Saturday

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http://1.bp.blogspot.comhttp://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/ahc/national-assessments/bondi-beach/pubs/bondi-beach.pdf

Bondi Beach is one of the world's most famous beaches and is of important social value to both the Australian community and to visitors. Bondi Beach is significant because of its special associations for Australians as a central
place in the development of beach culture in Australia. It embodies a powerful sense of place and way of life. It is where Australians meet nature's challenge in the surf and is strongly associated with the Bronzed Aussie myth of
easygoing hedonism and endeavour balanced with relaxation. A place full of Australian spirit, synonymous with Australian beach culture, it is recognised internationally... Egalitarian in nature, the beach and surfing had a profound effect in changing our way of life, and developing our
sense of national identity. The central role of beaches, and Bondi Beach in particular, in Australia’s self image is reflected in the use of the beach by painters, filmmakers, poets and writers in exploring this new self image and reflecting it back to Australian society. Bondi has played a central role in this process, and has come to be viewed both within Australia and internationally as the quintessential Australian beach.

Already the days are getting shorter as the cusp of summer recedes. Got a call from the builder who was sanding his floors, wanting more money. He couldn't believe how hopeless they were. And yet this was Australia, where half the able bodied men of the nation sat around on disability pensions and passive welfare destroyed much of the nation's character. On Australia Day they went to the Oxford Tavern, which advertised topless barmaids, thinking that as it was nearby where they were and nothing else would be happening, it would be going off. A scrawny, rather nice, lets face it, barmade with enormous jugs served three rather ordinary looking working blokes; and them. That was it. And soon the other blokes left; and it was only them left. After the other blokes left the barmaid put her top back on.

I'm not paid enough, she declared, while Ian pointed fruitlessly to the sign guaranteeing topless barmaids. I'm not paid enough she repeated. Leave her alone, he said. I'm more comfortable if she's more comfortable. Ian pointed at the sign again, but he shrugged. He wasn't a perve in any normal sense. This bar is like Australia itself, drained of life, he said, and they agreed, looking around at the grim surroundings, the peeling posters, the beer stained carpet, the povo walls. If there had ever been any good times in this place, it wasn't now. Behind them stretched another 20 kilometres of suburbs, equally dreary, equally drained of life. Outside the traffic whirred on the hot ashphalt, it, too, ugly and lifeless.

They were all shutting down. He downed another lemon squash. He thought of ripping someone's head off but couldn't be bothered. He thought of gangsters holding up banks, criminals owning bars, flash Leb boys in souped up cars, and realised that it was never going to happen here, there would be no guns pointed here. Down the road a group of men hovered at a tapas bar, drinking short black coffees, smoking cigarettes, not the least bit interested in the tapas. Australia's ludicrous licensing laws had crippled the bar scene. Richard Trevaskis had fantasised about opening a cocktail bar on Oxford Street, a cocktail on the way home from work. A perfect little bar.

But he died and it was well over a decade after his death before the licensing laws changed sufficiently to allow it to happen; those cosy little alcoves where money was no object, where men were united with each other, where flash days and glamorous nights lured them all into a startling intimacy, where other ways of being were all too well documented, where his own departure from the scene would be noted. Oh how he wanted to live in a village, to be known, recognised, appreciated. Here the hordes of tourists pass by and no one could care less. Leaving Sydney, he took his teenage kids first to the Icebergers, hunting for food, and then to Hurricane, where there was a wait of more than half an hour. But the ribs, the ribs, they're delicious, his son kept repeating. They were both moving into boarding situations, after all these years.

It had been him and the kids against the world for so long. Behind those locked doors and grated windows. Him and the kids and Major, the dog, huddled inside against the world. He had no belief that things would work well. No trust in anyone. He wanted to be free and yet didn't know how. Outside children with their yummy mummy ran towards the beach. But here they trailed the past with them, trailed through everything that had been. Surely there was an option, or an answer, but there was no knowing what it was. His farewell was later today; he just wnated to disappear. A gathering of the clan. A passing day. A passing life. It was all too easy and all too cruel. Oh, for God's sake, get a backbone, he thought, dismissing the local yokel pleading for more money.

All they had to do was finish the job to get their money - and they couldn't even do that. If everything worked it would be alright, but it wasn't going to. They hadn't worked in a generation and that was all there was to it. He could sigh with exasperation but there would be no acknowledgement. These shadows were going to beat them. The bastards had been too clever by half. He was going to Tambar to fix the house; and was utterly frustrated by the incompetence he found everywhere. His superannuation fund lied over the cheques being sent. So days rolled by when things should have been done but weren't. It was too easy to blame someone else. A life in transition. Is that all there is? Mary, Mary, quite contrary....

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/29/tony-blair-iraq-inquiry-billington

Blair at Chilcot: a well-rehearsed performance

Our theatre critic assesses Tony Blair's performance, and sees familiar mannerisms and usual arguments

What did we expect? That Tony Blair would break down in front of the Chilcot inquiry admitting he had taken Britain to war on the basis of flimsy intelligence? That he would beg God's forgiveness for the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqis? That he would guiltily confess that at the famous meeting at Crawford, Texas, he had given George Bush unequivocal support for military action?

None of these things happened, of course. What we got was an event short on drama but long on the now-familiar Blair apologia: a kind of "je ne regrette rien" in which he argued that, whatever the messy aftermath, he was right to take us to war to remove Saddam Hussein.

Just occasionally the panel broke through Blair's impenetrable mask of self-belief. He looked a touch rattled when the notorious Fern Britton interview was mentioned and he seemed slippery and evasive when questioned about Lord Goldsmith's change of heart over the legality of military intervention. But except when being interrogated by the terrier-like Sir Roderic Lyne, Blair gave an assured, well-rehearsed performance.

We got all the familiar Blair mannerisms: the thumb and forefinger pressed together to underscore a point, the palms extended outwards to betoken moral certainty in the face of external pressure, even the occasional wry smile as when he claimed: "I was never short of people challenging me."

It was a clever, lawyerly, almost Ciceronian performance in which Blair trotted out all the usual arguments and gave a display of his question-dodging skill. But it would have been much more revealing to see Blair quizzed by the parents, many of them present at the inquiry, of the British soldiers killed in Iraq. Then perhaps he wouldn't have got away quite so easily, as he did here, with murder.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/apr/27/ukcrime

The caged misery of Britain's real 'Hannibal the Cannibal'

Multiple killer Robert Maudsley has spent more than 20 years in solitary. His supporters say this only repeats the abuse that led to his crimes

'It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind'. Robert Maudsley.

They called him 'Blue' because that was the colour the face of his first victim had turned as he slowly strangled him. Then he became known as 'Spoons' after killing again and leaving the body with a spoon sticking out of the skull and part of the brain missing.

His third and fourth victims died on the same afternoon and soon afterwards Robert Maudsley acquired the nickname that has stuck: Hannibal the Cannibal.

Although he is now nearly 50 and has not committed a crime for more than 25 years, Maudsley is officially classified as Britain's most dangerous prisoner, a man said to represent such a high risk to those around him that he has spent the past quarter of a century in virtual isolation. With no prospect of ever being released, he will remain in prison in isolation until he dies.

Maudsley's bizarre and tragic story will be highlighted by Channel 5 next month as part of its Hideous Crimes documentary series. Using unprecedented access to members of his family, friends and former inmates, as well as Maudsley's own letters and psychiatric sessions, the programme paints a startling portrait of the abusive childhood that turned the man into a killer.

It will also mark the start of a new campaign to improve Maudsley's quality of life, on the grounds that his treatment could lead to further mental breakdown and is therefore a breach of his human rights.

'The prison authorities see me as a problem, and their solution has been to put me into solitary confinement and throw away the key, to bury me alive in a concrete coffin,' Maudsley wrote recently. 'It does not matter to them whether I am mad or bad. They do not know the answer and they do not care just so long as I am kept out of sight and out of mind.

'I am left to stagnate, vegetate and to regress; left to confront my solitary head-on with people who have eyes but don't see and who have ears but don't hear, who have mouths but don't speak. My life in solitary is one long period of unbroken depression.'

It is a situation that has appalled his supporters, who say that Maudsley is the victim of an uncaring and unsympathetic prison system that virtually denies him treatment and does nothing to assist in his rehabilitation.

Maudsley is housed in a 'glass cage', a two-cell unit at Wakefield prison that bears an uncanny resemblance to the one featured in The Silence of the Lambs. It was built for Maudsley in 1983, seven years before the film was released. At around 5.5m by 4.5m, the two cells are slightly larger than average and have large bulletproof windows through which inmates can be observed.

The only furnishings are a table and chair, both made of compressed cardboard. The lavatory and sink are bolted to the floor while the bed is a concrete slab.

A solid steel door opens into a small cage within the cell, encased in thick Perspex, with a small slot at the bottom through which guards pass him food and other items. He remains in the cell for 23 hours a day. During his daily hour of exercise, he is escorted to the yard by six prison officers. He is not allowed contact with any other inmates. It is a level of intense isolation to which no other prisoner, not even Myra Hindley, has been subjected.

Maudsley has a genius-level IQ, loves classical music, poetry and art. He is keen to take an Open University degree in music theory. Friends and family describe him as gentle, kind and highly intelligent. They enjoy both his company and his sense of humour.

'Since getting to know Bob, I have seen many prison documents about him,' says Jane Heaton, who began writing to Maudsley three years ago and has visited him several times. 'Everyone concentrates on the crimes he committed 25 years ago.

'It's as if they are living in a time loop and no one is prepared to look at how he is now. I would like to see him get an independent review of his condition and find a suitable course of treatment for him.'

The most recent pictures of Maudsley are more than 20 years old and were taken from a documentary made about his time in prison a few years into his regime of solitary. The rigours of solitary have taken their toll and today Maudsley looks far older than his 49 years. He has a grey beard, his hair is long and wispy and his skin, pale from lack of sunlight, is sucked in across his cheekbones.

During his last murder trial in 1979, the court heard that during his violent rages Maudsley believed his victims were his parents. The killings, his lawyers argued, were the result of pent-up aggression resulting from a childhood of near-constant abuse. 'When I kill, I think I have my parents in mind,' Maudsley said. 'If I had killed my parents in 1970, none of these people need have died. If I had killed them, then I would be walking around as a free man without a care in the world.'

Maudsley was born in June 1953, the fourth child of a Liverpool lorry driver. Before his second birthday, Robert, his brothers Paul and Kevin, and sister Brenda were all taken into care after they were found to be suffering from 'parental neglect'.

The young Robert spent most of his infancy at Nazareth House, a Roman Catholic orphanage run by nuns in Liverpool. During that time he formed a close bond with his brothers but barely knew his parents, who used to visit occasionally. Several years later, during which time they had eight other children, they took the first four back home.

It was to be the start of a horrific campaign of physical abuse. His brother Paul remembers: 'At the orphanage we had all got on really well. Our parents would come to visit, but they were just strangers. The nuns were our family and we all used to stick together. Then our parents took us home and we were subjected to physical abuse. It was something we'd never experienced before. They just picked on us one by one, gave us a beating and sent us off to our room.'

The worst, however, was reserved for Robert. 'All I remember of my childhood is the beatings. Once I was locked in a room for six months and my father only opened the door to come in to beat me, four or six times a day. He used to hit me with sticks or rods and once he bust a .22 air rifle over my back.' While his brothers had some vague memories of his parents, Robert had been too young and never knew them at all.

He was eventually taken away by social services and placed in a series of foster homes. His father told the rest of the family he had died. Robert drifted down to London at 16, developed a massive drug habit and spent the next few years in and out of psychiatric hospitals after repeated suicide attempts. On numerous occasions he told doctors that he could hear voices in his head telling him to kill his parents.

Working as a rent boy to support his growing drug habit, Maudsley committed his first murder in 1973 after being picked up by labourer John Farrell for sex. When Farrell produced pictures of several children he had abused, Maudsley flew into a rage and garrotted him.

Declared unfit to stand trial, Maudsley was sent to Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane and remained there for three years. What happened next has become the stuff of prison legend. In 1977 he and another psychopath took a third patient, a paedophile, hostage and barricaded themselves into a cell. They then tortured their victim for nine hours before garrotting him and holding his body aloft so that guards could see him through the spy hatch. According to one guard, the man was discovered with his head 'cracked open like a boiled egg' with a spoon hanging out of it and part of the brain missing.

Ironically, despite killing a patient in Broadmoor, Maudsley was found fit to stand trial. Convicted of manslaughter, he was sent not to hospital but to Wakefield Prison, otherwise known as the Monster Mansion. Maudsley arrived at Wakefield to find his reputation had preceded him. Dubbed 'cannibal' and 'brain-eater', he had been at the prison for only a matter of weeks when he set off on another killing spree.

According to other inmates who were there at the time, Maudsley set out to kill seven people that day. The first was sex offender Salney Darwood. He lured him into his cell and cut his throat, then hid his body under his bed. Maudsley then spent the rest of the morning trying to find other people to lure back, but no one would go with him. 'They could all see the madness in his eyes,' said one.

Eventually, he sneaked into the cell of 56-year-old Bill Roberts and attacked him as he lay on his bunk, hacking at his skull with a makeshift knife and then repeatedly dashing his head against the wall.

He then calmly walked into the wing office, placed a serrated home-made knife on the desk and informed the guards that they would be two short when it came to the next roll-call.

Convicted of double murder, Maudsley was inexplicably sent back to Wakefield Prison. Unable to mix with others for his and their safety, he was moved into solitary confinement and has remained there ever since.

During a spell in Parkhurst, on the Isle of Wight, Maudsley met psychiatrist Dr Bob Johnson, who, after three years of interviews and counselling, believed that he was making great progress and was three quarters of the way through removing the aggression and latent violence that made Maudsley such a danger. But then, without warning, the treatment was cut off and Maudsley was moved back to Wakefield.

'As far as I can tell, the prison authorities are trying to break him,' says his brother Paul. 'Every time they see him making a little progress, they throw a spanner in the works. He spent a time in Woodhill prison, and there he was getting on well with the staff, even playing chess with them. He had access to books and music and television. Now they have put him back in the cage at Wakefield. His troubles started because he got locked up as a kid. All they do when they put him back there is bring all that trauma back to him.'

Maudsley himself agrees: 'All I have to look forward to is further mental breakdown and possible suicide. In many ways, I think this is what the authorities hope for. That way the problem of Robert John Maudsley can be easily and swiftly resolved.'