In the aftermath of community outrage at Eddie McGuire, James Brayshaw and Danny Frawley’s “joke” about people paying to watch a drowning of journalist Caroline Wilson, the apologies came thick and fast. Lost in the torrent of sympathy was the nexus between the attempted silencing of a powerful female journalist and the violence that claims on average more than one women a week in Australia. One of those women was my 25-year-old sister, Vicki, who died after a knife attack by her ex-boyfriend Peter Keogh outside her place of work in Coburg on Wednesday 26 August 1987.
The agony of Vicki’s death would be a mere prelude to a brutal trial in which the killer was granted a defence of provocation by Justice George Hampel. Vicki’s “crime” was to have allegedly told the killer to “fuck off” – there was no corroborating evidence that she uttered these words – when he confronted her, armed with a knife.
What should have been a lawful right had become the trigger for a provocation defence that led to Keogh being found not guilty of murder and serving a mere three years and 11 months in jail. When I began unravelling the murders of women like my sister, the complicity of government, the courts and the broader society in the expunging of male guilt stood out like a beacon.
The reason the law was so slow to change was because its origins lay in a culture that silences and blames women for the violence visited upon them by men. In our patriarchal world, the right to chastise belongs overwhelmingly to men. It’s why Sydney’s Alan Jones wasn’t banished from the radio after calling for our first and only female prime minister, Julia Gillard, to be “shoved into a chaff bag” – along with Bob Brown – and dropped in the ocean. It’s why Sam Newman can blithely describe female journalists as “excrement” and tell Wilson, “even if you were under water, you’d still be talking”.
Someone should have told Sam that as late as the 1700s in the United Kingdom, outspoken women could be forced to wear a scold’s bridle equipped with a spike that pinned the tongue. Sometimes, in a punishment resembling that imagined for Gillard and Wilson, such women were placed in a ducking stool and lowered into a river.
As much as Sam Newman might argue this is a war between networks and personalities, the backdrop to the punishment for women who challenge male authority is a dark picture of gender-based violence. No government minister can tell us how many women have suffered death for using words men didn’t like in the years since feminism raised its head above the male parapet. Nor can anyone tell us exactly how many of the wife killers were exonerated with a not guilty verdict.
With the current death toll for “domestic killings” standing at around 65 a year we could reasonably suggest that some 3,000 Australian women have been killed since Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch was published in 1970. Yet in case after case judges offered the most puerile explanations for sheeting home the blame to women.
In the Victorian Public Records Office, a long way from the verbal assault on Caroline Wilson, can be found hundreds of inquests into the killing of women in so-called domestic settings. In 1972, the year Gough Whitlam was elected as prime minister on a platform that included gender equality, a stream of women were killed in Victoria by men found not guilty of murder.
Among them was 22-year-old Bev Quinsee, the estranged wife of the violent Edward Quinsee. While sentencing Quinsee for manslaughter, Justice George Lush remarked, “I do not absolve you Mr Quinsee from all blame for the separation, but your wife did a harsh thing to you when she left you.”
A terrified Bev Quinsee had fled the relationship after seeing her young son bashed by the man she had told people would kill her. Despite wounding her in a bedroom and then firing a cluster of bullets from his sawn-off rifle into her neck and head after chasing her into another room, Quinsee was offered a provocation defence on account of his wife’s supposed infidelity and hurtful words. He was sentenced to less than four years in jail.
Such verdicts did not end with the abolition of the provocation law, as we saw when Anthony Sherna was found guilty only of manslaughter in 2009 after strangling his wife, Susie Wild. In court, the tall and strongly built Sherna was described as the “mouse that roared” after years of alleged belittling, verbal and physical abuse from his tiny wife.
This is the cultural and legal backdrop against which Newman speaks when he demands that women accept the consequences of equality between the sexes. The product of a feted life in football and the media, Sam Newman has little personal experience of those feminists and campaigners who talk of a world where an underbelly of men bristles with resentment at women’s new-found power.
My late mother would have expressed deep disquiet about “the boys’” treatment of Caroline Wilson and how those bullying words would be interpreted by men who bash women.
It was this question I discussed with Eddie McGuire when he sought an opinion before delivering a heartfelt apology at the Collingwood Football Club on Monday evening. Whether Newman has unwittingly trashed his close friend’s unflinching and unequivocal apology, time will tell.
On 13 February 2008, the day then prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised to Indigenous Australians, my mother Lorna Cleary wrote in her diary, “Wednesday is sorry day. Not before time.” Mum, whose diaries are full of grief stricken messages to her daughter, understood the significance of an apology to people suffering an injustice.
I’m now convinced the only way to obliterate the culture of blame that stalks women is with a state and national apology for past wrongs – an apology delivered by a prime minister and state leaders that blunts the counter-attacks from men like Sam Newman.
If Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, can apologise to gay men brutalised by barbaric laws – as he should – how can he avoid apologising to the thousands of women Malcolm Turnbull describes as having “borne the burden of our failure to act for too long.”
If we don’t apologise to those women murdered as a result of institutionalised indifference and denied their basic human rights in court, how will we ever marginalise the boys now smarting at Eddie’s apology and laughing about the mock drowning of a “troublesome”, independent woman? Without an apology to these women, how will we ever convince “the boys” that their ranting only gives succour to the “wife bashers” and killers?
