Category: Society

Long Tan row reminds Australia of the differing perspectives on war

Posted on by Martin Newman

We call it the Vietnam War, but in that country it’s popularly known as the Resistance War Against America or the American War.

It has never in Vietnam been regarded as a noble confrontation between two legitimate foes, but a tooth and nail fight for survival against a foe seeking nothing less than subjugation.

That’s why the decision by its government to limit Australian involvement in a memorial service commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan should not be such a surprise to us.

While the Vietnamese have been more keen than anyone to put the 20-year war behind them, that doesn’t mean its forgotten and it doesn’t mean the repercussions from it are still not felt.

It’s estimated close to 600,000 civilians were killed in the war, many in intensive carpet bombings of small villages. Military deaths on the North Vietnamese side are estimated between 444,000 and 1.1 million. The South Vietnamese, fighting with the allies, lost between 220,000 and 313,000 soldiers. Over 1.5 million civilians and fighters were wounded.

By comparison around 58,000 US troops died and 521 Australians.

For 10 years from 1961-1971 the US dumped millions of gallons of toxins on the country to defoliate jungle areas and reduce hiding places for the North Vietnamese. It affected some 5 million people. To this day children are still being born with deformities attributed to the long-term affects of Agent Orange, while those directly exposed to it have suffered from cancer, skin and nervous disorders, liver damage and heart disease.

Though the war ended in 1975 tough economic embargoes imposed by the US lasted until 1995, further damaging the country.

It’s a human right to grieve, no one should be denied it. But it’s difficult for us as a nation, Vietnamese Australians excepted, to properly understand the turmoil and destructiveness of that war to the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Our own perspective has been very different, watched from afar.

The after affects for us, our soldiers dealing with post traumatic stress while serious and significant, pale alongside the suffering experienced by the Vietnamese.

There is nothing malicious or deliberately insensitive about Australia’s view of the war, but we just can’t know what they know.

The Vietnamese for decades have facilitated good relationships with Australian war veterans. They have shown they not only don’t have a problem with Aussie war vets memorialising our soldiers deaths, but they have also helped us do it.

Matters came to an uncomfortable head on Thursday  over the involvement of 1,000 Australian mourners at the Long Tan ceremony, which the Vietnamese government cancelled in favour of a smaller service.

It didn’t happen because of the Vietnam government’s insensitivity to our soldiers, more their sensitivity to the history of their own people and how they have been treated by foreign countries, including the imperial regimes of China and France.

Despite the Australian government’s claim the Long Tan ceremony had been agreed well beforehand, it is clear the large number of Australians planning to visit the site was felt to be inappropriate. Instead small groups were let in.

Some Australians reacted with outrage at the decision. Veterans associations described it as a “kick in the guts”. The Turnbull government jumped into negotiate a compromise. But not much could be done. A raw nerve had been hit.

In Turkey, the annual memorial to the Australian fallen at Gallipoli has become a significant and large scale pilgrimage by Australians. Super-sized TV screens are set up around the site as thousands of Australians journey there.

The Turks themselves have been incredibly magnanimous. They appreciate the significance to Australians of this battle above all others in any war we have fought in. They were also the victors on that occasion, repelling the Allied invasion, and a century after it happened few, if any, are left alive who remember it.

I don’t doubt the Vietnam government wants to avoid a similar scenario where the grief of the Vietnamese is overshadowed by large numbers of Australians mourning the deaths of our own war dead – and at Long Tan that was 18 soldiers.

It is a matter of perspective.

In Australia’s enthusiasm to reconcile past conflicts and to gain a degree of closure for our veterans we perhaps don’t get how that war affected Vietnam and how it still resonates with them, in a way that is very different from us or from events in WWI.

The reaction to the Long Tan anniversary is a reminder to us that the right of a people to grieve and memorialise their past in their own country outweighs our right to travel there and do the same.

As a nation we need to appreciate the wounds of Vietnam run deep on both sides.

New Literalism: How internet misfittery is warping the news

Posted on by Martin Newman

Someone apologised on Tuesday, although they hadn’t done anything wrong.

Unusual you might say, but it’s something we’re going to see a lot more of.

The reason for that is we have come to a time when misinformation, supposition and the tidal bores of online outrage are treated in the media with the same reverence as fact – provided they have an audience.

In the massively expanded and ever expanding world of online social networking and commentary there is now a sizeable section of the community who take everything they find on the internet at face value and who do not inquire. This amorphous, shape-shifting group regards what they see online, mistakes and all, literally and farms it out as fact to their connections.

Context has been thrown away for many people online and in its place is a new and dangerously ignorant reality.

By the time art collector Dasha Zhukova issued her grovelling apology on Tuesday afternoon for having been photographed sitting on a Bjarne Melgaard chair in the form of a black woman, millions of people around the world had already got a completely wrong opinion of her.

It was fuelled by the media, who reported the ‘outrage’ of regular people, which it then stoked and re-reported on. Many publishers seemed to leave out crucial information that would have explained the context of the photo, perhaps to not diminish the suggestion of racism.

Some punters even thought the chair was a real woman, made to pose semi-naked in subjugation.

And as if the existence of the picture, published digitally on the pop culture website Buro 24/7 about Garage magazine (of which Zhukova is editor), might not be enough to stir people up, others proffered that it had been doubly offensive coming on Martin Luther King Day (or MLK Day).

Nevermind that this was a Russian website and MLK Day is only celebrated in the US, and oddly Hiroshima and Toronto, and that elsewhere in the world few people are aware of it.

Online those boundaries are forgotten and made indistinguishable.

The digital community in the US, and quick to follow the media, quickly concluded this was some added racist slight by backward Europeans.

And because of this US-centric addition to the controversy the rest of the world suddenly was given the impression that the entire event had occurred in America rather than in cyberspace somewhere over the Urals.

Few people saw it for what it was – an edgy piece of political art designed to underline Zhukova’s serious industry credentials as a collector of modern art.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, sure, but not a malicious or even clumsy act of bigotry.

Created by the New York-based Norwegian artist and sculptor Bjarne Melgaard the piece first appeared at a Paris exhibition last year, titled Empire State, New York Art Now.

Because it deliberately and closely referenced the 1960s forniphilia (human furniture) works of British sculptor Allen Jones, who created similar works with white women as subjects, it was not at the time regarded as racist.

At the height of Pop Art Jones, now aged 76, created a series of furniture pieces based on bound white women, that inspired the sexualised female props in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.

But in Tuesday’s digital furore few knew this or bothered to find it out. Instead this one unexplained picture fuelled a completely unnecessary racism row.

Zhukova, the partner of billionaire Roman Abramovich, and the publishers of Buro 24/7 fell on their swords, aware once the ball was rolling no sensible explanation would be enough to satisfy the online hornets’ nest that had been stirred up. While drawing a line under it their apologies, though, only gave those way-off claims of racism the appearance of credibility.

On Wednesday, the story is front page news and the truth even more obscured amidst the blustering, ignorant hubbub.

But this is hardly an isolated incident.

Increasingly misinformation peddled online is being repeated enough to make people believe it. And if enough people believe it the media starts to report it as though it were real.

In the past week a picture reportedly of a Syrian child sleeping between the graves of his parents swept the internet. It seemed to perfectly and dramatically underline the futile loss of lives in the Syrian conflict and further condemn the country’s leadership.

The only problem was it wasn’t a Syrian child and they weren’t graves. The picture set up and taken in Saudi Arabia by an artist had been appropriated because it fit the subject matter the original disseminator wanted to convey.

When photographer Abdul Aziz al Otaibi contacted the person who had first deliberately misrepresented it on Twitter as an example of Syrian atrocities, the response he got was: “Why don’t you just let go and claim it is a picture from Syria and gain a reward from God.”

The damage, in any case, had already been done with more people viewing the viral image than will ever read the truth about it.

On a less important level this week there was also the ‘bikini bridge’ hoax, picked up by the mainstream media as fact.

Writing in the Telegraph, Radhika Sangani noted: “Apparently all it takes for the internet to believe something is a trend is a few celebs tweets, blog posts and a hashtag.. behind all of this is something much darker: we all believed it because it sounds plausible.”

And commenting on the number of hoax YouTube videos reported as fact in the press last year Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post described 2013 as “the year the media decisively elevated social media phenomenon, real or imagined, to the level of actual news”.

She cited the cheapness of sourcing it, the growth of social media and the lust for page views – tactics pioneered by high turnover news sites like Mail Online.

The often valueless sourcing of opinion from Twitter has meant you can find anyone online for comment on a particular angle to a story.

Gone are the days where a journalist would always seek out an expert in a field for their view. Now they take their pick from any number of anonymous postings, no matter how ill-informed, biased or stark-raving mad they are.

Reaction, any reaction, is reportable, no matter how right or wrong it is.

And now that everyone has a voice to express themselves the new literalists even make objections to the use of metaphors. No article can run online today describing a rivalry as a ‘war’ without several po-faced readers commenting self-righteously that war is nothing like that and the author’s an idiot for suggesting it.

The value of harnessing an online audience for news outlets has never been greater. We now measure the success and therefore the value of companies by the membership or readership they command. And it is so large now papers and broadcasters are unable to preclude it from mainstream news.

Unfortunately the upshot is facts, context and the full story have increasingly become a casualty.

(Originally published in The Huffington Post. Illustration: Internet Painting by Miltos Manetas)

Hermaphrodites fight for rights and recognition

Posted on by Martin Newman

“I grew up with no role models,” says XXXora, as she flicks her black hair from her face.

“I’ve had to live in the binary. Now I only ever dress in black and white. It’s my political statement. I do wear a silver mask. It makes me feel comfortable, safer, confident, I feel very vulnerable not having anything.”

I describe XXXora as ‘she’ and ‘her’ because it’s simpler for me to do that. I’ve not been taught any other way and I’m not sure how to explain her accurately with the appropriate personal pronoun. This is the loophole in the gender ‘binary’ that treats all people as either male or female.

The 33-year-old artist looks, acts and dresses like a woman, but she knows she is more than that, being one of the 30,000 plus people in the UK born with ambiguous sex organs – male and female.

Raised as a boy by her working-class Spanish parents she grew up in Ealing, West London, consciously uncomfortable wearing male clothes. She went through art school at Goldsmith’s College living as a man but later switched to a female persona, with which she more readily identifies.

Now comfortable in herself XXXora is in a stable relationship for the first time and is using her art to further inform and campaign on rights for ‘unisex’ people (the newly preferred term). 

She no longer refers to her previous male identity, but rejects being described as either male or female – and wants the government to recognise her as both, with a legal addition to official gender categories.

Exhibiting over the past two years, her art work focuses on androgyny and naturally occurring hermaphroditic species – flora and fauna, which she uses to bring greater awareness and promote more debate on the topic.

Her latest show, the Captured Hermaphrodite, finished on Friday in the City of London and she was last week nominated for an emerging talent prize at the Southwark Art Awards.

“Most people do not realise quite the number of hermaphroditic species that occur naturally in the world and so this show is an entertaining yet also an educative experience,” she says.

“My physical aesthetic and my work is always in black and white.

“I will continue to enforce these unnecessary binary limitations on my work and appearance until the UK recognises the hermaphrodite in law and adds a third box to the category of gender in passports, following in the footsteps of countries like Australia, New Zealand and India. 

“Evidence that the hermaphrodite exists is obviously overwhelmingly supported by science yet our society and its laws still ignore people like me.”

And she is not alone in wanting change. 

There is a growing recognition of the inadequate and often damaging treatment given to children born with both male and female sexual organs.

The medical community has long regarded hermaphrodism as something that can be ‘solved’ (Disorders of Sex Development – DSD) by corrective surgery or by picking what gender to raise a child based on the extent of their physical development. This is usually decided not long after birth and within the first 18 months of a child’s life.

Damagingly, it doesn’t take into account a person’s natural sexual inclination, which does not manifest until much later. And so many unisex children, like XXXora, are raised as a gender they don’t identify with, leading to confusion, depression and feelings of shame. 

To further complicate the situation it has been accepted medical practice in some quarters to keep the truth from the individual and sometimes the parents.

Dr Jay Hayes-Light, of the UK Intersex Association, says one in 2,000 people worldwide are born with ‘ambiguous’ sexual organs, making it a more common phenomenon than cystic fibrosis or autism.

He adds: “Currently, the UK does not recognise gender markers other than ‘male’ or ‘female’ on official documents such as passports although it is likely that this will change in the future.

“Those intersex people who identify as neither male nor female are in the minority in the UK. 

“Most intersex people do have a distinct gender identity as either male or female (irrespective of anatomy). What is important however, is that the government acknowledge that some do reject binary sex labels.”

Back in 2004 Dr Naomi O’Keefe, a psychologist from Argosy University in California, testifying on human rights violations against hermaphrodites, noted that much psychological harm was done to intersex people because society continued to keep it hidden behind a veil of secrecy and shame.

Meanwhile, Zwischengeschlect.org, a human rights advocacy group based in Germany, has attacked what it calls the extermination of hermaphrodites through corrective surgery, arbitrary decisions made at birth about the most appropriate sex to raise children and an unwillingness to speak about the issue.

It noted: “By the end of the 20th Century, after 50 years of systematic surgical and hormonal ‘corrections’ and ‘repairs’, as a species hermaphrodites are virtually extinct, both in real life and in public perception.” 

The group advocates respecting the physical integrity of unisex people and the self-determination of children born with atypical genitals.

The term hermaphrodite derives from the mythological Hermaphroditus, the son of Greek gods Hermes and Aphrodite, who was fused with the nymph Salmacis.

While there are lesser manifestations of it, ‘true’ hermaphrodites have a completely different chromosomal make-up to men and women with their karyotype having both XX and XY chromosome pairs.

In her art XXXora (her pseudonym a reference to chromosomes not porn) also focuses on human subjects that are androgynous, either by nature or deliberately. Stars like David Bowie, Marilyn Manson and Lady Gaga or women political leaders who take on male traits: Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Hillary Clinton.

“These for me are the only role models I could even grasp,” she says. “People who displayed androgyny. The question is did these people display androgyny viscerally, are they innately androgynous, or did they manipulate their gender variance for other reasons.

“Performers like Lady Gaga have used that androgyny to further their careers.” 

Other works by XXXora include an oak tree (another hermaphrodite species) intertwined with bodies. There is a recurrent theme of torture in her art that draws on Hieronymus Bosch and Francis Bacon. Clerical liturgy is represented as insects, irritants attacking the populace – a comment on the church’s unwillingness to even acknowledge unisex people.

These images convey both optimism and pain, and while XXXora is outwardly well-spoken and quite flamboyant (recently disrupting a Damien Hirst launch at Blain Southern’s Candy exhibition in Hanover Square by leaping into a large pile of sweets – an untitled work by Felix Gonzales-Torres) there is an awkward shyness there at times that hints at her struggles.

She intends to create works for the rest of her life on the theme, taking as her inspiration the thousands of naturally occurring dual sex species.

“When I was younger I was put into a boys school,” she says. “I had predominantly male organs so therefore the decision was made that I had to live like that, but it’s not my instinct in any way shape or form. Sexually, I feel completely feminine.

“My works show the slaughterhouse of being a hermaphrodite today.”

(Originally published in The Huffington Post. Photo of XXXora)

Bitter mourning for a soldier’s murder but defiant of the far-right

Posted on by Martin Newman

Yesterday morning I drove to work, as I always do, past the Woolwich garrison.

Down Ha Ha Road young servicewomen were exercising their horses on the common, straight-backed on mounts, whose muscles rippled under gleaming, well-cared-for equine flanks.

For those soldiers there was no hint on a crisp morn of what was to come or of the brutality soon to be visited upon one of their own.

Behind them the flat expanse of the Royal Artillery Barracks parade ground lay empty before its long Georgian edifice.

I’ve seen them often, horses and riders trotting around adjacent streets, and on some occasions drawing a vintage gun carriage behind them.

It’s a sight that locals find quirkily comforting in an area with a long history, stretching back hundreds of years, of military attachment.

The people of Woolwich and nearby Plumstead have a strong bond with the army, one forged as much from living cheek to jowl as through mutual suffering.

In WWII, with the armaments at the Royal Arsenal on the Thames and the military academy at the top of the hill, the whole area was a target for bombing raids by the Luftwaffe. Hundreds died.

At the end of my street are two modern houses built to replace the terraces destroyed by a V2 rocket, destined perhaps for the barracks further down the road, the brass foundry or the docks.

This neighbourhood is pockmarked with bomb craters from that time, now mostly covered over by new buildings or patched up with tarmac and brick.

The most visible remaining scar is the garrison chapel St George’s, now preserved as a historic ruin, which sits opposite the barracks, its roofless, torn structure the victim of a direct hit in 1944. Behind its locked iron gates are the names of the units, batteries and brigades based there and the conflicts they fought and died in.

The building and its contents are a poignant reminder of the great cost of service to your country.

But the men and women of the Foot Guards and the Royal Artillery keep a relatively low profile around Woolwich. Beyond the barracks they are not a highly visible group, briefed to wear civilian clothing at all times when off duty.

Generally you only ever see them in uniform at the Firepower Museum in lower Woolwich, running school children through training drills or helping educate them at the Heritage Centre about the role of women in the army.

During a recent exhibition there my young daughter asked a female sergeant what it was like.

‘Hard,’ she replied.

And that’s the truth. The Army is hard. Soldiers have an unforgiving life of manual labour and low pay. They go not where they want to, but where they are told.

The reaction of women who tried to protect Fusilier Lee Rigby, hacked to death yesterday afternoon, does not surprise me at all. Strong, compassionate characters the local mothers are also protective of the men and women among us who must serve in places like Afghanistan at the behest of their country.

And the neighbourhood is a diverse one. The Greenwich Islamic Centre on Plumstead Road has almost completed a large extension, testament to the thriving Muslim community.

While one or two pubs in the area can be readily identified as BNP/EDL supporting by their year-round flying of the cross of St George, they enjoy little support from locals now well used to the eclectic mix of races and religions.

The EDL and its rally last night in the town centre will hold no sway over the response of the community in dealing with this horrific crime.

Yesterday’s brutal murder of a serving soldier shocked the nation, but for the people of Woolwich it was particularly cruel and will be taken quite personally.

When a sixth generation waterman drowned in an accident on the Woolwich ferry two years ago there was a similar outpouring of grief here for a hard-working son taken unfairly.

Today my wife and I will walk up the hill to the garrison and lay flowers for 25-year-old Rigby. We will be joined by many other local people who will also want to pay their respects and reassure the soldiers at Woolwich barracks that the community, as ever, is behind them.

(Originally published in The Huffington Post)

Is Australia racist? Anthony Mundine says ‘Yes’

Posted on by Martin Newman

He boastfully calls himself ‘The Man’ – it oughta be ‘The Mouth’.

Australia’s most controversial sportsman, boxer Anthony Mundine, has a track record of putting his foot in it or, in the Aussie vernacular, shit-stirring.

Accused of racism himself in the past week for effectively telling a fellow Aboriginal boxer that he wasn’t black enough, Mundine came out and laid all his cards on the table over the issue.

The country itself was racist, its institutions were racist and its flag and its anthem excluded Aboriginals, the 37-year-old claimed.

It was the kind of red rag to a bull remark that Mundine is good at making.

In Australia, where he polarises opinion between those that can’t stand that ‘big mouth’ and those who admire a talent that’s seen him win three world titles at two weights, reaction to his comments was quick and mostly negative.

‘Below the belt’ opined one article, focusing on his ill-chosen words to rival boxer Daniel Geale, while an Aboriginal campaigner rather hysterically branded him a ‘neo-Nazi’.

The much-liked Geale, the current WBA and IBF middleweight champion, is a descendent of Tasmanian aborigines, most of whom were wiped out in the 1830s in perhaps the most near to comprehensive genocide ever pursued against a people that we know of.

Mundine at first disputed if there was such a thing as a Tasmanian Aborigine because of that genocide, but later retracted his remarks.

He was accused of shock tactics and several of his sporting peers, Aboriginals included, denounced him and trumpeted the usual line that he should just play his sport and keep his mouth shut.

But Mundine didn’t back off too far and used the opportunity of apologising to turn the accusations around and launch an embarrassing attack on his country’s race record.

In a counter move similar to Australian PM Julia Gillard’s own recent robust attack on the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott’s alleged ‘misogyny’, Mundine told reporters: “Everyone that comes here, and a lot of my close friends and family members, we feel that Australia is one of the most racist countries.

“I want to move forward, I want to unite the people.

”We’ve never had any representation on the flag, yet I see representation of the Union Jack, something that symbolises the invasion, the murder, the pillaging, and on and on. I think we need to address that – it’s dividing Australia, rather than uniting Australia.

“At the moment, I can’t fly it. And I want to fly the Australian flag. I want to fly it for the Australian people. But let’s do it together.”

He went on to describe the national anthem, Advance Australia Fair, as a legacy of the White Australia policy.

He added: ”I think that we need to move forward together, unite together, move forward as people, move forward as Australians, no matter what you are – brown, black, brindle, white – and move forward together.”

What of those comments though? And how valid are they?

Australia’s Aboriginal population is relatively small, 517,000 at the last census, about 2.5% of the population**, with three-quarters residing in cities and country towns, while 25% live in remote communities.

Despite a decent welfare system nowadays the life-expectancy of Aboriginals is about 17 years less than the national average*, a statistic that is twice as bad as comparable nations with an indigenous population.

Unemployment among Aboriginals is three times higher than the non-indigenous population** and Aboriginal women are 58 times more likely to be held in police custody than non-Aboriginals – for Aboriginal men it is 28 times higher***.

Alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and, in some communities, child abuse are endemic problems. The rate that Aboriginals are admitted to hospital, commit suicide or are diagnosed with mental health problems or disease is between two and three times higher than the non-indigenous population****.

All of these facts point to problems that are either not being addressed properly or not being addressed at all.

And the level of indifference to Aboriginals by the non-indigenous population has only begun to turn around in the past decade or two.

In Australia a national Sorry Day has been held every year since 1998 and four years ago the then prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised in parliament for laws and policies that “had inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss” for Aborigines. The previous incumbent John Howard had refused to make an official apology and was backed by about one in three Australians.

Foremost in Rudd’s mind was the controversy over the ‘stolen generation’ of children.

In reality the term used to describe them represented many generations of Aboriginal children, forcibly taken from their families from the 1900s to the 1960s and given to white families to raise in a heartless and bureaucratic attempt at integration.

But the apology was also for the numerous bloody, one-sided massacres committed by settlers, whalers, sealers, police detachments and the British armed forces, carried out since the early days of colonisation right up until the late 1920s.

While the benefits system is now supportive of Aboriginals, they were not entitled to a pension and other welfare until 1959.

It was not until 1962 that Aboriginals nationally were given the right to vote and it was only made compulsory, in line with the non-indigenous population, in 1983. There were bans on Aboriginals entering some town centres, right up until 1948 when the Western Australia capital Perth finally relented.

Among Mundine’s incendiary comments was the claim that Geale didn’t represent the Aboriginal community, citing his ‘white’ wife and kids.

He told a press conference for the fight: “I don’t see him representing black people, or coloured people. I don’t see him in the communities, I don’t see him doing the things I do to people, and fighting for the people. But he’s his own man. He’s got a white woman, he’s got white kids. I keep it real, all day every day.”

To outside observers it was a bit like Muhammad Ali’s portrayal of Joe Frasier and George Foreman as white stooges, part trash talk, but with the kernel of a real issue buried far beneath.

Explaining it later he added: “I wasn’t attacking her (Geale’s wife), or attacking her race. My outlook is, as an Aboriginal man, our people, we’re probably the most endangered species. We’re a dying race, and we’ve just got to embrace our sisters. There’s too many footy stars and too many other stars in powerful positions that don’t. And I don’t know why. That’s how we’re going to keep our people going.’

“Our women are the backbone of our community, and the Aboriginal community is weak if our women are weak, we need to bring our women up with us and embrace that.

“Our mortality rate is far worse than our birth rate. We are probably one of the only races on Earth like that right now.”

As crass as it seemed to direct those comments at the amiable Geale it was the type of view once espoused in 1960s America by Black Power activists – respect the sisters, nurture your own race, don’t fall victim to trying to meet the expectations of the majority.

Mundine has been attracting attention since the early 90s when he had his first amateur fights aged 17.

A top junior rugby league player at the time he was also the son of Tony Mundine, a fearsome hard-hitting Aboriginal middleweight boxer who had fought the legendary Carlos Monzon and ‘Bad’ Bennie Briscoe among others.

From an early stage in his life there was some air of anticipation about what Anthony Mundine would achieve, having already been earmarked as a gifted athlete in at least three sports (there was talk of him playing in Australia’s National Basketball League).

Since those early mutterings of potential Mundine’s won 44 fights and given up a successful career in rugby league, where he represented NSW in the game’s teak-tough State of Origin series.

He’s now 37 and, perhaps too late, is trying to attract some big money fights in the U.S. where it’s taken more than a decade for the heat to go out of acrimony at remarks he made blaming the country’s foreign policy for the 9/11 attacks.

And the Mundine mouth has continued to see the boxer run foul of the press and public.

But Aboriginal Australians need champions and not just successful sports people that tick all the right boxes for the white community. They need individuals with a profile that are prepared to speak up.

Mundine may not be the most eloquent orator, and he may not be the obvious choice as a mouthpiece for political change in Australia, but maybe he has a decent point or two to make.

Does that dour Federation-era anthem reflect anything about Australia today?

Should the country keep flying one of the many identikit flags that dot the South Pacific featuring the Union Jack in the top corner?

And do its people care enough about the Aboriginals to improve their life expectancy and their general well-being to a point equal to their own?

National Sorry Day (now called the the Day of Healing) is worth nothing if it’s just an apology for a distant past.

If Aboriginal kids continue to grow up with few opportunities and little self-esteem what good is saying ‘sorry’ to make ourselves feel better?

More people like Mundine are needed to start talking about solutions.

And not just Aboriginals – white folk too.

* Australian Institute of Health and Welfare

** Australian Bureau of Statistics

*** Australian Institute of Criminology

**** The Medical Journal of Australia

(Originally published in The Huffington Post)

Tough play shining a light on broken care home system

Posted on by Martin Newman

I had a friend years ago. We were close for a while, but she was complicated and when she was through with you that was it. So I knew her for a year then never saw her again. She was the same age as me, we were born a few days apart, and despite her not having seen anything at all of the world outside London and Slough she seemed to have lived a much longer life. She told me things that made my hair stand on end.

She’d been in the care system and she’d been raped. She’d been slashed with a knife by a gang. She had no connection with her two younger sisters, who had been abandoned with her, but had both been fostered out to a ‘nice’ family. For her the care system was a series of failed placements and homes where she was preyed upon by older children and on one occasion a carer.

If you met her in the street you’d never think she had a problem in the world because she had the brightest smile there was. But she’d beaten a crack habit, was semi-literate, dissolute and scarred permanently by her experiences. No amount of love or care, it seemed, could make any of it right again.

Working on a newspaper I learnt over the years that her story was not unique, but part of a pattern of abuse within a system where children could not be properly protected. The care system in Britain as a whole is a very poor substitute for the love and affection children need to develop.

In the past few days two things have reminded me of this: A powerful new theatre production about being in care and a warning from Barnados that served to validate what the play had to say.

The Finborough Theatre’s Fog, about a returned serviceman’s attempts to reunite his family after leaving his kids in care for a decade where they were abused, is harrowing. But it is a very matter-o-fact kind of harrowing. It tells us awful things that somehow aren’t as shocking as they should be, because in a way we have already come to accept that things like that occur when you are a ward of the state in Britain.

Barnados warned this week that children older than 10 in the care system are being “forgotten” and have become almost unplaceable among foster carers. The charity said 12,000 kids entering care last year (43%) were over 10, and while it didn’t give the figure on the number placed in foster homes, Government statistics tell us that just 3% of children aged over 10 in care were adopted out last year. Of these 84% were white, giving a less than 1% chance that a black or Asian child aged over 10 will find a home.

Some will be unfortunate enough to live out their childhoods in one of the 17 secure care homes for children that operate throughout Britain. In these the majority (66%) are detained or placed by the Youth Justice Board, while the vulnerable remainder are neglected or abused children who have been removed from their homes by local councils.

Throughout the wider care system a much higher figure of 62% are placed because of neglect or abuse. Just as worryingly, the standard of these childrens’ education is well below the norm, with just 45% attaining the basic level of education for their age. Barnardo’s say at least 8,750 new foster families must be found within the next year to avoid a catastrophic increase in the number of emotionally damaged children. And while homes are more likely to be found for babies and toddlers, UK adoption figures show that only 60 children under one were adopted out last year.

At the Finborough, on the outskirts of Chelsea in West London, hard-hitting Fog is selling out fast with its mixture of powerful acting and devastatingly pointed writing.

Penned by Tash Fairbanks, a 63-year-old feminist playwright, and her partner’s 27-year-old actor son Toby Wharton it is funny at times, disturbing and very, very real. It is also mesmerisingly sad.

Many people who have been in care may find it hard to watch.

Played by Wharton, in a riveting performance, the main character Gary or Fog (his nickname ‘F*** off Gary’) sets his sights low. He wants a big TV and a council block flat with a view. His dad Cannon (Victor Gardener) wants to provide much more, but can’t stomach working for £12k a year as a security guard. In the end Cannon’s half-hearted efforts will prove futile, an outcome the audience can sense from the first sighting of director Che Walker’s bleak concrete set.

Meanwhile sister Louise (Annie Hemmingway) has been ostracised by Gary and hates her father for leaving them. Going in the other direction, Gary’s best friend Mike (Benjamin Cawley) is doing well at school and heading for Oxford – he comes from a poor home but a supportive one, in the form of his nagging sister Bernice (Kanga Tanikye-Buah). There family provides the contrast between those with hope for a future and those crippled by their experiences.

While in care Lou has deliberately put herself in harms way to protect her younger brother from the predators around them. But her efforts have only mitigated the abuse. Hemmingway plays her bolshy and tough, but with a fraught tenderness. Her first appearance on stage made me well up, even though I knew little about her, such was the hurt she conveyed in her eyes. Her character is the only one that really cares about Fog and the audience knows intuitively that this ex-drug addict is the one hope he has – even though he rejects her. Lou has ‘put out’ in the children’s home ‘Brock House’ to protect Fog and been dubbed a whore, but she understands his pain and fear, as she shares it.

Some see the play as being about dad Cannon, about him being unable to adjust to coming back to a ‘Broken Britain’ that doesn’t care, to messed up kids he can’t get through to. There ARE real issues about returned soldiers in Britain – I see them everyday on my drive in to work, manning the check points at Docklands. War-hardened veterans forced to work in ‘by comparison’ Mickey Mouse security jobs, given no counselling for adjusting from a war zone to civilian life.

But this play is not about that, and it is only about Fog’s father in so much that it is to do with the effect his selfish desertion of his children has had. Played by the muscular, physically impressive Gardener, Cannon’s naïveté about the tough upbringing his children have endured provides the few moments where he shows his weakness. He’s a tough army man who can’t face up to the fact his kids have been abused in his absence…because of his absence.

Fog is a subtly rich play, at times a whirlwind of words, at others a bleak place of silence where pleas go unanswered. But for the verbose, black street slang spouting Fog, the script is remarkably restrained and often minimalistic in its detail. It releases information about the characters like secrets, and never labours explanation. But it gives us enough to piece together the tragedy of their lives. There are no formulaic responses, no cop outs and no pat ending.

That one-time friend of mine is out there somewhere, and hopefully in a better place, but the things that messed her up are still very real and they’re messing up a new generation of children.

Go see Fog – if you care.

Until January 28. The Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Road, London SW10 9ED. 020 7244 7439

www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

(Originally published in The Huffington Post)