The Barely Disguised Discrimination of Pack Panels

The moment a man spits his beer isn’t usually the time he has a life-changing epiphany. But that is what Adam Hunt, director of the advertising agency the Foundry, has claimed. His mate made a ‘fat chick’ joke about a passing large woman and as Hunt laughed he realized he was being discriminatory and his beer ‘went everywhere’.

Sound implausible? You see, Hunt had been thinking hard about fat pride. This was the brief the Gruen transfer gave him to make an ad to sell the impossible – fat. He decided ‘shape discrimination’ was no different to any other, went to the ‘darkest web sites’ and used 4 jokes, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and fat chick in turn, to make his point.

His ad was so successfully offensive the ABC pulled it from the Gruen transfer, but allowed it, and a lengthy panel discussion, to be aired on the web. And since we can count on prohibition to incite desire, people have since flocked to the site like bees to a forbidden honey pot.

The comments have proven fascinating. They ask whether shape discrimination can be equated with incinerating Jews, gay murder, or terminating black babies to purportedly solve the crime rate. Fatness, some of them argue, is a lifestyle choice, and it has the ignoble distinction of leaving a deeper carbon footprint. Unlike race, or even gay identity, it has been chosen and can be altered.

Who would chose fatness in a world where young men sport bumper stickers that read, ‘Harpoon Fat Chicks’?

Overweight results from a skewed relationship to food, perhaps starting in childhood overinterest, that, due to bullying and damaged self-image, quickly develops through adolescence into an eating disorder. The compulsion to eat more than your body needs come from losing touch with your appetite. Food becomes friend. As social isolation and despair expands with girth people become locked into abusive relationships with food, as their source of comfort seems to turn on them to create guilt and self-hatred. Eating becomes addictive, compulsive and a means to cope with depression and/or anxiety.

Gruen was right that it will never be possible to cultivate fat pride. Even if we successfully ended all shape discrimination, and celebrated large sexy women stars such as the gorgeous Dawn French, people who eat too much are being told by their doctors, and countless new studies reported daily in the mainstream media, that their eating habits are unsustainable for their health. Overeating in that knowledge is self-destructive.

But something else went out of Hunt’s head when he spat his beer and it was gender. His friend was a male who made a joke about a passing large woman. Somewhere in his deftly but overdrawn equivalence between shape discrimination, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism he lost sight of the simple fact that these jokes are mostly fat chick jokes – they are mainly directed at women.

How did this crucial understanding of the nature of the discrimination he wants to end get lost? Let’s turn to the panel and ask them. Hey guys …. Oh, you are all guys.

This was a panel of intelligent and sympathetic men. They thoughtfully argued the perennially tricky question of whether it is justified to recirculate vilification and offence even if the intention is to criticise and undermine it. Since not even the most astute and cashed-up advertising agency can control the reception of the meanings they create, that question remains unresolved.

But, smart and critical as they were, they were still men. Sure, that is no reason for them to miss the connection under their noses between gender and shape discrimination, but my point is they did, and they were less likely to if there were women among them.

What is it with these pack panels with token women? It is an entrenched cultural habit that commentary panels from The Panel, to Insiders are comprised of men with one woman present to offset their overt discrimination. I take my hat off to the women who participate. What audiences miss is that, no matter how fairly these panels are chaired, a lifetime of gendered conversational dynamics first mapped out by Dale Spender, in her Man Made Language, means that women talk most freely among themselves.

But in this particular panel, the Gruen did away with women altogether, with searing irony, to discuss discrimination. And unsurprisingly they missed gender altogether as one of the main conduits through which discrimination of all sorts, from shape to homophobia, gets expressed.

This is not to make the absurd claim that when it comes to discrimination women are always worse off. Here I am safely installed at my desk while traumatized Sri Lankan and Palestinian men are grieving on piles of rubble. But it is to say that if we want to end discrimination we have to understand how it is expressed and circulated. If we remain gender blind, we’ll overlook a principle field of power asymmetry that overlaps with all others.

There is another strained equivalence that can be drawn here. In the same way that the rate of sexual violence has been shown to decrease in countries where women take up high-level positions, such as parliamentarians, maybe another way to end shape discrimination that is mostly directed at women, is to end the phenomena of pack panels.

This article first appeared in The Age, 16 May 2009

This Year’s Budget Falls Right After Mothers Day.

Few people realize how flammable maternity bras are. Under the right conditions they go up like a drought-stricken quokka. Burning bras is of course a rather hackneyed way to draw attention to a protest cause. But this is what we did under the auspices of the Mothers of Intervention, on the steps of the Victorian parliament, on the release of Pru Goward’s Valuing Parenting report in 2002.

Goward had made strange bedfellows with Sharan Burrow of the ACTU to recommend 14 weeks universal, publicly-funded maternity leave. That’s right. It was 2002.

Seven years on and the memory of our charred, melted bras seems as good a symbol of recent gains for mothers as any. We mothers have all of us spent years in training, working and paying taxes. We all of us everyday, carry on the relentless grind of unpaid caring and domestic labour, that guides our littlies toward productive and participatory citizenship. In that sense we had all of them ‘for the country’ and each of the blessed little blighters does their bit to counter the ageing demographic.

Tuesday's budget night follows close on Sunday's Mothers' Day. Only 22 % of Australian enterprise agreements make provision for any paid maternity leave, a recent study at the University of Sydney by Marian Baird has revealed. Under these positively industrial-revolution era conditions Mothers are being forced into early returns to work. Let’s be absolutely clear about what this means. Women who are at times still recovering from birthing, and establishing breastfeeding, sleep-deprived, passing clots and with painfully distended breasts, and at the height of attachment, these women are sitting at their desks when they should be with the babies who need them.

Part of our difficulty is that too few of women who have experienced birth and newborn babies are informing the policy-making around paid maternity leave. It is unimaginable and unconscionable that new mothers and new babies should be torn apart from one another before they are ready because a wealthy government fails to understand and provide for the dictates of their bodies.

The Productivity Commission draft report has recommended 18 weeks pay at the minimum wage as a government-funded parental leave provision. We are facing a national skills shortage which may put women in a better bargaining position in demanding leave from their employers. The more flexible the work arrangements the more women are able to continue participation in the workforce. However, since women still dominate in lower-paid jobs in the service sector they are also most vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the economic downturn on unemployment.

A number of recent studies have shown that differences in men and women’s access to paid leave around the birth of their children establishes and entrenches patterns of inequity in the home. Pressures on women working the ‘double-shift’ are simply unsustainable. Without access to paid leave, and just as critically without enough support from their partners in caring and homemaking, women face a stark choice between having children and employment. Rationally and reasonably women are opting for fewer children – I know I did - having profound effects on low levels of fertility, and the aging demographic.

To counter these trends government policy needs to consider and provide for men not just as breadwinners, but as care-givers. It won’t be enough to support mother’s domestic and care commitments. Any paid leave needs to consider the particular needs of mothers as bearers, birthers and breastfeeders in the early stages of childraising. But if we genuinely want to encourage equity in the home as well as the workplace men need to be included in family-friendly provisions including access to paid leave.

A payment that attaches to the child and allows parents to negotiate the best time to take that leave, whether together or separately, or whether to spend that money on childcare at the right time, enables most flexibility. That is, as long as their choices are not forced by their respective workplaces paying men higher wages and insisting on inflexible hours, or demotion on their return to work.

Few people realize that mothers’ day was first celebrated in 1870 by an American civil war mother protesting her sons’ enlisting and advancing the cause of pacifism. Julia Ward knew the value of her work as a mother, but she also toiled in a no-man’s land between the public sentimental mythologies of mothering – the motherhood statements – and its actual valuing and exploitation by governments. This budget we mothers want our due for mothers day. Mr Rudd and Mr Swan need to keep in mind that women also vote with their wombs.

The Contortions of Pussycat Sex Appeal

Picture this. Five cervixes bobbing about on stage. Or was it six? Hard to keep count, what with my round-eyed seven-year-old next to me as I valiantly tried to explain away the music video thrust before her eyes.

The graphic nature of the Pussycat Dolls’ routine leaves very little to the imagination. Nevertheless, a coterie of cervixes came to mind. So very graphic was the fanny-flashing, they’re just a nip and a flap from soft porn.

For her tenth birthday a friend’s child had been given a DVD of current pop video clips and a bunch of her friends, including my 10 and 7-year-olds, were gathered around watching, in silent and detailed study, as a series of young women indulged in intent sexual posturing.

Behind them a group of mothers were variously open-mouthed, indifferent or guffawing at the desperate contortions these young women were pulling to appear pretty and desirable. And to whom? To an audience of flabby middle-aged corporate men who need to appear virile to their peers despite their impotence? Try girls aged under 10.

The ‘PCD’ – oh they are important enough to warrant an acronym - were mouthing something about popping bottles while opening giant champagne flagons from which sparkly glitter burst. Their every move seemed to be about turning themselves inside out so we could all get a better look.

A speculum might have saved them all that splitting, gyrating, thrusting and bottom vacillating. But less is more, right?

Those of us mothers who consciously work in a swat team of cultural quarantining might imagine these PCDs – Pornitically Correct Debutants - were manufactured by a boardroom of impotent Californian Corporate Profiteers who assume we all suffer the same need to make penile responsiveness the centre of our vision and our culture.

So central in fact that PCD inc is an expansionist media enterprise recast as a music group through a record deal with Interscope Records. Originally a Los Angeles burlesque dance act this toxic troupe of pornographied gender norms has morphed into a reality television program, venue, casino and merchandising and - who would have guessed - a spread in Playboy.

But their creator is not some bloated Caesar of a tyrannous gender regime emanating from the remote, dysfunctional community of Los Angeles and enforced through media saturation. Any libertarian media commentator would delight in telling you those are a set of stereotypes saying more about the devaluing of ‘low’-culture and the snobbery of critics. Did somebody mention gender politics?

The PCD creator is a woman, a model and choreographer named Robin Antin. Pink might have once have dubbed her a Stupid Girl, but instead she works with her. Antin’s immobilized face might feign scorn at repressed embittered feminists who think her work grossly exploits young women. But what would she say to mothers of little girls who, trying not to be too prohibitive, nevertheless draw the line at crotch-clutching and protest – we can’t turn it off.

You see, there’s the rub. The devastating argument always put against us inhibited, resentful feminists is to look the other way. I confess that is my impulse in the face of such a consistently dull, unrelenting cultural visage of same-same undressed pouting pretty-girls taking themselves so seriously it is laughable. Along with most families we adopt of policy of avoidance for our children, but it is slim defense against the barrage of turbo-sexed imagery that is not just before their eyes, but directly marketed at their age group.

Let’s once and for all debunk the ‘adult-entertainment’ façade of a retaining wall around sexualized imagery as delusional and counter-productive as that built around the Gaza strip.

Firstly, what adult missing even a residual trace of cynicism doesn’t appraise the PCDs as a tonga-line of twerps? Granted there may be a populace of men who actively suspend disbelief for the pleasures of penile responsiveness (to which we are all enjoined to bear witness), and to them I wearily say, oh get your hand off it.

Secondly, who else among our demographic has their antennae out, uncritically receiving all media transmissions from the likes of Robin Antin, and passively absorbing her damaging mesh of meanings about girlhood. Through a set of circumstances parents can’t actually control, it is children under 10 watching the PCDs and this is cause for real concern, even outrage.

Unsurprisingly my diatribe to the under tens didn’t work. I ranted the PCDs are like puppets who make a lot of money for other people and have no say about their dance moves or lyrics. They have careers so short-lived it is discriminatory. They make being pretty the central objective of young women, most of whom can never live up to their surgically altered features and air-brushed bodies.

But what did work was laughing at the preposterous lengths the PCD’s went to, to attain the status of sexy. The bewildering acrobatics of desirability have become so absurd, so ‘ridick’, you need botox to keep a straight face.

But little girls are trying, in a relentless routine of minute daily gestures and self-adorning, to figure out how on earth to be girls. And since it doesn’t come naturally they take the ludicrous posturing of the PCDs very seriously indeed. Diatribes and snickering aside, if parents want to give their children a childhood, that is largely distinguished from adulthood through their protection from adult sexuality, we need to stop buying into this guff. Better still Robin, stop making it.

Beauty Products Deserve the Finger

It is never the done thing for a woman to extol any part of herself as worthy. It is the done thing to be neurotic and thereby of especial remunerative value to the beauty industry. But I must say, lately my fingertips have been in very fine form.

They are smooth, unblemished, wrinkle free, and with enviably even skin tone.

You see, every time I smear eye gel and wrinkle softener and bio-oil and paw-paw ointment and sun-screen onto my face, it first gets gobbed onto the ends of my fingers which then prep with a little digital frottage. My fingertips probably absorb more Jurlique that the myriad ‘trouble spots’ that occupy the increasingly uneven terrain of my over-40 face.

By rights my plump little pads should be showing all the signs of having become the principal beneficiaries of a lotioning regime that no woman with a duty to beauty would ever dare to let lapse.

Thus it is surely our fingertips that should be held up as living proof of the virtues of moisturizing. They should be celebrated for their suppleness on the covers of Vogue and Madison and the fingertips of celebrities praised for their age-defying firmness in weekend magazine features.

Yet fingertips never appear full-frontal in cosmetic advertisements, even though, all of us unguent junkies are mostly treating these outer extremities. Sometimes they do make an appearance in those instructional ads that show with arrows exactly in which direction you need to apply your liniment for maximum firming impact. But as if resisting the paparazzi and the eye-focused world it panders to, fingertips are always coyly turned away from the camera.

Paring off the disproportionately over-represented and over-attended and frankly perfectly spoiled realm of Nails, why have we given so little attention to our fingertips when they have such a hand in our beauty maintenance? With every other part of our bodies, except perhaps our toes (as distinct from toenails), singled out for extreme makeovers and zoned for modification, improvement and treatment, how have our fingertips, the cats-cradle bridge between bottle and body, been so flagrantly cast aside?

If you were a dreadful cynic, and daily witnessed your brow furrowing under your wrinkle softener, you might think of two reasons.

Fingertips are unmodifiable.

Fingertips are in fact over-treated, yet unable to evince any sign of it.

As such fingertips are an audacious affront to the billion dollar cosmetic industry. They prove that our bodies are largely impervious to the thing that this incalculably opulent industry really sells. Lotioning. (Sun-screen aside - though I’ve never seen a freckled or sunburnt fingertip).

If we paid proper attention to fingertips we’d notice that they soak up a greater proportion of the oils, unguents and serums that are more expensive by the gram than uranium – and thereby, if you follow the logic of the beauty industry, are the most alluring part of a woman’s body.

Fingertips are on the pulse of beauty culture charlatanism. Forget statistics and a poignantly portrayed personal history of anorexia. Naomi Wolf needed to look no further than her most far-flung appendages to demolish the beauty myth.

For who has heard of fingertips being too fat, thin, disproportioned or aged? Aside from puckering quite becomingly in the bath I suspect our fingertips carry us through to the end of our mortality looking much the same on our deathbeds as they did when we clawed our way into life.

And, in the interim, what a service they perform! Have they ever been acknowledged as a sex-organ? Or, since the predominance of the keyboard, credited as the Membrane of Communication? In this ocularcentric world, once again doing the rounds of Golden-Globe and Oscar mania, is there an awards ceremony for excellence in touching and feeling anywhere that prizes fingertips rather than solar-plexes?

We are mesmerized by Nigella’s cuisine but never consider the role her pinkies play in all that saucy tip-to-tongue action. When it comes to Nigella all senses are reduced to that overstuffed and overrated organ of taste that doesn’t bear mention. But having excited so much controversy, not to mention fantasy, surely Nigella’s fingertips deserve their own agents?

The same goes for adored musicians of every genre. Habitually sensorily reductive we limit all aural pleasure to the ear, but forget the mechanics of music. The sheer haptic virtuosity of a pianist or harpist or violinist depends on the strike and stroke of their fingertips.

With all this brushing off, I’m surprised fingertips haven’t sought to annex themselves from the human body altogether. But as the croupiers of the digital world, they could also provide a perfect alibi for the world’s present economic crisis. A complete set of the finger prints of all the unregulated Bankers of Wall Street and we’d soon have our crooks with their hands up.

The point is fingertips are all over everything and yet most of us are stumped about whether fingertip is one word, or two, or hyphenated. We should never forget that it is the insouciantly moist fingertip that gives the beauty industry the finger, and deservedly so.

Angela's Ashes

On the hottest day on record in Victorian history my sister's home in St Andrews, 45 minutes north of Melbourne, burnt to the ground. While temperatures peaked at 48.8 degrees Celsius, ferocious winds battered a state that had baked to a tinder through 2 weeks of over 40 degree-days, and through a 13-year drought.

All day Angie and Drew had cut back and hosed off. At about 4pm they fought off four fire fronts. Burning balls of fire were tumbling through the air outside every window. As the house filled with smoke the kids were screaming under blankets on the floor where the terrified dog was shitting. They had followed to the letter a detailed fire plan, but Angela tells me 'we had no intention to stay and defend, we were trapped, and there was no warning'.

They scrambled down an embankment on to the road because it was the only thing around them not on fire. Grace fell and burnt her palm on hot coals. They went up the road under a blanket until the length of hose from their petrol pump ran out. Soon they saw through the smoke the flashing lights of the Angels masquerading as the Country Fire Authority. The firefighter told them they looked like ghosts materialising out of the smoke, and most harrowing to them was that 2 of them were children. The CFA took hours to chainsaw them up the road to safety.

They lost their lovingly tended home and garden, a beloved old dog, their eccentric chooks, but they have their lives. ‘Chas the wonder dog’ was found 2 days later on the only patch of green guarding the bag of photos Drew had pitched onto the lawn before they fled. But, as Angela tells me they have 'lost the way our family lived'. Their self-sufficient daily lives that gave them so much happiness is now 'in chaos'. Worse than that, within the weld of emotions including survivor guilt and bewilderment, Angela feels that she nearly caused the deaths of her own beautiful girls.

We picked them up from the Diamond Creek Emergency centre after midnight where people with ears full of soot huddled under the stiff dried blankets that had shielded them from ember attack. They were handed apocalyptic cards, which folded out through the phases: 'Walking Wounded', 'Priority One', 'Priority Two', and ‘Dead’. My 12 year-old niece unfolded hers to 'Dead' next to me and looked up from under the ember burn on her eyelid and said with adolescent drollery, 'Well, that's helpful'.

Somehow Angela and their family escaped the unimaginable deaths that hundreds of Victorians suffered. But the ferocity of the inferno they perished within was unnatural. There is a class action being mounted against the Singapore power company whose pole came down in the wind spraying sparks. There is an arsonist refused bail for the fire that erased the township of Marysville. There is much recrimination directed to local councils about restrictions on back burning and fuel load. But how these conditions resulted in a firestorm, which exploded with the force of some 400 Hiroshimas, and incinerated as many as 300 Victorians points to another kind of Arson.

We were warned. Over and over again scientists told us of the increased danger of bushfires fueled by severe, protracted drought and record-breaking heat waves. But over the last decade governments have either turned their backs, or dragged their feet on the warnings of their own commissioned and credible reports on climate change, or the increasingly dire warnings of the International Panel on Climate Change, which now says its 2007 report substantially underestimated the severity and rapidity of global warming.

Scientists have also warned against attributing a direct causal relation between global warming and the devastation of the Victorian bushfires. Indeed there are a number of factors at play, from arson to the privatization of amenities, to our repeated failure to heed the ecological cycle of fire-stick farming established by Aborigines over millennia.

But common sense dictates that climate change is undeniably a major factor. The morning of the fires Victorians were warned to stay indoors and not venture out into ‘our worst day in history’ because of record-breaking temperatures fanned by high winds. Southeastern Australia had experienced a record-breaking heatwave over 2 weeks and the drought had primed fuel loads with combustible vegetation that no amount of back burning could possibly keep up with.

Yet the Australian government continues to subsidize our fossil fuel industries by 9 billion taxpayer dollars annually. They will offer to the emergency summit in Copenhagen next month a piddling 5 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 from 2000 levels when Professor Ross Garnaut, in his interim report on climate change, had recommended a 25 pc reduction.

The solace of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's quite genuine words has felt empty. He has walked through the ashes and held the grieving and called the Marysville arsonist a ‘mass murderer’. But he needs to heed the growing sense that that these fires were beyond our ability to fight because they were something altogether new. He needs to heed the fire ecologists and climatologists who are telling us these bushfires were not a once in a lifetime event. Under a 'low level global warming scenario' these firestorms may be experienced every 4-5 years in Victoria. The head of the bureau's of meteorology’s National Climate Centre has offered the chilling words, ‘We are in the build-up to the next El Nino and already the drought is as bad as it has ever been — in terms of the drought, this may be as good as things get’. In other words this drought is here to stay meeting the CSIRO prediction that parts of the pretty and lush garden state of Victoria will become desert within five decades.

Carl Sagan has said that 'the universe is neither benign nor hostile but merely indifferent to creatures such as us'. But we creatures are neither indifferent nor stupid. I am no scientist but I cannot help feeling that those who have failed to act on climate change imperiled my sister and her family's lives on ‘Black Saturday’ and put them through a literal hell.

My sister is now sick with fear for the danger our parents face in Cottlesbridge over the hill from what is now her ‘property’, and for our sister and her children whose township of Beechworth was spared because of a wind change. Angie now feels 'we will go through this again until the whole state is burnt'. They are reluctant to apportion blame amongst so much sorrow. But like many of the traumatised who have joined the dots on climate change and this tragedy, part of their healing will require assurances from those in power, all around the world, that they will provide climate security to all of us, whether it is from drowning coastlines, flood, loss of food production or fire.

That is, if it isn’t already too late, as it is for hundreds of our fellow Victorians, who I know with an immediacy I have never felt before, were just people like us.


Liz Conor is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne
1,193 words
17 February 2009

In One Stroke

In One Stroke


The drive into South Mission Beach from the Bruce Highway bristles with Cassowary cautions. A giant bikini is crucified to a power pole. On the silent, half-hour return from the Tully hospital, we seemed a long way from home.

We’d woken up grumpy. It was raining again, and while we could not begrudge the drought stricken state of Queensland, we’d towed our trailer from Melbourne to Cooktown looking for sun and over 3 months saw little of it. And the confined space of a camper trailer can be somewhat exaggerated by two children, full of beans.

Jeremy was culling our book basket. He’d read a couple of titles and sorted them in piles on the seat. Then he read, ‘mmph woorph wprh mmfph’. We looked up at him in silent query, and he read the next title the same way. We hesitantly giggled. ‘Silly Daddy’ I said. And then the third title came the same. He remembers, clear as day, reading The Emperor’s New Clothes, which he put down with a little puzzled shake of his head.

At the moment it dawned on us that something was not right he half turned to me, rolled his eyes back and sat hard on the floor. He tried to get up, half fell out the door and rested there, assuring me he was fine through the right side of his face, drooling from the left.

In the instant I was screaming for help I knew it was a stroke but what I knew about stroke was not enough. Two burly campers got him up onto our bed while the girls stood, the eldest behind the youngest, stricken silent, eyes widened. Somehow they were swept into a neighbouring van, to play snap and nibble apple.

Until the ambulance arrived from Tully I ran around like a startled emu, darting into Jeremy who yawned benignly, telling me he was fine, and asking me to cancel the ambulance. He was the ostrich. I got him to squeeze my hands but his left side was warm and unresponsive: it struck me it had the sweetness of a sleeping child. So I conceded through a constricted throat and swimming vision that he was fine, darted into the neighbours van to tell the girls their Dad was fine and was told by the happy campers gathered, that he was fine. Yes, Fine I kept saying in between, Where is the freaking ambulance!!!

Emergency is defined by fineness. We are luckiest it seems when we are unlucky.

I cleared away the book basket and a pile of tropical maps so the paramedics could manoeuvre him onto a stretcher. It is a big part of Jeremy’s job to give the assembled public the assurance of his own calm competency. This he offered to the riveted campers, smiling half-faced through his oxygen mask. It made me ache. The little pockmark in his cheek I see as a love heart each time I settle into his shoulder had opened into a butterfly and he was taking flight.

The paramedics managed to perforate the surreal miasma I’d landed in and give me directions to the hospital. ‘This could reverse itself in a day’, they told me. ‘Silly boys’, I thought, ‘they’d say anything to get me to drive straight’. I had only remnants of information about stroke to make sense of what was happening. I had nannied a stroke victim in Amstelveen 20 years before and I had walked her to the toilet and packed her into an Arabian night of pillows each evening where she lay in the stress position of her own paralysis.

This was the understanding I packed his makeshift hospital bag under. He was emphatically gone and all around me were his articles of faith, the ordinary daily things that reify the belief that we will go on living, and wear that shirt and put away that toothbrush, and fold up that paper.

There is nothing so grave as these idiosyncratic articles and their silent testimony to the universe of a living soul – where and why he bought that ludicrous shirt, why he drinks from a mug a student gave him. The shrieking history of his personal items had me by the throat. He was not there. These things were what I now pieced together and their abandonment at that moment evoked in me a desperate love that I’d not felt since the moment of my daughters’ birth.

So we chased the ambulance, but it was out of sight. The eldest had regressed and was comforting herself with ludicrous silliness; the youngest was silently appraising the realm of mythological Cassowaries. I was snuffling and hiccuping back tears until finally I told them they needn’t be brave since I couldn’t manage it. Racing through my mind were the logistics of our world come tumbling down.

How to get him home. How to get the van home. The stairs at home. His job. My book. None of it mattered. All I wanted was for him to be there, half or whole, in any shape or form. For 15 years he had just been there. I would like to say that I treasured each moment, but that would rather understate what a cranky maenad I am. It dawned on me that the thing that made me most cranky was that he couldn’t be there enough. Just one more minute would suffice now, and he could fill it with as much laptop solitaire as he wanted.

We arrived at the Tully base hospital before him and it was then that I called his mother, my mother, his brothers, my sisters, his work mate and anyone who could share in the understanding of what it meant for Jeremy for fall down. Rocks may be buffeted by the vicissitudes of cranky lovers, demanding jobs and very loud children, but over time they show a little wear, that’s all.

So I should have counted on him sitting up with on the casualty bed, his knees up at a jaunty angle and his arms sloping easily behind his head. I half did. I’d brought along a tome of the military history of colonial New York, and fittingly enough Jared Diamond’s Collapse. He wanted them now. The doctor flexed his feet, pushed against his arms and I watched open mouthed as the side of him that best describes him, his left, was put through its paces.

The miracle moment came when he buttoned up his own shirt. I thought my panicked perception had gone awry, and I actually felt my eyes widen when the doctor told me that Jeremy would most likely completely recover in 24 hours. He had suffered a TIA, a trans ischemia attack often colloquially referred to as a ‘mini-stroke’.

A TIA doesn’t call for an emu, it barely warrants an ostrich. But it was of little consequence now to have over-reacted. I didn’t know that 30% of strokes are fatal, 30% leave lasting and debilitating effects and 30% will be recovered from in a day.

Jeremy’s was a stroke of luck. It was also a portent of a major event potentially in the next 24 hours or over the coming weeks. Unless the cause was properly identified and managed, his new clothes were a cloak of vulnerability.

I have a dear, darling friend, now in Sydney, who has an other-worldly capacity to network. She is a film producer so by now it is second nature, but what she pulled off for me in Mission Beach defied even my expectations. An old uni acquaintance I knew through her had married and was in Mission Beach. Her husband was a retired neuro-surgeon. The girls and I left Jeremy to the gunfire of Harlem Heights and ate pasta with them that night. Not only was Gianni able to perfectly explain what was likely to have happened, but his new profession was psychiatry so he could offer all the insights of shock, recovery, what the girls should and shouldn’t know, the ongoing risks and the true evils of trans-fats. We had been sent angels, one a statuesque Germanic beauty, the other a roguishly delightful Italian and between them they staved off a sobbing fit until the next night.

Jeremy did the milk-run of Queensland hospitals between Tully and Cairns the next day for a cat scan. He arrived back at the hospital dog-tired. Not one to care about appearances he had given instructions on a complicated VCAT case through one side of his mouth to his colleague a few hours after the TIA. He sounded a lush and didn’t give a rats and this and every other little thing he did was cause for unqualified adoration. The disjunction between what he said and the fact that he sounded like most of the roos in his top paddock had been brutally culled was uncanny. I placed him under surveillance, looking for any signs of damage. It didn’t add up that he could appear so altered and still be my love, and the girls’ Dad. They too, were watching like hawks. To make completely sure the youngest conducted her own tests and got him to hop around the ward on one leg. But all we could find was that he was even more Zen, even more sweet, and perhaps from the shock, more ardent.

We waited in the van, getting on with loads of washing, home schooling, tent rolling. It seemed an honour to wash out the soft dried circle of tea in the bottom of his newly quaint mug and to put it away knowing he would get it out again and make himself a cup and I would complain about him not making me one and he would point to the one he’d made me earlier sitting cold by the sink.

I got through the teeth, wees, jarmies, stories and songs. The girls were on best behaviour. We were all terribly careful, though I slipped up when the youngest asked if I could hold my nose and blow through my tear ducts. I suggested it wasn’t a good idea as it put pressure on the brain. After all the brain talk, this was not wise. ‘You’re making me sad,’ she whimpered and wailed out in my arms her own carefully managed trauma. When finally I could draw my little curtains and fall back under a pillow I sobbed a torrent that made the 5.9 metre memorial gumboot in remembrance of Tully’s 1959 rainfall look like Paddington Bear’s Wellington. It was foolish I knew for Jeremy had had a lucky stroke but still it came on the way an extreme weather event reckons with an uncertain future.

The nurse reported that he had made a full recovery in the morning, but he had to wait to see the doctor before we could come and get him. She’d call. More washing, schooling, triumphant running up the beach. I’d used myself up by the time we mounted the hospital ramp. I now knew he was, in fact, Fine, and that ramp was a harder climb than the 1010 steps to Fans Horizon in the Warrumbungle. I know because we climbed them a few days later.

Crisis throws everything into relief. God only knows how the hundreds of stroke victims each day and their families cope. I’m still not exactly sure what the girls went through. But for us, it was three short hours of dire panic, riding on the edge of existence, only to be hauled back over the precipice by a rather blithe British doctor, who told us to ‘carry on as you were’.

Not as easy as it sounds. Sleep switches off around 3am and often I dream of Jeremy dissembling before my eyes, disintegrating like memories. The results of a battery of tests came in, all the wheels and cogs of his body divulging the correct data and telling us his ‘mini-stroke’ was a one-off. As things went back to normal and my infuriation at his solitaire habit almost returned to prior levels we settled back into the cement of simple presence.

It may be the extravagant picnics, or those monumental moments of birth and marriage that we photograph. But I can now imagine how in years to come, it is the green mug with the harlequin pattern that I will search for in those images. They are the things that acutely bear witness to the moments we pay little attention to, that celebrate nothing in particular. They mark the quiet ticking over and the truth of our togetherness. They were poised on the edge of memory. They have been reinstated as the quiet guardians of blissful banality.

Bill Henson and the Explicit Beauty of Children

There is an unexpected moment early in Nabokov’s Lolita when the ‘bland’ and ‘goosefleshed’ Mrs Haze (Lolita’s mother), ‘had the cheek to take a photograph’ of the narrator Humbert Humbert. Meanwhile Humbert takes up vantages all around the house to spy on Lolita’s pubescent body, ‘the thousand eyes wide open in my eyed blood’ taking in ‘her tense narrow nates clothed in black’ as she sunbaths with her mother, hangs cloths on the line and walks the neighbourhood with her friends.

That snap is another little moment of inequity, in the careful tracery of Nabokov’s writing, that builds his narrator as a predator that ultimately harms the child in his care. Lolita is entirely unaware she is under this relentless and sexualising scrutiny. Later Humbert laments that he never filmed the mesmerizing grace of her tennis game. Photographs were insufficient for the delectation this paedophile takes in remembering his Lolita, and he remembers her principally as a visual object.

Earlier, Nabokov introduces his masterpiece as the journal of a dead pederast passed on to a Doctor to edit as a case history of ‘moral leprosy’. The conventionally good Doctor notes that as the book contains explicit scenes it will surely be condemned as obscene. But he appeals to Art. ‘”Offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual”; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come more or less as a shocking surprise.’

Over the long of career of photographer Bill Henson Australians still experience his pubescent nudes as a shocking surprise. However, Henson is an artist and his images are exhibited in the sanctified space of a gallery. He has been defended from the imputation, and now formal charge, of child pornographer because of the conventions of display and marketing by which his work is seen and known. His defenders have massed themselves on the ‘High’ side of the high art/mass culture divide. While arguing that part of the value of Henson’s work is that he is self-conscious and destabilizing of that divide, they now invoke it to defend that work.

His trouble is that the wider public, including the Prime Minister, are unwilling to make these distinctions of genre when it comes to explicitness. Despite a long history of the nude in art, photographic nudes are explicit because the explicit is industrial. No amount of high-falutin’ printing, framing and gallery-pricing can protect Henson’s works from the grubby taint of mass-production. Henson knows this and his adolescent nudes and landscapes ask us to think about the status of photography given its ever-expanding private, public and commercial uses.

But some of his nudes of young people on the cusp of childhood ask us to consider, as Nabokov did, the peculiar beauty in girls and boys of what Humbert called the Nymphet, and others have variously called the Maiden, and the Youth. The texture of pubescent skin, its sometimes whimsical and sometimes stark relation to light, is a point of fascination for Nabokov and Henson. They both have a facility to evoke a complex mesh of feeling through the physical qualities of young bodies and faces, though Nabokov does it better. This mesh includes the nostalgia of lost childhood, and the poignancy of an unknown future, the vulnerability of exposure and the power of commanding the gaze.

Some of his nudes I can't stomach. The gothic urban scenes of young adults in rape scenarios - one a girl crawling through the dark away from the camera with blood running down her thigh from her cunt - are, I think, unconscionable. I'm told they refer to Bosch and Carvagio. I wonder how they don't refer to aggravated rape. But why should a photographer not refer to sexual violence? How am I to know if these images are critical? I think the beauty of the models invites a gaze that eroticises the rape depicted. That's a big concern when the rape of children and young women is as endemic as it is. Another 2 images of sleeping girls with their legs open knowingly evoke the conventions of kiddie porn - though in the magazines I've viewed the perpetrator is creeping his hands into the tweetie-bird nightie. They are irrefutably child abuse scenarios and I think Henson has a responsibility with these images to explain himself.

But in that mix is the awareness of sexual potential, the memory of our own intense sexual responses as young adults and the conceit and bewilderment of how our sexual appeal positions us in the world we’re coming into as adults.

Both Nabokov and Henson are men artists who are preoccupied with that mesh of feeling. Both confront us with the reality of child sexuality and through their own artistry get us to feel distinctly uneasy about the confusion between sexual response and aesthetic pleasure. Both of them throw us back on the cultural mire of sexualised childhood, from ‘piccaninnies’ to fashion advertising and they insist that this mire absolutely clouds the ways we see children. It is an inescapable fact that children have been sexualized, it’s the soup we swim in. There is also an epidemic of child sexual abuse that cannot be extricated from this established and entrenched cultural frame. But Henson, it has to be owned, also goes beyond this frame is his dystopic images of exposed and misused adolescents seemingly abandoned to remote landscapes.

What child protection advocate Hetty Johnson has done, in instigating the police investigation of child pornography into 20 of Henson’s exhibited works, is clear-fell the complex scene that surrounds these works and reduce them to one possible interpretation. Since they are naked, the children are shown in a sexual context. Since the image as explicit, the creator is a pornographer who betrays in his work that he has sexual feeling towards children which he celebrates and promotes and then sells to paedophiles for the purpose of sexually arousing them.

My girls are beautiful. I’m often told this and I see their beauty both as their mother and as an observer and consumer of imagery that, from Audrey Tatou to Bratz dolls, has reduced human beauty to the gangling physiognomy and tensile unblemished skin of adolescence. It frightens me that their children’s bodies are proportioned exactly as fashion models, only in miniature, without breasts. I’ve twice seen passing men’s eyes linger with pleasure over their wide-open faces and coltish forms. I fear for them because before they were even born their status as girls was sexualised and their beauty as children was appropriated to the intensely sexualised world of commodity fashion and beauty. I’ve also worked in services for child sexual abuse victims and I know with more detail than I care to remember that no matter what I do, my girls are vulnerable to that abuse –it is certainly not a ‘remote’, Aboriginal problem. It is such a damaging crime that many of us would eradicate it at any cost.

But repression, as censorship, never eradicates. Prohibition produces desire. And Hetty has unwittingly drawn the gaze of paedophiles to Henson’s work, and we can be sure, they will not be looking for nostalgia, ambiguity or the relation of young skin to light. They will be looking for explicitness and intensifying their pleasure in the knowledge and transgression of looking at images that are banned.

I life-modeled for my sister when I was 13. A series of white on black nudes, some of which she sold, and some of which are still hanging around the families’ homes. They are lovely, but there is one that still invokes that peculiarly epidermal feeling of exposure because I remember a neighbour ogling it when she first drew it. Young women negotiate that gaze everywhere they go. And mostly their peculiar loveliness, which is undoubtedly sexual, is ogled and harassed. I would not send one of Hensen’s models, fully clothed, to walk the gauntlet of King Street on a Friday night.

Henson’s status as an artist does not protect him from the accusation that his imagery participates in the sexualistion of children, not if we accept the argument of his work, that the art/mass distinction is a furphy. But it’s a conversation we need to have. While Nabokov insists on that conversation, Henson doesn’t and I have always found that a troubling aspect his more menacing young-nudes. But it is also a limitation of his medium. As a photographer he can’t inscribe any moral viewpoint but only a scopic viewpoint.
Hensen is knowing about all the conventions of child sex that frame his images. Like Nabakov his work provoke us to be honest about that, to see these young people as both disturbingly part of a culture that exposes them before they have a full understanding of the status and meaning of their own bodies. But in his nudes these young men and women also stand apart from this culture. They are inelubtably born into it, in their own beautiful skins. Does and should beauty command respect? Why does it instead command obsessive fascination with no regard for the sexual autonomy of young men and women? We need to have this conversation, but not with police.