March 10, 2008
TRAVEL: Sep 05, AU Edition
SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT
After a whirlwind trip through India’s sights, smells and sounds, Robert Cross vows to return
AIPUR, India – ‘I was told that the first thing you’ll notice is the smell,’ said my friend Dave with a faint leer. Just a friendly word of warning to get me going on the wrong foot.
My wife, Juju, and I had been hearing a lot of secondhand and even firsthand tidbits like Dave’s almost every time we told anyone about our travel plans. Visiting India? Get ready for a shock: Pollution. Dirt. Poverty. Stifling heat. Noise. Weird behaviour. Those odors.
I’m here to testify that any negatives were far outweighed by the beauty, culture, architectural grandeur and spirituality we were privileged to sample during a brief visit to a few cities in the north.
After we cleared the jetway in New Delhi at 5:30 a.m. on an autumn Saturday, the only smell came from the universal airport brew of electric-light ozone, air conditioning and passenger scents no different from those at Sydney or Heathrow.
Instead, the first thing we noticed was the wallpaper on immigration officers’ cubicles, a darling blue-and-pink-flowered pattern of the sort that might decorate a little girl’s nursery.
The officers’ faces remained properly stern, of course, and they worked deliberately. We heard a constant thumping of rubber stamps and piped-in native music that sounded like the whining of a thousand mosquitoes, and after about 45 minutes, a man in uniform summoned Juju and me to his posy-splashed quarters, examined our documents and pounded on them with his stamps.
Still no smell when we finally carted our luggage to the parking lot. Obviously, Dave had been misinformed.
Our driver, Remish, helped with the bags, and we set off on the five-hour drive to Jaipur and the beginning of our seven-day India adventure. Dawn greeted New Delhi with a gray haze of pollution, and my chest felt heavy. Our little white van seemed to be the only passenger vehicle on a highway filled with trucks and bicycles. Huge cows, some gray, others black, lolled on the median strip.
Those trucks provided some color in the otherwise drab outskirts of the big city. Each one had been professionally painted with garlands of flowers, soaring birds, cartoonish tigers, lovable bovines and complex geometric patterns. Some bore neatly scripted slogans on their sides, like ‘I Love My India’ or ‘The Great Indian Spirit’. On the rear end of each lorry, the artists had painted a fervent plea: ‘PLEASE HONK YOUR HORN’. Remish hit the horn incessantly, sticking to the right-hand lane and passing the endless parade of freighters – India is a left-hand-drive country – while deftly avoiding wayward bikes and meandering cows.
Two hours later, as we drove into the state of Rajasthan, the roadside scene abruptly changed. Our divided highway became a two-laner, adding to our excitement the real possibility of head-on collisions.
In downtown Jaipur, Juju and I felt as if we had been dropped into the middle of a Bollywood epic. Film buffs use the term to describe Bombay’s prolific movie industry, and here we had subcontinental action in three dimensions. We entered Jaipur during rush hour, so some of the streets leading to our hotel had been temporarily declared one-way in the wrong direction, apparently an effort – largely futile – to prevent gridlock. While Remish circled the city at a crawl, trying to find a route, we suddenly were interacting with the people. A few tapped on the windows to beg for money or sell us things. But most were in cars or riding mopeds – intent on honking their way through thickets of traffic, but still taking a moment to smile and wave at Juju’s video camera.
We found ourselves in the middle of an enchanting old city, alive with markets and the brilliant colors of the dresses and turbans worn by residents going about their business. Pedestrians skittered between vehicles, which slowed down only when a cow or two decided to lounge in the middle of the street.
Remish at last found the hotel entrance, a discrete opening in a wall and a long driveway leading to the magnificent, cream-colored Jai Mahal Palace. The 250-year-old building had once served as a palace for one of Jaipur’s many royals. Rajasthan has had a bewildering lineup of rulers and high-ranking court figures through its long history, and we soon lost track of the lineage, despite the best efforts of our local guides. But the maharajas sure had good taste in housing.
We felt entitled to a few hours of leisure. The lawns, pools and statuary of the Jai Mahal Palace invited meditation and brought a welcome element of tranquility to soften the jet lag. A pantalooned and turbaned house musician entertained two children with an old stringed instrument while they frolicked on the grass near a pavilion where we and a few other guests ate lunch. Juju and I still felt dragged down by travel overload. A visitor to India should schedule a day of retreat every so often to avoid becoming overwhelmed by exotica and to think about the meaning of it all. Our tight schedule denied us that luxury.
The next morning, our guide, who introduced himself as G.S. Arora, joined us and Remish in the van for a tour of Jaipur. His eyes sparkled mischievously behind his glasses. We would have other guides in the days ahead – a scholarly gentleman in Agra and at the Taj Mahal; a religion expert amid the Hindu temple carvings (some quite erotic) in Khajuraho; the harried scout who showed us the sights in Delhi.
Even so, Arora was the first, and this is a story about first impressions, so the task of satisfying our basic curiosity about the Indian way of doing things fell to him.
We headed for the heart of Old Jaipur, the walled and picturesque enclave known as the Pink City. Arora explained that in 1876 the reigning maharaja, Ram Singh, ordered all buildings near the palace painted pink to celebrate a state visit from the Prince of Wales, who later would ascend to the English throne as King Edward VII. ‘Pink is the color of warmth and welcome,’ Arora informed us, and pink the old city has remained. The buildings within the wall are repainted every couple of years. ‘People can use different shades of pink, but the basic color has to be pink,’ Arora said. ‘The authorities take care of the painting.’
We paused at Hawa Mahal, the Palace of the Winds, for what Arora termed ‘a Japanese stop.’ He said that meant a stop for photographs. Although Juju is Asian, she laughed at the stereotype, one that I thought the world and its technology had obliterated. For a second, the guide’s little joke made India seem even more deliciously anachronistic.
The Palace of the Winds was pink, naturally, a beautiful 204-year-old facade about 5 stories high and dotted with tiny windows. From rooms and balconies on the other side, ladies of the court at the adjoining City Palace could discreetly peek down at the street scene.
On Tripolia Bazaar and other streets of the Pink City, merchants with open-air shops were selling everything imaginable. Although we felt the urge to get out and look at the displays of produce, spices, clothing, tools, toys and all the rest, we had a schedule to meet.
Arora did pause long enough to point out a milk market, where farmers had lined up canisters containing the morning’s output from their goats, cows, sheep and buffaloes.
The guide called our attention to a potential customer dipping his hand into a can. ‘To make the milk more profitable, a lot of water is added to this milk’, Arora said. ‘When the buyer comes in, he will put his hand in the milk, shake it out, rub the milk on his fingertips and see how much fat is in it. So the more hands that go into this can of milk, the better the milk becomes because of this added flavor. Thankfully, this is not the milk supplied to your hotel.’
That led to the subject of cows. ‘Every morning people would milk their cows and then leave them in the street to be fed by people,’ he told us. ‘The cow being a sacred animal, every household would try to feed them. After eating, they stand in the middle of the road or sit in the middle of the road and chew cud. This is good, because it slows and controls the traffic. And the cows like it, because the fumes make them feel high. In India, every animal except the husband is sacred.’
‘How do the cows know how to get home?’ Juju asked.
‘They always know. They are like homing pigeons.’
At the Amber Palace, our next stop, we found it easy to avoid eye contact with the hawkers because the palace itself commanded our full attention. The pinkish-beige structure sprawls across the crest of an imposing, rocky hill about 7 miles north of Jaipur. Begun in 1592 and completed in 1639, it served for more than 100 years as the capital of Rajasthan. In 1727, the reigning maharaja, Jai Singh, moved the capital to Jaipur, but the royal family continues to take up residence in the Amber Palace from time to time, even though the government now owns it.
We decided to ride an elephant up the hill to the palace entrance, a popular if somewhat hokey way to get there. Jeeps were also available, and visitors can hike up the steep ramp if they wish. Juju and I climbed onto a little seat behind our elephant driver. It swayed and tilted, while the driver engaged in a long, loud argument with his supervisor. Evidently, the driver wanted two more passengers for his mount, because the seat can hold four. Juju said, ‘I don’t like this at all. It’s scary. I want to get off.’ But before we could figure out how to do that, the elephant started up the ramp.
Arora, not being a tourist, preferred the Jeep. He met us in the palace courtyard, which was crowded with visitors and the elephants they came in on. He showed us around the wonderfully carved and pearl-inlaid areas where rulers held their audiences. We peeked into the artistically decorated private chambers that housed the maharajas and their concubines. A sandstone garrison stood grimly at a higher level, and both buildings spread their ramparts far along the mountainside like a truncated version of China’s Great Wall. Such a display of power and wealth must have intimidated enemies and subjects alike.
In the days that followed, we moved on to Agra and India’s absolute must-see, the Taj Mahal. After taking in the sights of Agra, we flew to Khajuraho, a relatively tranquil village famous for its beautiful Hindu temples dating back to the Chandela dynasty, which ruled for 500 years until overrun by the Moguls early in the 16th Century. The structures were a pleasant contrast to the palaces, tombs, fortifications and congestion of Rajasthan and Agra. We beheld an array of temple towers surrounded by lawns laced with uncrowded pathways.
Our guide that afternoon introduced himself as Mr. Singh. Immediately, he began to explain at great length the Hindu religion and how the carvings on those temples – built within a 100-year period, starting in AD 950 – illustrated the complexities of Hinduism and honored its divinities in all of their forms. He said the towers had been constructed in this out-of-the-way place to protect the sandstone images from frequent rains and floods that hit the Chandela capitals.
The masterful carvings encircled the towers in rows all the way to the top. They depicted gods and goddesses, of course, but also aspects of everyday life. Animals hauled farm goods, musicians played, soldiers fought, hunters stalked, and beautiful, exaggeratedly proportioned female dancers swayed. Animals both real and figments of artisans’ imaginations cavorted – leopards, elephants, horses, boars and combinations thereof.
Most famously, human couples were shown locked in carnal embrace, striking many of the positions detailed in the Kama Sutra.
‘You know about yoga?’ Mr. Singh asked. ‘There are a hundred kinds of yoga These are the way to reach the ultimate goal of life that is the next incarnation. These poses are a part of it, specific positions. Even sex could be a part of yoga.’
We were still pondering the complexities of the Hindu religion that night, as we dined at the rooftop Blue Sky Restaurant. Below us, merchants sold souvenirs, fabrics, saris, books and miniature copies of temple carvings. Across the street, the actual temples glowed with golden light and a voice boomed in Hindi – a sound and light show. We filled up on helpings of a dish very much like fried rice but punctuated with masala, a mixture of spices that provided a delicious mosaic of flavors.
Up there on the Blue Sky, we met a young couple from France who had been traveling through India for several weeks. They described wonders we would miss, experiences we wouldn’t have. At least not now. They were merchants, buying materials for their shop in Brittany. ‘We did make a short visit one time’, the man said, ‘and it was very difficult and frustrating. Doing it this way can still be difficult and sometimes frustrating, but there is so much to see.’
Intrepid INDIA
Classic Rajasthan
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, Ranthambhore National Park, Pushkar camel safari, Keoladeo Bird Park, Jaipur, castles
Brief: Rajasthan is home to all the colours of India. On our classic Rajasthan adventure we discover hidden forts, majestic palaces, colourful bazaars and of course enjoy a camel safari. This is the essence of Rajasthan.
Departure: Departs every Sunday from September to April and selected dates in July and August.
Price: AU$1020, plus Local Payment of US$200 per
person
Unforgettable India
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Original
Highlights: Delhi, Khajuraho’s erotic temples, the River Ganges, Orchha, Chitrakoot, markets, Varanasi, Taj Mahal
Brief: India is vibrant, intoxicating, inspiring, dramatic and above all, unforgettable. From the Mughal splendour of Delhi and Agra, to the reminders of the Hindu epics in Chitrakoot and memories of prehistoric man in Chanderi, this trip offers it all. Join pilgrims as they undertake their daily rituals on the banks of the Great Mother Ganges.
Departure: Departs every Saturday from September
to April.
Price: AU$920, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person
India Unplugged
22 days Delhi to Kolkata
Trip Style: Intrepid Basix
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, desert scenery, towns lost in time, palaces, Kolkata
Brief: Chaotic and inspiring, this is the real India. India Unplugged is a far-flung adventure to one of the planet’s most exotic destinations. See towering fortresses and holy rivers, cosy up with camels, try your hand bargaining in bazaars and still have time to check out the Taj Mahal.
Departure: Departs on a Sunday.
Price: AU$1080, plus Local Payment of US$150 per person
India Family Adventure
15 days, ex Delhi
Trip Style: Intrepid Family
Highlights: Delhi, Taj Mahal, Ranthambhore National Park, Bundi, Pushkar, camel safari, Jaipur
Brief: Come and meet India’s people and let them show you their homeland. This itinerary is designed for adults and children alike. Explore some of India’s most famous sights and experience an overnight camel trip into the desert, seek wildlife at Ranthambhore and learn local crafts around Jaipur.
Departure: Departs on a Saturday.
Price: AU$1270, plus Local Payment of US$200 per person
For more information on traveling in India with Intrepid Travel, please visit www.intrepidtravel.com, free call 1300 360 887 or come and see us at 360 Bourke Street, Melbourne.
KNOW BEFORE YOU GO
Best time of year to travel? India’s climate varies enormously from region to region and from season to season. While southern India basks in a reasonably constant tropical climate, the temperatures in the Rajasthan desert can vary from 50 degrees Celsius in July to 0 degrees Celsius at night in January. Monsoons bring torrential rain to most areas between June and August.
Religion: 81% Hindu, 12% Muslim, 2% Christian, 2% Sikh, 3% other
Language: Hindi (official) plus 12 other official languages and over 1600 dialects
Currency: Rupee (INR)
Visas: India does not offer visas on arrival - they must be applied for prior to travel. Conditions vary with country of origin and they usually take 1-2 weeks to process. In Australia, most travellers will apply for a 6 month multiple entry visa.
Electricity: 220-240V, 50 Hz
Times to avoid: Because climate changes so much within India, times to avoid certain areas will vary according to season. In addition, India is a land of festivals – best to check whether there is a festival going on in the area you want to travel to and book well in advance!
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
FOOD: Sep 05, AU Edition
NOODLING AROUND
Want a fun challenge in the kitchen? Make your own pasta, says Eli Jameson
Ah, the pasta aisle of the supermarket. Fettucini, cavatelli, oricchiette, rigatoni, penne rigate...just reading off the names on the different boxes and bags is enough to make one feel Italian. And so many of these shapes have names that sound cool even in English: Does a plate of priest’s caps (agnolotti) appeal? No? Well, perhaps a steaming bowl of strozzapretti – or ‘priest stranglers’ – will sate your appetite as well as your anti-clerical urges.
But almost every packet of pasta for sale in the supermarket has one thing in common, regardless of shape: it is dried. Which means that it is made by combining water and hard semolina flour and extruded in factories through various shaped dies. Some of these pastas are very good, and indeed gourmet dried pastas are showing up on the shelves of more and more suburban markets (tip: look for noodles that have a particularly rough sauce-holding surface as a sure tip-off of quality), but they lack a certain something. Now, I keep a five kilogram sack of penne rigate in the cabinet because it’s an incredibly economical and convenient base for a huge number of dinners. But there are times that some occasions, and some recipes, that call for more than just a couple of scoops of Barilla tossed into boiling water.
That alternative is, of course, fresh pasta. Contrary to what one might think, fresh pasta is not simply the pre-dried version of what comes in a rectangular blue box with instructions to ‘cottura 11 minuti’. Instead it is made from eggs and flour – which is why the stuff has a pretty firm use-by date – and unlike dried, only takes a few minutes to cook.
So where to get the stuff? Some fresh pasta is available from gourmet Italian delis and even supermarkets, but it is ridiculously expensive considering what goes in to it. Instead, I say, make your own.
I sometimes think that there is a conspiracy out there in the world of TV chefs and cookbook authors to keep certain ideas and techniques just vague and complicated enough so that the average punter remains mystified and unable to fully recreate certain end-products – or at least not regularly enough to become adept at them. I have a fantastic cookbook by the American chef Charlie Palmer which is almost like a detective hunt: every photograph of a finished dish has some extra touch or flourish not included in the printed recipe, and the reader has to study it closely to discern the hidden item. Call it The DaVinci Cookbook school of food writing. The end result is it convinces ordinary home chefs that fresh pasta can only be made with two kinds of imported artisinal flour and lots of kneading, followed by ample time for both chef and dough to have a good rest.
This is, of course, completely untrue, and there is no reason why fresh homemade pasta can’t become part of any home chef’s regular – i.e., at least weekly – routine. The advantages are numerous: though it takes a little longer to prepare on the front end (and we’re only talking about twenty minutes, with a little practice), it takes only moments to cook. One need only be up from the table for five minutes, tops, to knock up a pasta course before rejoining the rest of the party.
Furthermore, the texture is night-and-day to that of dried pasta. It holds sauce much more effectively – one might even say intimately – and as a result, one needs less to coat it. This is where the old adage that pasta is not about the sauce but the pasta comes from, and it’s impossible to understand unless one has experienced the difference. Fresh pasta absorbs sauce in a way dried simply can’t.
To make fresh pasta, one really only needs to get a hand-cranked pasta machine, costing between $60 and $90, depending on brand, at decent homewares stores. Word to the wise: spend the money on the more expensive Italian model if you can. The cheaper look-alike made in Korea will do the job just as well, but doesn’t stand up to regular use over the years, and will need to be replaced far sooner. Beyond that, the only ingredients are flour (I prefer Italian strong, or ‘00’ flour, but the basic house-brand stuff will do just as well) and eggs (see last month’s column on the virtues of fresh eggs – they make a difference here as well). Ready? Let’s begin.
To make a simple pasta like, say, fettucini for two, just place two cups of flour in a bowl, make a well in the middle, and crack the eggs into it. (Rule of thumb: one plate = one egg = one cup of flour). With a fork, begin to combine the eggs with the flour until you have a mass of dough. On a well-floured work surface, knead this well until it becomes a ball, and it starts to get stretchy when worked with the meat of your hand.
Now comes the fun part. Take about a third of the dough, flatten it, and run it through the machine on its widest setting (1). It may take a few goes at this stage to get it fully formed and looking like a square of pasta, but once that is achieved, keep running it through until you reach the second-thinnest setting (generally number 8). Give this sheet a dusting of flour, and repeat with the remaining dough. And when it’s all done, run it through the wide noodle cutters that come with the machine. Presto! You’ve just made fettucini!
So what now? Well, for one thing, it should be lightly dusted with flour and laid out on a sheet so that it doesn’t stick together, and allowed to dry out a bit. One can also make this at lunchtime for an evening’s dinner party without worrying a bit. When cooking time comes, plunge it into a pot of boiling, well-salted water, and let cook for just 2-3 minutes before tossing it into a pan of sauce. Make an alfredo by frying off some finely-diced onion in a large whack (100 grams) of butter, and adding a good slug of cream, a handful of parma cheese, salt, pepper and nutmeg. (Healthy it up with some greens, asparagus, or mushrooms if you like).
Or make a ravioli – those same sheets can be cut into circles and pressed together around a filling of your own invention, sealed by an egg wash. Use the flat edge of your chefs knife to press them shut so they don’t pop in the water. A favourite stuffing in our house is beetroot, sage, and goat cheese, served in a brown butter sauce jazzed up with beetroot greens.
Whatever you do, don’t be intimidated, and don’t let yourself be constrained by your imagination. Once you’ve got the technique down, you can knock up sheets of the stuff in all of twenty minutes. Your guests – and your palate – will thank you.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:36 PM | Comments (0)
Sep 05, AU edition
LOST IN TRANSLATION
She was a Russian dancer. He was a suburban psychopath. IAN WISHART has the story of a paedophile’s manipulation of the law to gain access to children, and a trail of wrecked lives he’s left behind him
Teardrops well, glistening in the soft evening light, but they never fall. ‘I can’t cry anymore,’ she says after a moment, gathering herself again. ‘I don’t cry’, she repeats, softly, more to herself than anyone else. Her name is Elena Reznikova*, and on a cold August night she’s a long way from home, back in the Ukraine. The story of a journey from her life as a Russian ballerina to being surrounded by semi-stacked boxes of files in a tatty suburban law office after hours, is a long and, like many Russian stories, tragic one.
Daughter of a Soviet Air Force pilot, her mother a nurse, Elena Reznikova had a relatively normal childhood in communist Russia. Born in the remote province of Khazakstan – a legacy that would return to haunt her Down Under – Elena’s parents shifted to a home in rural Ukraine, not far from a local nuclear power station named Chernobyl. She draws back the collar of her turtleneck sweater: ‘See, I still have scar from cancer’, she notes, touching her throat. Her voice is hoarse and barely there.
As if sensing the unspoken question, she adds: ‘I have lost my voice, all year. Stress. It will kill me eventually, I think.’
Stress. Now there’s an understatement.
It was back in February 2001 that Elena met Paul Copeland – originally from Australia, now transplanted to New Zealand – courtesy of a Russian bride internet agency.
‘I wanted to get out of Ukraine, out of Russia’, she reflects. ‘I met a person on internet line. He look good. He promised me beautiful life, I would “bloom like a flower”. I fell in love with his photos, I was ready to take care of his children. He said he needs a woman who will look after his children, who will cook, who will clean – and I was the best – and I was ready to be a stepmother, to be friendly with his other partners. Because he was like me, he had three different children from three different relationships. Can you imagine this madness?’
Elena had been married and divorced. Like thousands of Russian women, she was deserted by the men in her life because of appalling economic conditions over there.
‘My friends told me, ‘don’t give up, you can find a good man’. Because it is impossible to find in Ukraine, with children, it is economic, men are unable to provide.’
Copeland, she says, was everything she thought she wanted in a man. ‘All my girlfriends were crazy about him because he was good looking, charming, gentleman, just a little bit drunk, but we just thought he liked his beer, as we do in the Ukraine.’
But Elena had no idea Copeland had a very dark past, despite an incident that ever so slightly foreshadowed what she would later discover.
‘My neighbours came over. We have a tradition in Russia to make a person drunk because we want to know how he acts when he is drunk, because people are different when they are drunk. Paul was drinking and drinking, and he started to try and jump off the second floor balcony, because he said he was trying to escape being locked up.’
In 1989, Paul Copeland hit the headlines throughout New Zealand for trying to murder his first wife with a crossbow in Tauranga. It was a well-publicised court case, with testimony of terror.
A report from his trial in May 1990 recounts the facts: ‘A 32 year old Tauranga man tried to kill his estranged wife by shooting her with a hunting bow and arrow…from only a foot away…the broadhead spear arrow penetrated part of the woman’s liver, stomach and one of her lungs, poking out the other side of her body.
‘She managed to make her way to the kitchen where she tried to use the phone but was prevented by Copeland, who forced her up against a wall in the hallway opposite the kitchen.
‘Feeling dizzy, she had slid down the wall but managed to get up again to make her way downstairs and to her car where her young daughter was waiting for her. She had collapsed beside the car and neighbours who saw her had rushed to her aid,’ the Crown Prosecutor was recorded as telling the High Court at Rotorua.
‘Copeland, from an upstairs window, had asked several times if she was dead yet.’
He was found not guilty by reason of ‘temporary’ insanity. Copeland, you see, had always been troubled. His father was named in investigations as a violent alcoholic paedophile who had allegedly sodomised his young son. In his early teenage years, Paul Copeland allegedly returned the favour by raping one of his younger sisters. There were burglaries, drug use, car thefts and fraud charges. Violence towards animals was also a Copeland trademark – executing cats and other small animals by bludgeoning them, revelling in the gore.
Little surprise that the teenager ended up in the Tokanui mental institution as a result of his behaviour. Family members would later talk of assault incidents in Australia with drink driving and firearms convictions added into the mix.
None of this, however, was contained in the internet dating agency files as Copeland linked up with Reznikova in far off Ukraine. Instead, the New Zealander turned on the charm, promising marriage and more to the former ballerina and mother of two boys.
‘He said he wanted to make me pregnant, that this was beautiful because I need a baby girl, so we need to do it immediately because it would be easier to get visas.’
By August 2001, Elena was pregnant with their child – her third.
‘Paul was very good for about two weeks after I got pregnant, then he started to drink, he said he’d spent all the money for tickets, nearly, and I said, “Listen, we have to have money for tickets to go to your country”.’
In September that year, the couple and Elena’s youngest son, Yuri, landed in Auckland.
‘I couldn’t speak English. None. I couldn’t put sentence together. I couldn’t make myself understood. I left behind my eldest son because the immigration people in Moscow said it would be hard to get him out here, because Paul didn’t have enough money to pay. But he promised me he would bring him out later.
‘I’d always wanted to speak English well, like I do now. I wanted my children to speak English, and I wanted to have a good job and be happy. So New Zealand looked to me like a countryside that I liked, because my family came from the countryside. We had 100 turkeys. My family grows vegetables, we have lots of food, very hard working people.’
Clean and green the countryside in her new home might have been, but behind the four walls of Copeland’s house she began to discover his demons.
‘When I arrived in September I used to clean the house because I was a good cleaner…and I found some photos of other women with children, in Spain, Africa and elsewhere. So I asked him, ‘was this your previous girlfriend?’ He said ‘no, I just used to live with her for a while’. I said ‘why didn’t you bring her to New Zealand?’. He said ‘she wasn’t good, but her children were good’.’
Elena wasn’t quite sure what he meant.
‘When we first arrived, we had sex all weekend, every day, but when his other children arrived he wasn’t interested in me, he doesn’t have sex with me. I’m asking him, ‘Paul, I’m waiting for you upstairs’, but he never came up. I’m four months pregnant but I’m a woman who is still healthy, you know.’
Over the weeks and months of her pregnancy that followed over the summer of 2001, Elena claims Copeland became more and more distant, more focused on the children, including Elena’s six year old Yuri.
‘On the beach I noticed that he was putting his fingers in between the children’s legs every time he picked them up. His children always used to scream in the bath. I said to him, you bath boy, I bath girl. He was always present in the bath when the children were there. I don’t leave babies in the bath alone, but when children are five or older it is a different thing.
‘I often heard the children sobbing, and once [his daughter Amanda, from his second wife] came out crying and I asked “who hurt you”, and she pointed at Paul saying “him”.
‘He used to call me worthless, and good-for-nothing whore. On the few times we had sex after that he became violent, even though I was pregnant. He never kissed me, and turned my face away during the act of intercourse. He was cold and brutal. Then, at the end, he got worse. He had so much sex with me at the end that I had premature baby.’
Their child, Nicholai, was born in March 2002, with complications.
‘When he was born the baby didn’t breathe, and he said “I don’t know why I should have to buy expensive medicine just to keep the baby alive”. He refused to buy medicine, so I used to go to the church, and there was a very good woman there and she gave me $20.’
When the baby had to be rushed to hospital, Paul Copeland allegedly took his time.
‘He wanted the child to die. He told me. He didn’t want to take me to hospital. He went so slow. As a mother, I’m lucky I have medical skills to keep this child healthy and alive, so when he got better – it was four months later – I moved out of the house.
‘There was a neighbour across the road, and everybody knew about his background, nobody told me, it was a huge secret from me. And when I used to speak to people in the church, everywhere, people used to be so nice, they understood my problem and thought they would encourage him to marry me, so I would get residence. But I wanted to go back to Ukraine because I left my son behind and he told me I will never see him. Then he said if I went back he would keep my two other children with him, so I used to carry on in the home, being with him together, and no one could help.’
When she tried to get Copeland to sign their baby’s birth certificate, he spat the dummy.
‘He screamed at me about a former wife who had taken his money. He called her ‘a bitch, a whore and a lesbian’, and swore that no woman would ever get anything from him, although he did eventually sign the certificate.’
During this time, she says, Copeland would often threaten to have her deported back to Ukraine without her children. ‘I’ll keep them, and you won’t be able to go to court because I’ll make you leave the country.’
Copeland also took the unusual step of publishing a photograph of his fiancée onto an internet porn site, along with a story about their sexual exploits when he first met her in Russia: ‘My Elena didn’t like to drink, that was a problem! Still, I had my two beers and the offer of SEX was on, it was the Russian wash down now with no hot water from the tap. So Elena would fill a basin with hot water, and I would sit in the bath. Elena would wet me then with soap wash my body down, then rinse me. Now, guys who haven’t experienced this, it is good, very good to receive this care. So we are clean now, and it’s time to get dirty, so it’s off to the bed again for a lesson in Russian! The sex was good, very good…as will be revealed soon.’
The revelations are too graphic to reprint in a family magazine.
Elena could see no way out. Although her understanding of English was growing, she still found it hard to speak it, and many people simply wrote her off as ‘an over-emotional Russian’. But the woman from the church who’d paid for the medicine to save Nicholai’s life turned out to be a guardian angel.
‘So that woman, she said “I will help you go to a Women’s Refuge”. I said “what is that?” Because we don’t have that in our country. Can you imagine how crazy it seemed for me to leave for Women’s Refuge with four-months-old baby, and leave the man whom I loved, believe me. Later on I realised it was only about that he wants children to abuse.’
Elena fled on a Friday afternoon with baby and older son in tow. She asked the Women’s Refuge to help get her deported back to the Ukraine on the grounds that her immigration status was now void because of the relationship break-up. And she didn’t have the money herself for airfares. But on Monday morning, Paul Copeland had already obtained a court ruling preventing Elena from taking baby Nicholai out of New Zealand.
The Russian mother was trapped. Her own immigration status meant she now had to leave New Zealand; the court order meant her four month old baby son could not go with her. Paul taunted her by threatening to keep Yuri as well.
‘He always told me that he would send me back to Ukraine but he was keeping Yuri with him.’
Even so, Elena Reznikova still had no idea just what her fiancé had done in his past. It wasn’t until Paul’s sister picked her up from the refuge that the missing pieces of the jigsaw began to tumble into place.
‘She told me her brother is a paedophile, and he raped her and two others. And their father was a paedophile. It was like a dream for me because she got my Russian dictionary and she showed me the words. I hadn’t realised then that he had tried to kill his ex-wife. I was more shocked when I found that out.’
It was at this point that Elena was introduced to Copeland’s third wife, a woman named Elizabeth who’s still living in hiding, 11 years after first meeting Copeland. Elena had found a contact number for her and rang her from the Women’s Refuge. Elizabeth says she could barely understand the distressed Russian woman with the thick accent, but she took down bottles so she could feed baby Nicholai. When she heard Elena’s suspicions that the children had been sexually abused, this former Copeland bride heard the penny drop. Elizabeth immediately phoned Copeland’s sister when she got home, who explained that Paul had also sexually abused her when she was a child. ‘You should believe Elena,’ Copeland’s sister told Elizabeth.
It turned out Elizabeth was another foreign woman lured into Copeland’s orbit in 1994, just four years after his trial for trying to murder his first wife. Elizabeth’s own marriage was in difficulty, and she says Copeland was ‘very romantic’ and charming, and convinced her to leave her husband. She says he acted like a father to her two daughters, and ‘got me pregnant two months after we met’.
Sound familiar? Copeland told Elizabeth it would be easier to get residency if she was pregnant.
Once his victim was trapped, Copeland moved from suave suitor to Hannibal Lecter, catching the neighbour’s cat, gassing it, and then burning it in front of his wife despite her pleas to spare the creature.
A recent study suggested people who torture animals are more likely to be sexual abusers. On the Richter scale of deviance, Paul Copeland was already an 11.
After Elizabeth and Paul’s son, Timothy, was born in 1995, he again turned his attention to Elizabeth’s two older daughters, often watching them shower, poking them frequently with a toilet brush while they were naked, assaulting them, verbally abusing them, making one of the girls pick up excrement in the garden using only her bare hands.
Elizabeth worked nights, leaving her husband to babysit six-month-old Timothy and her two daughters. The children’s grandmother would often pop in and find the girls weeping and distressed. He teased one of the older girls about her weight, calling her Moby Dick, and suggested to a family friend the other ‘would be a slut and pregnant’ by the time she was 14.
It was around this time that Elizabeth, wife number three, discovered a box under the stairwell containing files relating to Copeland’s childhood and the fates of wives one and two.
She read of the bow and arrow attack on wife one, the declaration of temporary insanity and the very brief spell in Tokanui Hospital before the psychopathic Copeland had convinced the cuckoo-keepers he was sane enough to fly the nest. She read of how Paul had allegedly been raped by his own father, and the history of sex abuse in his family. She discovered how he’d met wife number two, a German woman (mother of Amanda), and burned her passport and all her papers. How he’d smashed all the windows in his house on one occasion, and psychiatric reports detailing the horrific tortures he’d practiced on animals as a child.
Naturally, after reading all this, Elizabeth became absolutely terrified about what might happen to her and her children.
When she tried to leave, and she did so half a dozen times, Copeland would invariably track her down, stalk her and terrify her until she returned. In the end, however, he booted her out along with her two daughters. Elizabeth says he physically threw them out the door, locked it and stayed inside with Timothy and Amanda. By the time Elizabeth returned with help, Copeland had barricaded both of his biological children in an upstairs bedroom.
Elizabeth staked out the local supermarket and tried to grab Timothy from the shopping trolley while Copeland’s back was turned, but he foiled the rescue by screaming ‘Help, this woman is stealing my son!’ He put Timothy in hiding. Police eventually found the two year old at Copeland’s sister’s house.
The stalking and terror got worse, however, and eventually Copeland managed to convince Elizabeth that he would leave her alone if she’d just give him access on alternative weeks to Timothy.
Mindful of the crossbow attack, Elizabeth signed the custody form.
It was after that, she says, that she noticed her little boy’s behaviour change markedly on his return from access visits; it was, she says unusually aggressive and strange.
This, then, was the story of wife number three.
The woman who would have been number four, Elena, is deeply saddened at the fate of Copeland’s first two children.
‘Last time I saw Timothy and Amanda they put their heads down, they know that I know their problem but I can’t help them. They don’t talk, they’re very embarrassed to tell anybody what’s happening to them because they’re scared that their father will kill them. He told them, “I will kill you if you tell anyone”. He told it to my son but my son is Russian and Russians are very strong. We have a, how do you say, self, self-preservation, as a child when you’re young. You learn to save yourself in a difficult situation, even losing your life.’
In the past year, Elena’s older son Yuri has told of being made to watch naked children on Copeland’s computer during the months that Copeland has had Nicholai in his care, and Elena’s family friends say Nicholai has complained of a “sore bottom”, and “dad touching me in the bottom”.
‘I have three boys,’ says Elena. ‘I have a lot of experience as a mother of boys. When they are small their penises never stand up, they don’t have hormones for sex, but my little boy, his penis is so sensitive. I think it has been massaged. He wakes up at night and says “it hurts”. I am so scared what will happen to him if he goes back to his father. This child has already been damaged.’
Yuri says he and the other children witnessed Paul Copeland interfering with Nicholai’s genitals and bottom – in fact, all the children were made to watch it.
Elena obtained a psychologist’s report on Yuri two years ago, and she says the psychologist was convinced Yuri had also been abused.
She says one of the most frightening things about Copeland is his psychopathic aloofness.
He’s absolutely normal in public, but he’s not normal. His body language is absolutely absent. He doesn’t move, there’s no body language. I didn’t want to have anything to do with a former criminal anymore because I was scared that one day I would have to protect myself and the lives of my children. He told me I would never see my eldest son again, and I haven’t seen him in four years, his threat came true.
‘When I go to bed I feel that I’m already dead or am unable to leave, or help my children to be happy, to be together. The man is killing me psychologically, emotionally. He would like to kill me physically. He has already tried to kill his ex-wife.
‘My second relationship, my partner said “Elena, I can’t pay these bills for lawyers, this is crazy, just give the child away”. I said, “Peter, this is sexual abuse”. He said, “I know”. He said, “sorry Elena, I do love you but with all these problems I don’t want you. I don’t want your children”.’
Nor has the New Zealand Government come to the rescue of the children. The Immigration Service has cancelled Elena’s right to stay in New Zealand, and wants to deport her, if necessary without her children who would be left in the care of Paul Copeland.
‘My application for residence was cancelled because I was born in Khazakstan. It’s another nonsense. Khazakstan is part of Russia and it appears on my birth certificate, but my parents took me out of Khazakstan when I was two months old, so Immigration Service asked me for a police certificate from Khazakstan, and it’s impossible to get! It’s so stupid.’
It wouldn’t be the first time New Zealand’s bureaucrats have been called stupid.
With Copeland continuing to stalk her and harass the men helping her, Elena found herself increasingly isolated. No money to keep up her fight to stay in New Zealand long enough to get the non-removal order lifted, no money to buy groceries. No work permit. She turned, reluctantly, to prostitution to pay the bills.
‘I hated it. I did not want to do. But how else could I survive? How else could I provide?’
Today, she sells other services.
‘My flatmates discover my cooking and cleaning is so good, they pay me to do all of it.’
With the help of a Russian-speaking lawyer, she’s launched a renewed bid to secure New Zealand residency and, as at the time of writing, she has temporarily wrested back control of her children from Paul Copeland and is helping heal their scars.
‘I got Nicholai back two weeks ago,’ she murmurs. ‘He wakes at night, but I think he will get better. I love him. Once I didn’t want to stay in New Zealand. Now I do.’
The most stunning aspect of the whole story, however, is why on earth a man with Paul Copeland’s psychiatric history, a sexual predator who raped his own sister and tried to murder his wife with a bow and arrow, a man who enjoyed killing cats in the cruellest ways he could find – why such a man would be allowed anywhere near a child by New Zealand’s social workers and psychologists.
For Elena, that is the biggest mystery of all.
*All names except those of Elena Reznikova and Paul Copeland have been changed for privacy purposes
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
DVDs: Sep 05, AU Edition
WAR STORIES
James Fletcher reports on the latest home-viewing offerings
A Loving Father
Rated: M
4 stars
Director Jacob Berger, son of well known English writer John Berger, isn’t a man afraid of presenting himself as a target within the subtext of his own films. A Loving Father, or Aime Ton Pere for the traditionalists, is a prime example centering on the emotional turmoil of a son trying to connect with a father isolated by fame. But what makes this film remarkable are the confronting performances he draws from his two lead actors, Gerard Depardieu and his own real-life son Guillaume Depardieu, who have their own dark history inspiring their on-screen conflict.
Gerard plays Leo, a cruel self-absorbed writer who receives news that he is to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Against the wishes of his daughter Virginia, played with nervous intensity by waif like actress Sylvie Testud, Leo sets out on a motorcycle journey across Europe to claim his prize. However his son Paul (Guillaume), fresh out of rehab and having heard the news, attempts to reconnect with the man he hasn’t spoken to in years. Of course things don’t go as planned and Paul finds himself kidnapping his renowned father after a fatal accident leaves the literary world, including his sister Virginia, believing Leo to be dead.
Part thriller, part black comedy and part biopic, Berger infuses the script with all his insecurities, angst and obsession while manipulating Gerard and Guillaume’s flawed relationship (which culminated with Gerard publicly disowning his son a year after the films release) to achieve a captivating honesty that saves the film from becoming over indulgent or satirical.
Now on DVD with English subtitles, A Loving Father has little in the way of extra material with biographies on the main cast offering some interesting background facts on the Depardieus’ murky past. However, the stunning performances and obvious emotional investment allows Berger to deliver a brave and entertaining film which explores the darker side of family dysfunction.
Jonny Wilkinson: The Real Story
Rated: Exempt
3 stars
With the Tri Nations and the Bledisloe Cup fueling the 2005 Rugby season at the moment, it’s not surprising that Jonny Wilkinson: The Real Story makes its way to DVD this month. What is surprising is just how well made and enjoyable this profile of the Lions’ & Newcastle Falcon’s fly half actually is.
Since scoring the winning goal in the 2003 World Cup against Australia, Jonny Wilkinson has become synonymous with international Rugby, gaining fame well beyond the usual fraternity of sports fans. But for the most part, Wil- kinson has avoided the public eye, doing only the occasional media interview or product endorsement.
Having followed Wilkin- son around over a twelve week period in the lead up to the 2003 World cup, The Real Story delivers an entertaining, humourous and surprisingly intimate profile of the sporting icon which thankfully transcends the run-of-the-mill films typical of sports documentaries. Complementing archival footage of Jonny playing in the under-8s league with hard hitting action from international competition, director Simon Niblett also uses to great effect interviews with Wilkinson’s parents, girlfriend and peers including former Lions captain Will Carling and rugby fan Ian Botham filmed exclusively for the documentary.
However it’s the interviews with Wilkinson himself that establish the core of the show, filmed in candid and unpredictable locations around the UK and on tour, and all designed to capture honest, unrehearsed responses. The result reveals a surprisingly likable and sincere man deftly balancing a professional, sporting and private life with a determined ease befitting a much more seasoned player.
Running just short of an hour with no bonus material, Jonny Wilkison: The Real Story easily stands on its own merits as a simple and entertaining profile filmed for the love of the game and without any tabloid motives. A rare find and well worth adding to
the collection.
Truth, Lies & Intelligence
Rated: M
4 stars
Truth, Lies & Intelligence is unique in being the only Australian film to effectively explore Australia’s involvement in the lead up to the Iraq War. Filmed in 2003 by award winning filmmaker Carmel Travers the film recounts the origins of the intelligence fraud surrounding Iraq’s WMDs and its use in achieving the eventual invasion of that country by the US, Britain and Australia.
Featuring insightful interviews from high profile whistle-blowers such as Greg Thielman, the former advisor to the US Secretary of State, Australian ex-intelligence officer Andrew Wilkie and Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to key figures in the Middle East including Hamze Mansour, the head of the Islamic National Front and common truck drivers along Iraq’s dangerous highways, highways they point out, which remained safe under Saddam’s rule, Travers delivers a decisive political documentary rich in journalistic integrity and dramatic revelations.
Now on DVD, Truth, Lies & Intelligence boasts an impressive extras package that opens with an introduction by Travers explaining her motivation in making the film. The usual suspects also appear with the film’s trailer, an image gallery and biographies on the key figures included, however it is the two extended interviews that make this package stand out, the first with Greg Thielman, personal advisor to Colin Powell, and the second with Australian Andrew Wilkie who speaks candidly about his role within ONA and the double-edged relationship Australian intelligence agencies have with their American counterparts. He also elaborates on his motivations in exposing the truth, along with details of his resignation and subsequent treatment by the Howard government.
Although threatened by the Attorney General’s Office and forced to surrender her computer hard drives and personal emails during the films production, Travers has managed to produce an undeniably compelling film and a stunning document of Australia’s current political climate.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:34 PM | Comments (0)
BOOKS: Sep 05. AU Edition
MEN BEHAVING BADLY
This month: sickos, school shooters, and English-language abusers – plus a great sea tale
MR MUO’S TRAVELLING COUCH
By Dai Sijie
Chatto & Windus, $39.95, ISBN: 0 7011 7739 X
Dai Sijie’s first novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Mistress, was a delightfully written fable which showed how appealing forbidden Western literature (Balzac, Tolstoy, Dickens) could be to people living in an oppressive regime. Sijie’s second novel, also exquisitely written, similarly deploys the encounter of a strand of Western thought with Chinese culture, but this time Western psychology – i.e. psychoanalysis – is depicted to satiric and ironic effect. Mr Muo is a French-educated travelling Freudian psychoanalyst but his dream interpretations are considered by his listeners to be either fortune telling or greeted with howls of laughter. Freud and psychoanalysis are easy targets to mock (Nabokov never spared the ‘Viennese witchdoctor’) and at times I found myself chuckling along with the mockers and knockers.
The plot also oozes satiric mockery towards Chinese society and government. For Mr Muo’s real quest in China is not to spread the ideas of Freud but to find a virgin with which to bribe a corrupt judge to free his first love who has been imprisoned for selling articles to the West that describe scenes of Chinese torture. Believe it or not, Muo has trouble finding a virgin – the villages are filled with old women and young girls – the eligible young women having moved into the cities. In other words, the plot is fanciful and Mr Muo is something of a Chinese Quixote tilting at windmills.
Dai Sijie, let me note, writes safely in Paris and in French. I am reasonably confident this book will not be on sale in China, a land of widespread corruption and censorship, anytime soon. The richly elegant style and the multiple layers of irony (Mr Muo is himself a virgin) make this very much a writer’s book. But it also clearly has a political message – albeit one couched in an ironic fable of folly.
Despite its excellence of style, some of the monologues seem inordinately long and discursive though I suspect Chinese readers (hopefully it will find some) may locate more resonance in them than an Occidental one. Also the basic plot engine is left unsatisfiedly unresolved (a Kafkaesque touch, perhaps) or yet another irony? Readers must decide.
I CHOOSE TO LIVE
By Sabine Dardenne
Virago Press, $29.95, ISBN: 1 84408 2105
In recent times few crimes have been more shocking than those perpetuated by Mark Dutroux, the Belgian paedophile who kidnapped, raped and murdered several girls, two as young as eight.
Sabine Dardenne, a slightly built pre-pubescent twelve-year-old, who by her own description looked about ten, was cycling home from school one day in May 1996 when a van pulled alongside her. She was quickly abducted then chained up naked in a small dirty dungeon-like room where she became prey to Dutroux’s psychopathic lust.
As well as being her physical tormentor, Dutroux played havoc with her fears. He kept referring to a mysterious boss, who, if he was let loose on the hapless Sabine, would torture and murder her. By contrast, Dutroux’s treatment was self portrayed as ‘kind’ – he even tried to portray himself as her saviour and brainwash her that her parents had not paid the ransom asked for her life.
Being young and in fear of her life, Dardenne believed him. His physical power over her was absolute yet he never broke her spirit.
Eventually, desperate with loneliness and thinking she might spend the rest of her life chained up in that dismal room, she asked if she could have a friend. When another girl barely two years older than herself turned up, drugged and chained, she was beside herself with guilt. But this is one contemporary horror that has something of a happy ending for Dutroux was caught and told the police about the two trapped girls. The two eight year olds were not so lucky – they starved to death behind that massive concrete door that secured the makeshift prison.
Dardenne tells her own story in simple direct prose – and it is all the more moving for that simplicity. If there is any reader seeking titillation from these pages they will get absolutely none: there are no descriptions whatsoever of the sexual humiliations Dutroux inflicted on the two girls.
At the time the story broke, speculation was rife about a vast underground network of paedophiles in Belgium. Dardenne always believed that Dutroux was the main protagonist (though he had a couple of accomplices including, incredibly, his wife). Subsequent information indicates that Dutroux did not have a secret boss and his attempt to make out he was a humble cog in a large network, who procured for others, was an attempt to lessen his own guilt.
That the two girls survived was a small miracle; that Dardenne’s resolute strength of character carried her through to a normal adult life and a normal relationship without any help from psychiatrists is perhaps the biggest miracle of all. Her body may been violated, her mind temporarily downtrodden, but her soul stayed pure and strong.
RAMPAGE: The Social Roots of School Shootings
By Katherine S. Newman, Cybelle Fox, David J. Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth
Basic Books, $32, ISBN: 0 465 05104 9
I recently read a book called We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, a fictional work which made it plain that Kevin, a fifteen-year-old murderer, was basically an evil kid and his mother’s failings as a parent could not be blamed for his horrible deeds – even though she tortured herself psychologically with the possibility. In Kevin, the psychological, let alone the social, causes of youthful carnage were not presented as the explanation for psychopathic behaviour. Rampage examines psychological factors but seeks to place more emphasis on overlooked sociological factors.
School killers, as the name suggests, perform their mass murders at school. They are disturbingly young and getting younger – Andrew Golden was just eleven when he teamed up with 13-year Mitchell Johnson to shoot dead five people and injure a further ten at his school in Arkansas. Although like most mature men I tell myself I am not easily shocked, an eleven-year-old shooting dead or wounding several people does appal. At that tender age, I was doing projects on tea or sugar, and had never been exposed to a gun more powerful than an air pistol.
Quite often, there aren’t many clues to forewarn. Johnson had been rejected by a girlfriend and Golden was cruel to cats. Hardly sufficient reason or motivation to shoot fifteen people. They, like several such killers, came from a small town. The multiple contributors have tried to find a commonality among school killers by a series of graphs that list factors such as age, ethnicity, urbanity and aspects of social marginalisation such as being a loner, being teased or bullied, or indeed even just feeling marginalised. They also looked at mental illness or family problems, disciplinary history, violent writings, trouble with the law, issued threats, mental illness, suicidality, and depression. Finally, they considered access to guns. Summing up their findings, the authors says that there is not enough commonality to compose a reliable or predictable profile. Depressing news, isn’t it?
My gut instinct is that the sociological explanations offered (structural secrecy, institutional memory loss, loosely-coupled systems, counsellors having too many roles to fill) are weaker and more abstract than the psychological ones. Small towns and being loners seem to figure prominently but also, alas, there are plenty of school killers who had friends and even mentioned their intentions to create havoc – which were of course often not taken seriously.
The authors seem to contradict themselves on pages 268-269 when they write ‘... and they weren’t all bullies or teased either’ which is followed three lines later by the statement, ‘And nearly all of them were bullied or teased.’ So which is it? Were they bullied or not? The table on pages 312-313 shows each of the shooters were either bullied or that there was ‘no evidence’. I know it’s not strictly kosher to say so, but if every known case shows bullying, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that a healthy percentage of the remaining teenagers were also bullied? Not that being bullied is sufficient cause for wholesale murder.
The chapter on prevention offers some cautious measures: keeping better records, more school resource officers, challenging notions of masculinity, zero tolerance policy of disciplinary breaches (how is this ever possible?), encouraging kids to report threats. All very well and good. But I am left with the lingering feeling that this is a study from the inside of American society and to an outsider three factors which, though they are in part included in the book, have a peculiarly American flavour – (a) the wide ownership, obsession and ready access to guns; (b) the status anxiety which makes Americans (especially socially marginalised ones) willing to do anything to achieve fame; (c) a society which accepts adolescence as a zone of complete freedom and independence. America, one could say, is paying a high price for its freedoms.
PASSAGE TO TORRES STRAIT: Four Centuries in the Wake of Great Navigators, Mutineers, Castaways and Beachcombers
By Miles Hordern
John Murray, $39.95, ISBN: 0 7195 6496 4
This is a book to stir the salt in the blood of even the most landbound reader. Isn’t that what shipping clerks and ‘customer sales representatives’ (receptionists, bank clerks, office workers) secretly yearn for – to sail off on a blue ocean and anchor in remote and gorgeous lagoons there to parley with beautiful bronze-skinned inhabitants? In days gone by, your best security measure to obtain a benign reception by the locals was to be alone – a lone survivor is no threat – and not be part of group (certain to be bumped off).
So off we sail with the Waiheke Island-based author and his 28-foot sloop for high adventure and re-exploration of history on the high blue seas. By the way, this is how it starts: ‘At lunchtime I finished a bottle of rum’. That I assume was the dessert – and not the aperitif – following a lengthy journey. Horden’s adventurous sojourn was to take him north of Auckland to the Melanesian islands, west across the Coral Sea to the Great Barrier Reef and into the dangerous maze of Torres Strait, wrecker of ships, killer of men.
In Dillon’s Bay, Eerromango – south of Vanuatu – Hordern outlines the protocol of the Melanesian approach to a lone vessel. ‘They would circle the boat in perfect silence...when ready they made a deliberate noise, slapping the paddle against the surface or clearing their throats. Then they waited for an invitation to come alongside’. After boarding they would make requests, in this case for tobacco.
This happened three times and just as Horden was tiring of the one-way traffic after an exhausting journey, the Erromagans returned with sixty pieces of fruit. Erromango may seem an out of the way place now, but in the nineteenth century these waters saw a brisk trade in sandalwood, used for soap and cosmetics. At first, sandalwood was traded for beads, fish-hooks then saws, tomahawks, carving knives and butchers’ cleavers and still later muskets, powder and tobacco.
Some of the castaways or survivors of shipwreck were treated like kings. For in times of early contact, white sailors were assumed to be spirits or supernatural beings. One character known as Big-Legged Jimmy was plied with feasts, kava and young women and left hundreds of grandchildren. By contrast, others like Leonard Shaw, who survived a massacre in the Kilinailau Islands, New Guinea, was kept as a pet and tortured by children who pulled out his facial hair. Hordern describes the enthralling survival tales of the like of William Lockerby on Fiji, John Young on Hawaii, and Peter Dillon on remote Tikopia, even today without airstrip, wharf, white residents, electricity or telephones. Both Conrad and New Zealand castaways get a look in.
All around the vastness of the South Pacific, Horden narrates, the castaway, mutineer or beachcomber was often the envoy of European culture. First encounters were not as we so often fondly imagine – a high ranking officer (Captain Cook, say) with a formidable well- equipped ship meeting a noble chief on white beach and exchanging gifts, but rather a lone and miserable survivor often seeking advantage and sometimes getting it, sometime not. The somewhat throwaway term beachcomber has been immeasurably enriched for me by reading this book. So we are on double journey with Horden, the still adventurous present – the difficult and complex passage through Torres Strait is thrilling reading – and the even more adventurous past.
I have left the best wine (or swig of rum) to last. Horden, a proven sailor, can also write like the roaring forties. Graham Billing is probably our best naturalist writer but Hordern (English now settled in New Zealand) is running him close. ‘Tepid strings of spray spun into the cockpit as if coughed up from the belly of a waking beast.’ On virtually every page there are descriptions as fine as this. This is an ideal book for either sailor or landlubber.
HOW MUMBO JUMBO CONQUERED THE WORLD
By Francis Wheen,
Harper Perennial, $24.95, ISBN: 0 00 714097 5
I’ve always liked books that take a wide overview (it saves me work) and authors that debunk – for there’s lot in this world that needs debunking. Francis Wheen does rather nicely in both categories. Wheen is firm but fair: he’s tough on everyone. Madame Thatcher, Reagan and the George Bushes cop heavy flak. So do Anthony Robbins and Deepak Chopra. As do Ayatollah Khomeini and Milton Friedman. And readers will be pleased to hear that Holocaust denier David Irving gets a roasting.
On the evidence of quotation, Chopra sounds the daffiest: ‘People who have achieved an enormous amount of success are inherently very spiritual’; this must make Bill Gates the holiest man one earth apart from the Pope and the Dalai Lama. How about, ‘Ageing is simply learned behaviour’? Demi Moore agrees, and she hopes to live to 130. Wheen can be unfairly cruel, as when he quips, ‘Why the longevity formula failed to work for Princess Diana, with whom [Chopra] lunched shortly before her death remains a mystery’. Whether it’s Wess Roberts’ The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun or Mars and Venus’ John Gray or ‘Six Hats’ de Bono, Wheen wraps them all up in a chapter entitled ‘Old Snake Oil, New Bottles’. Wheen summarises them all as writers of ‘lucrative twaddle’ and blames Dale Carnegie for starting the vogue back in 1948. Whereas Carnegie contented himself with phrases like, ‘If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive’, today’s gurus use ‘neologistic jargon’ like ‘re-engineering’, ‘demassing’, ‘downsizing’, and ‘benchmarking’ in an attempt ‘to give their twee clichés an appearance of scientific method and intellectual rigour’. Right on, Francis.
But if the gurus are mouthing clichés and twaddle, how come top management pays them so much to talk to their staff? Good question – and apparently there is an answer. One executive manager explained, ‘What he’s saying is a lot of common sense and not new really. But if I pay him $15,000 to say it, my general mangers and my people listen’. So there you are – it’s not really the message but the messenger – and the high fee.
Moving on from self-improvement, he sideswipes the‘boa-deconstructors’ (Derrida and his ilk) and includes the twitty Luce Irigray who referred to E=mc2 as a ‘sexed equation’ that privileged the speed of light over less masculine speeds. When Allen Sokal, author of the most famous intellectual hoax of our time (and someone of whom Wheen wholeheartedly approves) accused Julia Kristeva of using mathematical terms she did not understand, she conceded she was ‘not a real mathematician’. Derrida cops it for asserting that Paul de Man’s wartime blatant Jew-baiting was somehow an implicit repudiation of anti-Semitism. I’m surprised Wheen didn’t quote American philosopher John Searle whose demolition of Derrida was published in the New York Review of Books, but the field of debunkers – like the producers of bunkum – is richly crowded.
Wheen’s learning is formidable. He cites, usually for purposes of intellectual demolition, dozens of books and authors of which and of whom I am ignorant.
To catch up with his list of targets would mean reading for a couple of years at least. It’s easy at times to have a moment of confusion between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, Thomas Friedman and Milton Friedman and the two John Grays, one American and one English.
As debunkers go, I rate Francis Wheen up with the best – with Martin Gardener, or H.L. Mencken. I look forward to further books from this acid-penned guru who hates gurus.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)
Sep 05, AU edition
RAGING BULL
There’s nothing more red-blooded than a juicy slab of steak, but BARBARA SUMNER-BURSTYN reports that a female sex hormone linked to ‘gay’ behaviour in animals and adverse effects on children is
being pumped into some of our beef cattle – without being disclosed on food packaging labels
Butchers dancing like Hari Krishnas, senior citizens thrashing out hard rock extolling its virtues, meat, especially red meat is hot right now. After years of slow decline prompted by health concerns about cholesterol and ‘lighter eating’ trends, Australia’s meat producers are staging a comeback. By doing everything from rolling back health concerns – pointing out, for example, that lean red meat is less than five per cent fat, and pushing it as a source of iron for potentially anaemic women – to reviving traditional steakhouse dining, meat producers, distributors and sellers are working hard to get back on our plates.
But like ‘fog facts’ – important things known but not known that nobody seems able to focus on anymore – described in Larry Beinhart’s book, ‘Fog Facts’ Politics: What We Don’t Know and Why We Don’t Know It, there’s more going on in the paddocks than just grass munching.
Hormone Growth Promotants for example. Known in the industry as HGPs, the official line is that the sex hormones implanted into the ears of cattle are natural or nature identical substances that simply replicate nature, mimicking the hormones lost through castration and equating to other natural dietary sources of hormones such as eggs or soybeans. And, for the most part, Australians don’t know that these substances are going into their meat – despite HGPs being banned in the EU, a fact which has spawned complex record-keeping and audit trail arrangements to make sure no meat from HGP cattle makes it to Europe.
Question your butcher about HGP’s and he’ll probably look at you blankly – and labels will tell you precious little more. Yet they have been used routinely in Australian beef production since 1979 – and have until recently been thought to be an effective way to improve growth rates and feed efficiency in the stockyards. A $3
implant, for example, can generate up to $25-$30 worth of extra cow at the market.
Across the Tasman, the New Zealand Food Safety Authority recently endorsed food labelling to ensure informed choice, but that call has recently disappeared from the agency’s website. When questioned about the presence of artificial hormones in New Zealand’s meat chain and the lack of labelling Sandra Daly, Director of Communications, said that they are a science-based organisation and based on the scientific evidence, there is no consumer protection basis for banning HGP use for beef production for New Zealand.
Australia endorses that position. In a major report, the Australian Department of Health and Aging found that the human safety and toxicology of HGP’s have been extensively assessed by regulatory authorities in Australia, the USA, Canada and New Zealand, in addition to expert scientific committees from the World Health Organisation. The NZFSA says the report forms a part of the information New Zealand considers in developing their views on HGPs. They comment that all international bodies and national regulatory agencies accept the safety data that residues of registered hormones do not pose a threat to consumers.
All that is, except the European Union. The use of HGPs was banned by the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, in 1988. The WTO responded that the ban was unscientific. In 2003 the EU completed a full scientific risk assessment, re-evaluating the potential risks to human health from hormone residues. This resulted in the permanent prohibition of estradiol 17ß. Their so-called ‘precautionary’
approach extends to five hormones (testosterone, progesterone, trembolone acetate, zeranol and melengestrol acetate) that have now been provisionally prohibited. In addition to estradiol 17ß there are seven registered HGP’s in Australia including those containing progesterone and trembolone acetate.
In banning HGP’s the EU say they have considered all social, economic and political factors. They concluded that estradiol 17ß was a ‘complete’ carcinogen and that others such as trembolone acetate, the synthetic equivalent of testosterone, should be viewed as having potentially endocrine-disrupting, developmental, immunological, neurobiological, immunotoxic, genotoxic and carcinogenic effects. The EU claims there is a lack of data to support an alternative view. They also contend that despite the WTO rulings there is limited information available on the levels of the various metabolites, or breakdown products, despite this information being relevant.
The EU also suggests that young children may be more sensitive to low levels of the hormones than previously thought. The authors conclude that in light of recent progress in our understanding of estrogen levels in children, possible adverse effects on human health by consumption of meat from estrogen-treated animals cannot be excluded.
The WTO has consistently ruled against the EU. Despite WTO-approved retaliatory economic trade sanctions imposed by the United States, the EU continues to defy orders to lift the ban. EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy stated in November last year that the EU ban on certain HGPs was based on a thorough and independent scientific risk assessment.
The approach exercised by the EU appears to be echoed by a leading comparative cancer research programme at Cornell University in the United States. They say that while there’s no evidence to suggest that eating meat from hormone-treated animals affects breast cancer risks, a conclusion on lack of human health effect can only be made after large-scale studies to compare the health of people who eat HGP meat to people who don’t. These have never been done. Cornell also acknowledges that large epidemiological studies have never been done to assess whether or not early puberty in developing girls is associated with having eaten growth hormone-treated foods.
The Australian report concludes that even with the EU’s latest data supporting the ban they can find no grounds for amending Australia’s regulatory position on HGPs. New Zealand takes the same position.
Derek Moore, New Zealand manager for Elanco, the makers of Compudose, one of the most widely used HGPs in New Zealand, is verbose in his dismissal of any concerns surrounding the products: ‘There is no question that the EU position is a form of trade embargo and market protectionism. It’s a non-tariff trade barrier.’ Moore goes on to describe the precautionary principal (the EU’s better-safe-than-sorry approach to implementing health regulations) as entirely arbitrary. ‘I give it no weight’, he said and added that the science in favour of HGPs was so unequivocal that there was really only one side to this issue, the side of the facts.
Compudose is a controlled-release estradiol. The package insert says Estradiol 17ß is a naturally-occurring substance. In the material safety data sheet published by Elanco, the emergency overview for the product states that estradiol may enter the body through the skin, causes cancer and is highly potent. Fetal changes, reproductive tissue damage, mental disorders are also mentioned, as are increased breast size and other feminizing effects in males occupationally exposed to estrogens. The published warning for the product says that even intermittent absorption of small amounts of estrogen through the skin may result in accumulation of relatively high systemic levels with concomitant negative health effects on children whose parents work with estrogen products. (3) Elanco, a subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, is at pains to point out that its product does not pose any health risk, either to those handling the product or to consumers who ultimately eat the implanted meat. ‘The data is pointing out the hazards of exposure,’ says Moore, ‘that is entirely different from the risk.’
Compudose is implanted only in the skin immediately beneath the ear of a cattle beast. Disposal of ears of implanted cattle is an issue. NZFSA says they are discarded as waste, rendered or used in gelatin production. Gelatin is made from skin (pigskin and hide split) and bone taken from slaughtered animals that have been approved for human consumption. The resulting gelatin is then used in a plethora of locally produced products. A report by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) said that failure to discard implanted ears could lead to mg amounts of hormone residues to enter the food chain and cause acute toxicity in consumers. The NZFSA responds that Australia allows HGP implantation in other parts of the body. But as Elanco New Zealand points out, the product and all product use guidelines are the same as in New Zealand. Martin Holmes, a spokesperson for the APVMA says that, as in New Zealand, Compudose is implanted only in the ear.
A further issue is the use of antibiotics. Elanco acknowledges that the implant may be dusted with the antibiotic tetracycline. Derek Moore is unsure if the local version contains any antibiotic. He suggests that perhaps the implant is coated in talcum powder.
In the United States the needle used to insert the implant is also often coated with an antibiotic. Vet Services in the Hawkes Bay are adamant they do not use antibiotics to cleanse needles. But either way the trace use of an antibiotic for non-therapeutic purposes is concerning. In the United States a bill currently before the US House of Representatives (The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2005) stated that non-therapeutic overuse of antibiotics in animals was creating severe antibiotic resistance in people. The task force cautioned that if current trends continue, treatments for common infections could become nonexistent. Again the EU is at the forefront of precautionary measures, banning the use of all non-therapeutic veterinary antibiotics identified as similar or identical to those used in humans. Elanco says it has yet to be demonstrated that non-therapeutic use of antibiotics has a detrimental effect on humans.
So why use HGPs at all? The industry calls them ‘quality enhancers’. In one local trial cattle treated with Compudose had an average weight increase of 23.5%. Cattle treated with HGPs grow faster enabling them to be sent to the works in shorter time, lowering the farmer cost of beef raising. It’s estimated that for every dollar spent on an HGP there is a five-dollar return.
Because of the EU ban and restrictions in nine other countries considered minor markets HGPs are strictly controlled in Australia . They include identification prior to or immediately after implantation, double-tagging, strict dose notation, a level of paper work that one vet described as onerous, implantation by trained and certified implanters and a requirement that all lost tags be replaced immediately. Once HGP cattle reach the works they must be separated from other animals and either killed in a separate area or only after all the equipment is completely cleansed. Abattoir workers spoken to described the processes as time-consuming.
Perhaps the most salient point for Australian meat consumers is the fact that all identification procedures and separation effort is designed solely to protect our standing with the EU. ‘There is no emphasis on ensuring the local market can access non-HGP meat,’ admits the NZFSA. They advise that there are three main mechanisms for post-slaughter separation and identification. Organics such as those run by Biogro, the New Zealand Beef and Lamb Marketing Bureau’s domestic Quality Mark and Qualmark. (Qualmark reports that they do not certify meat)
Such is the adherence to the ‘science’ of HGPs and the belief that the EU ban is nothing more than market protectionism, the only risk acknowledged by the NZFSA is a trade risk. Implanted animals in Australia and New Zealand are not tested for residues of any of the registered HGPs. Instead up to 450 non-implanted cattle are tested to ensure compliance with the identification regulations to protect the export market.
NZ Food Safety Authority director of animal products Tony Zohrab was reported recently as saying any decision on the use of HGPs is very much a commercial one between farmers and processors. The organisations official position is that while consumer perception obviously plays a role in decision-making, wherever possible, when that perception is at odds with scientific evidence, they prefer consumer education to scientifically unjustified regulation.
Elanco’s Derek Moore says their own consumer research shows people want safe and affordable food. ‘The use of HGPs and antibiotics in animal production is of very low concern.’ And he comments that banning things is unacceptable in our modern marketplace.
He’s right of course. HGPs should not be banned. The tracking and status of HGP cattle in Australia is comprehensive and effective. Labeling for the local market is no more commercially onerous than separation for the European market. Consumer choice is promoted as the ultimate freedom. It is the market that must test the validity of claims in support of HGPs. It is the market that must sort out whether consumers really want to eat meat grown with growth promoting hormones.
THE LESBIAN GULLS
The issue of estrogen in the diet is a controversial one. Scientists have discovered a number of foods – most notably soy – that contain high levels of phytoestrogens, the plant equivalent of the female sex hormone.
Although initially dismissed by some as ‘soy conspiracy theory’, research on the effects of phytoestrogens and other estrogen compounds on human sexual development is now widespread, particularly because of soy’s use as a milk substitute for infants.
New Scientist magazine reported two years ago that girls raised on soy infant formula are more likely to suffer menstrual discomfort, and boys born to vegetarian mothers are five times more likely to suffer genital abnormalities. Other studies have reinforced suspicions about diets high in phytoestrogens, and some scientists now believe there’s evidence that they could be a factor in causing homosexuality.
The first evidence came in from the animal kingdom, as Science News online reported:
‘While the health community has recently begun a host of studies to explore a possible link between estrogenic pollutants and cancers in women, few researchers have focused on the related reproductive risks such environmental hormones may pose for both sexes. That’s unfortunate says Theo Colborn, a zoologist with the World Wildlife Fund in Washington, D.C., because reproductive effects are likely to be ‘much more widespread.’
‘Indeed, she notes, animal data are beginning to suggest that far smaller exposures are needed to trigger reproductive effects than to induce cancers. And because some of these reproductive changes may be subtle, they could evade detection for decades – even a lifetime – unless hunted for explicitly.
‘Colborn has convened a number of symposia in the past few years for researchers who study reproductively impaired wildlife populations or laboratory animals exposed to environmental hormones. Most of these scientists, she says, describe the links they’re finding between impaired reproduction and ‘hormonal’ pollutants as sobering – if not downright scary.
‘Indeed, she and many other environmental scientists worry that if hormone-like contaminants can feminize male animals, these ubiquitous pollutants may also underlie troubling reproductive-system trends being witnessed in men.’
A University of California, Davis, study by avian toxicologist Michael Fry in the 1980s determined that estrogenic pollution lay behind the ‘lesbian behaviour’ of seagulls. Significantly, to test their theory, they injected normal seagull eggs with estradiol, the additive being pumped into some New Zealand and Australian beef.
‘To connect these effects with estrogenic pollutants, Fry and his colleagues conducted a number of experiments during the 1980s. In one, they injected eggs of contaminant-free gulls with estradiol…When the hatchlings emerged, they exhibited the same array of feminized sex organs as DDT-contaminated Western gulls on Santa Barbara Island, off the coast of California.’
The estradiol, and a range of other estrogenic pollutants like DDT, effectively ‘chemically castrated’ the males, Fry says.
As Science News reported: ‘He suspects the males’ likely lack of interest in mating explains not only why female gulls dominated Santa Barbara Island’s breeding colony in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also why the females cohabited.’
Increasingly, scientists suspect environmental hormone pollutants caused by human agriculture and industrial waste are working into the animal food chain and creating more instances of so-called ‘gay behaviour’ by animals.
Indeed, the debate over whether homosexuality is genetic, or a lifestyle choice, has raged for decades. But increasingly scientists are discovering evidence pointing to a more complex answer, and one which the estrogen controversy could shed some light on.
If homosexuality were truly an inherited genetic condition, it should have disappeared from the human gene pool thousands of years ago, on the basis of Darwin’s evolutionary theory about natural selection of traits most likely to boost procreation.
Another blow to the simplistic ‘gay gene’ theory are studies of identical twins, which show that where one twin is gay, there is only a 50% chance that the other twin will be as well. Because the genes of identical twins are, well, identical, if a gay gene exists both twins should have it. On that basis, scientists have concluded that homosexuality must not be genetic, given the lower strike rate. Instead, they’re increasingly leaning towards environmental factors during pregnancy.
Subsequent studies, for example, have shown that identical twins were sometimes exposed to differing hormone levels in the womb – one twin might receive higher doses of hormones from the mother, either through diet or the pregnancy itself.
That, say researchers, could explain why one identical twin is gay and the other is not.
Which brings us back to estrogen additives like soy, or estradiol and the lesbian seagulls. Could it be that the increased prevalence of gay behaviour in humans has less to do with “who we are” than what we eat or inhale?
The ethical implications are enormous, particularly if ongoing studies confirm that pollutants and estrogen-laden foods are possible causative factors in both homosexuality and reproductive health problems.
The question is, what are the hormones doing to humans?
Ian Wishart
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)
DIARY OF A CABBIE : Sep 05, AU Edition
ALL DUE RESPECT
A chance fare leaves our driver wondering if there will always be an England
A week doesn’t pass when my cab radio doesn’t issue broadcasts warning of youths throwing rocks at passing cabs, usually in the housing commission areas of Redfern and Matraville.
Indeed the nightly bus runs out to La Perouse don’t operate without security aboard anymore. The vicious attack I wrote of last month was not an isolated incident in that part of the City, where similar attacks occur on a regular basis. For many of these youths violence is fun. Where once kids were content to get drunk, these days a night out is not complete without proving oneself by smashing someone who can make the simple mistake of looking at them. And in a disturbing portent of things to come, such public violence in Britain has now graduated to sinister new levels, namely, the targeting of the weak and vulnerable in society, in particular the elderly. Labelled low level urban terrorism it has led to the Government instituting a legal instrument called Ant-Social Behaviour Orders.
Recently I picked up a visiting British Labor MP Frank Field, who has been championing the fight against this urban scourge and was in Sydney to deliver a series of lectures for the Centre for Independent Studies. Field says anti-social behaviour stems from the collapse of functional families, the unions and the church, adding that the issue was once taken up squarely by the Left, which ages ago stressed personal responsibility and self-improvement.
Field had just been interviewed on radio when he hailed me outside the ABC in Ultimo. Having listened to the interview I sought to ascertain the extent of the problem. A talkback caller had confirmed it by likening it to A Clockwork Orange, a film which depicted a society spinning out of control. ‘Is it really that bad in your electorate?’ I asked. ‘Absolutely’, Field replied, ‘Pensioners are constantly coming to my office reporting how young lads run across their bungalow roofs, pee in their letterboxes, bang on their windows or jump out at them in the dark’.
Wondering how youth arrived at this point I asked, ‘Do you think it’s to do with the fact many parents simply don’t know how to parent, or won’t parent?’. ‘Most definitely’, he replied, ‘Those parents are failing to nurture their young, to teach them what constitutes civil behaviour’.
When I commented that some parents aren’t fit to breed he replied, ‘Well, you know what the saddest thing I’m seeing is the amount of grandparents forced to raise their children’s children’. ‘Well mate’, I told him, ‘obviously we don’t have the same problem here, yet. But there are certain areas around town I prefer to pick up young adults, such as the Bible belt in the north-west of Sydney where the kids are better behaved than other areas’.
Field noted his seat of Birkenhead was traditionally a Catholic constituency but had now changed to a secular seat. He noted the decline of religion in society had also coincided with the rise in yobbo behaviour. Just then he spotted St. Mary’s Cathedral and requested I drop him off there.
I pulled into the Domain to write up our conversation whilst it was fresh in my mind. Some 15 minutes later I looked up to see Field briskly striding past, heading for the Art Gallery. He saw me and as we exchanged a wave I noted he carried a pained expression. A man on a mission. It seemed as if he bore the hopes of the civilised world. Or at least Britain. Good luck to him.
Read more of Adrian the Cabbie at www.cablog.com.au
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:58 AM | Comments (0)
The Rough Life
SWING TIME
Welcome to Investigate’s new and occasional tribute to the greatest game on Earth
If there were an identifiable chemical compound called golf, it would have been scheduled as an illegal drug by now. To the outsider, a golf ‘user’ getting his fix looks about as bizarre as a heroin junkie doing his thing: an assortment of special equipment, the requirement of a special place (though a golf course is generally a lot nicer for non-participants than a bus station toilet), bizarre contortions all cause others to think, ‘Why on Earth…?’
Golf can be like other drugs as well. It can drain a wallet faster than a coke habit, and turn someone into a crashing bore who thinks he has a lot of deep and profound things to say to people who don’t share his enthusiasm faster than three bong hits of the highest-grade hydroponic.
About the only drug it’s hard to parallel golf with is ecstasy: not much chance of seeing players hugging up on one another under flashing lights while listening to trance music. Of course, you can’t spell ‘clubhouse’ without ‘club’, so I could be wrong.
And yet. Like a drug, once someone gets hooked on golf, it can be a lifelong affair: one that breaks up far fewer families (though some, to be sure!) than the hard stuff, but is just as addictive.
The first time I picked up a club I was hooked. I was in my mid-twenties, and I had been living in a small city – more like a big town – surrounded by golf courses, and where the only two social activities for young men were hitting the bars and hitting the links. So when a few friends said they were heading for the driving range after brunch one Sunday, I asked if I could tag along.
To make a long story short, they handed me a nine-iron, a bucket of balls, and gave me about thirty seconds worth of instruction. Which, considering the amount of money I’ve wasted on golf books, tutorials, and sessions with pros over the subsequent years, makes it far and away the most cost-effictive swing coaching I’ve ever had. If I remember right, it was pretty much ‘OK, stand like this, and then swing’, followed by a lot of impromptu Caddyshack routines. (‘Be the ball, Danny. Be the ball.’)
Of course, the first several balls I managed to hit went skittering off in all sorts of embarassing directions, some of them caroming off the wall of my stall on the range. Then came the moment of connection, when everything aligned more-or-less properly and my clubhead hit that range ball with a quiet, distinguished click and the ball took off on an high and graceful arc, hung for a moment at its apex, and then drifted back down to Earth, landing in a ‘Roadrunner and Coyote’-style poof! on the dusty range.
That was something of a fluke, but that didn’t stop me from beating several more buckets (and tearing up my shoulder and palms in the process) and demanding that we all go and play the following week – an experience better left undescribed.
But that’s what this new column, ‘The Rough Life’ is all about. Average golfers who love the game travelling around Australia to hit some balls on some of our best courses.
It won’t be written from the perspective of a jock who hits 300m off the tee; that’s not most of us. Instead, it is devoted to the hackers, the slicers, and the happy hookers who take mulligans, ride in buggies, and are addicted to this great game, no matter how badly they play it.
See you at the 19th.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:48 AM | Comments (0)
Sep 05, AU Edition
BAD CHOICES
A New South Wales abortionist will stand trial in November for manslaughter after an alleged illegal termination that went terribly wrong – the first such prosecution in New South Wales in over two decades. Investigate’s Claire Morrow has the inside story of Dr. Suman Sood’s many brushes with the law, and sheds light on just what happens when young women in crisis get caught up in Australia’s abortion industry
The mother was a 20-year-old woman who had the support of her parents and boyfriend to continue the pregnancy. She was recently employed after a period of unemployment without benefits. She was concerned about money. Her parents offered to raise the child, but the pregnant young woman thought they might be moving overseas, and didn’t want that for her child. ‘I thought about it (having the baby) and knew I wouldn’t be able to raise a child,’ she said. ‘I was sad about that and then angry, I knew what I had to do.’
Thus begins the tragic story of an unnamed young woman whose decision to terminate her twenty-something week pregnancy in the office of Dr Suman Sood has led to manslaughter charges, revelations of fraud, and shed light on what Australian women get when they think about exercising their ‘right to choose’.
The young woman was not even eligible for an abortion when she turned up at Sood’s clinic: after 20 weeks gestation, terminations are only performed in hospital, and only in cases of rare or compelling circumstances. And one can only begin to imagine the storm of emotions surrounding her decision: while on the one hand she clearly cared about the baby, on the other hand, she felt that she couldn’t go through with the pregnancy – that, somehow, it was her duty to abort.
The young woman claims she received little in the way of counseling and that Sood told her the procedure would cost $1,500 (and that she needed some of that money on the day – she only had $400 on her). The young mother alleges that Dr Sood inserted a pessary into her vagina and gave her two tablets ‘to soften up the baby’ to take by mouth, with instructions to return the next day to complete the procedure.
Rather than returning for the ‘completion’, the young woman went into labour early the next morning and her baby was delivered prematurely at 3:30 in the morning, on the toilet, by the distressed and surprised mother, who rushed to hospital shortly thereafter. Before the birth, she alleges that she had called Dr Sood in alarm. Sood’s response was to tell her to take some Panadol; she advised her patient that she was suffering Braxton-Hicks contractions. It was not until the baby arrived at the hospital that doctors realized he was alive. He died around 8 am the same day.
Dr Sood’s defense is an affidavit she wrote weeks after the event. In it, she states that she had seen the patient on a Saturday, advised her that she could not lawfully terminate a pregnancy beyond 20 weeks, suggested she think it over, and if she still wanted an abortion, she should return on Tuesday for a referral to a Queensland clinic, where abortion could be obtained at her stage in pregnancy.
Sood states that on the Monday in question, she was not working at the clinic (this is the day the mother alleges that Dr Sood started the abortion procedure). That doesn’t mean Sood was not around, however: by sheer coincidence, when the patient went to the clinic for tummy cramps that day, Dr Sood was indeed there to ‘fetch something’, and did examine the woman. At this point Sood says she assessed her young patient as having Braxton-Hicks contractions, gave her two ‘Tri-Profen’ analgesics, and told her to go home and take some Panadol. Imagine her surprise when she heard the poor girl went into premature labour and had the baby. Nothing to do with her, right?
Sood’s defense raises a number of questions. Why did she wait weeks to file an affidavit, given the seriousness of the incident? What was she doing at her clinic, randomly fetching something – knowing that she would be at work the next day? And having shown up, what would induce her to see a patient whilst there if she had been well and was due to return the following day if she needed a letter? Unless she was, as prosecutors allege, halfway through an illegal abortion.
Sood’s patient’s baby, meanwhile, being at 21-24 weeks gestation, would have been approximately 20cm long, kicking, sleeping and hearing in the womb, a fully formed human, his gender clear, in miniature. The baby survived his premature delivery but died a few hours later. Premature babies have been known to be ‘viable’ at this stage, if the mother goes into labour which cannot be stopped. Oddly, if Dr Sood had had the foresight to kill the baby in utero and keep a close eye on her patient, she would never have been caught. One wonders – if she was in principle willing to perform a late-term abortion – how much practice she may have had.
So just who is Dr Sood? To make a long story short, she is the owner of the private Australian Women’s Health Clinic in the Sydney suburb of Fairfield, and has what might politely be called a checkered past. People keep alleging that has made money in less-than-honest ways. And she was in fact found guilty on of Medicare fraud (96 counts) earlier this year but went straight back to work.
On the 8th of February this year, Dr Sood faced 96 charges of dishonestly obtaining Medicare benefits. At trial it was revealed that Dr Sood was bulk-billing patients through Medicare and also charging them an out of pocket fee; around $120 for a 12 week pregnancy, and $1,100 for a 19 week pregnancy. Now a doctor can charge whatever she likes for a medical service in private practice, but Medicare refunds a flat $144.30 for an abortion. If a doctor wants to charge $200, $500 or $3,000 upfront, she is entitled to do so. The mother then takes her receipt to a Medicare office and receives $144.30 back. Unless she has reached the Medicare safety net, in which case she receives $144.30, plus 80% of the difference. If the doctor bulk bills the patient (many doctors in private practice bulk bill poor patients) the patient gives no cash up front, Medicare pays the doctor directly, and the doctor is not entitled to receive any more money.
The charges followed a raid on Sood’s practice on 30 October 2001. Moments before her arrest, Dr Sood was seen by an employee shoving bundles of receipts under medical waste. Perhaps she was hoping the Health Insurance Commission investigators would be too squeamish to look there. A nurse at the clinic, Minna Zoretic, testified that she had seen Dr Sood dumping papers in a bin. Ms Zoretic had also worked on reception, and taken money from patients for abortions. Ms Zoretic had worked as a nurse, receptionist and counselor at the clinic, although she had no qualifications in counseling. Dr Sood was sentenced to 300 hours of community service and fined more than $20,000, but went back to work.
The baby who died after a premature birth, allegedly induced by Dr Sood, had a mother who was ‘counseled’ at the clinic by Minna Zoretic, who again has no counseling qualifications.
Investigate has also learned that Dr Sood was once investigated by the NSW Industrial Relations Commission for a kickback scheme wherein she was alleged to have received $25 for each sample she sent to Westpath Services, a pathology company. Dr Raghubir Singh – another doctor working at the clinic – has alleged that Sood received between $8,000 and $10,000 a month from the scheme. And she has been the subject of a number of complaints to the Health Care Complaints Commission (HCCC scheme), but has continued to work.
Under NSW law, one doctor’s opinion that a woman’s physical, mental, social or economic health might suffer as a result of pregnancy or birth is sufficient to warrant a legal abortion. The doctor in question can be the abortion doctor who will profit. Apparently their medical scruples are beyond reproach. To detain someone against their will in a mental health institute because they are a danger to themselves or others requires two doctors, and the case must be heard by a magistrate within 48 hours. To kill a baby, the opinion of a doctor with a vested interest meets the letter of the law.
A doctor who provides abortion is a general practitioner who has decided to provide abortion. Abortion is not routinely taught in medical schools; one must profess an interest, and once one has become a GP, approach a clinic and learn on the job. If a doctor knows what to do in a technical sense, there is no theoretical law to prevent them from hanging up their shingle as an abortionist. There are no licensing requirements. There is an Association of abortion providers, which has voluntary membership. The association sees itself as promoting women’s health, using the safest techniques, and keeping up with ‘best practice’. Dr Sood was not a member. One wonders why.
Dr Sood is not the first person in NSW to be charged under the Crimes Act for performing an illegal abortion, just the first to be charged in more than 20 years. In 1981, Dr George Smart was charged with performing an illegal abortion in circumstances similar to this current case. The teenage girl who he aborted had been refused abortion at other services, and was more than 20 weeks pregnant. Like Dr Sood, Dr Smart was not a member of the relevant professional association, and was on the outer edge of that community. He was reportedly not liked or trusted by other abortion doctors, and could not find other abortionists to testify on his behalf. Smart was found guilty, and lodged an appeal. The case law would have been challenged on appeal, but Smart died before the appeal was heard, so the law was not challenged, and has not been clarified since.
The burden on the prosecution is to prove that Dr Sood was trying to cause a miscarriage (or, more accurately, a stillbirth; babies delivered after 20 weeks must be registered with Births Deaths and Marriages) and gave her prostaglandin. This can be proven or disproven by blood tests the hospital may or may not have run at the time they admitted the young woman. Because it is a criminal case, the standard of proof required is high. The young woman would probably win a civil case. In the civil area, the laws could be tested and clarified. And indeed a number of civil charges have been brought against abortion providers across Australia, for assault (if the woman has not given informed consent, than any contact with her body is presumed to be assault) or nervous shock. These cases have always been settled out of court, meaning that the law is not challenged or clarified in court, and that the woman is bound by a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the case.
Law relating to unborn children is terrifically confused, and varies by state. If a 39-week pregnant woman is stabbed, and the baby dies but the mother lives, no one has been murdered. If a 24-week premmie baby is stabbed, then it has been murdered. Abortion is legal in different circumstances in different states. The majority of general practitioners feel that they do not have a clear understanding of abortion law.
In NSW, counseling is not a legal requirement prior to abortion, although most best-practice publications suggest that it should be available. In order to legally consent to any medical procedure, the patient must give informed consent. The interpretation of this in relation to abortion seems to be that the woman should have an understanding of what will be done to her body and consent to anaesthetic risks and so forth. There is no expressed need to give her any information about the baby.
To find out more about the consequences of terminations on Australia’s women, Investigate spoke to Melinda Tankard-Reist, the author of the 2002 book Giving Sorrow Words and the forthcoming Defiant Birth: Women who Resist Medical Eugenics, and an advocate for Australian women suffering from post-abortion grief. In her 2002 book she discusses the case of the Australian woman who was led into a room for abortion ‘counseling’ and told to press ‘play’ to hear the recorded message.
‘The hundreds of women I have spoke to didn’t feel that they had made an informed choice or gave informed consent…abortion is sold as something quick and simple and easy. The providers’ attitude is that any pregnancy in less-than-perfect circumstances should be aborted. It’s the sensible thing to do’, she says, adding that she believes the fact that so many women ‘choose’ abortion is a sign that there is something terribly wrong with society.
‘This is a Band-aid solution where a woman is abandoned to her so-called autonomy, and if she suffers emotionally after the abortion is told to keep her mouth shut, that she is the ano- maly…this is a sacred right…any questioning or discussion is out of order.’
Tankard-Reist reports that of the hundreds of women who answered her advertisement to talk about grief after abortion, a large number asked if they were the only woman who had felt that way, and called.
In Australia pregnancy decision-making counseling is provided primarily by groups that have a combination of church and government funding. As are, in fact, many other social services such as drug rehabilitation programs, and injecting rooms. The staff at these centres are likely to be pro-life themselves, but have chosen to help women by offering free telephone and face to face support during pregnancy. Investigate test-called two of these services, under the guise of Karen, a 19-year-old student who was 14 weeks pregnant and seeking an abortion. In both cases the counselors took neither a pro Nor con position, and I found ‘Karen’s’ discussions with the services to be sympathetic and focused on providing non-judgemental support to discuss the options.
In NSW, non-directive pregnancy counseling that includes referral for termination is provided by the Bessie Smythe Foundation. Margaret Kirkby, Centre Director for Bessie Smyth spoke to Investigate about abortion and the legacy that counseling, or lack thereof, can create. While Ms Kirkby is resolutely pro-choice, she admits that Bessie Smythe ran an abortion clinic until 2002, but found that it was economically impossible to keep providing abortions to all women in need while also offering ethically adequate counseling: ‘At the end of the day, it is a small business. Running a service in a way that all women have access to extensive counseling is not financially viable. We believe that providing counseling for 100% of clients is good practice. But it’s not covered by Medicare. [These services] do the best they can. They are staffed by people who are caring and committed’, Kirkby said.
In many, but not all cases this would seem to be true. One may disagree with their moral reasoning, but in many cases these individual people are doing the best they can to assist women the way that seems right to them.
But while she admits women may feel grief and loss – she calls it ‘hitting a wall’ – after an abortion, Kirkby resolutely refuses to accept the existence of what many call Post Abortion Stress Syndrome; she claims that it is a right-wing anti-abortion myth designed to scare women and blame abortion providers. Also, it is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of mental disorders. (A slightly odd argument coming from someone like Kirkby, in that implies that the patriarchal medical old-boys of the DSM IV are the best judges of womens’ mental health issues.)
Some abortion providers in NSW allow for counseling which is included in the up front fee, if the woman books the counseling ahead. Some providers do this, but if the woman does not have an abortion on the day of the counseling, she is charged an extra $50 fee – and $50 is a lot of money in some circumstances. Other clinics refer women who seem distressed or unsure to a psychologist, who charges his or her own fee. Some clinics, such as the multinational Marie Stopes, provide no counseling at all, under any circumstances. They either send you home or run you through the system. Those are the choices.
In June this year Natasha Stott Despoja tabled a motion in parliament to force pregnancy counseling services to disclose ‘this service does not refer for termination’ in any advertisement. She felt it was misleading women to provide pregnancy advice from a service that didn’t seek to increase the Australian abortion statistics. She did not discuss in the motion any need for abortion providers to advertise that ‘this clinic has a financial interest in your having an abortion.’
Kirkby told Investigate that ‘compulsory counseling would be an insult to women...it could lead to a situation where women were forced by the state to do certain things, such as view pictures of babies, or wait 72 hours after the counseling before the abortion’, as is the case in some American states. ‘Counselling women must be non-directive, and focus on the woman’s needs…It could also create a situation where counseling was about ticking off boxes, not about supporting women’. Tankard Reist agrees that it would be terrible to force women to view pictures or read information against their will but counters that ‘all information should be freely available; it is absurd and shows the poor state things are in that we even need to discuss the need for counseling’.
Regarding the ‘national tragedy’ of abortion rates in Australia, most people would agree that it would be a good thing to lower the rate of abortion. There are tremendously difficult issues involved in thinking about abortion, the least of these being the lack of data. Health Minister Tony Abbott caused an uproar when he suggested that there were 100,000 terminations performed each year, but the fact is that hard numbers are tough to come by. Most Australian states do not keep records of abortions; Medicare data tells us how many women have had procedures for which they claimed a Medicare rebate, but those numbers are fuzzy as well as some of these procedures will have involved women who have had a miscarriage or stillbirth, and many other women will never claim the Medicare rebate. Some trends show the overall abortion rate decreasing, but it is equally plausible that this is a reflection of miscarriage management, which has trended towards a non-interventionist approach over the last decade as women are no longer routinely given D&Cs after miscarriage.
Arbitrary time limits on abortion are also confused. Why 20 weeks, why not 19, or 21? Is a cleft lip enough of a disability to warrant a termination? What about a 90% chance the baby has Down’s Syndrome – versus a 10% chance that the baby is fine? The current government rhetoric on women’s issues is struggles to mash together a jumble of moderate and conservative attitudes into a cohesive policy. So we want less abortions, but we don’t want more women on the single parent’s pension.
The poorest and most disadvantaged women have the hardest time getting access to everything, including abortion and counseling. Yet they have more abortions, and surely would benefit from more counseling.
The abortion debate is too often about choosing sides, and not enough about civilized respectful discussion of the issues by non-like minded people. Fred Nile can’t keep himself from interrupting pro-choice speakers, and pro-choice pollies can’t stop themselves from name-calling in response. The issue is not ‘settled’, and the majority who think they have an opinion haven’t challenged it, and are going on a gut reaction.
We need to think very seriously about how women are treated in our society, and that a NSW abortion clinic advertises ‘Accidental and Unplanned pregnancy is a fact of life. Dealing with it can be emotional and stressful’. The implication would seem to be that abortion is a fact of life, but it’s just one of those crosses we women have to bear. We should accept that obviously we will not be able to finish our degrees, make enough money, achieve what we want and need, if we become pregnant.
I prefer this quote provided by the American organisation Feminists for Life which has as its slogan, ‘Abortion is a sign that we are not meeting the needs of women’: ‘When a man steals to satisfy hunger, we may safely conclude that there is something wrong in society – so when a woman destroys the life of her unborn child, it is an evidence that either by education or circumstances she has been greatly wronged.’
The abortion-breast cancer debate: Is there a link?
Many studies have suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer, to the effect that abortion is a risk factor for breast cancer. Not all women who have abortions get breast cancer, there are a myriad of risk factors, and more than one form of breast cancer. Nevertheless abortion is a modifiable risk factor – unlike family history, for example, it can be avoided.
The Abortion Providers Federation of Australia acknowledges that a number of reputable studies have shown a link, but calls for more studies, and their website implies that no conclusions can be drawn. It is, however, accepted that early first full-term pregnancy (i.e. before 24 years of age), increased number of pregnancies, and length of time breastfeeding all decrease breast cancer risk. This is not debated.
An independent link is thought to be due to the proliferation of new breast cells in early pregnancy. If the pregnancy is continued, these cells become mature and less vulnerable to cancer. In most cases of miscarriage, there is a gradual decline in the hormones that cause this proliferation. In some miscarriages, and all abortions, the hormone change is rapid.
The first study to examine the abortion-breast cancer link among American women was published in 1981 and reported that abortion ‘appears to cause a substantial increase in risk of subsequent breast cancer.’ A 140% risk elevation was reported. [Pike MC et al., British Journal of Cancer (1981;43:72-6]
The only statistically significant study of American women using medical records (rather than histories) reported a 90% increased risk of breast cancer among women in New York who had chosen abortion. [Howe et al. (1989) Int J Epidemiol 18:300-4]
Critics of the link rely on the problem of reported history. This argument supposes that women who are healthy under-report their history of abortion (which is well established), but also that women who have breast cancer defy this general trend and accurately (or with exaggeration) report their abortion history.
Posted by InvestigateDesign at 01:45 AM | Comments (0)
MUSIC: Sep 05, AU Edition
VISIONS OF EMBARGOES
Ed Bark is stuck inside a screening room with the can’t-talk-about-this-movie blues again
BEVERLY HILLS, California – Now you see him, or else you don’t. The secretive society known as Bob Dylan and his ‘people’ called the tune for PBS (think ABC, but with explicit corporate sponsorship) last week. It was something of a protest song, but more a marketing ploy tied to September’s DVD and PBS unveilings of the Martin Scorsese-directed No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Here’s how it went down.
PBS told TV critics in late spring that their only opportunity to see the 3-hour film would be on the night of July 13 at a closely guarded theatre screening in Beverly Hills. No review copies would be sent out between the screening and PBS’ Sept. 26 premiere of the film as part of its acclaimed ‘American Masters’ series. Critics were also strongly encouraged to keep their opinions to themselves for at least the next two months.
This is hardly business as usual. In an increasingly crowded TV universe, PBS and rival networks routinely send shows to critics weeks and often months before their air dates. But No Direction Home would be a glaring exception. Why? Because Dylan and his manager, Jeff Rosen, who interviewed him for the film, are either paranoid or pragmatic about piracy.
‘The Dylan people say that he is the most bootlegged artist in the world’, PBS president Pat Mitchell said in an interview. ‘And they are terrified that if screeners are sent out, the next thing we know it would be all