‘Mallee bulls’ tear up the turf at ADFA

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‘MALLEE BULLS’ TEAR UP THE TURF
at the Australian Defence Force Academy

On 6 April 2011 an 18-year old female cadet at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) went to the media with a story that has shaken the military.

A couple of weeks earlier this cadet, Kate, had consensual sex with a male cadet, also 18 years old. What she didn’t realise at the time was that the other cadet had set the whole thing up to be filmed on a webcam. It was transmitted via Skype to a watching group of six male cadets in an adjoining room.

Kate may never have known about this if it wasn’t that one of the watching cadets reported it to superiors at ADFA.

The Skype sex scandal is the kind of incident with the potential to shake the establishment, not least because it occurred within an institution that has a responsibility to uphold some pretty firm values. It’s prompted questions about whether sexism in this form is embedded within our culture as a whole, or within subcultures in Australian society.

Ironically, the scandal has fallen out of the media and been superseded by weeks of coverage of one particular wedding, and of a woman named Kate who has found herself in a very different situation.

In the midst of the royal wedding coverage, the media on Friday 29 April did report that two of the young men involved in the ADFA Skype scandal had fronted the ACT Magistrates Court.

Back at the beginning of April, there was talk that the principle male player in the incident, Daniel McDonald, could be charged with rape, since the situation in which the female cadet consented to sex was misrepresented to her. Instead, the charges he faces are “using a carriage service to cause offence” and “committing an act of indecency”.

These are charges that don’t have much of a ring to their name, and that aren’t likely to stick to a young man’s reputation in the way that the single word “rape” would.

Instead, the men involved continue their studies at ADFA, where officer cadets essentially study a university degree while also taking on board the culture of the Defence Force, for better or worse.

This notion of culture, and of a sexist culture particular to the Forces, is one of the biggest issues to come out of the whole scandal.

Defence Minister Stephen Smith initiated a series of reviews into various areas of the Defence Force as soon as the news of the Skype abuse came out. One of these is an enquiry into the treatment of women at ADFA, to be conducted by Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick.

Meanwhile, ABC News Online reported that ADFA graduates denied any culture of sexism, and Australia Defence Association director Neil James appeared to blame the incident on a kind of unavoidable need for sex on behalf of young men at ADFA.

As reported by news.com.au and AAP, James described ADFA cadets as “fit as mallee bulls”, and in need of a sexual outlet from the “high pressure environment” that they are apparently in.

While James was careful to say that he didn’t condone the behaviour of the male cadets involved, he did describe Kate as “a bit of a troubled lass” because of some unrelated issues at ADFA.

One gets the impression that his “fit as mallee bulls” description wasn’t designed to be applicable to the women at ADFA – he was specifically talking about “bulls”, after all.

This in itself positions females as the sex outlet that James says the men (and boys – some of those involved are not yet 18) need. Sure, sex can be an outlet for all sorts of people, but the positioning of it in this manner – such that the woman provides the outlet to the man – by the head of the Defence Association appears indicative of some underlying problems.

Aside of James’ perhaps thoughtless comments, there’s also questions about what actually initiated the incident. What prompts a few young people to decide to broadcast an intimate act to others without consent of one of the involved parties?

These cadets had only been at ADFA for two months. They brought attitudes and values with them from the outside world. Two months probably wasn’t long enough to shake these attitudes to the core and replace them with entirely new values – thus many have argued that their behaviour has nothing to do with a culture particular to ADFA.

But two months was undoubtedly long enough for the cadets to sort themselves into social groups based on some of the attitudes and values they brought with them – and on how these attitudes fitted into ADFA’s existing culture.

It was long enough for them to figure out that being “fit as mallee bulls”, in spite of rules surrounding fraternisation, was what was expected of them.

It was also long enough for loyalty to the male friendship group to rank above loyalty to a female sexual partner. The betrayal here is enormous. Regardless of the level of emotional attachment between the two cadets – whether they slept together that day purely for sexual enjoyment or with a deeper level of feeling involved – it was still an intimate act.

It was an act that required some level of trust between the involved parties and that expected a level of discretion in return.

That this discretion and trust was so openly violated is evidence of this sense of loyalty to the male friendship group over the female sexual partner. That only one of the six watching cadets stepped forward is another indication.

Some commentators have suggested that all of these cadets should be immediately expelled from ADFA, with the possible exception of the one who blew the whistle. How can these young men be trusted on a battlefield if they cannot be trusted in the relatively low pressure environment of ADFA?

The discretion between partners is frequently betrayed in the way that groups of both men and women tell each other about their sexual exploits. Often, it’s done in a way that would upset the other party if they knew about it. Sometimes, it leads to a development of a “reputation”.

The positive or negative nature of this reputation is largely dependent on the gender of the person involved – evidenced in the well-known double standard applied to women who are described as sluts for behaviour that might earn a man a few approving slaps on the back from his mates.

The capturing of the actual act of sex on a webcam was premeditated in a way that the sharing of exploits after the fact usually isn’t – making the betrayal ten times worse.

Whether or not Broderick’s enquiry finds evidence of a culture of sexism within ADFA, this incident is a pretty clear indication that there are some serious issues in the way that women are perceived and treated within the Forces.

This article originally appeared in the Women’s Edition of La Trobe University’s student newspaper, Rabelais, on 12 May 2011.

Letter to The Age

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Vale Labor values

I worry about the values of Julia Gillard’s Labor government in the light of the ‘Malaysia solution’. Instead of striking nonsensical deals with countries that are not signatories to the 1951 Convention on the Rights of Refugees, the government should be working to make the arrival of asylum seekers by boat into a non-issue. I am sick of hearing about ‘boat people’ and ‘queue jumpers’, terms that are meaningless and misleading.

I am also disgusted that 10 years on from Tampa and under a new government, the same scare tactics are used to make asylum seekers into a political football. What happened to Labor’s values? What happened to Prime Minister Gillard’s concept of a fair go? Clearly, it is not extended to those who have arrived in Australia under the harshest of conditions, and who deserve our compassion and care.

Published in The Age on 11 May 2011. It’s the second letter on this page.

A delayed reflection on Biutiful

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I saw the movie Biutiful several weeks ago, and before seeing it I had intended to write a review of it. But the movie was too heavy for me to engage with it immediately afterwards. It left me shaking, an indication of it’s power. One expects grittiness and confronting images from the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, but this was too much for me. Afterwards I spent days trying to shake some of the more disturbing images from my mind. At night when my thoughts relaxed, the images crept back in and kept me awake.

I went to Barcelona in 2008, to Barra Gotica, the Gothic Quarter. This is the tourist area of Barcelona, and while young men may try to sell you beer or something stronger in back alleyways, there is little obvious sadness or suffering or pain in this bouyant, active area of the city.

The Barcelona of Biutiful is another city altogether, a city where illegal sellers of imitation goods on the street live in tiny cramped apartments. It is a city of poverty, vicious cycles and exploitation. Only in long shots where the Temple de la Sagrada Família can be seen rising above the suburbs, or in the images of the beach, can the Barcelona that I experienced be glimpsed at all.

Javier Bardem plays the main character in Biutiful, Uxbal, and brings his usual gruff charisma to the screen. But here his character is also pained, dying, angry, afraid. When he loves, it is bittersweet.

The most disturbing scene involves the Chinese workers who are paid a pittance to produce those imitation goods that Uxbal’s African workers then sell on the streets. The movie is powerful and well made in a gritty, awful sense – there is nothing soft about the way the cinematography portrays the city and the lives of people in it.

I can’t say much more, because I don’t wish to re-engage more closely with my memories of the film. I acknowledge this movie’s strength and Iñárritu’s ability to capture humanity so confrontingly, but for me, it was too much.

Cicadas

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I went for a walk this evening to see the sunset. I was trying to escape the feeling of being boxed up by the squares of the computer screens that were present all day. As I returned from my walk there was a lone woman on the swings, swinging high as adults tend to do. There were no children on the playground, no one else around at all.

I stopped on the other side of the park and stretched. There was still colour in the sky. The evening was warm, and noisy. I hated the squeal of car tires and the sound of engines revving. The background hum of traffic was so loud that I felt it pressing in on me. The trams were ok, clattering down the hill two blocks away. The sounds of the cars made me tense.

I sat down on the grass and changed the tone of my listening, and I heard the cicadas. They comforted me. They sounded as though they were trying to drown out the noise, as though they too could not bear it. I heard them, and they grew louder as I listened.

The girl stopped swinging and walked away. After a while I got up and crossed the park to the swing set. The swing she had left still moved slightly. I swung high into the sky. The colour was fading. After a while a man and two small boys approached. The larger of the boys offered the spare swing to the little one, and the little one took it. After a moment I jumped off my swing, and ran away across the grass.

Film review: The Way Back

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The Way Back is the latest Peter Weir film, tracing the story of a group of escapees from a Siberian Gulag in the Soviet Union. In some ways it follows a predictable trajectory – stories of escapees necessarily tend to begin with some explanation of why they are locked up in the first place, followed by an introduction to their place of imprisonment before they start scoping for a means of escape. However, this didn’t prevent the film from holding me in its thrall throughout its 133 minute running time – I was completely engrossed. I have to admit that the controversy surrounding the book on which the film is based (The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz) kept popping into my head at inopportune moments, but ultimately the film does not lose any of its punch because of that debate.

While the horrors of Nazi Germany are widely studied, with many books and films produced on the subject, those of us coming up through the Australian school system usually find that we have very little knowledge of Stalinist Russia. Matters aren’t helped by the fact that Hollywood has largely stayed well away from Stalin’s regime. In this respect alone, it’s positive that a film such as The Way Back has been made, allowing this chapter of history to a reach a new audience, albeit in a fictionalised form.

The movie is by no means an overly negative or depressing film, but it nonetheless filled me with a sense of the overwhelming nature of human suffering. The early scenes of the movie gave an indication of the sheer numbers of people imprisoned in Siberia and reinforced the sweeping nature of their pain. The escapees in this story are just a drop in the ocean of people who have been imprisoned, tortured or worked to death, or who have lost their lives in harsh landscapes throughout human history.

The way in which the film’s characters are often dwarfed by the landscapes they are traversing only adds to this sense of enormity. This sacrifice of character is necessary in the scope of such a large story – the journey from Siberia to India covered 7000 kilometres – and in order to demonstrate the majesty and enormity of the landscapes through which they passed. Like Weir’s previous film, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, there aren’t many surprises in The Way Back, with the possible exception of the presence of a Polish teenager for part of the journey. However, also like Master and Commander, it is smoothly executed, evidently well researched and contains some excellent cinematography. It left me thinking about the nature of human interaction and suffering, particularly in the midst of harsh landscapes, and offers a fine tribute to those who perished in Soviet Gulags.

This review has also been published on upstart.

The other home

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Back in Melbourne, and the rain is hissing on the road outside the open window.

In Carlton tonight half of Lygon Street was closed, ready for tomorrow’s festival. A pizza oven was parked where our bus stop should be. So we walked along Elgin Street between the showers of rain, the air still warm and smelling of bitumen. We got a bus and changed to a tram at the junction.

At home when it rains on the bitumen in summer, the air smells of eucalypt and is washed clean of the sea. But it only rained once that I can remember, all summer at home. It rained just after I left the water one evening, so I missed out on swimming in the rain.

Back in Melbourne, the other home. The sea is far away, but not too far. On Monday a different life begins, a new routine. It is as though the time on the other side of the country exists in a bubble, a time capsule. Melbourne seems unchanged. It is as though I have not been gone at all.

Coming back here makes me glad, because it is good to come back to a place that once was strange and that now is littered with a history of my own. We have a past together, this city and I. We have had this past for a long time, but it takes a year and a half here and a few months away to realise it.

Sometime soon it will be time to live in another city or another place, and then I must remember: after a while, when you have lived there long enough to have a routine and to know some of the place intimately, go away for some time and then return, just to see how it feels to come back.

On coming home

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To call it ‘home’ in the first place is supposedly definitive. But it is a word that I interchange, and I am not sure that it is as important as it could be.

I have been gone for fourteen months; it was my third extended absence, and also my longest. I am no returning expat or long-lost child who has been gone for years and years; I am just part of the generation that picks up stumps between 18 and 25 and takes off for a while. Most of us come back, periodically, to confront or remember or re-experience the home that we left.

I feel childlike here, yet I also feel old. I have seen this place across so many years.

There is a sense of belonging, but also a feeling that those with whom I belong are nonetheless moving on without me.

I feel at ease, here in familiar surrounds where the summer sun has the same intensity that I remember. It is a town known for taking it easy, and it’s smoothing me over too, calming me down, bringing me back into its rhythms.

Yet there is the itch of temporariness, the knowledge of another imminent departure. I am constantly wondering if this really is home, to the exclusion of all other places.

This time, I also wonder if I have pushed it too far – if I have been gone too long, so that this place can never be what it once was.

Garden

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Photo taken by me, on some nameless supermarket film.

I have never been much of a gardener, always keeping too busy with ships or horses. But my Mum is quite the opposite – she has always, as far as I know, had a garden, and throughout my lifetime she has always loved it. Her mother before her was, I think, much the same.

I’m back at home this summer and my parents are away, so I’m left solely in charge of the garden. I don’t have to do much, except for water by hand – almost the entire garden has to be watered every second day, and some plants every day.

The way I feel about this is part of the shift in seeing one’s parents, or at least their endeavours, in a different light – the shift that perhaps every child reaches, gradually or abruptly, at some stage of their teenage years or early adulthood. A few days ago I followed Mum through the garden while she watered. She showed me what needed to be done and how often, pointing out the plants that would droop if I forgot them, telling me which ones to pay special attention in hot weather. And so I had to look at her garden, really look at it. I noticed the garden’s orderliness, its density, its thick greenery; I noticed how each plant has its place and its space. I noticed how Mum watered each with a care specific to it, and how she knew each one. She spoke of her plants as though they were animals, and I remembered how upset she always is if one of them dies needlessly, because of a lack of care.

Yesterday and today I have been on my own in the evenings, retracing Mum’s footsteps with the hose. I have lingered over-long on some plants, not wanting to under-water, not wanting to let any of them die. And I begin to understand why Mum does not seem to see watering as a chore. It is peaceful, wandering the garden in the cool of the evening, listening to the gush of the water, making sure that the water goes straight to the plants and is not wasted. My mind wandered. I thought of the Queensland floods, and I imagined rose bushes underwater or washed utterly away. I thought of sailing, of acres of salt water and its constant motion. I thought of the struggling garden in my grandmother’s house on the other side of the country, where I live.

In spite of these thoughts and their disparity, linked only by water, the garden has made me feel peaceful this evening, and I am glad of it.