Eric was a touring member of the Wallabies between 1947 and 1949.
He’s still going strong at 90.
The kids want to take him on at lawn bowls.
It’s a long story, but Eric has a new love – Enid.
Eric and Enid called off their engagement in 1941.
This gallery contains 5 photos.
Twitter is a funny thing.
If you’re reading this you probably already know I love the wonderful things that using Twitter adds to my life.
Twitter is friendly, collegial, and supportive.
At least you can build it to be that way. It is the classic example of being able to choose your friends.
Every day I learn new things, see things I’ve never seen before, travel vicariously with ‘friends’ I have made in different parts of the world.
Penpals, if you like.
And here in Newcastle, it’s no different.
Over the last couple of years I’ve come to know both virtually and in real life a wonderful group of locals who simply enjoy the opportunity to chat with each other and maybe even meet occasionally for a coffee or a meal.
What I love about them, one of the many things I appreciate about them, is that they don’t care that I’m ‘the woman on the radio’.
It’s rarely a topic of conversation.
The conversations are about life. Love. Politics. Wine. Anything.
We talk about the stuff that I talk about on the radio, but they couldn’t give a stuff about my job.
Joe Grgas was one of the locals who I was fortunate to meet on quite a few occasions, and who would often tweet me while I was on air – particularly to comment on music.
Or food. Or kids.
They are small gestures, but things like this can make your whole day.
Because it makes you feel like a friend.
Thank you, Joe.
We were talking on the radio recently about The Beatles, and how on earth could you choose just one favourite Beatles song?
Joe could.
And so.
I played it for you today, @joegrgas.
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Today I saw something wonderful. And unexpected.
My kids know about real food. Fresh food. They don’t think cakes come from packet mix because mum says if you’re going to have chocolate cake, have a real one. They know how to make dumplings. They’ve had chooks in their backyard (and will do again when I build a proper pen … long story).
They know how to make yoghurt, and therefore they know how to make labna. And they eat it. They pick herbs from the garden for including in meals or mint for pineapple slushies.
They even know how to make beef jerky and smoked salmon.
I’m very much a slacker-mum, and I could make sure they watched less television and ran around the yard a bit more, but they do know about real, fresh food. They see mum cook interesting, tasty things, and then freeze them for later. I make their school lunches nearly every day and they’re always very simple sangers & a bit of fruit. Maybe a bikkie or two. Sometimes they get a canteen lunch order or a little money to spend, but not often. They don’t mind, it’s just how it is.
Because we cook. Yes, I work full-time and they do after-school stuff like soccer and violin and we probably don’t have all that much of a social life and there’s nowhere near enough hours in the day but we love to make interesting, tasty things to eat. Real food is a priority. In case you’re wondering, we eat McDonalds and pizza. Too often.
Occasionally we visit the local farmers’ market. We have the lovely Turkish family cook spinach, fetta and mushroom gozleme for us for breakfast. And because I must reverse engineer anything tasty we now make it at home in a sandwich press.
We buy oranges from the man who grows them, lemons and lemon cordial from the woman who grows the lemons and makes the cordial, ‘Russian’ sausages from Mr Kasmaroski who was taught how to make them by his great-grandfather. We buy felafel, hommus, baba ganoush and the most amazingly garlicky garlic dip from the man who makes them and we get some of his delicious bread smothered in zaatar to eat our dips and goodies with
Today at the farmers’ market we met Stephane Pois.
I knew a little about Stephane as he had been on our breakfast program at the ABC station I work at to make pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, and he once gave me a beautiful spicy sausage to try, but I don’t know him very well. After today, however, he is my new best friend.
I didn’t know that Stephane was the very best kind of Pied Piper.
Stephane is a very French Frenchman who kisses you on both cheeks and does food and wine tours and food tastings, gourmet hampers and so on in the Hunter Valley. At the farmers’ market, however, he shares his love of fresh produce and beautiful, simple food by doing quick cooking demonstrations. Today he made, among other things, vin chaud – mulled wine, and this mother could have happily sat there all day tasting it in tiny little cups. Or mugs. OK buckets.
In between doing the demonstrations, Stephane does a children’s tour of the market. With portable microphone in hand and kids dressed in aprons and chef’s hats, they charge off at a rapid trot to visit half a dozen stall holders where Stephane tells them about the food, the people who make or grow it, and then they have a little taste and maybe collect goodies for their loot bags.
Today they learned about fresh oranges and which ones are sweeter, they tasted beautiful Angus beef and chilli (yes, chilli) sausages with Tim (in the photo), they tasted labna made by Simon (and declared it better than their mother’s – funny because Simon taught me how to make it), they tried pate and delicious pork terrine made by Stephane himself, salted caramel truffles and scored a lovely bag of fresh mushrooms from the mushroom grower.
And then they all returned to Stephane’s cooking stall to cook vichy carrots.
End result? Incredibly happy and motivated children who had just had a rip-roaring gallop through the farmers market, met some wonderful growers and producers who obviously share a love of food and see the importance of Stephane’s quest to inspire children. And they all do this for free. Maybe the parents buy an item here or there, maybe they don’t, but no-one worries about that. Stephane’s quest is healthy kids who understand fresh produce and love good food.
I reckon this very loud and exuberant Frenchman knows just how to achieve it.
We have seen our cardiologist. I say ‘our’ because he is a wonderful man who has taken care of #2 son since the day he was born.
Mr 9 does, indeed, have Wolff Parkinson White syndrome and has been prescribed a beta blocker and regular checkups, we will see Dr Garry again in a few months.
His advice was that Mr 9 may grow out of it as he gets bigger, or may require a cardiac ablation when he’s about 12 to actually ‘fry’ the dodgy electrical pathway in Birdy’s heart.
But I know this:
We will all be just fine!
Due to popular demand!
I admit I actually prefer this to the traditional coffee flavours.
Please note this recipe makes a large quantity – portion control, my arse. I also just kinda don’t really follow a recipe – ever – but this is what I think I do. There are some highly technical terms following.
2 x 250gm tubs marscapone
800gm frozen raspberries (I buy the big-arsed bag of Nanna’s raspberries from Woolies – about $8)
250ml carton cream (fresh, pouring cream, not thickened cream. One day I will make this with sour cream because I reckon it would be fantastic)
2 x eggs
1 x cup caster sugar
1 x large packet savoiardi biscuits (how the hell do you spell ‘savoiardi’ … sponge fingers)
vanilla essence (try to buy the real stuff, it tastes heaps better)
Frangelico liquer (name your poison, really. I’ve also made it with La Grande Passion – the ‘passionfruit’ version of Grande Marnier)
Separate your eggs and cream together the egg yolks, sugar & vanilla.
Add marscapone and cream and whip until thickening nicely. Not too thick, you don’t want cheese – even though it would be very tasty. Thick enough to not be too sloppy.
Whip your egg whites until they’re thick and fluffy. If you get yolk or any other kind of fat in the egg whites, they will not whip. (Thanks Aunty M for teaching me that when I was a wee thing)
Gently mix all that stuff together and you’ll find you have a bloody huge bowl of awesome tasting creamy stuff with the ability to cause coronary artery disease at the merest glance. Don’t sweat it.
Pour your chosen booze (Frangelico really is awesome for this) into a little bowl so you can dip your savoiardi into it. Dip both sides, don’t be stingy.
Then layer boozy bikkies, marscapone goop and shitloads of raspberries until you’ve filled the dish. Then lick the bowl, beaters, spatulas and whatever else you’ve used. Before your kids get them.
Put it in the fridge overnight – you want ‘all the flavours to swap around’.
Eat it.
Or if you want to be really fancy, whip up some more cream just before serving, slather the top of it and then grate several kilograms of your favourite chocolate over the top.
Some recipes for tiramisu fuck around with gelatine and shit. Why bother. This is awesome!
Enjoy!
Sometimes I think our two sons couldn’t be more different. One is tall and slender and brown-eyed, the other is a blue-eyed man-mountain. One is anxious and thoughtful, the other is a one-man riot. Of course there are many things they also have in common.
Unfortunately, on Christmas Eve we added another item to the list of things the boys share.
At the date of writing we have an unconfirmed diagnosis of Wolff Parkinson White syndrome for Mr 9.
So it seems both of the boys have an issue with their hearts.
Fuck it.
What’s your favourite place? Perhaps you have more than one. I love home, of course. Home is my nest, my sanctuary. But there are other places that I love, that somehow speak to a place deep inside me. Tasmania is one. The Blue Mountains is another. I wish I could explain the feeling I get when we’re in the mountains. It is some heady mix of history, nature, wilderness, life, death, Mother Nature … can’t find the words. But it gives me an incredibly wonderful feeling.
If I ever run away, you know where you’ll find me.
Birthday parties.
Just the mere mention of a child’s birthday party is enough to send me into a sweat.
I hate them. No, really.
Over the last 9 years, we’ve had the usual schedule of small birthday parties for our boys, but for the last two years we’ve given them the option of a birthday party at home OR a weekend away. Being boys who love an adventure and new places, they’ve quite sensibly opted for the weekend away. So we’ve gone fishing at the Manning River, we’ve stayed in a cabin with wallabies in the Barrington Tops, off to Canberra … fine, fun things that all four of us enjoy.
This year it came to a screaming halt. The screaming was mine.
“Mama? Can I have a birthday party at home this year?” Mr soon-to-be-9 enquired?
“Oh, um … err … are you SURE? You wouldn’t like to go away for the weekend?”
“Nah, I reckon it’d be fun to get the kids around here again.”
OK. Well, I understand all about the importance of the child’s social standing at school and so on so a party it was.
However, I simply refuse to pay an exorbitant amount of money for themed parties, clowns, face-painters, magicians, musicians, hookers and blow. Not going to happen. I will, however, spend a goodly amount of money on awesome loot bags for all attendees, great food for kids (no fairy bread here, thank you very much), and great food (and wine) for the adults.
Here comes another area of my birthday party anxiety: The Dump & Run Parent.
It would seem, certainly after this year’s experience, that this is de rigeur for kids’ birthday parties. The parent chauffeurs their precious offspring to the front door, and then backs away as fast as they can without going base over apex on their way to … wherever it is that they go to … telling me they’ll see me later. Yes, but WHEN?!? I have never done this. Should I?
Suddenly, I am in charge of 15 nine year old kids all charged up and ready to go nuts in my loungeroom, my kitchen, my bathroom, my sons’ bedrooms, MY bedroom, the verandahs – front and back … and I’m amazed by how much bigger they look in my loungeroom than when I see them all each afternoon at school. They’re huge. All of them. They’ve suddenly grown to be at least seven feet tall.
And then it rains. Not just a little. Huey sends down enough of the wet stuff to keep the Murray-Darling irrigators in business for several hundred years to come.
Housebound. Did I tell you there were FIFTEEN NINE YEAR OLDS IN MY HOUSE?
Credit is due to my inlaws, both retired teachers who love these sorts of gatherings of small people and are wizards at games to entertain kids of all ages. Suddenly an enormous package appeared. Pass-the-parcel. Fabulously hand-crafted by my Russian mother-in-law – each layer cleverly identified for each of the kids, and a gift in each layer for the unwrappee tasked with performing some weird party trick for the amusement of his/her peers.
Credit is also due to those parents who didn’t ‘dump and run’. Mostly these were friends of mine with kids that we know. But there was also a mum who stayed with her special needs* child. A beautiful, sunny boy who goes to school in his wheelchair, ably assisted by a carer. A boy who both of my sons adore. A boy who has trouble communicating clearly verbally, who can’t hear well, but whose face and smile and hilarious nature make it clear that – at least on the inside – he’s doing just fine. I don’t think he is terribly impaired intellectually, but certainly physically he has a host of difficulties. My son had James sit next to him to help with the unwrapping of gifts.
Also at the party was one of the children of Sudanese refugees who attend our school. His parents don’t drive so my husband picked him up from his home and then the inlaws dropped him off. He came to my rescue with the strangely shaped balloons that I simply couldn’t blow up. Neither could my hubby. Nor our kids. A boy of super lung capacity!
I don’t know what criteria my kids use when they make choose friends, I think they just hang out with like-minded souls. They certainly don’t apply the prejudices that most adults do.
I admit I had a glass of wine to see me through the afternoon. OK, maybe two glasses. But here’s what I learned:
My kids are awesome. And the friends they have chosen are awesome. Some of them we have known since the first day of kindergarten. Some we have come to know over the last four years. They are smart, funny, caring, splendid children and I adore them. They are welcome in our home any day.
My wish for these kids is that they stick together, take care of each other, enjoy each other’s company, and continue to return to our home well into their adulthood. I know they’ll have their ups and downs, they’ll face their challenges, fall in and out of like and love, share their first drinks, smokes and … things. (Oh come on, I don’t have to explain, do I?)
But my heart looks forward to seeing these young people taking up even more space in my loungeroom in the years to come.
To my darling sons – YOU are awesome.
Love,
Mama.
* I asked his mum about this article before publishing it, to ensure it was OK. She asked me to change ‘disabled’ to ‘special needs’, which of course I am more than happy to do. I’ve also asked if she’d like to write a blog to share with us all – so here’s hoping she will. Here is part of her email to me: “If you would like to leave the story below as is, that’s ok, though I prefer the words “additional needs” than disabled. It is commonly called “special needs” now. Education, eh. Better than “What is your son’s defect?” as an elderly man asked me once. I couldn’t help myself, I had quick wit that day, I said “Nothing” questioningly. (My son is there right next to me!! He has feelings too! Not that he knows what some words mean at 9, though I’m informing the inquirer, in my own subtle way, he he). You can even add the above instead, if you wish, ie. the boy with additional need’s Mum added this comment when I checked with her about the publishing of the photo…”
My mother-in-law isn’t happy that we’ve become a family of beekeepers. I understand this. She worries. A lot. About everything. Even stuff I haven’t heard of yet. But right now it’s, “But they might be allergic? The children might get stung! They might die!” I could never live like that.
Last weekend we inherited a beehive. I had thought of getting bees previously and when I mentioned it to a beekeeping friend she immediately offered me her surplus hive – complete with buzzy bees. So now, in my backyard, is a hive of thousands of little bee friends who are going to pollinate my fruit trees and make me vast amounts of delicious honey. Oh, and the beeswax is just another bonus.
Messing about on the internet today, I found an interesting blog. It’s called Fooducate. It is US-based but as soon as I looked at it I knew I had met kindred souls.
First of all, let me state this. I am not a food-nazi, I don’t do food paranoia, I’m sure we eat too much fat, salt, etc. We eat fast food, we eat takeaways, we eat biscuits and deep-fried stuff. But here’s my thing:
Most of the time, we eat real, fresh food. In this house, if you are eating chocolate cake, chances are it is one that I have made myself with lashings of quality chocolate, eggs, butter – real ingredients. If you are going to eat chocolate cake, make it a good one. My kids help me make pancakes on the weekend. I have a bread machine that gets a work out at least three times a week – sometimes for bread, sometimes for pizza dough, or gozleme. The kids frequently see Mama making food. This is important to me.
My mother used to say, “If you can’t spell it and you can’t pronounce it – don’t eat it!”
Next time you go to a supermarket and you see the yummy prepared chocolate cakes, take a moment to read the ingredient list. I know we’re all busy working parents and so on, but really … do you actually KNOW what half of that stuff is? Or do you just assume that if it is in food, it must therefore be safe to eat.
I’m sure you’ve all had the experience of being asked by a young check-out operator, “What is this?” – this most recently happened to me when I purchased a lovely bag of fresh broad beans. I’m not casting nasturtiums (!) on her, she is simply representative of her own life experience. Frankly you don’t often see fresh broad beans in supermarkets, and it’s so convenient to buy them frozen.
But I want more for my children.
I want them to know what food is and where it comes from.
Our garden is full of edibles, young fruit trees, english spinach growing underneath the almond tree, herbs in any available spot that I can shove a seedling into. My garden is very random, if you like order you will hate my garden. It has become a bit of a case of ‘if you can’t eat it, why is it there’.
Now we have bees. We ‘robbed the hive’ for the first time yesterday and my boys got to try honey straight from the comb. They are looking forward to giving our honey as gifts. They want to make candles with the beeswax.
I’m afraid I might still eat the odd chicken nugget, even though I know full well it is made of that pink shit above.
But I’ll make sure my kids know exactly how odd chicken nuggets are!
* Oh, the pink shit above? It is ‘mechanically separated chicken‘. Oh yes. Nom nom nom.
I’ve written about the beautiful Dainere Anthoney for my ABC blog and also for HappyChild (where this post first appeared September 2010).
Brain cancer. Medulloblastoma.
Dainere and her family are fighting this cruel disease as hard as they can, but it is a terrible and aggressive opponent that wants nothing but to take her young life. The treatments Dainere has endured to try to cripple her foe are gradually crippling her. She is constantly exhausted and in pain. She finds it hard to talk and her speech has been affected, so she writes.
She is a wonderful writer who writes with great love and compassion for all of her family. Her siblings Nalani and Jarrett – teenagers that should be having the time of their lives but for now are forced to take somewhat of a back seat while all of the attention is on their younger sister. I know they would never envy her disease, but sometimes they must envy the attention and I was aware of this as my own children handed over a small silk bag of treats for Dainere – a simple, sweet perfume, a long chain of embroidered elephants to hang in room, and chocolate to share with everyone. Their own lives should be celebrated, and I’m sure they are, but this must be a rough time for them. They don’t know it yet but this will shape their lives
Her parents, Yvonne & Stephen. I’ve written before about my own son’s fight for his life, but I can assure you it doesn’t compare with what these two wonderful people are going through. I admire them greatly for their warmth and the normality they strive to give their three children.
You can read Dainere’s fabulous blog here – please leave her a comment, even if you just say hello, she loves it!
Dainere has been having a few setbacks. It was time to go. So I booked accommodation, packed the kids and bags in the car, and we drove to Canberra for the weekend to meet the family. And deliver that hug. And several kisses on the cheek!
I’m not sure how much pain she is in, she writes about it a lot so I think it has become pretty constant. She finds just about everything exhausting. So I had no intention of overstaying my welcome. Just an hour. Sitting next to this beautiful girl with her soft, fluffy beanie. A little girl who has lots to say but finds it hard to do so but whose smile is about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Dainere oozes serenity. She is a wise and ancient soul in a tiny, bird-like body that is betraying her. You just have to read her extensive and regular blog entries to know that she’s generous of spirit and compassion and determined to make a difference. To make her life count. She will probably never know just how significant her contribution has been to others, including me.
I took my family to meet hers and I confess I was a little concerned about how my 7 & 8 year old sons would deal with meeting a little girl who is so very ill. I have talked about her with them on many occasions, and of course they are aware of Mr 7′s serious congenital heart defect and surgery. My kids are pretty awesome, without fail they always step up to whatever challenges they face, but meeting Dainere was going to be a life lesson. Of course, they were great and I asked Mr 8 earlier this evening what he’d made of it all:
I was worried about her, worried that she would have lots of scars and not be the pretty girl that she is. I was worried about her cancer, that she’ll have to have more operations and lose more of her ability to move her body. I was scared of meeting someone who is possibly going to die – imagine every day waking up and knowing that death is probably coming soon. I have thought that she might find somebody who has the technology to stop this brain cancer, but probably not. I wouldn’t be very happy if it was me or one of my relatives or close friends. I reckon her mother and father must be very scared and worried about her, and her brother and sister are probably thinking about her all the time and wondering what it’s like going through operations, not being able to walk – stuff like that. I’m glad I met her, she’s a very nice person and it’s sad that she has to be so sick. I hope she finds a doctor that can help her come through all this.
Dainere – thank you for having us bring the crazy that is my little family to visit yours. I think you have the warmest, softest cheek I’ve ever been lucky enough to kiss! Knowing you makes my world a better place. I am so pleased that you and I have remained email buddies! Every day you remind me to think about the things, and the people, that really matter.
… child abuse.
I understand frustration, annoyance, exhaustion, exasperation, fear … but I do not understand it when children are intentionally harmed or intentionally placed in danger. Nor do I understand how sometimes people stand by and let it happen – KNOWING that there is something wrong. Having just a few months ago completed a series of interviews with adult survivors of child abuse, I can assure you my world is somewhat changed. I knew it happened. I had no idea how often, or to how many. Female and male. The letters are still arriving at work from those who want to share their story.
I’m still reeling from watching this interview between Mia Freedman and Caroline Overington – two women whose work I love and whilst I don’t know them personally, I suspect I’d like them a great deal. I’ll call them friends, because in the virtual world, they most certainly are.
I love Twitter. Some of the most interesting conversations I have with people are in 140 characters or less. OK, maybe groups of 140 characters or 140 characters that include links to other amazing things. I have a true and deep love of learning, so I love that Twitter gives me something new each and every day. Several times a day. My world is a richer place for the things others choose to share with me. Smart, funny, intelligent, stupid, wicked, naughty, outrageous, heartbreaking, inspiring … the whole shebang!
One of my ‘tweeps’ – someone with whom I have a 140conversation on Twitter – is @redundantmother. She’s relatively new to Twitter (aren’t we all!) … but she has a fine way with those 140 characters and I love her stuff. She gives me all of the above. Sometimes all at the same time.
But this week, she wrote the piece that follows. And I, in turn, share it with you. Thanks @redundantmother – you are anything but that. Thank you for asking me to share your words with my friends.
A Heartfelt Plea
I’ve worked in child protection for 15 years. I thought that I had seen everything there was to see. I thought that I had seen every horror that children can experience at the hands of their parents (mostly) but also strangers and other people in their extended family. I thought wrong.
I thought that I was “hardened”, that the years working with these children and their families had inoculated me against being shocked about the extent of child abuse in our community, in our families. I thought wrong.
I’ve always held a very strong conviction that when working in child protection, when you stop being affected by the horrors that children are faced with on a daily basis, when you stop wanting to cry for these kids, you know it’s time to find another line of work. I’ve never stopped crying for these kids.
Last night I watched a short film by Ian Darling called Polly and me on ABC1. Did it shock me? No. I’m very well aware that everything that was depicted on Polly and me happens and unfortunately, the little girl’s story, as shocking and confronting as it was, is not at the worst end of the scale of child abuse and neglect. I wasn’t shocked so much about the content; what gripped me and what held my insides like a vice was the fact that I was actually seeing it play out in front of me.
As a child protection worker you are often left to respond to child abuse after it happens, after you have received a report, after somebody has seen something, after a child has been injured, after a neighbour has heard something going on. It’s almost always after the event. When you do preventative work with families it’s almost always because abuse or neglect has occurred in the past and you try to put supports in place to prevent it from re-occurring. At the end of the day, the real horror stories are the ones where you work with the children and families after the abuse or neglect has occurred.
Polly and me was like all of those stories about the children that I have in my heart and in my mind from the last 15 years. The difference was, it was unfolding before me. I knew it was a film, I knew that the little girl was an actor, (and a brilliant actor at that), I knew that the mother too was an actor, as was the guy who gave the mother drugs and her up and who sexually abused the little girl was an actor…but it wanted to stop it. I knew what was coming, I knew as the scenes were unfolding, what would happen. It’s like the script of child protection reports of 15 years past.
People think that experiences they have are unique and that nobody experiences them in the same way that they do, and that may be so, but the experience of this child unfortunately is not unique. This child’s story is an unfolding mess of what happens to children every day in this state, this country and across the globe.
I desperately wanted to get in there and take her out. I wanted to get in there and remove her from that and let her play in the park on the swings and clean her up and give her some food that she didn’t have to scavenge from a can. I wanted to give her a real bed, give her lots of Polly’s, I wanted to allow her the freedom to play with Polly and not experience her mother being beaten up or watching her injecting herself intravenously with drugs and pass out. I wanted her to not see her mother bringing men home and then listen to her having sex with them…I wanted to stop her being sexually abused, I wanted to take her away from that. I wanted to be back in child protection.
I didn’t leave child protection because the work was too hard, or because I’d had enough or I thought I’d done enough. I left child protection because sometimes the bureaucracy and the red tape around child protection made it feel like we were losing sight of children like this girl in this film. Watching Polly and me last night made me want to go back.
The panel discussion after the film inspired me and made me despair at the same time. The beautiful girl, Bee, and the amazing young man Asher, were so courageous and inspiring despite their horrendous histories of abuse. They wanted to raise awareness of child protection in our community so that it stops happening to kids like it did to them, they want to talk about it, to allow people to feel comfortable to talk about things we normally would shut away. The professionals on the panel were also wonderful; the Pediatrician, the Foster Parent and the advocacy worker, all of whom clearly had so much experience dealing with children who had been abused and neglected, giving their views.
The part that made me despair was that there was nobody there from the Department of Human Services (the Victorian equivalent of NSW Community Services), and not just another bureaucrat, but a “real” frontline worker.
As someone who has worked in child protection and who has never been allowed to tell her story, I ached to see someone there who could speak to the wonderful and inspiring work that is being carried out by child protection workers across this state and others across Australia every day. These child protection workers are a very rare and very wonderful breed. Nobody who works in child protection, nobody does it for the money. Nobody does it for the good feelings of achievement and self-worth at the end of the day. This is because most of the times, on most days when you get home from work after working in child protection you feel like hell. You feel like you have been chasing your tail, seeing child after child after child who has been abused or neglected and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. And there isn’t.
In 2008/09 Community Services in NSW received over 300,000 reports of children being abused or neglected…300,000. This is a number that is just incomprehensible to most people. Granted, some of those reports probably shouldn’t have been made; reports of children presenting to school with head lice or without lunches, but a large slice of these reports are children who have been very seriously abused or neglected. Children who have had serious physical injuries sometimes resulting in death, children who have been so severely sexually abused that they will never have children of their own, children who have been so horrendously psychologically abused and neglected that they will never trust another human being again.
These are the children that stick with you. These are the children that were depicted by that wonderful little girl in Polly and me.
So what’s the solution? Everybody is looking for a solution. In late 2009, the Honourable Justice James Wood conducted an Inquiry into Child Protection Services in NSW. You can read his report here. In March 2010, the NSW government responded to Justice Wood’s report with the Keep Them Safe: A Shared Response to Child Wellbeing report. This was the government’s 5-year plan to implement most of Justice Wood’s recommendations about the re-shaping of the child protection system in NSW. You can find more information about this on the website. The philosophy behind the Keep Them Safe report is that child protection is everybody’s business, not just that of government departments responsible for child protection. It outlines reforms and recommendations and changes to government practice and policy to improve the child protection system in NSW.
But how many of you knew this? How many people in the community would know that NSW Community Services, NSW Police, NSW Health and NSW Education and Training and other NSW government departments and non-government agencies have faced their biggest shake up ever in terms of how they identify and respond to children at risk of significant harm. Not many I would think.
This is why community education is absolutely crucial. We are regularly exposed to all sorts of graphic, visual representations of the dangers in our community splayed daily across our television screens, magazines, newspapers and radio. The drink driving campaign is a good example. The graphic depiction of what can happen when you drive over the legal limit. The campaigns about smoking are just as graphic, as they should be. The other ones about teenage drinking, the need to rest during long driving trips, the speeding campaigns, all graphic, all with the same message. We see blood, we see injuries, and ultimately, we see the absolute devastation that these events can bring a family and community…and so we should.
What we don’t see is the devastating effects of child abuse in our community. We don’t see children being abused and neglected, we don’t see children cowering in corners, we don’t see children being admitted to hospital with broken bones as a result of being physically assaulted by an adult, we don’t see children being admitted to hospital bleeding and broken as a result of being sexually abused by adults. Why not?
Sure it’s confronting, it’s confronting to think that an adult can harm a child in that way, but we NEED to hear think about that, we need to see the effects, we need to be educated, just as we are about the devastating effects of drink driving, teenage drinking and drug use. These campaigns work because they scare people. They scare people and they shake people into reality and whenever you have one extra drink and drive, whenever you drag on a cigarette, whenever you take drugs – you think about those ads, even fleetingly. Those ads are in our subconscious; those ads are in our collective psyche. Children that are being abused and neglected are not, and they should be.
This week is Child Protection Week.
I hope that we can all raise awareness of child abuse and neglect within our families, our circle of friends and our community. It might not seem like much, but every little bit counts.
For more information you can go to:
NSW Community Services – www.community.nsw.gov.au
NAPCAN – National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect www.napcan.org.au
Keep Them Safe – www.keepthemsafe.nsw.gov.au
To report a child you believe is at risk of significant harm from abuse or neglect call the NSW Community Services Helpline on 132111.
