Monthly Archives: January 2010

Silver threads among the gold…

Posted by Wendy on January 26, 2010 No comments

norahbattyArnold’s dad passed away a little over 15 months ago and in the time since we have often been at a loss as to how to deal with Arnold’s mum. The problem is she was married for 55 years and despite knowing many people over that time they all tended to be her husband’s friends – from work, the Masonic…she never actually made any friends of her own and it has now come to the point where, since Arnold’s dad has gone, they no longer call around or phone up. It is strange really and quite common we are told – women of her generation who never went out to work, got married and basically stayed at home. She has never been independent, never even went shopping on her own. The big problem was she was becoming too clingy of her son and depending too much on him for her company – to the point of her starting to compete with her own grandchildren for his attention…not a good thing. But now she is widowed she has accepted at least that a huge gap is there and it needs to be filled so we went along to Age-Concern to see about joining her up for some activities at the local centre.

Okay so they offered the usual classes and activities, a woodwork class was making some safety products including a ramp for the front step and most of the class was female! – but the atmosphere was really good and we felt sure she’d enjoy the afternoon tea gatherings, she loves to talk and she especially loves tea and scones. She’s around there this afternoon and we are hoping that it can become a regular outing for her.

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It’s Australia Day – NOT invasion day, survival day or anything else!

Posted by Wendy on January 25, 2010 2 comments

australiaday2I always enjoyed celebrating Australia Day when I was back home; you got the day off work, the sun always shone and the weather was fantastic. There’s plenty to do and heaps of festivities to go and see and participate in. Okay, there is always the usual naff ‘re-enactment’ of the 1788 landing at Port Jackson at one of the many beaches but they are generally accompanied by a sausage sizzle at the beach with free drinks and stuff to see and do.

Of course the indigenous folk see this day differently and have given it their own names of ‘Survival Day’ and ‘Invasion Day’. Australia’s a free and democratic society so they are within their rights to do so although I think it is a lot of nonsense. Australia has a unique place in the world today and this would never have happened had colonisation not taken place; the aborigines and Terra Australis would not have remained undiscovered throughout the industrial revolution, two world wars and the new millenium had the Brit’s not sent their overflow of prisoners down south. In fact, I wonder how many indigenous people would be left at all to protest today had, say, the Dutch arrived en masse (as they had begun to do in dribs and drabs in the late 1700′s…) or had the Japanese landed and decided to do a ‘Nanking’ starting off in and around Sydney…

I reckon all Australian’s are proud that our indigenous people are of a culture that is the oldest known surviving culture in the world. But when you look at it the aborigines themselves did not sprout up out of the Australian soil – they too arrived at one point (much) earlier on from southern Asia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands in a mass immigration across the land bridge. So using their perspective, they could well be called the first ‘invaders’ themselves.

Anyway, Happy Australia Day!

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Does Section 39 of the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 apply to blogs and should the Edlington brothers be named…?

Posted by Wendy on January 24, 2010 No comments

There are a lot of very angry people out there right now and so they rightly should be. The two ten year olds who tortured and murdered two year old James Bulger were not only named but their photographs were published and we all know what they looked like at the time. Today they lead new lives – one is said to be living in Australia – new identities, new birth certificates even. They were given every form of assistance available to help them re-establish themselves in society after serving a pathetically short sentence for what they did to that poor little boy and his family. What surprises me is that nobody has yet discovered their new identities – or taken a recent photograph of them – and put the details on the internet.

We remember well the ‘Baby P’ case and how easy it was to identify Tracey Connolly, Stephen Barker and his brother Jason Barker-Owen, so how is it that these two have escaped a public outing…?

The courts are being asked to lift the restrictions based on Section 39 of the Children and Young Persons Act of 1933:

“39. Power to prohibit publication of certain matter in newspapers. — (1) In relation to any proceedings in any court . . . F5 , the court may direct that— (a)no newspaper report of the proceedings shall reveal the name, address or school, or include any particulars calculated to lead to the identification, of any child or young person concerned in the proceedings, either as being the person [F6 by or against] or in respect of whom the proceedings are taken, or as being a witness therein:(b)no picture shall be published in any newspaper as being or including a picture of any child or young person so concerned in the proceedings as aforesaid;except in so far (if at all) as may be permitted by the direction of the court. (2) Any person who publishes any matter in contravention of any such direction shall on summary conviction be liable in respect of each offence to a fine not exceeding [F7 level 5 on the standard scale].

Why have these two latest young monsters not been outed in the same way as Robert Thompson and Jon Venables – and why? no doubt the media will adhere to the reporting restrictions put in place to supposedly ‘protect’ them and not adversely affect their rehabilitation, I wonder how long it will be before their names and pictures appear on the blogosphere. I guess you could ask if I would publish any pictures of them here on this site – to be honest I doubt that I would simply because, despite their wickedness and evil crime, they are still children and I would not flout the law just to expose the grim faces of two boys who are basically products of their upbringing. As far as I stand legally,well, that Section 39 clearly prohibits the publication of the information in the newspapers, there is no amendment included to cover personal blogs on the internet. Now if I had a picture of their atrocious parents though that might be a different matter…

But yes, I do think they should at least be named. You do the crime…

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