stopped calling, or young women have stopped answering?

The peak year for Australian nuns was 1966, when 14,620 women were in convents. By 1996, the figure had halved to 7360 and most of those were elderly. Today, the nation’s 120 or so female orders have only about 60 novices training for a life of poverty, chastity and obedience, according to Sister Mary Cresp, of the Australian Council of Leaders of Religious Institutes.

Hogan’s order, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, has no novices, and only one nun is under 65. They had an applicant several years ago, but decided that in all conscience they had to turn her away. They sold their altar-bread business to Cistercian monks and used the money from the sale of their large convent to provide for themselves in old age. “There’s no point in asking someone to commit their life now,” says Hogan. “I even worry about (the youngest sister, who is 53); I said to her ‘What are you going to do?’”

A common view of women who entered convents was that they were running away from the world. In fact, for many, the opposite was true; becoming a nun opened them up to adventure in a way that would not otherwise have been possible given the restrictions on women’s lives in earlier times. Take the Sisters of St John of God; founded originally to help with poverty during the Irish potato famine, they came to Australia from Ireland in 1895 and worked in hessian tents nursing miners at Kalgoorlie.

CHRISSIE CONNOLLY grew up as the eldest of eight children in a farming family in the west of Ireland. Like Hogan, she describes herself as a party girl when young. “But in the back of my mind I was thinking, `What is life all about? Is this how I’m going to spend my life – having a good time, enjoying myself?”‘

In 1946, aged 17, she joined a St John of God nursing convent and became Sister Teresina. Four of her sisters later followed her into the convent and out to Australia.

She arrived in Western Australia knowing it would be hard. “In those days in Subiaco we had … no lay people; it was all sisters working in the hospital. You were going all day long, run, run, run, run. We never knew what it was to have a day off; we worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week. We got a holiday once a year for two weeks. We had to study as well as work; you’d come off duty in a broken shift, you’d have your dinner, have prayers then go back to the study hall and back down to duty at 5 o’clock.

“But we were looking after people and people were very grateful, and we were bonded together. We’d have our fun in between times, sorting the laundry and bringing patients to the theatre and back again.”

Back then, religion was a deeply felt part of people’s lives in Ireland in a way that seems unimaginable now, she says.

Perhaps also behind her decision was the knowledge that her mother had always wanted to be a nun. Connolly knows she took the adventurer’s course; she has travelled and studied in Asia and America and spent 10 years as chief executive officer of 500 staff at a large private hospital in Ballarat. In her day, becoming a nun “laid the world at your feet. They gave you no choice (about where you would go), but you knew you were going to be out in it”.

“When I go back to Ireland and see the girls that were my friends when I was going to school – there’s a friend up the road, she’s very happily married and she has about 10 or 11 children and she’s never moved away from there.”
Madeline Duckett joined the Sisters of Mercy in 1965. She used to sing Beatles’ songs in her head while hanging out the washing during silence and played tennis in ankle-length habits and starched veils. Duckett joined straight from a Mercy boarding school; convent life was not so different, she says dryly.

Her spontaneity “went underground” for some time after she entered. Like Maria in the The Sound of Music, “I was too scared to be spontaneous because I just seemed to always get into trouble when I did. I kissed the ground any number of times. Any infringement of (the order’s) Rule you were supposed to confess. Breaking the silence was one of the major ones”.

Duckett and her fellow novices did dress as brides and were bussed en masse to St Patrick’s cathedral in the city, to the amazed gaze of onlookers. Of more concern to Duckett was what happened after the bridal gown was exchanged for the habit, part-way through the ceremony. “In the habit we did the prostration (lying flat upon the ground to signify surrender to God). So we had to practise for nights beforehand so that it wasn’t bottoms up when you went down or got up.”

That was the world Duckett joined, but it was not to survive the tsunami that followed Vatican II (1962-1965), Pope John XXIII’s push to modernise the church. For Duckett, an immediate result was an eye-opening year of study of the new theology. “That was the most mind-blowing experience. None of us had studied moral theology as such; we’d simply been told what was right and what was wrong. And now we learned about some of the ways you come to decision-making and that for the law to be the law it has to fulfil certain criteria. It was very, very freeing.”

But after all this opening up came a sudden closing down. In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, his encyclical banning artificial contraception. Suddenly many priests and nuns were openly criticising church teaching and leaving.

In Hogan’s order, half the nuns left within 12 months in 1968-69. “That really shook me up because my best friend in the order left. And she said, `we’re not women of charity, maturity and prayer; it’s just not working here, this thing’. I thought, `you’re right’. What was going wrong in one sense was the (lack of) maturity. You just couldn’t grow and relate.”

Hogan now believes the 12 years she spent locked away from the world were dehumanising. “When I walked in the door of the convent and became Sister Mary Frances, `Carol’ died,” she says. “Total abnegation of the self was the centre of our spirituality. It required us to be like a candle that burnt before the Blessed Sacrament and left no trace.

“I think the structure (of that enclosed order) just dehumanised people. It took away intimacy; it took away development; it took away the possibility of being an independent thinker … I think perhaps one of the reasons I look younger than I am is because there was this arrested development for 12 years.”

Connolly was disturbed by the number of nuns leaving her order, but never had doubts herself. She remembers endless debate about every little aspect of change: what length should skirts be, how much hair should show? One of her four sisters left and later married. Connolly was sympathetic to her unhappiness and to her decision. “We just accepted it. Whatever was best for her.”

While many nuns agonised over the changes, Duckett says that lay people also resisted nuns abandoning their habits and their convents. “It’s like you can’t be human and you can’t be imperfect because you have to hold on to the sense of the holy for the human race. Part of the whole transition is (that we are) no longer being set apart or stood on a pedestal so that the rest of humankind can get on with their lives (and ignore spiritual issues).”

There has always been a mystique about nuns as the brides of Christ, the eternal virgins who devote themselves to the sacred. The image is of piety and selflessness and of life on a higher plane than the rest of the mortal world. Yet most nuns also engaged intensely with the physical world through work such as nursing, teaching or welfare. In Hollywood scripts, the mystique was often reduced to the cliche of tension between the love of God and the love of a good man (such as Peter Finch, in Audrey Hepburn’s portrayal of The Nun’s Story).

The reality is that the life of celibacy and devotion has always worked for some and embittered or exploited others. Says one Catholic observer, who did not wish to be named: “The `metaphorical marriage’ stuff sexualises their relationship with God, in a way; they use the language of love much like the mystics do. There is a long tradition of that in the church. But what it does to the ordinary person who isn’t a great mystical poet, trying to live their lives out in that language, I don’t know.”

Gray, a theology lecturer at Western Australia’s Notre Dame University, sharply dislikes the whole concept. In the early 1990s, she interviewed 80 nuns, aged from 26 to 83, for her book, Neither Escaping nor Exploiting Sex: Women’s Celibacy. “Most of them found (the bride of Christ image) intolerable or just unhelpful,” she says. Gray says her life as a nun is “a quest for the ultimate means of union with what’s good and what’s beautiful and what’s wonderful about being human … (But) I don’t want to be part of a harem, even God’s harem.”

Many nuns talk about celibacy as something that allows them to share themselves with everyone rather than just one person. Gray calls that “the prostitution interpretation – `I am available, I can move around, people can do with me what they want”‘.

“I think it’s dangerous in that it has led to abuse (of their goodwill). A lot of women who are religious have gone into situations and stayed in situations they should never have stayed in because of this notion that they have to be available. A lot of women have been kept working in institutions in the church where they have been treated like dross, given no thanks and just been used as pieces that could be moved around. The old religious life demanded that, that you have no attachment to any person or any place.”

For her research, Gray interviewed only nuns whom she felt coped well with their sexuality. “They were people who hadn’t been twisted by their celibacy,” she says. “They weren’t depressive and they weren’t asexual.” Because of this focus her sample was not random or necessarily representative, so its findings cannot be generalised to all nuns.

But Gray found that up to 25 of those interviewed “hinted at, if not explicitly described, significant sexual encounters” since taking their vows, although not all of these had been full sexual encounters. They had sought forgiveness and saw them as growth experiences. “Most have been able to incorporate any deviations from their vow as an important part of learning who they are.”

All nuns who stay nuns sacrifice partnerships and children. Duckett says leaving her first boyfriend behind when she entered was painful, but she has not missed children. While Hogan says: “People would say I’m not fulfilled because I haven’t got a child, but I don’t feel that way. I’ve got three little children I call my adopted grandchildren whom I’m very close to.”

Connolly admits to moments of regret at not having her own home and family.

“Oh Lord, yes. There’s no human being in any position, any vocation, who doesn’t have some regret, especially when they come to their 40s. There are pluses and minuses, though.

“This might sound selfish, but I can go to bed at night-time not worrying about where my kids are or what they might be doing.”

Men have never been an issue for her, although occasionally a surgeon, unaware that she was a nun, would try to ask her out. “We used to have great fun because all the staff knew, but some of the doctors didn’t know.” But forget Audrey Hepburn and the tragic romance of renunciation; passes were more likely to be dealt with summarily. One nun was washing a patient who tried to kiss her. “She put the soap in his mouth,” laughs Connolly.

That sturdy blend of idealism and pragmatism has left a large legacy in Australia. Many of the Catholic system’s 1700 schools were founded and run by nuns, as was much of its health system (at present 20 public hospitals, including St Vincent’s and the Mercy Hospital for Women in Melbourne, as well as 8300 beds in other kinds of hospitals and 16,500 aged-care beds).

But just as nuns are struggling with the future – lay people must be organised to run all this now, and big old convents must be sold or turned over to other uses – the past has come back to haunt them. There have been reports of physical and emotional abuse, such as beatings and cold baths, in orphanages and children’s homes in the 1950s and 1960s and at least one order has formally apologised for having accepted stolen Aboriginal children into care.

“In hindsight we should have questioned what, as a church, we were asked to do for the Government,” a leader of the Order of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart said in 1999.

Connolly and Duckett find it painful that such news has overshadowed so much good work. And Gray points out that there are different social mores now about the use of violence in education and family life and that nuns in earlier times often worked under appalling circumstances.

One nun told a 1998 inquiry into government and church welfare institutions of her time in a notorious orphanage in Queensland. “All those babies. They’d always be putting their arms up, and you didn’t have time to give them any individual love.” That inquiry found abuse “was allowed to happen” in both church and government institutions because of scant resources, a lack of support from society, overcrowding, isolation and the powerlessness of institutional inmates.

ONE Catholic observer says nuns are blamed for work that the church insisted the orders take on, such as dealing with the consequences of the forced migration of children from England after the war. “Many of these kids weren’t even toilet trained; they were seven or eight and were basically street kids abandoned or lost during the Blitz. There were such numbers, and such a degree of need, and of course these women weren’t trained. Most of the people in orphanages were neither teachers nor nurses. The whole story is a tragedy.”

There is also a less tangible legacy. Nuns ran large institutions and took on powerful roles in an era where women were largely invisible in public life; Catholic convent girls grew up seeing that women could work and lead. The bright ones took it as their ticket to life.

Through their teaching, nuns shaped Australian Catholicism and tried to inject generations of children with a sense of social justice. Public figures such as Labor Senator Rosemary Crowley and ex-Senator Susan Ryan have talked about the effect of nuns on their world views, as has that ferocious feminist and refugee from Catholicism, Germaine Greer.

Crowley remembers the nuns at her old convent school being divided between the sadistic and the wonderful. She has no doubt about their effect on her attitudes. Crowley, now with the Labor Party, still recalls learning in primary school about Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, which promoted the rights of workers to unionise and expect a fair wage.

And she remembers the nun who became her sports mistress. Upon learning that Crowley’s basketball team had never won a match, she asked crisply: “Didn’t we know it was to the greater glory of God to develop all of our talents?” (The following year they were undefeated champions.)

Connolly’s last job was as “mission sister” for St John of God’s Perth hospital, training 400 lay staff in the values, such as compassion and duty of care, that the nuns want to continue after they hand over the reins.

Connolly is philosophical about the collapse in vocations. She sees orders of nuns as having developed largely in response to social needs that are now being filled in other ways. “I don’t think that really matters because the religious orders were founded, a lot of them, for education and health. And look at the fine job the lay people are doing now. There will always be religious sisters, I believe, but in different numbers; smaller numbers.”

Duckett believes many orders are in a process of transformation and rejuvenation rather than utter decline. “It’s the cocoon thing. Maybe we won’t have the numbers in the same way in the future, but something else is happening that’s beyond what we can put words on at the moment. We’re moving into a new, radical way of being.”

Hogan went through a period of intense rage and review about her life when she first discovered feminism and thought through its implications for the position of women in the church. “I thought that for 2000 years women had been deceived and I had too.”

Now, she says, she knows that Jesus was a feminist – “Who was the first evangelist? Who got the news (of the resurrection) first? Mary Magdalen. Do we ever hear that in church?” And in her teaching and counselling she routinely employs what some feminist scholars call the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: “I call it smelling a dead rat – and holding it up!”

Having come to terms with all this, the realisation that her order was facing sunset “was very, very upsetting for me for a while. I thought, `I’ve given the best years of my life to something that just seems to be a failure”‘.

“The whole tribal thing of church has gone; it was the focal point, it was the St Patrick’s day march and the St Patrick’s night concert, it was the parish school, it was the local thing you walked to. Now everything’s changed and everything’s up for grabs in the post-modern world. I don’t quite know where the church will go, because it hasn’t even gotten into modernism, I don’t think, much less post-modernism.”

But she loves her work at the university and knows she continues to make a difference to people’s lives. “I have chosen to stay in my religious community because it has given me my vision and been the framework of my life; it’s been the sea in which I’ve swum. It has enabled me to live my dream.”

The nuns who remain are, as ever, at the forefront of social need; it was the Sisters of Charity in Sydney who tried to set up Australia’s first injecting room. But, with female ordination not even a blip on the Vatican’s radar, it is possible that the falling away of nuns will further weaken the limited power of women in the institutional church. Connolly acknowledges that all but one of the CEO positions for St John of God hospitals handed over to lay people in the past 15 years went to men.

DUCKETT is not convinced that it matters, given the declining relevance of institutional religion to many people’s lives. Formerly a secondary teacher and tertiary lecturer, she has also been on the board of the Jesuit magazine of public affairs, Eureka Street. Now she works at a small spirituality centre for women that uses myth, psychology and a broad sense of spirituality rather than dogma to help people explore their lives.

Nuns are “definitely beyond the cloister”, she says, but now they need “to rediscover the contemplative heart that exists at the centre of all the action.

“Younger people are also looking for meditation or that coming to a quiet place within themselves; it’s a real spiritual search today, but it’s not necessarily a religious one … I think God and the whole thing is beyond religion. Religions are ways of coming into that.”
People now want smaller groups and more personal ministry. “I think we’ve done the big churches and cathedrals. There are historical moments where that’s the way of expressing it and then there’s a need for it desperately to be balanced out by a more intimate kind of setting where people cannot just hear the word, but actually grapple with it and see where it integrates into their own lives.”

Duckett and the others interviewed here have never wanted to be priests and have no strong feelings about female ordination. She says: “If we look back on our lives, we can see a pattern, and within that pattern is the gift we each have to offer to the world around us.

“We are all ordained by life to do what it is our gift to do. It’s another kind of ordination – call it primordial – than just being ordained by oil. And any priest worth his salt is not just ordained once; he is ordained again and again through the lives he comes in contact with and what these people give to him.” Or to her.

First published in The Age.

Love, marriage and housework: navigating the minefield

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PROFESSOR Ken Dempsey recalls interviewing married couples about how they shared the domestic load. One husband said with pride: “I always do the Sunday night dinner.” Says Dempsey, “When we came to interview the wife, she just laughed and said, `On the way home from golf, he buys a pizza’.”

This couple is not necessarily destined for the Family Court, although Dempsey points out that American research found that the more housework a man did, the less often his wife thought of divorce.

But he believes women’s resentment about housework is a key barometer of a marriage’s health, and his latest research suggests that even women who see themselves as happily married are more dissatisfied with many aspects of their relationships, including the emotional ones, than are men.

It is mainly female unhappiness that fuels divorce, with up to 75per cent of divorces now initiated by women. This makes the issue as much a matter for community inquiry as bedroom argument.

Is it that men are reluctant to give up male privilege? Or is it that women are trying to force female standards of housekeeping and emotional response on their men?
The research by Dempsey, associate professor of sociology at La Trobe University, is published in the latest issue of Family Matters, the journal of the Australian Institute of Family Studies. It confirms earlier findings that the number of women racing to work clutching briefcases still far exceeds the number of men willing to race about the house brandishing dunny brushes.

Some households with working wives continue to run on 1950s norms: “Many men demanded explanations from wives for not having carried out household or personal care tasks for them, such as having a meal ready the moment they walked in the door from work.”
But women’s response to this is complex. How they feel about the division of labor is not determined solely by how the division works, Dempsey says: “When women say the division is fair, what they are really telling you is how they feel about the marriage generally.

“If a husband is great with the children, which is a high priority for the wife, she tends not to mind doing more of the work. There’s almost no chance she will say the division of labor is unfair even if she’s doing 99per cent of it. If he delivers in other ways that are important to her, she will make rationalisations such as, `Oh, I’m better at this than him anyway’.”

Which throws into some gloom Dempsey’s finding that more women than men thought the following the following areas were unfairly divided: housework (71per cent, 10per cent); child care (64per cent, 4per cent); and leisure opportunities (40per cent and
5per cent).

Both men and women believed that men got the better deal from marriage, with many women describing their husbands as being like another child they had to pick up after. It might be this resentment as much as exhaustion that explains the lower libidos of working mothers reported in a different study last week.

Dempsey’s sample of 85 was small, so it was not representative. But Professor Pat Noller, director of the University of Queensland’s Family Centre, says it is a common finding that women have more complaints, and that many of them revolve around men’s distance from housework and child care.

“Men’s lack of involvement is seen as a lack of equality, because even women who are working full-time are still carrying the major burden at home. But the fact that women are more dissatisfied than men doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of women who are satisfied.” The problem is that those who are unhappy often find their husbands don’t take their concerns seriously. “Typically, he doesn’t see her unhappiness and doesn’t hear her saying she wants change. A study done in Sydney interviewed former couples about why they were divorced. The men all said it had surprised them, but the women all said, `We told him and told him and told him’.”

Noller has sympathy for men’s emotional style, which she says defines intimacy as sharing sex and companionship. “The classic story is where the women tells the therapist that her husband never shows her he loves her, and he says, `But I wash her car for her every week’.”

She says this century has seen a “feminisation of love”, with the female preference for emotional openness and deep talk becoming the yardstick for intimacy. “Men don’t always have the emotional awareness to be involved in this. You ask them how they feel and they don’t know. I think there is a certain degree of unfairness (in that expectation).”

On the other hand, a man’s “not hearing” a woman’s distress in a relationship can be a power play. “If you like the way things are but your spouse wants change and that change centres on you, chances are you’re not going to want to talk about it. That maintains the status quo but it leaves the partner helpless and can destroy the relationship, but men seem willing to take that risk.”

Quinn Pawson, director of counselling education with Relationships Australia, says many couples arrive in therapy stuck in a pattern where he withdraws every time she makes a demand.

“I am confident that men do engage emotionally – we see it week in and week out. But the question is how to engage them … (while) not leaving the woman with all the responsibility for maintaining the relationship, including the emotional housework.”

Another researcher has suggested that the unspoken expectations of wifehood influence the labor sharing in a relationship. Janeen Baxter, associate professor of sociology at the University of Queensland, has found that de facto women do 3.5hours less housework a week than wives.

“For women, it is not just the presence of a man that leads to spending more time on housework and having greater responsibility for more of the household tasks, but it is the presence of a husband.

“It appears that the institution of marriage exerts influence on men and women to behave in particular kinds of ways, independently of the social and economic differences between married and cohabiting women, which we know lead to women doing more housework (for example, having young children in the household, women spending less time in paid work and women contributing less of the family income).”

Her study of 179 people in cohabiting relationships and 1231 married people found that even women who lived with their partner before marriage did less housework after marriage than women who had not lived with their partners beforehand.

But marriages overall have changed from the rigid gender role division of work that used to exist. Baxter says American research found that women had cut their housework almost in half since the 1960s (although they now spent more time on shopping and child care), and that men’s share of housework had almost doubled in that time. It’s just that the figure for men started from a low base.

“Basically, what it comes down to is that in another 100 years things might be equal,” she says.
Table: Perceived problems in marriage

Females % Males %

Partner does not provide enough emotional support 53 15

Communication a problem 38 18

Partner makes too many demands 25 15

Insufficient time with partner 51 23

Insufficient interest in physical love making 2 33

Too busy with work or outside interests 71 30

Insufficient initiative in planning joint activities 76 48

One or more facets of the marriage reportedas unfair to respondent 76 15

Making three or more complaints about partner 67 28

Wanting to change one or more aspects of marriage 58 30

Source: The Melbourne marriage survey, 2001

Ending the affair WOMEN AND GAMBLING

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GABRIELA Byrne remembers first hearing about Jie Yu, the mother whose toddler died after being left in a hot car while she played the pokies. Byrne shivered to think that it could have been her. Even more painfully, “When my daughter heard it, she said, `It could have been me.”‘

Byrne used to be a problem gambler. For four years from 1992, nothing else mattered to her when the urge hit. “I picked up my kids one day; my son was at preschool and my daughter in the first year of school. It was a hot day. I had this voice saying to me, `Oh my God, today you can’t gamble,’ because my husband was interstate at work and I had the kids. And then this voice said, `But you need to go, just for five minutes.”‘

Byrne left her children in a car across the road while she played the pokies at a local hotel. She was gone only 20minutes, “probably because I ran out of money.

“But it doesn’t take 20minutes for a child to get out of the car and run across a busy street and get hit. (Another gambler I know) put her son to bed, he was three at the time, and she left him to play the pokies. When she came back at 11.30 or 12 a neighbor had him because he had been running out on the street screaming for his mum.”

News of the death of Jie Yu’s son, toddler Brian Yao, in February last year was splashed across newspapers and television reports. Even Prime Minister John Howard felt impelled to comment on the tragedy. A Supreme Court jury recently convicted Yu of manslaughter and she is awaiting sentence.

But while Brian Yao’s fate seemed extraordinary, the circumstances that led to it are frighteningly common. Researchers have known for years that women who become “hooked” on pokie machines lose their sense of time while they are playing and become oblivious to the demands of normal life.

“I think there’s the potential for it to occur again,” says Julie Nelson, coordinator of Gamblers Help Northern, of Brian’s death. Nelson says more than 50,000Victorian women are now “addicted” to poker machines, and women make up 52per cent of problem gamblers calling Gamblers Help. The Productivity Commission has estimated that 1.1per cent of the population has severe gambling problems, and 2.3per cent have serious problems.

Women who are compulsive pokie players commonly feel the sense of timelessness and tuning out from the normal world that Yu experienced during the two-and-a-half hours that proved fatal for her son, according to Victorian Government research.

Playing for Time, a study by the Department of Human Services into the impacts of gambling on women, says: “Many women have reasons to be attracted to the sense of timelessness, ritual or even distortion of thinking that may arise during long episodes of play. It gives an opportunity for respite, a chance to change `the present’ by replacing it with oblivion.”

Says Nelson: “The product has a very mind-deadening effect; you can switch off totally, you can absorb yourself in the flashing lights and the continuous play.”

The effect is so intense that in problem gamblers it can interfere with otherwise powerful parenting instincts, says Helen Carrig, manager of Relationship Australia’s South Australian problem gambling service. “Women, in particular, are programmed to look after children, so when a mother forgets her child or puts gambling ahead of her priorities in terms of purchasing for the household, that tells you something very serious is going on for her.”

This is not news that all politicians have been keen to disseminate. The Playing for Time report was gagged for two years by the previous Kennett government, according to one of its contributors, Ainslie Hannan. Hannan, who is also chairwoman of Women’s Health in the North, says: “They wouldn’t let the research be launched. It was completed in 1998 but was finally launched in March, 2000, by (Labor minister) Christine Campbell.” Playing for Time found that women gamble for many reasons: loneliness, boredom, anxiety, depression; to escape the relentless demands of family, or because they have financial or relationship problems. Many women who start as “normal” social gamblers develop a problem with it if there is a big change in their lives: if they lose a job or a partner, if children arrive or leave home, or if they experience some kind of tragedy. Psychiatry labels problem gambling an “impulse control disorder”.

There are similarities between men and women with gambling problems but they tend to gamble for different reasons, says Nelson. “We see more men gambling for a competitive edge, whereas women are more likely to be filling in time or to relieve their mind of pressure… using it for emotional pain relief.”

Once an obsession with poker machines develops, it has all the hallmarks of an affair, says Helen Carrig. “They no longer think about their partner; they think about the machine. The effect on relationships is exactly like having an affair: there is deceit, preoccupation, and time and money spent away from the partner and the relationship.”

Byrne, who now counsels problem gamblers, agrees. “I always refer to my time as a poker machine addict as my hot passionate love affair with George (as in Tattersall). It had a lot of characteristics of an affair; the lying, the cheating, the putting of a lot of your needs or wishes on to something or someone else. You lose all sense when you have an affair like this.”

For some women, the relationship with poker machines mirrors the dynamics of an empty or abusive relationship they have in real life, says Jeanette Wentzel, a counsellor with Gamblers Help Eastern. “It’s like another person they have to feed and cosset and give something to, another thing making demands on them.”
Byrne says problem players experience adrenalin highs while playing, followed by depressive lows that send them back to the pokies for another lift. Kate Earle, a psychologist and researcher, says tense people use the pokies as a tranquilliser and flat people use them as a stimulant. “It’s an avoidance mechanism for a lot of people. We can only stand so much reality,” she says.

This leads to the question raised by the gambling industry before a recent Productivity Commission inquiry. Industry representatives argued that problem gambling was the result of people with problems who gambled, rather than something that was caused by gambling.

But the commission concluded that, for many gamblers, pre-existing problems do not appear to trigger problem gambling. It also said scientists have been unable to identify an “addictive personality”. “While some factors may predispose a person to gambling, there is little evidence that problem gamblers share common personality traits, which suggests, in turn, that anyone can, in the right circumstances, become a problem gambler,” it found.

Women seem particularly vulnerable to poker machines. “Men certainly haven’t taken to poker machines in the same way or so rapidly,” says Alun Jackson, professor of social work at Melbourne University.

Research suggests this is partly because there are few recreational spaces in which lonely or isolated women feel as welcome, comfortable, anonymous and safe as they do at pokie venues – and such venues are now common in many suburbs, sharing the same areas women have always frequented for shopping. The gaming venue where Brian Yao died is next to a supermarket.

“Women describe (pokie playing) as one of the few times that people don’t ask them who they are. People who look different aren’t questioned,” Hannan says. “Women also feel that (gambling) is one of the few things in their life that’s just for them, and with that comes a sense of freedom and a sense of false control.”
Sometimes, there are few recreational alternatives. “Take Sunbury,” says Nelson. “It’s a commuter suburb. Partners are at work from 7am and don’t get home till 7pm, and that’s a big day for women to fill. But nearly every community venue, such as the bowling club, has gaming machines. There are five main community meeting places and they all have gaming machines.”

And sometimes women are directly targeted in marketing campaigns. Byrne says: “I know of a pub in Oakleigh that for a while, until we sent a TV crew there, was giving women vouchers for milk and ironing. If you go there and spend $20 you get half an hour’s ironing from somebody. They are especially targeting women and social security (recipients).”

Compulsive gamblers and their counsellors have suggested a range of measures to ease the problem. They include interruptions to play and reminders to players about how much time has passed and how much money has been lost; education programs, including warnings in venues about the possibility of “addiction”; and alternative avenues for play, recreation and creativity for women.

Byrne is now cured of her gambling obsession, to the point where she can go into pokies venues without feeling tempted to play. “It’s like it is with an old passionate love affair. If you run into an old flame, the one you thought you could not live without, you look at him and you think, `God, what on earth did I ever see in him.”‘ Her voice is suddenly joyous: “It’s not me any more. I don’t know what I ever saw in it.”

But she knows that she can never replace what she gambled away. Byrne lost a job and many friendships – and came close to losing her marriage – before she was able to break her addiction. “My daughter and my son are very educated about this; I think we have a very, very close relationship. But I missed four years of their growing up. And that’s something nobody can give you back, even God.”

The personal costs

* Problem gambling causes 29,000 divorces or separations each year.

* One in 10 problem gamblers contemplates suicide and up to 420 suicides a year can be attributed to gambling. Each year 49,000 people suffer depression “often to always” as a result of their problem gambling.

* Problem gamblers each lose an average of $12,000 a year; their total losses are $3 billion a year, making them one-third of the gambling industry’s market.

* For every problem gambler there is, on average, one associated child living in the same household.

* American research has found that children of problem gamblers are more likely to be depressed, drop out of school, smoke, drink, take drugs, and gamble.

Source: Productivity Commission

Also see Gambling with Life and Ending The Affair

First published in The Age.

A gamble with life

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Jie Hua Yu looked blank when the police first asked her about playing the pokies. “Pokies?” she asked, in her uncertain English. “What – what do you mean?” It seemed she had been in Australia long enough to have discovered this consolation of the lonely, but not long enough to know its name in the local lingo.

It was midnight in a homicide squad interview room. Yu hadn’t slept for 36 hours. She was there because her son, 19-month-old Brian Yao, was in intensive care. The previous day, February 16, 2000, she had left him in a hot car for two-and-a-half hours while she played poker machines at a local hotel.

On the police video tape of that interview, played in court last week, Yu looked weary but relaxed. She even laughed a couple of times. It was if she didn’t yet understand the gravity of the situation: her son’s, or her own.

On February 22 last year, five days after that interview, doctors at the Royal Children’s Hospital pronounced Brian dead. Yu was charged with having killed him.

It seemed to be a different woman who appeared on a charge of manslaughter in the Supreme Court dock last week. This woman wept; not noisily, but often. Whenever the events surrounding her child’s death were raised, she cried, her face crumpling like a child’s. Then she would rub at her eyes with a handkerchief, fiercely, as if trying to scour away the grief.

The gambling problem that was to take her son’s life began long before he was born, a psychiatrist told the court. Yu, now 40, arrived in Australia from China in 1988 and married her husband, waiter Benny Yao, the following year. The psychiatrist said her “very significant” gambling difficulties began after she left work to have children.

The eldest of her three children was seven when Brian died; the youngest, three months.

Ruth Vine, deputy chief psychiatrist for the state of Victoria, said: “There was certainly an element of loneliness and lack of socialisation in Mrs Yu’s life, in that she had very little contact with non-Chinese-speaking people, particularly following the birth of her children and her removal from the workforce … the setting in which this initiated.”

The doctor said Yu was an intelligent woman whose problem had reached the point where she was almost constantly preoccupied by the thought of poker machines: “Although she probably only actually attended such venues two or three times a week, nonetheless the thought and the preoccupation, and a sense of anxiety and guilt and apprehension, was with her on a far more frequent basis.”
Dr Vine said problem gambling was classified medically as an impulse-control disorder, such as shoplifting. People suffering from it used gambling “as self-treatment for depression, looking for excitement, to calm down – it has all sorts of different (causes)”.

(For legal reasons, Dr Vine’s evidence was ruled not relevant and was not presented to the jury. The comments reported here relate to a voir dire examination before the judge, the purpose of which was to help determine the legal relevance of her medical evidence as to Yu’s state of mind.)

Dr Vine said Yu’s husband had become concerned about her gambling to the point where he had got rid of her Visa card.

That fateful Wednesday morning, Benny Yao was asleep after having finished work at 2am. Jie Yu got up about seven, fed Brian and his school-aged brother, and pottered about until it was time to drop her older son at school.

Then she returned home to get money for shopping. She entered the house briefly and took $150. When she returned to the car, Brian was asleep. So she decided instead to go to the Ferntree Gully hotel, which has 90 gaming machines.

“I was going to go in there for 20 to 30 minutes,” she told police through an interpreter. “… I thought, `I will just play for a while and if I can win $8 or $10 or something, then I can shop for more things’.”

She parked her red Toyota Camry in an area of the car park that had no shade and wound up the windows so Brian would not be abducted. She left him asleep, in his polycotton pyjamas, strapped into his child harness.

Inside, she “did one round” to see which machine was “good”. “Then I played with one machine for some time and then I didn’t win and then … I go and do the same thing with the other one.” She sometimes looked through a window to check the car, “but I didn’t go into the car to check … I thought that I was lucky and he was still asleep”.

In fact, Brian was developing heatstroke, a condition to which children are far more vulnerable than adults. Children’s bodies are not as effective at regulating their temperature and they have a higher metabolic rate. And small children, as the prosecutor pointed out, cannot remove themselves from safety harnesses or locked cars.

Scientists later determined from tests that if the temperature outside is 24.7, the car’s interior will be 35.1 degrees; and if it is 28.8 outside, the inside can reach 59 degrees. But Yu was inside in air-conditioning, unaware of the rising temperature or even the passage of time. Dr Vine said: “Mrs Yu described a state of mind at that time that is very common in persons who have a preoccupation with gambling in that she was entirely – entirely – focused on the activity at hand … and I think it’s recognised that the (environment) in which many poker machines are kept tends to be one where there is an encouragement for that focus to develop …

“I am not going to say she had an altered state of consciousness, but an extremely focused attention that was only cognisant, really, of the machine in front of her.”
To that extent, the doctor said, she was “unaware of her son or the car or the day”.

Reality returned with the arrival some time after 11.30am of her husband. Hotel staff saw him talking to her angrily in the foyer. A gaming-room attendant, Val Miles, told the court Yu was “certainly cowering” as her husband upbraided her. Yu later told police through an interpreter: “He said that I was having fun by myself and leaving our son in the car.” Yu said she thought she had been in the gaming room for only 20 or 30 minutes.

Mrs Miles said she watched the couple leave. When they reached the car, “the gentleman hit the lady across the head. They seemed still to be arguing”.

When the parents found the child unconscious, they took him straight to the local Angliss Hospital. Doctors said he was cyanosed (blue) and convulsing, with a dangerously high temperature of 42.3 degrees (a normal temperature is between 36 and 37.5 degrees).

Pathologist Matthew Lynch, who performed the autopsy on Brian, said: “(Heatstroke) is the end stage of the temperature going up and the body losing the capacity to bring it down. When it gets to that end point, most of the important systems of the body start to malfunction.” Dr Lynch said this involved severe brain injury as well as problems with the heart, lungs and kidneys. “And these problems will compound each other. The situation often just gets worse and worse.”

In his summing up, the prosecutor, Paul Coghlan, QC, built a quiet but inexorable case against Yu. He pointed out that love and negligence are not mutually exclusive; that negligence arises because we have a duty of care to others; and that the duty of care of a parent for a small child is one of the greatest. He said that Brian’s death was an inevitable and foreseeable consequence of his mother’s conscious actions, and that two-and-half hours was an inexcusable length of time to have left him in the car. He asked the jury to set a community standard on the issue.

He spoke soberly, without aggression. “There’s no joy in this case. There’s no joy for me as a prosecutor, no joy to say that this is a case in relation to which a determination has to made about a mother in these circumstances. (But) it’s about the enforcement of law as we understand it in this community.”

The defence counsel, Brian Bourke, appealed for the jury’s sympathy with Rumpolesque eloquence. He quoted at length the British writer G.K. Chesterton on his experience as a juror, including his dismay at the way lawyers and judges and policemen lose perspective: “`This is the reason for the jury system. Strictly, they don’t see the prisoner in the dock … They only see their own workshop…”

Mr Bourke suggested it was the gambling industry that should be on trial. The jury should remember the accused as a good and caring mother, he said.

“Put yourself in her position for one minute. She will live with it to the end of her days. Regardless of what is said by this jury, what verdict you return, she will bear that, and she needs no verdict of yours to appreciate and realise the enormity of this sort of conduct.”

The jury took only two hours to find Yu guilty. She has yet to be sentenced. Justice Bernard Teague indicated that he would impose jail only if it were necessary to allow Yu to access the supportive supervision available to those on parole.

In the end, the law had viewed the child’s death with gravity and the mother’s life with compassion.

First published in The Age.

Also see The End of The Affair.

A mother is found guilty, but what to do?

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The prosecutor said the case gave him no joy. The judge said he was pleased that the jury, and not he, had to make this hard call. The defence counsel said “gambling dens” were the real culprits.

And the accused stayed mute, but for her quiet weeping.

But when court adjourned after she was convicted of manslaughter, Jie Hua Yu, the mother whose toddler died of heatstroke after being left in a hot car while she played the pokies, sat sobbing, her head on her husband’s shoulder.

Her younger sister Yali, who had testified that Yu was a good and loving mother, wept in an alcove outside the courtroom.

It was the end of a long and, all parties acknowledged, tragic story.

It began on February 16 last year, when Yu, after dropping an older child at school, decided to stop off for 20 or 30 minutes’ play at a local gambling venue, the Ferntree Gully Hotel.

She left the second of her three children, 19-month-old Brian Yao, strapped in the car in an unshaded area of the hotel car park.

He was asleep, she later explained to police, and she thought she wasn’t going to be inside for long.

Two-and-a-half hours later, Yu’s husband, Benny Yao, woke at their home in Kelvin Drive, Ferntree Gully, and realised his wife and child were gone.

He arrived at the hotel looking for her. The couple found Brian unconscious and took him straight to a nearby hospital.

He arrived blue and convulsing.

Despite an emergency transfer to the Royal Children’s Hospital, he was later declared brain dead and was removed from life support on February 22.

Yu was charged with having killed him through criminal negligence.

This Supreme Court case was a quiet one. Barristers did not shout or bluster. Medical witnesses kept descriptions of distressing facts to a minimum. It was as if no one wished to add to the suffering that Yu had already endured.

Yu, a 40-year-old housewife, arrived each day dressed in unadorned suits with her face bare of makeup. She sat next to her Cantonese interpreter, her head bent to one side as she listened to the swift translation of legal exchanges. Had it not been for the misery etched on her face, they would have looked like girlfriends exchanging confidences.

Yesterday Yu’s defence counsel, Brian Burke, argued that this good and loving mother should not be branded a killer. He said her conduct did not deserve to be punished as a crime. He asked jurors to put themselves in her place.

He blamed the gambling industry for “wreaking havoc” on innocent people. “It’s a great pity it’s not the gambling dens on trial, isn’t it? They are not on trial; got the sanctity and blessing of governments from top to bottom.”

The prosecutor, Paul Coghlan, QC, told the jury that love and negligence were not mutually exclusive. He argued that leaving a small child locked in a hot car for two-and-a-half hours “so terrifically” breached Yu’s duty of care to her son that it called for the intervention of the criminal law.

“The question you will have to address is whether it can ever be said to be not unexcusable to leave a child in this sort of car, in this sort of car park, on this sort of day, for two-and-a-half hours. It’s just not on … for proper contemporary standards … Lines should be drawn.”

The jury took two hours to conclude that Mr Coghlan was right.

Justice Bernard Teague adjourned the sentence for a date to be fixed. He said he would consider punishments that did not involve prison.

First published in The Age.

Also see A Gamble With Life and Ending The Affair.