What can we do? Kelly Hansen, CEO NOVA for Women and Children, discusses solutions. |
Protection
by Dael Allison
The brick-walled briefing room is quiet. Weekly meetings at Women’s Support Services are usually relaxed and chatty, but not today. Around the oval conference-table a few women whisper together, others riffle through papers, some sit preoccupied.
You try to focus on the report you’ll be giving but the dot-points blur. Instead, dingoes lope ahead on the track as you wrestle the Troop Carrier over sandy corrugations. Six females, following each other through the shadows cast by the desert casuarinas.
The she-team.
The words circle in your mind like a mantra. A she-team is what it feels like you’ve been part of, in your twelve-week internship here at WSS.
Last year, during your semester of research with the communities west of Alice Springs, you watched out for those dingoes every time you drove out Haasts Bluff way. Sometimes there was only a flicker of gold in the scrub. Other times you saw them wandering along the dry bed of the Finke River. Once they were right beside the track, hunting through a tumble of rocks. You stopped the Troopie to watch. They seemed unfazed, as if they had already absorbed the vehicle’s occasional appearances into their landscape. They were so close you could pick out individual characteristics: one bitch with a clubbed front foot, another with a black shoulder stripe. The matriarch was unmistakable. Older and powerful-looking, the tip missing from one ear and her muzzle crooked by a long scar. She had watched you, and it felt like the fierce intensity in her yellow eyes was more recognition than aggression.
Hanny has that intensity, you think, dragging yourself back to the briefing room. Hanny the matriarch, still in her office taking another call from the police. You wish she would come back. You need to get this presentation over. Last week, asking you to report to this meeting, she’d said, ‘Just an overview of how you’re travelling with the internship, Jazz. A chance to give feedback and help, if you need it. Nothing formal.’
Nothing formal. You’d totally stressed out, working midnights to pull together statistics, policies and procedures. There’s a rumour that a permanent position could be available. You want it. You want to prove that your future should be here, that you are passionate as the rest of the team about helping women. So many needing so much – accommodation, a shoulder to cry on, tools to help them cope with abuse, poverty, mental illness. They need a safety net, a better future.
You look around the table. Nobody meets your eye. A niggling voice in your head says, They know you can’t cope. They know you aren’t up to it. Your gut clenches. Isn’t it at least partly true? None of the case studies and role-plays and reams and reams of reading at uni, not even your research in the desert, prepared you for the sheer volume and complexity of what you’ve encountered here. Most days you feel overwhelmed.
You take deep slow breaths. Focus on the positives.
Yesterday was good, especially the new writing group. Valentina brought flowers, Merle cooked apple muffins, and you were blown away when everyone read what they’d written. Afterwards Essie barrelled in with her battered shopping trolley jammed full of books. ‘Two dollars the lot,’ she gloated, pulling out Jung, Doris Lessing, Pablo Neruda. Handing you a dog-eared copy of Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, she said. ‘Stick this on your bookshelf, like an affirmation. The title’s ironic of course.’ Essie has lived rough for years, but she is hard to place in emergency accommodation because refuge houses are often old, with narrow hallways and small rooms that freak her out. When you couldn’t find anything for her she sailed off saying, ‘Another train adventure!’ You worry about her, knowing she will be alone on the station late at night. That she would catch the last service to Sydney and sleep on the train at Central station, then return first thing in the morning, somehow avoiding the conductors each way. Essie is a wild dresser for an old girl. Loves wearing red. She loves WSS, too, with its wide corridors, roomy laundry, and big bright bathrooms with plenty of towels and toiletries.
Yesterday Aamira also came in to your office.
Don’t think about Aamira.
There’s a loud rumble out in the street, something big passing in the regular grind of traffic. You let your mind follow it. Outside, people will be walking beneath the budding trees. It will be a normal busy day.
Inside, nothing feels normal.
You re-focus on your notes, but Aamira takes over. The warmth and colour she always brought into your office. The scarves around her head so flamboyant that most people missed the machete scars, corrugating one side of her face.
Yesterday she sat gently rocking the stroller where Happiness slept. Beautiful Happiness, with her round breast-fed cheeks and tiny knots of rusty curls, her satiny brown limbs peeking from beneath a frilly pink nylon dress. Hard to pull your eyes away, until Aamira showed you a creased photograph of her village back in Sudan. Round mud huts with conical thatched roofs, bare earth, a few twisted trees, brown and white goats and a scatter of chickens. In the foreground were three small children with skinny limbs and beaming smiles. Her other children. Tears seeped down her cheeks as she softly told the story of the massacre.
Hanny rushes in. She drops into the chair beside you, saying loudly, ‘Sorry, a shit of a morning, Thanks everyone for your patience.’
The women around the table are instantly alert, every face turned to her. Like you, they are waiting for news.
Instead, Hanny says, ‘Look, you all know we’ve been dealing with and I’d rather leave the police update until later. In fact, I’d also like to sideline the agenda, to let Jazz get on with her presentation. It’s been tough for her, and more delay sure as hell won’t make it easier. Everyone happy with that?’
Voices agree. Someone claps.
Hanny turns to you.
‘Okay Jazz?’
You nod, but you are remembering the time the dingo matriarch and two other females turned on a young dog and savaged her. The pack moved on, and she followed, but a long way back, bleeding and slow.
Your throat feels like sand.
The women in this room daunt you. They are clear about how things should be done and they don’t tolerate bullshit. Beside them, you feel like an adolescent pup. Will they decide to turn on you? Teach you a lesson?
Aamira, at forty, hadn’t wanted a child. She hadn’t wanted attention from any man, so the name she chose for her daughter spoke volumes. Yesterday she didn’t want to talk about the man who fathered Happiness. Who recently returned, raping Aamira again. You tried to convince her that reporting him to the police was the only way she would be safe. You offered to go to the station with her. She refused. Instead she spoke quietly about isolated she felt in the safe-house, where you’d found a small room for her and Happiness. She said she would never adjust to life without a village. Later, she smiled when you gave her the brochure on Newcastle’s coastal walks. She nodded at your suggestion that she and Happiness get outside more, take advantage of the spring warmth.
Yesterday, when Aamira left the WSS, she didn’t catch the bus back to the safe house. Instead she pushed her daughter in the stroller the four kilometres to Strzelecki Lookout, following one of the coastal walks mapped on the brochure. When they reached the top she left the stroller behind. With Happiness in her arms, she climbed through the barrier fence, walked to the edge of the cliff, and fell.
‘Do it, Jazz,’ Hanny says softly. ‘You’ll be fine.’
The last time you saw the dingoes they were hurrying away from the Troopie towards a low ridge. Glowing red-gold in the late sun, they picked their way carefully between the rocks. You saw they had three little pups in tow. The old female stayed, watching you until her pack disappeared over the ridge. Then she was gone too.
Hanny is watching you like that.
You stare at the report you wrote before your faith in providing the answers was shredded. Headings and dot points outlining what everyone already knows. These women are your pack, and they want you to learn. They know that protection is all you can aim for.
The unease in your gut turns to fierceness. You crushing the report in your hands. Stand up to speak.
by Dael Allison
The brick-walled briefing room is quiet. Weekly meetings at Women’s Support Services are usually relaxed and chatty, but not today. Around the oval conference-table a few women whisper together, others riffle through papers, some sit preoccupied.
You try to focus on the report you’ll be giving but the dot-points blur. Instead, dingoes lope ahead on the track as you wrestle the Troop Carrier over sandy corrugations. Six females, following each other through the shadows cast by the desert casuarinas.
The she-team.
The words circle in your mind like a mantra. A she-team is what it feels like you’ve been part of, in your twelve-week internship here at WSS.
Last year, during your semester of research with the communities west of Alice Springs, you watched out for those dingoes every time you drove out Haasts Bluff way. Sometimes there was only a flicker of gold in the scrub. Other times you saw them wandering along the dry bed of the Finke River. Once they were right beside the track, hunting through a tumble of rocks. You stopped the Troopie to watch. They seemed unfazed, as if they had already absorbed the vehicle’s occasional appearances into their landscape. They were so close you could pick out individual characteristics: one bitch with a clubbed front foot, another with a black shoulder stripe. The matriarch was unmistakable. Older and powerful-looking, the tip missing from one ear and her muzzle crooked by a long scar. She had watched you, and it felt like the fierce intensity in her yellow eyes was more recognition than aggression.
Hanny has that intensity, you think, dragging yourself back to the briefing room. Hanny the matriarch, still in her office taking another call from the police. You wish she would come back. You need to get this presentation over. Last week, asking you to report to this meeting, she’d said, ‘Just an overview of how you’re travelling with the internship, Jazz. A chance to give feedback and help, if you need it. Nothing formal.’
Nothing formal. You’d totally stressed out, working midnights to pull together statistics, policies and procedures. There’s a rumour that a permanent position could be available. You want it. You want to prove that your future should be here, that you are passionate as the rest of the team about helping women. So many needing so much – accommodation, a shoulder to cry on, tools to help them cope with abuse, poverty, mental illness. They need a safety net, a better future.
You look around the table. Nobody meets your eye. A niggling voice in your head says, They know you can’t cope. They know you aren’t up to it. Your gut clenches. Isn’t it at least partly true? None of the case studies and role-plays and reams and reams of reading at uni, not even your research in the desert, prepared you for the sheer volume and complexity of what you’ve encountered here. Most days you feel overwhelmed.
You take deep slow breaths. Focus on the positives.
Yesterday was good, especially the new writing group. Valentina brought flowers, Merle cooked apple muffins, and you were blown away when everyone read what they’d written. Afterwards Essie barrelled in with her battered shopping trolley jammed full of books. ‘Two dollars the lot,’ she gloated, pulling out Jung, Doris Lessing, Pablo Neruda. Handing you a dog-eared copy of Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, she said. ‘Stick this on your bookshelf, like an affirmation. The title’s ironic of course.’ Essie has lived rough for years, but she is hard to place in emergency accommodation because refuge houses are often old, with narrow hallways and small rooms that freak her out. When you couldn’t find anything for her she sailed off saying, ‘Another train adventure!’ You worry about her, knowing she will be alone on the station late at night. That she would catch the last service to Sydney and sleep on the train at Central station, then return first thing in the morning, somehow avoiding the conductors each way. Essie is a wild dresser for an old girl. Loves wearing red. She loves WSS, too, with its wide corridors, roomy laundry, and big bright bathrooms with plenty of towels and toiletries.
Yesterday Aamira also came in to your office.
Don’t think about Aamira.
There’s a loud rumble out in the street, something big passing in the regular grind of traffic. You let your mind follow it. Outside, people will be walking beneath the budding trees. It will be a normal busy day.
Inside, nothing feels normal.
You re-focus on your notes, but Aamira takes over. The warmth and colour she always brought into your office. The scarves around her head so flamboyant that most people missed the machete scars, corrugating one side of her face.
Yesterday she sat gently rocking the stroller where Happiness slept. Beautiful Happiness, with her round breast-fed cheeks and tiny knots of rusty curls, her satiny brown limbs peeking from beneath a frilly pink nylon dress. Hard to pull your eyes away, until Aamira showed you a creased photograph of her village back in Sudan. Round mud huts with conical thatched roofs, bare earth, a few twisted trees, brown and white goats and a scatter of chickens. In the foreground were three small children with skinny limbs and beaming smiles. Her other children. Tears seeped down her cheeks as she softly told the story of the massacre.
Hanny rushes in. She drops into the chair beside you, saying loudly, ‘Sorry, a shit of a morning, Thanks everyone for your patience.’
The women around the table are instantly alert, every face turned to her. Like you, they are waiting for news.
Instead, Hanny says, ‘Look, you all know we’ve been dealing with and I’d rather leave the police update until later. In fact, I’d also like to sideline the agenda, to let Jazz get on with her presentation. It’s been tough for her, and more delay sure as hell won’t make it easier. Everyone happy with that?’
Voices agree. Someone claps.
Hanny turns to you.
‘Okay Jazz?’
You nod, but you are remembering the time the dingo matriarch and two other females turned on a young dog and savaged her. The pack moved on, and she followed, but a long way back, bleeding and slow.
Your throat feels like sand.
The women in this room daunt you. They are clear about how things should be done and they don’t tolerate bullshit. Beside them, you feel like an adolescent pup. Will they decide to turn on you? Teach you a lesson?
Aamira, at forty, hadn’t wanted a child. She hadn’t wanted attention from any man, so the name she chose for her daughter spoke volumes. Yesterday she didn’t want to talk about the man who fathered Happiness. Who recently returned, raping Aamira again. You tried to convince her that reporting him to the police was the only way she would be safe. You offered to go to the station with her. She refused. Instead she spoke quietly about isolated she felt in the safe-house, where you’d found a small room for her and Happiness. She said she would never adjust to life without a village. Later, she smiled when you gave her the brochure on Newcastle’s coastal walks. She nodded at your suggestion that she and Happiness get outside more, take advantage of the spring warmth.
Yesterday, when Aamira left the WSS, she didn’t catch the bus back to the safe house. Instead she pushed her daughter in the stroller the four kilometres to Strzelecki Lookout, following one of the coastal walks mapped on the brochure. When they reached the top she left the stroller behind. With Happiness in her arms, she climbed through the barrier fence, walked to the edge of the cliff, and fell.
‘Do it, Jazz,’ Hanny says softly. ‘You’ll be fine.’
The last time you saw the dingoes they were hurrying away from the Troopie towards a low ridge. Glowing red-gold in the late sun, they picked their way carefully between the rocks. You saw they had three little pups in tow. The old female stayed, watching you until her pack disappeared over the ridge. Then she was gone too.
Hanny is watching you like that.
You stare at the report you wrote before your faith in providing the answers was shredded. Headings and dot points outlining what everyone already knows. These women are your pack, and they want you to learn. They know that protection is all you can aim for.
The unease in your gut turns to fierceness. You crushing the report in your hands. Stand up to speak.
