“Generations of men are frustrated, angry and ashamed that, despite following the rules - and despite sacrificing the tender, emotionally connected boys inside of them - they're not getting what was promised to them.”

Ezra up a tree. Binalong Bay, Bay of Fires, Tasmania. July 2021.

See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence by Jess Hill

A bleak insight into the history, culture and laws around familial violence in Australia. The book offers a broad sweep of the movement Hill identifies as a "historic shift in power and accountability" in which "the Western world [has] finally started taking men’s violence against women seriously". The full truth of the latter half of this statement remains still to be seen.

Unlike the dry government reports and inquiries cited throughout the work, Hill gets behind the simple facts and figures (although there are plenty of these too) to give the reader a real visceral sense of the terror, abuse and personal and institutional failures behind the dreadful data.

It's not perfect, and I scratched my head at times in which she defers to various authorities and takes assertions at face value (telling rather than showing), but it largely doesn't detract from the whole. There is a tendency to simplify the very complex forces at work (it seems to posit a unified feminist position on psychoanalytic and psychological approaches to shame in relation to violence), but perhaps this is unavoidable if you're trying to appeal to a broad audience.

All up, a worthy addition to the literature and a great primer on the issues.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

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Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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