Great piece by Margaret in today’s Crikey.

Last Tuesday Crikey published an editorial criticising Chris Masters’s Jonestown for the way in which it “outed” Alan Jones and treated its subject matter with “breathless, censorious innuendo.” It took my breath away.

It wasn’t only the cheek of Crikey accusing the country’s leading investigative journalist a man who has done more than anyone at Crikey to keep public life clean of having missed the lead that made me uneasy. It was that hardly anyone including me had had a chance to read the whole book, and yet the debate was raging based only on the extracts published in The Sydney Morning Herald on the weekend.

Those extracts selected by Fairfax have done the book and the community a disservice. If you read them, then you have read almost all the quasi-s-xual material in the book, which is 453 pages long not including footnotes and index. If you have read nothing else, then you don’t know what the book is about.

Yet because the s-xy bits came out first, the debate has been hijacked by the issue of whether Masters should have “outed” Jones, and whether he did it in a justifiable way.

These are important and difficult issues, and I will return to them. I am not completely on Masters’s side.

But outing is not by a country mile the most important thing in the book. Continue reading →

In early 1996 my father Fred fell from his motor bike on the farm and cracked a rib. He had blood in his urine, which the doctors called haematuria which means blood in the urine in Greek. The doctor told him that the indicated procedure for haematuria was a cystoscopy to check the bladder for tumours or other conditions. This is a nasty procedure in which the patient is put under a general anaesthetic and the doctor inserts a camera up the urethra (up the penis) and into the bladder and has a look around.

Because the procedure is unpleasant and not completely free of risk especially for a man in his mid 70s, and because the diagnosis seemed obvious Dad decided with the doctor’s blessing that he’d not bother with it. About four months later with ribs in fine fettle the symptoms recurred. On performing the cystoscopy the specialist told Dad as he woke up ‘You’ve got a nasty tumour in there’. And so he had. During his long illness one of the specialists asked him if he’d ever worked with aniline dyes. Dad had worked for a printer for a year or so when he was 19 in England. Smoking till his mid forties probably didn’t help but working for the printers probably gave him the cancer over half a century later.

Dad didn’t fancy having the surgery, and had always thought he wouldn’t. But he decided to go ahead, perhaps to please others. He ended up with a stoma and urostomy bag but this failed to stop the cancer. Metastases spread to the rest of his body (some of the nastiest medical conditions have some of the most beguiling names).

Just a few months after Dad died, I noticed blood in my own urine. Continue reading →

What would you call a situation in which a man . . .

[P]unched his wife in the face and she fell to the ground.

He kicked her before smashing her face with a rock.

She suffered multiple fractures to her skull, ribs, vertebrae, and shoulder blades, as well as a ruptured liver.

The court heard the woman had taken out a domestic violence order against Conway a week before her death.

He had been convicted three times for previously assaulting her.

Well you don’t call it murder apparently. The convicted Katherine man Robert Conway, 37, “pleaded guilty to unlawfully killing his wife”. He was sentenced to 11 years in jail. Non-parole period? Five-and-a-half years.