No, and almost no memory of anything before it - but he was only three and a half at the time.
I am trying to treat two incredibly traumatized 3 year olds at the moment - one was in a car accident, where his mum was hurt - she is fine, but seeing her like that stuffed up their attachment, and he has frank trauma from the accident as well. The other witnessed her dad deliberately run over her mum - and drive off, leaving the mum for dead, and the little girl trying to help her. Hard to work with such weeny ones!
Yes - sometimes the traumatic memories are very vivid, though.
LOL! Normal day at the office.
Number 2 kid is doing better, oddly.
kids seem to vary more in personality than do adults. It's like life homogenizes people.
Hmmm - when I think about it, it is probably because number 2's mum brought her in immediately - she was seen as soon as mum was out of hospital, and no damaging interactions had become entrenched.
Number one I saw months and months down the track - and all sorts of things have become entrenched there. sigh
Oh, poor kids.
They are so resilient, though. We stayed in a second-floor bedroom at E.G.'s grandma's house in Iowa -- everyone was joking about being absolutely sure that the window was closed, because that was the selfsame window that one of E.G.'s uncles had tumbled out of as a toddler. The uncle in question survived, and is perfectly healthy. His mother was in the kitchen, he was playing in the house, she heard a thud or something, went out, and he was meandering around the yard. Figured out from a dent in the grass, I believe, what had happened. But none the worse for wear.
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Artist
: Redgum
Song
: I Was Only Nineteen
Album
:
Submitted by
: Daniel Frawley
Corrected by
:
Rated
: 9.5 (18 votes)
Mum and Dad and Denny saw the passing-out parade at Puckapunyal
It was a long march from cadets.
The sixth battalion was the next to tour, and it was me who drew the card.
We did Canungra, Shoalwater before we left.
And Townsville lined the footpaths as we marched down to the quay
This clipping from the paper shows us young and strong and clean.
And there's me in my slouch hat with my SLR and greens.
God help me, I was only nineteen.
From Vung Tau, riding Chinooks, to the dust at Nui Dat
I'd been in and out of choppers now for months.
But we made our tents a home, VB and pinups on the lockers
And an Asian orange sunset through the scrub.
And can you tell me, doctor, why I stil can't get to sleep?
And night-time's just a jungle dark and a barking M16?
And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?
God help me, I was only ninteen.
A four week operation when each step could mean your last one on two legs
It was a war within yourself.
But you wouldn't let your mates down til they had you dusted off
So you closed your eyes and thought about something else.
Then someone yelled out "Contact!" and the bloke behind me swore
We hooked in there for hours, then a Godalmighty roar
Frankie kicked a mine the day that mankind kicked the moon,
God help me, he was going home in June.
I can still see Frankie, drinking tinnies in the Grand Hotel
On a thirty-six hour rec leave in Vung Tau
And I can still hear Frankie, lying screaming in the jungle
Til the morphine came and killed the bloody row.
And the Anzac legends didn't mention mud and blood and tears
And the stories that my father told me never seemed quite real.
I caught some pieces in my back that I didn't even feel
God help me, I was only nineteen.
And can you tell me, doctor, why I still can't get to sleep?
And why the Channel Seven chopper chills me to my feet?
And what's this rash that comes and goes, can you tell me what it means?
God help me, I was only nineteen.
That was Australia's Vietnam anthem - thought about it for some reason tonight.
This is the second, true, story that all the capital punishment and suchlike arguments made me think of, because it is about dealing with the stuff of which capital punishment can be made - or not, and this was a story I was thinking of often when reading people's opinions about the issue.
(It is a really sad story - so be warned.)
Long time back, when I was doing my honours English, (it was weird - we did three years of honours work, instead of the usual one - go figure...), we formed a tight band of students. This was partly because of the torment and fun of it all, and partly because we were the first group of non-traditional, non-sort of twinset and pearlsy, non "nice" honours students - which was stressful and agitating for many of the staff, who showed it - so we clung together more and became even more outrageous! Well, most of us did.
Anyway, one of the more outrageous was Anne-Marie - a "mature-age" student - 34 when we began to my 18 - which seemed VERY mature.
Anne-Marie was a large, dramatic woman - with huge brown eyes, curly brown hair, theatrical dress - self-absorbed and prone to outbursts of hysteria, she was also very warm, clever and magnetic.
Her parties were the stuff of legend - especially the two solstice parties which occurred every year.
She was partnered by a very lively, supportive and fascinating husband, and had two daughters and a little son. The household was warm, busy, intellectual, disorganized, chaotic and great fun to visit.
The second daughter, Juliet, I always liked especially. She was thin, with longish brown hair and a very mobile, expressive face and a wry humour. Her bedroom door had some sort of a fierce beast on it, a tiger, I think, and a sign saying "Visitors will be eaten". I imagine it was a necessary refuge from the whirlwind of the house, although, as I discovered when I did a stint of cleaning for the family, the whirlwind had taken very concrete form in her messy bedroom, if not in her head.
Anne-Marie and I drifted apart when our joint years of study ended, (and were never close friends - just friendly acquaintances) but we would run into each other from time to time.
I always asked after the children, and I remember very clearly a day when I asked this, and Anne-Marie answered oddly that Julie had "gone away" for a while. The subject was visibly laden with no-go signs and bear traps, (and Julie was 14 at the time - a very bear-trappy time) so I asked no more - but I found it quite disturbing.
The next time I saw Julie, it was because her photograph, along with that of six other young women, was plastered on the front page of the main daily newspaper - she was missing, feared murdered.
The story, as it slowly emerged over the ensuing years, was that two men - a young, charismatic and quite popular one, and an older, passive and somewhat outcast one, had formed a frightening team.
Julie, in common with a number of the victims, had become a little "lost". In an academic family, she had not been fond of school, and had dropped out. Her anxious mother had given her some space and freedom, which Anne-Marie had longed for herself and never received, and Julie and a friend sold jewellery in the city.
How do particular people get picked? I suspect often it is pure, blind chance - I suspect, sometimes, it is a certain lostness which stands out to predators. Paedophiles say they can tell vulnerable kids at a glance.
Anyway, these two men, led, it seems by the younger one, managed to befriend a series of young women (some with a degree of street wisdom - it seems the young man could be very charming and winning) - win their trust, at least enough to get them to agree happily to get in a car, and, undetected, kidnap seven of them, drive them, bound, to an isolated paddock near a small country town (Truro) a couple of hours drive away from the city, and rape and murder them, dig shallow graves, and leave them there - lonely with the elements, as it seemed to us all when they were reclaimed at last.
The murders were stopped by chance, really, although a city detective was becoming alarmed by a disturbing pattern in a certain series of teenage "run-aways." (They DO run away, bless them, for all sorts of reasons, leaving broken hearts - or because of broken hearts, and bodies too - lots of them turn up in a while, some never do.) The younger man died in a car accident - and the older man seems not to have been a predator when alone.
When Julie disappeared, all the usual things were done - police, families, Red Cross. Her parents searched the city for months and months, begged friends for news, heard rumours and seemingly confident tales of her going to Melbourne, or Sydney. or somewhere - never Truro. Nobody much ever went there. At one point, Anne-Marie was told Juliet was living with her sister, who had moved up north for a while, a very cruel piece of mis-information.
One day, the detective I mentioned above, turned up at the door to say that he feared Julie was one of a group of young girls who fitted a pattern of disappearances that he thought, he said with great sadness, meant they had been targeted by a serial killer - not sure if that word was used then, though.
The seven girls' parents gave permission for their daughters' photographs and details to be used as part of a campaign to flush out the killer. As Anne-Marie said in a book she later wrote - it is better to know, even the worst, than to live in fear and suspense.
A large reward was offered for information leading to...etc. It worked. Someone - someone I now know, as a matter of fact, heard something - you know the sort of thing, like six degrees of separation, the lead killer had actually boasted...word spreads...
My estimation of the person who gave the information to the police has not gone up by my learning that he actually CLAIMED, and was given, the reward. So it goes.
Miller, the man of the duo still alive, was arrested and led police to the bodies.
There was a trial anyway, because there always is for murder.
I know a number of people who went to every day of that trial, and listened to every word of Miller's describing what happened - one assumes, of course, that he made himself as guiltless as possible in all of this, so his accounts were taken with many a grain of salt, but they were heart-tearing, nonetheless.
One of the people who went every day was a young lawyer friend, a crown prosecutor, who took leave to do so. "I wanted to see if I could understand what the nature of evil is" he said, unable to look away from this, who was able to forget the day's evil that was part of his job on most days. "Did it help?" I asked. "No."
I did not expect it to - I have looked deeply into the eyes of people who do evil things - really evil things, if evil exists - they are just people, when it boils down to it. Not that I would want to meet a lot of them in a dark alley, as they say.
Another person who went every day was Anne-Marie. Every day. It was a long trial.
I know she wanted Miller to see her daughter in her, for Julie to be able to confront her killer, or one of them. I think she wanted to understand. I don't think Miller understood, really.
One day, in describing Juliet's murder, he said she asked, during the long drive: "You ain't for real, are you?" I remember thinking - Julie would NEVER say ain't! Anne-Marie was very jarred by the exact same thing: "She would NEVER have used that word!" she wrote indignantly, in her book.
Well, Miller is still in prison - I don't know for how much longer - perhaps forever.
Anne-Marie is dead, too. She died of cancer a few years ago. How are you, I asked a very diminished woman when I met her in a gardening shop a few months before her death - I knew how she was, by her look, and by the sad tenderness of the way her husband was supporting her, as he no doubt had throughout, though she was the visible, audible one. Well, she was always both!
How is Anne-Marie, I asked her other daughter at a party, about four years before her death - as good as she will ever be, now, I suppose, she answered.
I suspect, though, that before she died Anne-Marie DID get better, in a way, because she did an interesting thing.
I know she wanted to tear Miller apart with her bare hands at times, and pull the other man from his grave and do the same to him.
For a couple of years before she died, though, she began corresponding with Miller - then went to the prison and visited him quite a few times.
It may be that his motive - either partly or in full - in agreeing to this was his hope that it might somehow support his applications for parole, at some time - it is possible. However, Anne-Marie was a compelling woman. I find it hard to imagine that something of Julie's reality was not conveyed to him, and impossible to believe that Anne-Marie's grief was not somehow made impossibly clear. I wonder if this has helped him to take real responsibility for what he did? He has always seemed to hide behind the dead partner. I hope, for his sake, that it did. It was certainly a chance to do so.
I know that it was healing for her, because she wrote about it. I think she sort of forgave him - she said she did, but not why, really, as far as I can recall. I have no way of knowing how he feels, now, about it all - I suspect his ability to feel was very damaged at some point.
A thing that haunts me about the story is something that the younger man was reported to have said, by an acquaintance to whom he boasted about what he was doing. The acquaintance testified about the conversation - he must have indicated some sort of shock or surprise about the murders - the younger man's response was to shrug, and say: "They're just rags."
(That is an Australian term which means, I think, a young woman of no account - the kind you sleep with and discard, not girl-friend material - something along those lines.)
I am glad parents like Anne-Marie (and some of the parents of a number of young men who were similarly preyed upon, by, apparently, a group of reasonably powerful and well-respected men, only one of whom has been convicted, at - horrifyingly - around the same time!) went to court and made a silent statement about the lives and worth of their sons and daughters.
Nobody, anywhere is "just a rag". Not everyone has someone to declare it for them, when they cannot.
d, you have a way with words...
Light stuff from now on!
New Zealand Cattle and Sheep To Be Taxed For Farting!
New Zealand is to introduce a flatulence tax for its cattle and sheep farmers.
This (according to a radio broadcast I heard this evening) makes great sense, since half of the country's greenhouse gasses are produced by these animals.
Cattle, of course, are to be taxed at a higher rate than sheep. Pigs, chooks and suchlike are, it seems, innocent in this respect.
The money is to be used to fund research and technology into limiting greenhouse gas emissions in other areas.
This means, I presume, that Moondoggy will find any visits to our New Zealand cousins prohibitively expensive....
How will they know how much to tax ? Will they have a "fart-o-meter" attached to each sheep's bum ???
And will the rate of tax depend on intensity of sound and odor ??
nah - someone has done the meqasuring, it seems - flat rate for sheep, and a bigger tax for cattle.
I should have waited until after my coffee to read that second story..... so sad. And you DO have the skills of a story teller, dlowan.
Awww - don't read 'em if they make you sad, Li'l k!!!!
I guess I am so used to hearing sad/terrible things that I am more likely to get fascinated with what meaning and movement people can make out of them, and the ideas they bring to mind, than to focus on the sad stuff.
Not a person on earth (worth a salt) wouldn't get sad reading those posts!
Well, all tennis minded Australians are agog to see if our Mark Phillipousis (also claimed as Greece's by the large and very vocal Greek-Australian populace!) can win Wimbledon!
We are still, I think, close enough to Britain to feel a special thrill about winning stuff on British soil - one in the eye for granny, I guess.
Here, in little Adelaide, after weeks of rain (but the earth was so dry that it has all been soaking in, and not filling our reservoirs - so we have water restrictions for the first time in more than 40 years - and the poor Murray is so drought-stricken still that her mouth is closing) we have reversed the recent trend of wet, gale-blown weekends, and Mondays and Tuesdays full of fresh, squeaky-faced, golden sunlight, and are having a beautiful, sun-drenched weekend.
I am still too stupidly ill to go walking and suchlike in it, but I am enjoying it through my windows, and through the ecstatic, sun-drunk behaviour of the cats - who appear, for all the world, to be making love to the light!
I love animal behaviour in new sun - I used to very much enjoy the first days of spring sunlight, when I would go to feed my horse, and find him - (and, like beads on a necklace, all the other horses in THEIR paddocks) - stretched out on their sides soaking up the warmth and light.
All the horses would appear embarrassed to be found in these undignified postures, and would often struggle up, looking sheepish. It was a treat if my fella allowed me to reach him still lying down, and lie down with my head on his belly, and enjoy the sun, too.
To matters political: our Federal Government was suitably embarrassed last week when new boatload of would-be refugees made it an inch or so into our new immigration zone (this government has drawn new national sea boundaries, to exclude a number of places favoured by boat people to land, from bestowing the same rights as those who do manage to make it to the mainland - these boundaries only apply to people - fish and oil and such in those waters are still ours. Did I hear you say "Huh"? I say other words, often also with a "u" in them, though!).
Despite having made it to home base, as it were, these people, who appear to be Vietnamese, were turned back to Christmas Island, for processing.
Interestingly, Australia's own Family Court (more famed, in my view, for child abuse than child protection) has turned on the Federal Government - ruling that children may not be kept in detention centres. Well, blimey! Whoodathunk that keeping kiddies in detention centres was a bad thing! Only almost anyone of any sense and decency. I guess the feds will take it to the High Court?
Dammit!!! mark lost at Wimbledon! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
I mean, I hate patriotismand all, but this hurts!
