Author: Elisabeth

To fly on broken wings

How do you fly on broken
wings?  Wings so broken there are times
when it’s impossible to get off the ground. 
Flying on Broken Wings is Carrie Bailee’s
extraordinary story of survival in the face of horrendous and unspeakable
childhood abuse.  Unspeakable because it
takes readers places where no one wants to go. 
We enter a world of horror so great
we’re left gasping.  And for anyone who
has been touched by the trauma of childhood abuse it becomes a shared journey
with someone who’s seen and experienced the worst of it. 
Bailee was not only abused by her
drunken father who took delight in tormenting the nine year old girl, but she
was also sold to the highest bidder in a paedophile ring where a group of men
took delight in photographing children in sexual poses and of doing all manner
of perverse things onto their innocent bodies. 
These children are most likely dead
by now, the degree of depravity visited upon them can only suggest as
much.  But Bailee managed to escape from
her adoptive maternal home and from then on she no longer needed to visit her
father on the dreaded access visits, although she thereafter encountered other
horrific experiences, including a rape shortly after her arrival in Australia
as a twenty year old. 
Later in Australia with the help of a group
of brave and determined women, counsellors, friends, psychiatrists, and refugee
advocates Bailee managed to begin to heal from these unspeakable traumas, but
not before going through long periods of intense re-traumatisation when the
flashbacks of her childhood brought her back through dissociation
into being that little girl again, a girl who could not protect herself from her father’s extreme cruelty.
The book is well paced.  These flashbacks come to us in spurts,
sometimes long spurts, but they are always interspersed with parts of the
journey wherein Bailee is able to see something of the life she had led and to
reach out for help. 
It is her capacity to reach out for
help, despite her occasional attempts to run away that is most striking. 
Bailee has a website and on it you
can see her performance of her slam poem, ‘Sold’, and there you see a most
attractive and passionate young woman, today the mother of two small girls, who has
managed to survive to tell her story, especially since both her adoptive
parents have died.
I mentioned I was reading this book to a number
of people while I followed Bailee’s journey and several said they did not want
to read about that level of horror.  I can
understand this. 
‘To tell of the trauma is to be re-traumatised’. 
 Bailee’s book is not an easy read, not for
its inaccessibility but for the extent to which unlike watching the six o’clock
news on the television or online where horrific images of torture and brutality
play out often, this book takes us into the heart and mind of one of the tortured
and she is ‘one of us’, a white western woman with pale skin and
Caucasian features. 
I worried when reading of her good
fortune under Phillip Ruddoch’s reign that Bailee is one of the lucky
ones.  Senator Brian Harradine had spoken
up on her behalf.  But it seems to me it
would have been  harder and continues to be harder today to evoke compassion for all
refugees who seek asylum in this country, in part because they are not regarded
as one of us. 
Coming from Canada, Bailee is only
half-foreign, with her different accent but that’s about the end of it.
The book also alerts us to the need
for greater intervention in situations of domestic violence and childhood
abuse, and the degree to which traumatised and tormented victims become
voiceless. 
As Bailee writes: ‘Children are
made to feel responsible for what is being done to them.  This is the abuser’s most powerful
weapon.  It prevents them from telling.’
Baillee’s experience is not
isolated.  For this reason, I urge people
to read Flying on Broken Wings. There
are paedophile rings throughout the world and proliferating.  They consist of men who are hell bent on the
exploitation of small children, for complicated reasons often including there own experiences of abuse.  
 Paedophiles breed in societies where brutality
is sometimes condoned, and where disenfranchised men grow up hating those who
are most vulnerable, including their own vulnerable selves. 

To read Bailee’s book is to want
to stomp this out – now. 

Politics and a short history of telephones.

Rooster one day, feather duster the
next, or so my husband reckons in relation to the fate of a certain politician
and his conservative party following their defeat in yesterdays election in
Queensland. 
Triumph to abjection.  I know the slide well.  The ways in which I might see-saw between
omnipotence and impotence.  One day on
top of the world, the next day in the gutter. 
1972 
My boyfriend rang from
Edithvale.  It wasn’t often I spoke on
the telephone.  I had an aversion to the
disembodied voice at the other end.  The
fact that I could not see the other person’s face rendered me voiceless, as if
I could not find words enough in my mind to fill the silence that grew between
us. 
And so I had trained myself to use
the telephone only for calls of an intentional nature.  The calls you make to arrange an
appointment, or to meet someone.  Nothing
that required any other effort than to relay a brief message. 
The call on the telephone to my boyfriend to make arrangements for when we would meet on the weekend was even shorter than
I had expected when my father came along with his scissors and snipped the
cord. 
The idea that I should engage
with someone in the outside world, or perhaps the fact that this someone was a
boyfriend, had enraged my father. 
There was no reasoning with him, and
I fled.
2002 
Forty years later when my then
fifteen-year-old daughter was on the phone for about the fourth time that night
clogging up the line, my husband took my father’s place. 
In those days we had only one line
and my husband sometimes needed it for work.  He, too, destroyed the connection that night,
but not in the same way.  Not quite.
He snatched the telephone from our daughter’s hand after she had refused to finish up the call and cracked the
receiver open on his knee.  It must
have hurt him, but his rage shielded him from too much pain. 
Not so our daughter.  She was devastated and she too fled, but not
after remonstrating with her father for doing this, and with me for not
stopping him.
Years later my daughter showed me
she had kept the broken telephone in her possession as a souvenir of that
dreadful time. 
It’s not something my husband is
proud of, nor am I.
It puzzles me this antipathy we can have to others who connect elsewhere with someone else in our presence.  The jealousy that stirs. 
1960
It was not the first time my father
had disconnected the telephone.  He did
it years before when I was still very small, but this time he simply refused to
pay the bill and the telephone company instead cut us off. 
For years we were without a
telephone and it seemed to me even as a seven year old that there was something
shameful about not having a telephone number to offer people in case they might
want to make contact with us, other than face to face, on foot or by
letter. 
I never once talked to my father
about his decision to sever my phone connection with my boyfriend but to give
him credit, my husband talked to my daughter and in a calmer moment he apologised.  He was good at apologising. 
As was my daughter, both apologised
for their part in the fracas, but in my mind now I hang the responsibility on
my husband’s shoulders and on mine.
We should have found a better way
to deal with an adolescent daughter who spent too many hours on the telephone,
even though at the time it seemed as though words were not enough.
In the end we ordered an extra
phone line and there was no longer any need to police the time spent on calls
except when mobiles came in and for a time our daughter could run up huge bills
from talking too long to her friends on this then more expensive form. 
2015
Today the mobile phone is such a lifeline
for most of us.  And I, too, am in the
habit of checking mine several times a day just to be sure no one is trying to
reach me. 
Another daughter in Scotland communicates by
Skype and we, too, talk on the phone but now face to face on the screen. 
It helps to see her face.  It helps to hear her voice.  The distance between us washes away for a
moment and she could be in the next room.
1957
When my mother and father travelled
from Holland to Australia in the early 1950s, before my father had the
telephone cut off, my grandparents sometimes made a call.  We children were never allowed to speak, but
I heard the tension in my mother’s voice as she tried to connect across the
distance with her own father and how every word which cost so much money seemed
precious and therefore too hard to find. 
The conversations were stilted and short.

Words are like that, unless they
flow freely, they fall flat.  From rooster to feather duster in one fell
swoop.