Associate Professor Peter Hedegus has been selected to premier his film, Sorella’s Story to the world at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival in August.
The film explores the story behind a single atrocity photography of a group of women and 11-year-old Sorella, during the Holocaust.
Shot in 360° and viewed through a Virtual Reality headset, Solinia’s Story places the viewer in the snowy landscape of 1941 Latvia and is set prior to a mass execution on a beach during the Holocaust.
Sorella’s Story was filmed in Hungary, the main character Sorella is voiced by Australian actress Charlotte Stent and played by Hungarian actress Kiara Kalmár.
The work was written, directed, and produced by Peter and was produced by Jaclyn McLendon and Bobbi-Lea Dionysius and co-produced by Axel Griegor and András Muhi with Peter Kurucz as sound designer.
The 1941 photograph Sorella’s Story is based on
Peter said that using 360° technology to produce the film enabled a more impactful way to connect the viewer with the story.
“I was deeply moved by the image of the women in the photograph and wanted to be brave,
to tell stories about the Holocaust that push boundaries and engage with new audiences,” Associate Professor Hedegus said.
“With Sorella’s Story we set out to create an experience that will emotionally connect people across cultures, demographics and economic divides.”
“The honour of premiering the film at the Venice Film Festival realises the dream of being able to offer that experience to people from around the world.”
Sorella’s Story is part of a unique suite of projects, together with In Their Name which aired on the ABC on 7 August at 6:30pm.
In Their Name is an intimate portrait of a conversation between director Peter Hegedus and 92-year-old Ethel Davies. Now based in Sydney, Davies was a consultant to Sorella’s Story, as her family perished in the same massacre as Sorella.
A scene from Sorella’s Story A further feature documentary soon to be completed To Never Forget tells the larger story of the Latvian Holocaust intertwined with Peter’s three-year personal journey to bring the immersive film to reality.
Peter developed the film with the assistance of Griffith Film School (GFS) and the production team fostered a unique collaboration with a team of GFSstaff and students who travelled to Latvia and Hungary in a range of key production roles.
The GFS team included Louise Harvey for VFX with the assistance of Levi Johns, Bobbi-Lea Dionysius, Tess Brading, Amelia Paxman, Sarah Hope, Gilberto Roque, Jemma Potgieter and Peter Kurucz.
The film was also made possible thanks to the Griffith University strategic research initiative, Disrupting Violence.
A drug normally used to prevent tissue rejection following organ transplants could be repurposed to help treat human metapneumovirus (HMPV) infection in children.
Dr Larissa Dirr
A team of Griffith University researchers, led by Dr Larissa Dirr, Dr Benjamin Bailly and Professor Mark von Itzstein AO from the Institute for Glycomics, have been testing an approved commercially available library of drugs to see which can inhibit HMPV, commonly known as pneumonia, in an in vitro cell model.
Dr Dirr said they tested the drugs to see if they blocked binding or replication of the virus and if they could be combined to achieve a stronger antiviral potency.
“Of these evaluated available drugs, we found five candidates with potent HMPV activity and low cytotoxicity,” she said.
Dr Benjamin Bailly
“One of the drugs that shows strong antiviral activity is mycophenolic acid (MPA) an approved medicine that prevents tissue rejection following organ transplantation and is used for the treatment of certain autoimmune diseases.
“The anti-HMPV effect of MPA is caused by the depletion of guanosine, a nucleoside used in the synthesis of DNA and RNA.”
Dr Bailly said HMPV is responsible for 10 to 12 per cent of paediatric hospitalisations and has a high mortality rate in immunocompromised people suffering from severe cases of pneumonia.
Professor Mark von Itzstein, Dr Benjamin Bailly, Dr Patrice Guillon, Ms Annelies Van Den Bergh
“To date, there is no approved drug or vaccine available on the market to treat these infections,” he said.
“While our research is still at an early stage, if MPA proves to deliver promising results during our preclinical evaluation, then the process to get MPA on the market could be fast-tracked.
“The next step will be to test MPA in an ex vivo human airway epithelial model or an in vivo animal model.
“We’re pleased with the results to date, particularly the required dose of MPA in the in vitro cell model is below the already approved human oral dose.”
Director of the Institute for Glycomics and co-senior author on this paper, Professor Mark von Itzstein AO is delighted with the progress of this research.
“The repurposing of existing drugs presents a real opportunity to have useful drugs available to patients in a shorter amount of time,” Professor von Itzstein said.
The research, which included PhD student Annelies Van Den Bergh, Dr Patrice Guillon and Prof Mark von Itzstein has been published in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and a review about antiviral strategies for HMPV was recently published in Antiviral Research.
An integrity expert breaks it down
The prospects of Australia securing a strong federal anti-corruption agency have taken a huge leap forward, with introduction of the Albanese government’s much awaited National Anti-Corruption Commission bill into federal parliament.
It’s 17 years since Transparency International Australia first recommended this reform, and five years since a Senate Select Committee agreed unanimously it was time to give it serious consideration.
While the Greens had taken the lead and introduced bills for an integrity commission for over a decade, it wasn’t until Labor promised one in January 2018, and Independent Cathy McGowan introduced one into a hung parliament in November that year, that the then Coalition government was forced to act. However it was November 2020 before the Coalition revealed a much-criticised draft bill, which was never introduced.
Ultimately, the Morrison government’s failure to deliver a credible proposal was instrumental in its defeat in May 2022. But it also paved the way for a commission that can be not just strong and effective, but enduring, with the Coalition Opposition now signalling strongly it wants to regain credibility by supporting Labor’s vastly superior model.
In coming weeks, a joint select committee of the parliament will take submissions and review the bill, and recommend any improvements by November 10.
It will be a crucial process. The government is close to delivering on its promise to create a state-of-the-art anti-corruption body – but isn’t quite there yet.
“In coming weeks, a joint select committee of the parliament will take submissions and review the bill, and recommend any improvements by November 10.
It will be a crucial process. The government is close to delivering on its promise to create a state-of-the-art anti-corruption body – but isn’t quite there yet..”
Scope of corruption
The first strength of the proposed commission lies in the scope of corruption that it can investigate.
The Labor plan goes broader than the Morrison model, which for politicians and most of the public sector was limited to criminal offences – not “grey area” corruption where most of the scandals and problems actually lie.
Instead, it covers any conduct that could adversely affect, directly or indirectly, the honest and impartial exercise of a public official’s powers or performance of their functions. It’s a definition that’s simpler, more flexible, and less legalistic or complicated than most State definitions.
In a win for democracy, there’s almost no difference in treatment between politicians and anyone else. And to drive a stronger integrity system, the Commission has to be notified of all serious or systemic corruption issues arising across federal government, and can receive and assess information from any source about any corruption issue – even if only minor – to ensure it’s dealt with.
The strong investigative powers of the Commission itself will be saved for those corruption issues it independently assesses to be serious or systemic. But given any significant corruption issue is, by definition, serious in nature, this should present no bar to the Commission investigating what it needs to.
As flagged by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on Monday, not only public officials but “any person”, including private individuals or businesses that seek to corrupt public decision-making, can be in the frame.
Prevention, resources and independence
Other strengths of the bill include a clear function to drive corruption prevention and education initiatives across the Commonwealth, including holding public inquiries into corruption risks and general integrity issues. This is one of the few features preserved and extended on from the Coalition’s model.
After some early, inadequate estimates, Labor has now backed the Commission with more serious resources. It’s lifting the Coalition’s proposed annual budget of $42 million to a promised $65.5 million annually.
Together with othermeasures, flagged or underway, these features make the proposed National Anti-Corruption Commission by far the biggest integrity reform in Australian federal government for at least 40 years.
So, where are the wrinkles?
Against all these strengths, questions still surround whether:
the budget of the Commission will be sufficiently independent and guaranteed
the parliamentary committee overseeing the appointment and performance of the commission is constituted in a genuinely durable, multi-partisan fashion
and whether the proposed inspector of the Commission’s powers has wide enough functions to properly fulfil that job.
But the two biggest problems relate to public hearings, and the major gap in the federal integrity system which remains unfilled: effective whistleblower protections.
The new bill fulfils a promise to empower the commission to hold public hearings where necessary and in the public interest, like a royal commission.
However, the Albanese government’s model has unexpectedly fallen short in proposing public hearings be available only in “exceptional circumstances”.
This limit wasn’t part of the “design principles” Labor took to the election. Nor is it an accurate description of when such powers should be, and are used successfully by royal commissions and standing state anti-corruption bodies. It has proved a cumbersome barrier in the only state where it applies (Victoria).
There are ways to further ensure public hearings are only used where appropriate, to address any fears of a “kangaroo court” or “show trials”.
But our joint research between Griffith University and Transparency International Australia makes it plain: “exceptional circumstances” is unhelpful and potentially dangerous as a test for that purpose.
Finally, the government gave an election pledge that its package would be “extremely similar” to the integrity commission models previously introduced by the Greens, McGowan and her successor, Dr Helen Haines.
However the bill differs substantially from Haines’ model by not including a whistleblowing commissioner, identified by past parliamentary inquiries as also central to a strengthened integrity system.
Despite recently telling parliament the government was taking the idea of a whistleblower protection authority “very seriously indeed”, it got no mention in the Attorney-General’s speech introducing the new commission.
The government has committed to fix overdue, minor problems with federal public sector whistleblowing laws. But it’s yet to outline plans to address more serious reforms to plug this gap, including an agency to actually enforce protections and make them real.
It remains to be seen whether all these historic integrity reforms, when complete, will be enough to reverse Australia’s decade-long slide on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.
However, there can be no doubt Australia is set to take at least one huge step forward.
Author
Professor A J Brown is leader of the Centre for Governance & Public Policy’s public integrity and anti-corruption research program, and professor of public policy and law in the School of Government & International Relations.
A 25-year veteran of developments in Australia’s integrity systems, since 2010 he has been a boardmember of Transparency International Australia, the world anti-corruption organisation, and in 2017 and again in 2020 was elected to Transparency International’s global board, where he led the development of its worldwide strategy ‘Holding Power to Account, 2021-2030’.
Since 2005 he has led six Australian Research Council projects into public integrity and governance reform, including two establishing the Australian Constitutional Values Survey, three into public interest whistleblowing, and the 2020 Australian Research Council Linkage Project report, ‘Australia’s National Integrity System: The Blueprint for Reform’.
Share on facebook
Share
Share on twitter
Share
Share on linkedin
Share
You might also like
Australia has one of the largest inventories of rock art in the world with up to one-hundred thousand individual sites. Pictographs (paintings, drawings, stencils and prints) and petroglyphs (engraved, incised, pecked and pounded designs) are found almost anywhere that has suitable rock surfaces, such as in rock shelters and caves, on boulders and rock platforms.
First Nations people have been marking these places with geometric designs, figurative imagery, stencils and prints for tens of thousands of years with both the sites and particular designs remaining important today as a part of living culture and living heritage. The rock art reflects and expresses changing experiences within landscapes over time, spirituality, history, law and lore, as well as relationships between individuals and groups of people, other creatures, land and Ancestral Beings that are said to have created the world, including some rock art.
Recent research has shown that visiting, engaging with and caring for rock art sites enhances Indigenous well-being and damage or destruction of sites can severely impact on that.
Marra Wonga is a large sandstone rock shelter and art site near Barcaldine, central Queensland that has more rock markings than any other site in Queensland. There are estimated to be at least 15,000 petroglyphs, which are mostly animal tracks, lines, grooves and drilled holes, as well as 111 hand-related and object stencils spread across 160 metres.
Marra Wonga and the Seven Sisters
Marra Wonga is a large sandstone rock shelter and art site near Barcaldine, central Queensland that has more rock markings than any other site in Queensland. There are estimated to be at least 15,000 petroglyphs, which are mostly animal tracks, lines, grooves and drilled holes, as well as 111 hand-related and object stencils spread across 160 metres. It is one of only four rock art sites associated with a Seven Sisters story and many story elements are represented with specific rock art designs, including seven engraved star-like designs seemingly made as part of a composition. Seven Sisters stories associated with the Pleiades star cluster and the Orion constellation are found across Indigenous Australia and throughout the world, with the oldest stories have been traced back to ancient Greece.
Although details vary, Seven Sisters stories the world over share many features including a Pleiades connection, the seven sisters being chased by men or a man, sometimes a hunter and/or clever man associated with Orion, who loved and/or lusted after one or more of the sisters. For Marra Wonga it is a clever man known as Wattanuri and there is an engraved depiction of him at the southern end of the site. He is a very important Ancestral Being with varying names in different languages across Australia. Some of the stories have an unpleasant or violent side, but it is said that the actions of the sisters and their pursuer in an ancient era of the Dreamtime led to the creation of landscape features across Australia that remain today.
A section of Marra Wonga shelf reveals a Seven Sisters Dreaming story. Image: Paul Tacon
Seven Sisters Dreaming Story
There are at least 83 areas with stories of the Seven Sisters across Australia, many extensive Seven Sisters Dreaming Tracks, both related and unrelated, and hundreds of localities on and off the Dreaming Tracks associated with the Seven Sisters story. In Australia, sometimes restrictions on the stories are imposed by Aboriginal society, but this is not the case in other cultures. Most stories are common knowledge while others are only known by women and some only by men. All stories remain vitally important for First Nations people across Australia today, as evidenced by recent publications by a variety of authors and the highly successful ‘Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters’ 2017 exhibition produced by the National Museum of Australia and now travelling internationally.
Working closely with Iningai Traditional Owners, Griffith University and other archaeologists began the documentation of Marra Wonga in September 2020. In a recent article published in Australian Archaeology we describe, discuss and interpret some of the features of Marra Wonga from archaeological (etic) and ethnographic (emic) perspectives. It is very rare in the world today to have detailed ethnographic perspectives to sit alongside archaeological description, although in Australia we are fortunate that some remain strong, as with Marra Wonga.
Ten clusters of designs spread across the length of the engraved area of Marra Wonga appear to have been placed in a particular order, from south to north, although the designs were likely made at different times, with an accumulation of these clusters and other rock markings over time. However, the order makes sense for contemporary Aboriginal community members as different parts of a Seven Sisters Dreaming story, in the correct sequence. This consists of (1) an anthropomorph interpreted as Wattanuri by Iningai and other elders; (2) a snake-like design; (3) a cluster of engraved feet on the floor including those with six-toes; (4) an engraved ‘penis’; (5) seven star-like design cluster; (6) a long engraved snake; (7) two red boomerang stencils one above the other; (8) a red digging stick stencil, stencilled tips and possible ring pad stencil; (9) engraved human-like feet and dingo track; (10) an engraved star-like design.
Pleiades Star Cluster. Image: NASA https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/pia13121.html
Interpreting the story
The full interpretation and narrative can be found in our published article but is summarised as follows:
In terms of a narrative from south to north, and from one end of Marra Wonga to the other, the ten key elements of many Seven Sisters stories can be found in an ordered sequence that can be identified archaeologically through detailed recording and makes sense in terms of the contemporary community story for Marra Wonga along the lines of:
Wattanuri arrives at the southern end of Marra Wonga from Gray Rock to the west in search of the Seven Sisters;
Wattanuri transforms into a snake-like or mythical creature;
Wattanuri checks his footprints to see if his magic is out of control;
Wattanuri emerges as a penis and throws boomerangs at the Seven Sisters;
An enormous Rainbow Serpent appears and the journey across and creation of country continues. Relations between men and women, varied foods and medicines and other things are emphasised with boomerang, digging stick and ring pad stencils. A dingo looks out for the Seven Sisters and watches over one that remains on Earth, with Wattanuri close behind checking his footprints and magic again.
This could be embellished with more detail and different aspects of emphasis when people told the Seven Sisters story at Marra Wonga in the past, including reference to the macropod and bird tracks, hand stencils and other rock art, as well as natural holes and features of the rock wall.
All rock art sites have or once had stories associated with particular designs and the sites themselves, as well as the landscapes they are a part of. But we know of no other rock art site anywhere in the world with a narrative that runs across the entirety of the site. Today, Marra Wonga is a teaching site used to tell important cultural stories that are connected to many other places through the imagery and Dreaming Tracks, as well as a tourist destination managed by the Yambangku Aboriginal Cultural Heritage and Tourism Development Aboriginal Corporation (YACHATDAC), with whom we partnered for this research.
Marra Wonga is an extraordinary rock art site worthy of special protection, conservation and management given its many unique features. It is one of the most amazing rock art sites in Australia and definitely in my top ten!
Petroglyphs at Marra Wonga. Image: Paul Tacon
Author
Distinguished Professor Paul S.C. Taçon FAHA FSA is an archaeologist and anthropologist, past ARC Australian Laureate Fellow (2016-2021) and Chair in Rock Art Research at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. He also directs Griffith University’s Place, Evolution and Rock Art Heritage Unit (PERAHU) and is a member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research and Griffith’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution. He has conducted archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork since 1980 and has over 93 months field experience in remote parts of Australia, Cambodia, Canada, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, southern Africa, Thailand, the Philippines and the USA. In December 2016, Prof Taçon was awarded the top award at the annual Australian Archaeological Association conference, the Rhys Jones Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Australian Archaeology. He also received the 2016 Griffith University Vice-Chancellor’s Research Excellence Award for Research Leadership.
Share on facebook
Share
Share on twitter
Share
Share on linkedin
Share
You might also like
The Audi Foundation is supporting Griffith University’s School of Engineering and Built Environment students by generously donating an Audi A7 for them to study.
As one of the most advanced luxury cars on the market today, students have the amazing opportunity to investigate the technology used in the vehicle and gain practical, real-world skills and analyze the components and technology used by Audi.
The Audi A7 Sportback is a vehicle that is truly on the forefront of automotive technology, automotive design and sustainability and gives a glimpse into the future of how the automotive industry is adapting vehicles to seamlessly integrate into our lives.
Professor Rosalind Archer
Academic and teaching staff at Griffith University are innovating the curriculum in coming trimesters to include the A7 in course work, with the aim to cross pollenate the learning experiences the vehicle can provide across the school and the university.
Head of School, Engineering and Built Environment Professor Rosalind Archer from Griffith University said the university was thrilled to receive the vehicle and give students access to world leading technology to align with their studies at the University.
“The technology in the car is some of the most advanced you can find on the road, and our students will have an incredible opportunity to see how the many aspects of modern automotive technology and manufacturing processes are combined in the A7,” Professor Archer said.
Professor Rosalind Archer, Chairman of the Audi Foundation Paul Sansom, Head of Audi Foundation Hayley Nissim
“We will be able to utilize the vehicle as a teaching tool across many areas such as engineering, industrial design, electronics, ergonomics, and many other disciplines. Our goal for the A7 is to investigate the components, materials, compounds, and the manufacturing process through the lens of sustainability and excellence in engineering.”
“We are extremely thankful to the Audi Foundation and Audi South Brisbane for supporting the future of our students and the higher education sector, and I know all our students are extremely excited to start looking at the A7 and getting to work!”
“We are delighted to be able to support educational institutions, such as the Griffith University, with examples of the latest in automotive technology,” said Paul Sansom, Chairman of the Audi Foundation and Group Managing Director of Volkswagen Group Australia.
“The Audi Foundation’s support of institutions like Griffith University is one way that we are able to realise our ambition to drive meaningful change by shaping strong education outcomes.”
Constructed wetlands, built to treat wastewater and stormwater runoff, act as a barrier preventing the spread of microplastics through the environment, a Griffith-led study has found.
Published in Environmental Pollution, the researchers investigated the amount and distribution of microplastics in water and sediment at five constructed wetlands with stormwater and wastewater sources feeding into the wetlands.
Mr Hsuan-Cheng Lu, a PhD candidate from the Australian Rivers Institute
“Wastewater and stormwater are both critical pathways for microplastics to enter the aquatic environment,” said Mr Hsuan-Cheng Lu, a PhD candidate from the Australian Rivers Institute.
“Currently there’s little information about the potential for constructed wetlands, a commonly used wastewater and stormwater treatment system, to help diminish the flow of microplastics to the environment and their accumulation in the water and sediment of the wetlands.”
As constructed wetlands are a proven filters for other chemical contaminants from stormwater, the researchers investigated how well they collect and retain microplastics.
The microplastic levels were up to four times higher in the storm/wastewater entering the wetland compared to water at the outlet. Similarly, the levels microplastics found in the constructed wetland sediment were higher than most reported freshwater sediment levels, with the amount of microplastics much greater in the sediment at the wetland inlet compared to the outlet.
“Wetland vegetation slows down runoff water, allowing microplastics to settle into the sediment,” said co-author Professor Frederic Leusch who leads the ARI Toxicology Research Program (ARITOX) at the Australian Rivers Institute.
“These initial results, gathered from a Gold Coast wetlands, showed the sediment carried a higher level of microplastics than most other freshwater environments globally.
“While it doesn’t sound good, it means that the wetlands act as a barrier preventing the microplastics from spreading further downstream, into our rivers and oceans.”
The dominant form of microplastics was PET fibres primarily originating from clothing and textiles, however, PE and PP from the breakdown of large plastic items, such as food packaging and bottles, was also found in the sediment.
Professor Frederic Leusch, leads the ARI Toxicology Research Program (ARITOX) at the Australian Rivers Institute
As the study was carried out over the dry season in Queensland, more research is needed during wetter seasons and flood events to determine if wetland barriers retain the plastics under the pressures of increased water flows or whether they get washed into ecosystems downstream.
“This study is an important first step that shows constructed wetlands can not only retain the microplastics in treated water and storm water runoff, but their sediment can also act as sinks trapping and accumulating the microplastics over time,” said Mr Lu.
“The accumulation of microplastics and other pollutants in wetlands over time also raises concerns, as the constructed wetlands provide a key habitat for wildlife in the urban landscape.
“For this reason, the logical next step after determining whether wetland microplastic traps survive the rigours of the wet season, is work with council engineers to investigate how the accumulated microplastics can be safely removed.”
For Griffith University’s A Better Future for All series, in partnership with HOTA, Home of the Arts, Kerry O’Brien welcomes Hedley Thomas.
With more than 70 million downloads, Hedley Thomas’s The Teacher’s Pet is the global podcast phenomenon that helped take down a killer.
Hedley has been a journalist for more than 35 years and now focuses on long-form podcast investigations into the unsolved murders of women.
His work on The Teacher’s Pet won him his second Gold Walkley Award; he is the only journalist to have received two.
In 2020, Hedley’s second podcast series into an unsolved murder, The Night Driver, uncovered new evidence in the unsolved 2001 disappearance of Bathurst retail manager, Janine Vaughan.
Most recently Hedley’s third major podcast series, Shandee’s Story, investigated the savage stabbing murder of a young woman in Queensland in 2013. The podcast uncovered failures and inconsistencies in testing and reporting on crime scenes by the State’s DNA laboratory, triggering the reinvestigation of serious unsolved crimes.
Professor Carolyn Evans
I’m Carolyn Evans, Vice Chancellor and President of Griffith University. Griffith University is proud to partner with HOTA, the Home of the Arts here on the beautiful Gold Coast to present A Better Future for All, a series of in-depth conversation with some of the leading thinkers and actors in Australia. I begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands on which we are situated, the Kombumerri families of the Yugambeh Language region. We pay our respects to their elders, past and present and recognise their continuing connection with the lands, waters, and their extended communities throughout Southeast Queensland. Could I also acknowledge our University Chancellor the Honourable Andrew Fraser, Deputy Chancellor Miss Rebecca Frizelle OAM, and today, standing in for the CEO of HOTA, Mr. Mik Auckland, as well of course as Kerry O’Brien and Hedley Thomas, of whom more in a moment.
Tonight, we delve into the field of true crime and the power of audio storytelling with celebrated award winning investigative journalist and podcaster Hedley Thomas. Now it’s particularly suitable and appropriate that we meet here tonight on the Gold Coast, because it was at the Gold Coast bulletin in the 1980s that Hedley started his career as an enthusiastic young cadet. Since that time, he has graced Australia’s media hall of fame more than once or twice. He has indeed received seven Walkley’s, two of which were gold Walkley Awards, the highest accolade in Australian journalism. Indeed, between he and Kerry the stage should be groaning with the combined weight of their Walkley awards. Hedley and his producer Slade Gibson won the 2018 gold Walkley for their acclaimed true crime podcast, ‘The Teacher’s Pet’, a gripping listen that I wouldn’t mind betting quite a few in the audience are familiar with. It wasn’t long before ‘A Teacher’s Pet’ was a global phenomenon topping international charts and clocking up more than 50 million downloads so far. ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ and Hedley’s work more broadly contributed to the reopening of the 40-year unsolved disappearance case of Lynette Dawson, and now has led to a conviction. By looking at old cases through new lenses, Hedley’s helped to uncover fresh evidence, expose procedural failures and inconsistencies within our legal system, help trigger the re-investigation of serious unsolved crimes, and advocate for a proposal of new parole laws aimed at providing closure for grieving families. Hedley’s latest podcast investigates the unsolved murder of 23-year-old Shandee Blackburn in Mackay, recognised in the, resulted in the establishment of the State Commission Inquiry into DNA testing, a very significant inquiry. Hedley has successfully capitalised on the changing media landscape and the exponential growth of podcasting to amplify the impact and reach of investigative journalism. And without doubt, his work raises some key legal questions surrounding investigative journalism, and the tightrope that journalists sometimes find themselves traversing. While the practice of investigative journalism plays an important role in exposing both injustices and cover ups that would most likely have remained buried, the stakes are high of course when it comes to maintaining the right to a fair trial.
Griffith University prides itself on our interdisciplinary foundations. And these are all pertinent questions that will be explored tonight for aspiring and accomplished journalists, lawyers, criminologist, academics, and of course many interested citizens who are with us tonight. We’re proud to be able to present our community with opportunities to learn from influential practitioners such as Hedley Thomas. And with that in mind, I asked you to join with me in welcoming Kerry and Hedley.
Kerry O’Brien
Hedley, thanks for volunteering to be my first podcast interview. Thank you. So, I had to learn a little more about this process, to prepare myself for the interview. I’ve listened, I’ve listened to podcasts here and there, but I’m not a podcast aficionado and particularly on true crime. So, we know that you started with ‘Teacher’s Pet’. We know you started with the Chris Dawson case and the missing, the disappearance of Lynette Dawson and so on. But you’d had a lifetime of writing for newspapers professionally. When you took the step into podcasts in 2018 with ‘Teacher’s Pet’, it was your first. So, having chosen that case, what was your hope of what you would deliver with it?
Hedley Thomas
Well, I hoped that I would change the way the authorities were dealing with an unsolved case that I believed was murder. It had been treated for the first, almost 10 years by police, as a missing person case of Lyn Dawson abandoning her husband and her two little girls in her home. At the same time as his husband, as her husband, rather, was infatuated with a schoolgirl. So, I wanted to try and effectively force the authorities to prosecute someone who had been recommended for prosecution by two coroners after separate inquests, in the early 2000s. And I didn’t really know whether we would find enough evidence to be able to do that. I, I started believing that he was likely guilty of the murder of his wife. And as it developed, as I met more witnesses, as I found new witnesses, and we uncovered more evidence, I became very, very confident that he had killed her. But again, it was always going to be a matter for a jury, if we could ever get it to that stage. We just wanted the authorities, the DPP to finally say, yes, this case should be prosecuted, it should be put before a jury and let the jurors decide.
Kerry O’Brien
But you’ve done some legwork on on podcasting. And you must have convinced yourself that it was a potentially better vehicle for you, for that kind of investigative work. In other words, what, interaction with audience, being able to reach a wider audience than through your paper, what was it about podcasting that absolutely seized you? Because it was a risk, in a sense.
Hedley Thomas
It was. What I understood about podcasts, I had no idea about how to produce one. But I understood that it gave me the opportunity to go very deep into a story, deeper than I would ever be able to go for The Australian, even if I were writing weekend features for several weeks running. I knew that if I did 8 or 10 episodes of a minimum of 10,000 words per episode, that’s 10 hours of audio, but it’s a huge amount of detail, detail that would forensically examine the circumstances of an overwhelmingly persuasive case. So that was the attraction. I thought that once people understood the case in its detail, once they got past the lurid headlines, and went deeper, then if they became connected to the case, there would be some momentum for a decision. And it could cause people in the office of the DPP, who had just routinely said, no, we’re not prosecuting, we’re disregarding the recommendations of the coroners, that it would cause them to rethink it. So, it was a it was a belief that podcasting offered me that rare opportunity to dissect something in a, in a more forensic way than I could do in any other genre in journalism.
Kerry O’Brien
But in papers, it’s look, good journalism anywhere is tough. But there’s something quite pure and straightforward about being a print journo, it used to be, before convergence. It was, it was you, and your sub, and your editor, really, and the photographer, to the extent that the photograph was an important aspect of what you might be doing. You were stepping into a world where it was suddenly more complex, technically, more people in the chain. Just describe to me what you walked into there, technically.
Hedley Thomas
I wish I knew; I still don’t understand the technology. It was very daunting, Kerry. I remember going and buying this recommended recording device, that I was told was you know, the bee’s knees of, of podcasting. And I took it to the to the first interview I needed to do in the country town of Dalby, Western Toowoomba, and I was interviewing a former student of Chris Dawson, in that, in that town, she lived there with her husband and children. And she had agreed to meet me, to talk to me about her experiences, her anecdotes, her recollections of Mr. Dawson. And I thought that would be pretty straightforward to set up this device because I previously used a little cassette recorder for interviews. But this is new technology, and I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t turn it on. And I was quickly losing confidence, and the interviewee was, I’m sure thinking, oh my gosh, you know, this guy’s wanting my information for a podcast, and he can’t actually operate the machine. But we got through that. Thanks to her she actually took it over. She said, I think it just needs to be re-formatted properly.
Kerry O’Brien
What a good thing you weren’t interviewing a villain.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah. Yeah. So, like a lot of it was, I was winging it, you know, and, and I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for interviews. I, I was across the evidence I, I burrowed into the evidence as much as possible. And I have a golden rule, I want to capture as many documents as possible. 1000s and 1000s of pages of transcript witness statements, all of the inquest material. And I read it and reread it, and I make notes and tab things. That’s my preparation. And it’s more than, you know, I would do you know, in newspapers, because I wanted to be across that. But in terms of the equipment, I was out of my depth, and I still am.
Kerry O’Brien
And then, but then, so there was the recording, there was the gathering of the interviews and so on. But then you had to put it together, and you had to work with someone else to be producing it. So, you had this little kind of studio, I guess, out in Ashgrove, at the foothills of the.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, that’s right. My, my, my now very good friend, Slade Gibson, who is an audio engineer, but he’d never done a podcast either. And he said that he would happily partner with me on this as the, as the guy who would put it all together. And I said, so you’re going to cut up my audio. And when I write a script, you’ll, you’ll sort of paste it into your file. And it’ll all,
Kerry O’Brien
You’re not using very technical jargon here.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah. No. And he said, mate something like that. And he said, I’ll do a mix. And I was thinking ahh yeah, sounds like, you know, musical lingo. He’s the former guitarist for Savage Garden. So, you know, he knows his music. And he wrote some of the most beautiful tunes. And, and they were, just became emblematic in the podcast. But we, I think, because we’re both new to it, because we didn’t have anyone telling us, you know, these are the rules, we could just do what came instinctively and the instinct, the journalism was instinctive, that’s what I understood. I knew how to conduct the interviews; I knew how to how to frame the story. Slade could put it together through trial and error. What I was letting him down a little bit on was the quality of the audio. So, I would, because I was in such a rush, I would often have the device on the dashboard of my car, which is, you know, a pretty noisy Audi with this sort of, you know, grumbly engine and, and you can hear this, this, this noise reverberating through a lot of the recordings. You can hear floorboards squeaking in my house, you can hear my daughter stacking the dishwasher, and I’m madly waving. I’m trying to interview someone, it’s a really important interview. So, all of that’s coming through the audio. But people have since said to me, when I’ve been a bit defensive about it, they’ve said, well, that’s that was actually part of the appeal because it wasn’t overproduced, it was barely produced at all it was, was pretty raw.
Kerry O’Brien
What I’m fascinated by you would have had to make a decision right at the start. A, you had to kind of take a stab at how many episodes you were going to be able to sustain, you wouldn’t have known exactly where you were going to get to at the end of it until you’d written it and one interview might lead to another and so on. But you would have had to decide, do I, do I play it safe and wait until we’ve finished the whole thing before we start running it? Or do we, or do we put a few episodes down, start running it and then run like buggery and try and stay ahead of it as we go. What did you decide?
Hedley Thomas
I took the big risk and ran like buggery. Yeah, so the sensible option, and which is by just about 99% of podcasters would do, would be to, pre produced a package, eight or 10 or 12 episodes, have them all carefully listened to, you’d have, you know, effectively a committee of editors, finessing it and getting in there and changing things. And then it’s really slick. And you can go on holidays while it’s releasing and happy days. But I wrote three and a half episodes. And I thought God, I’ve only done three and a half, there’s at least another five episodes. It ended up being double that, 16. But I thought at that time that writing another five episodes would be so boring. I just wanted to start, you know, airing what I’d already written because I was getting, I think, just enthused by the story. I really wanted the story to start reaching people and I had more words than I’d ever written before in terms of one story just sitting on my laptop, and it felt like they were going stale. So, I said I’m, I’m going to release these, one, one each week. And then I rang the editor-in-chief and he said, oh, are you sure? Like how are you going to,
Kerry O’Brien
So, you’re doing this under the umbrella of the Australian. That’s right. But it’s really your little kind of sell.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, I was pretty, pretty autonomous. And, and he said are you, are you, yeah, you sure that’s okay, like you’ll be able to manage? I said, Yeah, because I’ve done, I’ve done three and a half episodes. So, while everyone’s listening to episode one, I’ll be working on like the end of episode three, and then episode four. So, I’ve got a head start. But you very quickly run out of. You know where this is going. Oh my god, it turned into the biggest nightmare. Because what I didn’t appreciate was that people listening to episode one immediately contacted me with information that I’d never heard of that was so vital, I had to put it into episode two, which meant I had to rip stuff out of episode two and work out where that might go. And so, I would just sort of put it somewhere at the back end as a key, as a placeholder. And then I had to do the same thing with episode three. And so, all the time I should have been spending writing episodes four or five, six and seven were taken up just, just changing the early episodes. And then I ran out of, I ran out of runway. And Slade Gibson likens it like, you know, he said that he’d never done anything so difficult. He said, it was like, being the guy on the railway track, building the track, as the trains’ bearing down.
Kerry O’Brien
So how close did the train get?
Hedley Thomas
Incredibly close, like, we were, we were writing, I was writing 1000s of words a day, from very early in the morning until I dropped. And then I’d have to get them all narrated and then Slade had to chop it all up and, and get it all mixed and built, and then legal-ed and edited. And starting from scratch, which is what we were from about episode five. So, starting on a Friday morning, because episode four, or the previous episode comes out on Thursday night, and you’ve got a blank screen. You’ve got, you’ve done the interviews, you know, what roughly can go there. And you’ve got an idea in your mind about the framework, but then having to sort of put it all down and make it interesting. It was, it was incredibly taxing. By the time we got to Episode 14, I said to Slade, that we we’ve only got a few more to go. And he said, no, no, we don’t. And his wife said that he’d been hiding under the bed in anticipation of me coming over to his studio. And he said, now we’re just going to have to take a break, I can’t, like we were both shattered. I’ve never done anything so difficult. But while it was grueling and, and a high wire act, like you know, if it had gone badly, if we had made a big error, it would have been very difficult to overcome the problem. It also,
Kerry O’Brien
Did you ever feel at any point, unease of putting something to air that you hadn’t quite had the time to read it, particularly if you’re dealing stuff, with stuff that was still coming in, as you’re putting it together. That that you were on the edge of whether you had enough time to actually properly check and think through what you were doing.
Hedley Thomas
Kerry, I should have been uneasy about it. But but I think because I was so immersed in the detail of the story, it was all I could think about. When I would go to sleep, I would, I would go to sleep, considering the angles that I’d been developing that day, and that I wanted to develop the next day, I would wake up and have my first coffee, you know, with, with ideas buzzing in my head. So, because, and I’ve never had this much of a, of a sort of a locked on sense with a story. Because I was so into it, I didn’t, I was confident that I wouldn’t make the errors. And we didn’t, we didn’t make any, any mistakes. That’s the amazing thing. In all of those episodes, you know that there’ll be people who will say, well, the tone that you had in that episode in terms of, you know, the emphasis on one thing or the other, you know, people will differ on that. But in terms of factual mistakes, it’s very clean. So, it was a huge risk, but we got through.
Kerry O’Brien
Okay, so you’ve said somewhere along the line that your overriding aim with these podcasts is to solve crimes. Now, that’s a, that’s a big goal. And we know that police work, you’re certainly not perfect. We know that the judicial system is not perfect. But nonetheless, there are some very skilled people in police investigation and in the legal and judicial system. Where did your confidence come from? That you would be able to do what they could not do.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah. I’ve long held the view that there are indeed brilliant lawyers, defence lawyers and some, you know, really good prosecutors and obviously great judges. But police, unfortunately, have so much crime to investigate. They’re, they’re under enormous pressure. And things fall through the cracks. And I’ve, I’ve discovered time and again, that it doesn’t matter how exhaustively a case might have been investigated for potential prosecution, you can always discover new facts, new witnesses and new evidence. And I’ve also seen how fallible the system, the legal, the criminal justice system is, particularly in Queensland, which is, I mean, I’m not singling out Queensland as being any worse than any other jurisdiction. But that’s the state that, you know, I practice my journalism in. Um, some colossal, colossal failures in the, in the system, not just by police. But, but by prosecuting authorities, in not properly, in not having either all the information in front of them or having the information and making the wrong call. And I don’t think that citizens, and particularly journalists, should ever accept that because they are very senior people who are running our criminal justice system, they know best, we should just leave it to them, that we should then back off. No, I actually believe that so many travesties of justice remain travesties, because journalists haven’t picked apart some of the problems. They haven’t gone deep into the detail.
Kerry O’Brien
Now why haven’t, look, if the journalists are doing their job in the first place, why is it a case that they are never given the time to properly investigate? I mean, well. I think that I think it’s very rare. You’d have to say we’re a part of the problem as well, if that is a problem in the justice system. That’s our job, too, isn’t it? Yeah. That’s right. We don’t even have all that many specialist crime reporters anymore. We don’t have a lot of reporters who are automatically assigned to the beat of the court anymore, do we?
Hedley Thomas
That’s a big problem. And, you know, the autonomy, the privilege that I got, to spend more than six months investigating Lynn Dawson’s disappearance, before we produced the first episode, about eight, nine months on Shandee’s Story, which is a current podcast that I’ve been working on. That’s highly unusual. And it is, I think, a reflection of the pressures and challenges that, that all of us in the media have been under. I mean, I did my cadetship with the Gold Coast Bulletin. This place used to be the council chambers, I used to come here as a cadet reporter to cover council. And Murray Rix who’s been taking photographs today was in the, in the, in the, he was a photographer at The Bulletin, one of about 20 photographers, when I was there. I think there’s one photographer, or maybe two now. So, it’s, it’s a lot tougher, but when we get the opportunity, we should go hard. And I’m hoping that as a result of these podcasts, and people seeing that results are possible, really significant change can be made, that, that newspaper and, and other media owners and operators will invest much more in this kind of journalism, because it’s much more important than so much of the clickbait you know, minute by minute rubbish that is being served up now. I mean, I don’t understand how we’ve got to a stage where a staple of journalism is, has become what someone has put on their Facebook page, and someone else has commented on. You know, that seems to be the norm now. You know, what someone’s put up on Instagram is, is then taking off and being, you know, a national topic.
Kerry O’Brien
Well, you’re being critical of your own news organisation now, apart from others, aren’t you, yeah. I won’t, I won’t push you too hard on that one tonight.
Hedley Thomas
That’s alright. All media, sadly.
Kerry O’Brien
Yeah. But let’s cut to the heart of what you delivered in Teacher’s Pet. What, what was it that you’re able to highlight tonight, that convinces you, that it was your work that brought a fresh trial and ultimately the conviction of Chris Dawson for the murder of his wife Lynette, whose body has still not been found?
Hedley Thomas
I’ll qualify that by saying, I’ve never said that The Teacher’s Pet produced a fresh trial. Because I don’t know what the decision-making process was in the office of the DPP. What I know for a fact is that the DPP had rejected the idea of a prosecution on at least four previous occasions, before the podcast. And what the podcast did was it drew from, from parts of Sydney, people who had not spoken up before about things they knew, in relation to Chris Dawson, and Lyn, and things that Chris had said or done, and things that they had seen. And those, those facts were, became part of the podcast. For example, a babysitter in the house, a babysitter who was there before the babysitter, who ultimately became Lynn’s daughter’s stepmother and Chris, the second wife, she talked, she came out of the woodwork and talked to me. And in a very tearful interview, about the domestic violence that she witnessed in the house between Chris and Lyn. Chris, she said was capable of just exploding without much, without any provocation, he would just lose his temper and, and several times she witnessed this, and Lyn being harmed as a result, nobody had previously seen or talked about to the police. Bear in mind, I had all the witness statements. I had the product of the two inquests, so I knew what the police case essentially was. And nobody had talked about any domestic violence. And that was a significant thing. And a man came forward, not to me, but to the police. He used to play football with Chris and the Newtown Jets. And he talked about how Chris had approached him to get a hitman to kill Lyn. And that approach by that man, Robert Silkmen, I think would have been a very significant factor in the DPP going forward. There were a number of other people who came forward, but the ultimate decision to to take it, for the for the DPP to say to the police, who had always been at least for the last 20 years, wanted to prosecute, the police were absolutely convinced that there was a winnable case of murder.
Kerry O’Brien
And then as you say, there were the two coronial hearings, recommending that charges, be, that the prosecution occur. Yeah. Can you understand why the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions kept rejecting?
Hedley Thomas
No, I can’t. No, I think they made repeated errors. I think they misunderstood parts of the evidence. And we will never know.
Kerry O’Brien
That’s a big statement to make. Yeah, about the people, skilled people, charged with the responsibility of determining when a case could be successfully prosecuted and deserved to be prosecuted or not.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, I know, it’s a big call. And it sounds very arrogant. I’m not a lawyer. And I wasn’t privy to the internal workings of that office when they were making those decisions. But I’ve interviewed a number of senior lawyers about the evidence in the case. We’ve, we’ve, we’ve seen other cases that were prosecuted by that same office on arguably thinner evidence than was presented in Lyn Dawson’s case. And I think that the, the evidence speaks for itself. They got, they ended up presenting a brief of evidence at the end of 2018, to the DPP, which had said, yes, we will go forward. So, I think that goes to the fallibility of, of people. Of any system. From time to time, you know, and, you know, I want to just add, Kerry, the DPP, when it finally prosecuted this case, did an amazing job. I mean, they did an incredible prosecution in front of a judge alone. And it culminated in the guilty verdict a couple of months ago.
Kerry O’Brien
40 years, after the event. What, what obligation do you have to be fair to all parties in these podcasts, and I’m talking specifically about the Dawson case as the illustration. What, what ethical obligation did you have to Chris Dawson, even if you were utterly convinced, he was guilty.
Hedley Thomas
I had ethical obligations to give him absolute right of reply, to offer him the opportunity to speak in the podcast. And,
Kerry O’Brien
But if you’re convinced of his guilt before you start, I wonder how fair a crack you’re going to give him.
Hedley Thomas
I wasn’t convinced. I was, I thought it was likely, and as it went on, I became convinced. And I think what you’ve highlighted there goes to a really important issue in journalism. My job is to try and be as balanced as possible. But it’s, for me anyway, and I think for most journalists, absurd to believe that we don’t, as a result of our own values, our upbringing, our education, relationships, experiences in life, it’s absurd to believe we don’t approach stories and interviews with a view, a private view about a person’s about, about the angles about, you know, what might have happened. We can’t just approach stories with, with a 50-50 mindset. Having said that, you know, I think most journalists do an amazing job in being balanced and delivering a balanced story. The Teacher’s Pet, I will accept, you know, was not, was not balanced insofar as it was 50-50, did he, do it? Did he not? It was not a who done it. It was he done it, you know, and, and that, and that’s a bit unusual. But the weight of the evidence made it that way. There were no other suspects. There was, the findings of two coroner’s who had heard all the evidence who said, he should be prosecuted for murder. And
Kerry O’Brien
Being prosecuted is one thing. Being proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt is another. Just, before the actual case proceeded, Dawson’s defence counsel pushed very hard to have the whole thing stood aside on the basis that he couldn’t possibly have a fair trial. And what you had done was a part of his argument. And, and Justice, this was heard by Justice Elizabeth Fullerton in the New South Wales Supreme Court, she was very critical, when ruling, and I’m sure you’ve read this a dozen times, when ruling on the defence claim that it would be impossible to have a fair trial, that the presumption of innocence had been blown. Quote, this is what she said: No one who listened to the podcast would be left in any doubt as to Mr. Thomas’s views as the presenter and the views of those he interviewed with varying degrees of emphasis that the applicant, that is, Dawson, both physically and emotionally abused Lynette Dawson before killing her. Now, although she dismissed, and you’ve pretty much agreed in what you’ve just said. And although she dismissed the defense’s claim, she did say, I am in no doubt that the adverse publicity in this case, or more accurately, the unrestrained and uncensored public commentary about the applicant’s guilt is the most egregious example of media interference with a criminal trial process, which this Court has had to consider, in deciding whether to take the extraordinary step of permanently staying a criminal prosecution. I’m left in no doubt that Mr. Thomas intended to apply pressure on the ODPP to prosecute the applicant. Now, she’s saying, that it was entirely possible that she might have ruled that it was impossible to have a fair trial on the very thing that you were setting out to do, which was to bring this man to justice, could have been subverted by your own work.
Hedley Thomas
Well, it was a tough, it was a very tough judgement. And, and Justice Fullerton delivered that judgement after a lengthy stay proceeding, which we couldn’t report on at the time, it was all done behind closed doors, because of the concern that more publicity would make it even harder for him to get a fair trial. I gave evidence over three, three days in that in that proceeding, and at the end of it, and after reading the judgement, I was very thankful that we have a jury system, rather than a judge alone.
Kerry O’Brien
Why did you find that? Well, I though. So, it was judge alone in this case, to remove the possibility of, of the jury having been biased by what had been in the public eye.
Hedley Thomas
I disagreed with some key parts of her judgement. Of course, I did, because it was so critical of the podcast, and my approach. But Kerry, this was a case in which when I started it, there had been no prosecution, despite an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence, and the findings of those two coroners who said there should be a prosecution. For 36 years, it was, Lyn’s family would have died without justice, if we hadn’t taken the approach that was taken. So yes, it was a, it was a rugged, front footed, very robust approach. But that was the only way it was going to,
Kerry O’Brien
And did you understand the risk you were taking in that process? Well. As reflected in what she had to say.
Hedley Thomas
Well, what I understood was that if we didn’t take an approach like that, there would never be the prospect of a prosecution. What I thought was that if we did take that approach, and there was a prosecution, it would sort of be conducted without this potential challenge. I thought that it would be able to proceed to a jury, and what the jury determined was a matter for the jury. It would just need to go forward.
Kerry O’Brien
Yeah. So, you’ve also said that, that you have to be, this is a quote, you have to be a little bit obsessed as a journalist to do justice to a story. Now, can a journalist be both professional and obsessed?
Hedley Thomas
I, absolutely. I mean, I think obsession is really another word for deep commitment. You know, it doesn’t mean sort of google-eyed crazy, you know, it just means absolutely locked on and putting aside your own hobbies and, and parties and going to the track, whatever, for weeks, months at a time, while you’re getting this job done.
Kerry O’Brien
Heaven forbids you couldn’t go to the track.
Hedley Thomas
Well, luckily, we’ve got those apps on the phone.
Kerry O’Brien
So, podcasts, I think, never having done one, but it strikes me, but I’ve listened to them. Podcasts are different to most mainstream journalism formats, I think. More intimate, more personal, maybe even more persuasive if skillfully produced. People clearly become more engaged, get carried along by the narrative. I mean, if they’re not, the podcast doesn’t succeed at all. And you’ve got to be, you’ve got a lot more invested in it yourself, haven’t you? I mean, your kind of, you’re more sort of nakedly exposed there out there, aren’t you now, than you might have been as Hedley Thomas’ byline in a newspaper?
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, you certainly are. And your listeners form a relationship with you, they’ve never met you. But because they’re hearing the voice, and they’re hearing it for hours and hours, because the series can go for as long as many as 20-24 hours. They become very invested in it. And I think that it’s the, the, the intimacy that develops because of the voice, and the voices of the people in the podcast, and the different tones and, and tambor that people are hearing that makes such a powerful difference. Now Kerry, your voice is so distinctive to me. If I heard your voice across a crowded room,
Kerry O’Brien
You would automatically believe what was being said?
Hedley Thomas
Well, I’d love to use your voice in a podcast, like as one of my voice actors, but people listen to voices and, and they can trust. Familiarity. Its familiarity. Yeah, yeah, and they develop a relationship of trust. And that’s what’s been happening thankfully, with these podcasts.
Kerry O’Brien
Which is a high mark for you to keep meeting every time. Your, your next podcast series was called Night Driver. You give them all these really catchy titles, obviously Night Driver in 2020, which I think you found both tantalising and frustrating and I’ll come back to that. Because I want to jump the order a bit and go to the next one you did, now, which you called Shandee’s Story. And that’s still in train in a way. And that was set in Mackay in Queensland, can you give a quick recap of Shandee Blackburn’s murder in 23, in 2013, the subsequent court case in which her ex-boyfriend John Peros was acquitted of her murder in 2017. And so often, even when somebody is charged, it can take a long time between the charge and the and the jury verdict. And what decided you to take that case?
Hedley Thomas
I read the coroner’s findings, and they were so striking. The coroner described a 23-year-old girl who was walking home from her job in a coffee shop in a big sports club in Mackay. It was late at night, and she was just turning the corner to go to her mother’s place. She was probably 70 metres from home when a figure from across the road starts running towards her. And Shandee is cut down, there was more than 20 knife blows, many of them directed at her face and head. She …
Kerry O’Brien
Suggesting a personal anger.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, that’s right. And she lay dying, bleeding in the gutter as the figure ran back across the same road and disappeared. Now how do we know a figure ran across the road? There were no witnesses to the running. But there was CCTV footage taken from a house nearby that just shows this outline crouching in bushes and then running across. When I read the coroner’s findings about, and his findings were delivered in 2020, it went through the whole case, the whole police investigation, and the fact that the case had gone to trial with Shandee’s ex-boyfriend, John Peros, being accused of murder, and a jury returning in less than two hours. And at the end of his findings. Finding him not guilty. Yeah, finding him not guilty. He was acquitted. But the coroner who had access to more evidence and sat for longer and had more witnesses appearing before him, determined that Shandee Blackburn was, in fact, killed by John Peros. And where does this leave us? This man,
Kerry O’Brien
Because of double jeopardy.
Hedley Thomas
Is yeah, he’s he’s walking free. And he’s been acquitted. And that’s the rule of law.
Kerry O’Brien
And he can’t be retried for the same offence. That’s right, unless there is genuinely fresh evidence.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, that’s right. So, it was such a compelling case just on the papers that I read. And it was about a 60- or 70-page judgement. And then I wanted to delve into it. I contacted Shandee’s family and asked them if they would approve of that, would they cooperate, and they were so happy that that we would do that, and it went from there. And it started in, you know,
Kerry O’Brien
So, you had to find fresh evidence to get anywhere.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah. And I was incredibly lucky. Because early in the piece, while I was reading the trial transcripts and realising that DNA was nowhere to be found, the police had expected that there would be a lot of DNA in the suspect’s vehicle, and that there would be DNA of the killer under Shandee’s fingernails at the crime scene and so on. But there was hardly any DNA to be found. And I was perplexed about another aspect of the DNA because the defence team for the accused suggested that an Aboriginal criminal in Mackay was the real killer, that he’d got away with it and that there was partial DNA from him left at the crime scene. So, I contacted a forensic biologist called Dr. Kirsty Wright. And she grew up on the Gold Coast too. But I didn’t know her, I just have to admit I used Google to find her. And she was only too happy to help, and I had access to all of the documents, or many of the documents from the case relating to DNA. Kirsty started examining these documents, and within a short period of time, she was incredibly alarmed at not just the handling of the DNA by the Queensland Forensic Centre, which tests all of the samples collected by police from crime scenes. She was horrified at the, what she believed were systemic issues in that lab. And within just a few months of us first meeting, Kirsty who’s an uncontroversial scientist, who has done amazing work around the world and in Australia, was making a public complaint to their anti-corruption commission in Queensland, and also publicly calling for the government’s lab to be closed, to be shut down, because it was getting everything so badly wrong. And, and, you know, she was actually spot on.
Kerry O’Brien
So, you’ve now got this government inquiry into precisely the operations of the lab, and the ramifications of that are huge, aren’t they?
Hedley Thomas
Massive, and what that inquiry, which is being run by a former Court of Appeal Judge, Walter Sofronoff, Court of Appeal President in Queensland. What the inquiry has already established is that 1000s of statements that are produced by scientists from that lab for courts contain information which is untrue. The lab has, for years, been adopting a very shoddy testing process that allowed DNA that was existing in the crime scene samples to go undetected by the lab. And then, then the lab would report to the police, there’s no DNA there, so there’s nothing to see. And the police sometimes will be saying, look, it’s a, it’s a shirt covered in blood. You know, there’s underwear with obvious semen stain. How can there not be DNA? We’re talking, obviously, about murders and rapes. But that was the feedback from the lab that the DNA wasn’t being detected. The reason was the process the lab had adopted, had and had persuaded the police would be good for them, meant that this DNA was just not showing up. It was not going to be presenting to the scientists. It was always there and if the scientists had only, had the lab management had only told the scientists to do what would have been standard in most labs, which was test the samples thoroughly, fully. It would have been apparent, but they didn’t do that. So, you can imagine Kerry, there are 1000s of crime scene samples from 1000s of cases going back, who knows how many years, that have been compromised.
Kerry O’Brien
So potentially there could be an awful lot of cases that might be reopened? Yes. So, have you been able to establish in Shandee’s case, whether the DNA material that had been collected at any point has actually been held? Can it be revisited?
Hedley Thomas
Yes. All the DNA in Shandee’s case is being retested. All the sorry, all the samples are being retested, including dozens of samples from the accused’s car. And samples from the crime scene samples that were taken from Shandee’s body and her clothes. And another lab is doing that retesting. We expect,
Kerry O’Brien
If there is a different story that emerges from that reappraisal is that, would that constitute potentially, the fresh evidence that might cause, that might lead to another trial?
Hedley Thomas
Yes, potentially. And this is where it’ll become a great contest between lawyers. You know, I think most people here as a matter of common sense would agree that if you find DNA in a case where an accused was already acquitted, but you years later find DNA that should have been used in a prosecution, potentially to persuade the jury to a conviction, then that should be something that is relied upon in a new prosecution, overcoming what’s known as double jeopardy. However, the argument against that will be it has to be compelling and fresh evidence. And defence lawyers, I’m sure will say it’s not fresh. There was a little echo there. They’ll say it’s not fresh. It was always there. It was the incompetence of the lab, that failed to detect it. Now look, this is all hypothetical. John Peros has always said he didn’t do it, so. In fact, he’s suing you at the moment. He is suing us for defamation, yeah, so. With that example I’m not suggesting.
Kerry O’Brien
I’m glad you’ve stressed that at this stage he’s said he is still innocent. Yeah. Okay. So, in fact, as you would write, you were just telling me before we came on tonight, that it was almost like hold the front page again, because you’ve got Shandee still running, or running again. And you suddenly hit on something that would cause you to redo or add to your next episode, right?
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, that’s right. So, the 26th episode of Shandee’s Story is due out tomorrow. We did 20 episodes originally, and then we’re now into the episodes that are covering the Commission of Inquiry’s hearings. And I realised that at about four o’clock that that there was a really significant piece of tomorrow’s episode that we’d, we’d overlooked, we should do it. And so, I got on the phone to two of my colleagues, we had a, we had a Google meet hook up, I used my iPhone to record my end of the conversation. And tonight,
Kerry O’Brien
You didn’t have it on the dashboard again, did you?
Hedley Thomas
No, on my sister’s coffee table. And we’re going to crunch it all together to make a new chapter for that episode, in time for tomorrow’s release.
Kerry O’Brien
Okay, so you heard that here first. I’m going to go to that third podcast series. In fact, it was the second but it’s one of three. And that’s the Night Driver, as you called it, although this one actually, it followed The Teacher’s Pet in 2020, Shandee you started doing in 21. Can you briefly recap and very briefly, because we only got about 10 minutes left. On the case of Janine Vaughan, who disappeared off a Bathurst Street 19 years ago, why you decided it was worth a podcast and why you called it The Night Driver?
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, so Janine Vaughan was working in retail. She was the manager of a men’s wear store. She’d been out with friends at a local pub. It was a Thursday night. And then she wandered off. After they left the pub, there was an idea they’d go for last drinks and another one. It was a rainy night. She walked ahead of her friends. They were having a little lover’s tiff. She got to the corner; a car pulls up. They see her getting in this car, and no one ever sees Janine again. That was,
Kerry O’Brien
So like Lyn Dawson, body never found. Never found. But in that case, no strong suspect.
Hedley Thomas
No, that’s right. But what happened unusually in The Night Driver was, or sorry, in this, in this, in Janine Vaughan’s case was that town very quickly turned on a detective who had been and at that time was the deputy mayor as well as the head of the C.I.B. He was the leading detective in the town. He was a man who was very popular with some of the townsfolk, and he had a number of girlfriends, but a lot of people had it in for him. And they decided through, I think, rumour and innuendo, and we’re talking about a town that was, I think, reeling from the disappearance of this very popular young woman, that it was the copper who did it and other coppers were closing ranks around him trying to protect him. And I think when I was attracted to the story, I thought, that is an amazing case, you know, a police officer suspected of the murder, he’s got away with it according to the townsfolk. Let’s investigate this and find out whether we can discover what really happened, where Janine is. And as I went deeper into it, I realised through just, again, forensic examination of as much evidence as possible that this police officer had been stitched up and really was run out of town so unfairly, his life ruined, through just vicious rumour and innuendo, when there was really nothing at all that could be used in a provocative way to suggest he had anything to do with it. We came up with about four serious suspects in that case. And there’s unfortunately, no resolution. However,
Kerry O’Brien
But with those four, quote unquote, serious suspects. May maybe that was the police judgement, I don’t know. But it became your judgement, I guess, how comfortable were you in putting a spotlight on possible quote on quote, persons of interest around circumstantial evidence, considering the capacity of the almost inevitable gossip and innuendo in a relatively small community like Bathurst, the potentially unfair implications for innocent people?
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, it’s it’s a, it’s a balancing act. And I think that in The Night Driver, the tone and the approach to it was very different to The Teacher’s Pet, such that if you were one of those persons of interest, you were, I think, already used to the fact that you had been named, and in some media shamed, for having been a person of interest, that in the podcast series, you’re actually being permitted to tell your side of the story, to present your case. I mean, and can I just quickly talk about that in relation to Chris Dawson. Chris was offered, as were his brothers, unedited interviews, every opportunity to participate, unedited, so they could have talked to me for an hour, and I would have run the whole thing as a special episode. But with The Night Driver, yeah, we did focus on four persons of interest. But we’ve, we never elevated to the, this person probably did it or anything like that. It was, these were the persons described by the police and coroners as the persons of interest. And this is what they say about their position.
Kerry O’Brien
Having, having had if I can call it the success, enormous success, 50 million hits and so on. But, but having had that success with Teacher’s Pet, how did you feel walking away from Night Driver with no real outcome?
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, really deflated. And I felt that I had disappointed the family of Janine, that they had invested a lot of hope in there being a result. And, unfortunately, that couldn’t be delivered. But, and I don’t want to raise expectations too high. But I have just in the last couple of weeks, got a really interesting lead on it. And I’m planning to drive to Bathurst in the next few weeks, and properly check it out. And it is, I think, one of the more promising ones that has come up since that series launched.
Kerry O’Brien
So so having had that experience of Night Driver, thus far. It’s entirely possible that when you, when you get through a podcast process and you end up with a result like Night Driver, it’s never going to leave you, really, is it. No, there’s always the possibility that you’ll dig back into it. Yeah. Memory is part of what really intrigues me here because we all know about false memory, we know about faulty memory, we know about how we can convince ourselves. I wrote a memoir a few years ago, and reassured, I was reassured that that the majority, significantly majority of events that I had remembered reasonably accurately, but there are a few where I was completely blindsided, where I was absolutely convinced about something and discovered it could not possibly have happened like that. Now, it’s not just that part of faulty memory, particularly when something has happened a long time ago. But when you hear other people giving their memories of something, and, and and you suddenly feel that your memory has been triggered by that, that can be a very tricky road to walk down can’t it. And there are cases littered with illustrations of how memory has failed, really in the end. Failed the test.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, and in Chris Dawson’s murder trial, the judge Ian Harrison had to weigh a lot of memory issues from witnesses, some of whom hadn’t come forward to police initially. So there wasn’t a document, which the judge could look at to say, well, this was dated in 1990 and it seems to be pretty consistent with what the witness is telling me now, a lot of witnesses hadn’t come forward until 2018 when The Teacher’s Pet was rolling. But, you know, its,
Kerry O’Brien
Cos then there are the people of course, who fabricate stories, or fabricate evidence, or fabricate memories to become part of the story. Have you struck them? Oh, yes. Yeah, how easily are you able to weed them out? I mean, some of them, some of them probably stand out, like the proverbial, but. Yeah, I think. But some not necessarily.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah I think you get a bit of an instinct, after a while, Kerry, you no doubt, weeded plenty out as well, you realise, who are the people who just are in love with the idea of themselves appearing.
Kerry O’Brien
There are some who can be very, very convincing, and it takes a lot of time and effort.
Hedley Thomas
I almost got sucked in very badly during The Teacher’s Pet with one witness who well, alleged witness, who came up with a completely fanciful story. But I didn’t know it was fanciful until after I had written it, narrated it, I had all of her audio. It was, it was actually in the, in the episode and, that Slade had built, and it was about half an hour from release. And I made one further call, and it just started to crumble slightly, and I just thought, oh, no, I need to pull this out and work on this a bit longer. I thought I’d rigorously tested it. But there was that one further call where I got a slightly different take on the same set of facts, and that just convinced me that there was something a bit off, and it got ripped out. And thank goodness it did, because,
Kerry O’Brien
And under pressure you might not have made that call.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah, yeah. But it was, it was all completely wrong. I don’t think she was a fantasist. I think she really believed in what she was saying. But it couldn’t be true.
Kerry O’Brien
Well they would be the worst ones to try and weed out. So what have you learned since you began the podcast. It’s caused you to change the way you do them. Any lessons learned?
Hedley Thomas
I’ve learned that I should be, and can, achieve a higher quality of audio. So, better microphones, I’d definitely use a better mic. I’ve,
Kerry O’Brien
Do you think you’re a better journalist and a better investigator, than you were?
Hedley Thomas
Yes, yeah, I think I have become sharper and more focused. And some of it is just a gut feeling when you read a statement and you think that witness is really important, even though the police might not have taken the witness too, too seriously. But yeah of course, practice is only going to make you better. And I’ve been blessed to have the support of colleagues who have also wanted to help and be involved in the podcast. And they’ve taught me so many things too. So, you know, I, one of the things I really enjoy about doing Shandee’s Legacy, which is the follow on from, from the 20-episode series we did, is that I’m working with Claire Harvey, David Murray, Matthew Condon, and we’re collaborating. We did a similar collaboration for the podcast series called The Teacher’s Trial, 20 episodes, one a week for five months, covering the trial, the trial didn’t last for five months. But Claire had this idea that when the judge had gone out to consider his verdict, and, that she thought the judge might only be out for a couple of weeks, and that we would fill that space with material that we’d been husbanding. And then we’d, we’d have this sort of continuous seamless series. Well, the judge was out for about five or six weeks, and we were running out of material and we were exhausted.
Kerry O’Brien
But you would have had to walk a very fine line there, you’d actually been a witness, in the case you’d been criticised by the judge before the trial. That’s a very fine ethical balance there too, isn’t it. I mean, you weren’t participating on the audio in the actual podcast, but you can’t have been completely detached from it.
Hedley Thomas
I was detached from the early episodes until I gave my evidence. And so I didn’t, I was literally quarantined from what they were doing in all the episodes leading up to when I became a witness in the murder trial. And then after that, I was all in and it was fine. The other difference with this murder trial was that it was judge alone. So with no jurors, we were, we had, I think, space and liberties, to talk about the evidence that we wouldn’t have been able to take if it had been with a jury, with jurors, because the judge, he wasn’t listening to the podcast. And even if he had, he wouldn’t have been influenced by it.
Kerry O’Brien
Now very heady to get 50 million downloads. No other journalist in this country could possibly claim to have had an audience of 50 million people. Would it be human, if you didn’t feel the urge to chase the ratings and to try to replicate that extraordinary level of success. How do you counter that? How do you maintain your balance, your professional balance?
Hedley Thomas
Well, I’ve got some wonderful, close family support. And they keep me pretty down to earth.
Kerry O’Brien
I know what that’s like, yeah.
Hedley Thomas
Yeah. My wife, she, she’s amazing. And an emergency department nurse, former journalist, and she is very, very good at ensuring I don’t get too big headed. I have wonderful family, extended family, and great friends, some of whom are here tonight. And, you know, I don’t think I’ve changed through through all this. In terms of chasing subjects or or murder cases that might be ratings pullers, I don’t, I don’t think so, I want to, I have to feel that I can give my very best to a murder investigation, before I commit to it. And the test for me is, am I, am I really interested in this? Does this really grab me? Can I become a bit obsessed for month after month of research and slog and interview, so that I can do this justice? And, you know, I don’t tell people that when I don’t take up their case that, you know, it just didn’t grab me. It’s not, you can’t say that, you know, but I, I know when it does, and because because you can’t stop reading, you’ll stay up till 2am ploughing through the files. And that’s when I know. And it wouldn’t matter what kind of case it was, if I get that, that that sense, that’s the one I want to go after.
Kerry O’Brien
Well, this is the first time in a while we’ve gone over. So I hope that means that I’m not just indulging myself as another journalist, I think, I think we’ve all been really caught up in this fascinating journey tonight. Hedley, thank you very much for sharing it with us. Thank you, Kerry.
Kerry and Hedley, thank you very much again. Another round of applause for an absolutely compelling, compelling evening. It’s my great, great pleasure to get to sum up a little bit of what we’ve heard. And I’ll try and do that quickly. Because Kerry, we have run over. It was great to to understand that podcasts actually allow the journalist to go a lot deeper into the story than might be available to them if they’re sitting in a newspaper room. But Hedley, you explained that with that comes far more extensive preparation than perhaps for that written article. Refreshing for me to hear that technical know-how is not a prerequisite for for delivering a 50 million plus podcast series. But extraordinary also to hear how how frantic you were, and manipulating those episodes, two, three and four, as new information came in, and I can only imagine the adrenaline rush, that that came with that and indeed, the adrenaline completion or the adrenaline depletion rather, when the final episode was aired, it must have been quite the letdown. It would seem that journalism is a lot tougher now. And it’s harder for journalists to find that time and that space to go deeper into those stories. And I was just wondering if perhaps that might also be the case for law enforcement, and for the people at the frontline of law enforcement and whether they don’t have the time to fully pursue the stories. You talked a little bit about the ethical obligations and trying to remain balanced. But every individual will approach a story or an interview with their own private views. And the skill there is remaining balanced, even though you did say that this was always for you a ‘he’d done it’ rather than a who done it. You have to be a little bit obsessed and crazy and deeply committed to do justice to a story of this nature. And Kerry, you posited that podcasts as a form of journalism are perhaps more intimate, and potentially, therefore more persuasive than the other formats. And Hedley, you responded by saying you think the listeners form a more intense relationship with a journalist, become more invested, and perhaps attached in a different way to to how they would if you’re a journalist in print alone. It’s very intriguing to hear especially in the case of Shandee’s Story, how that one investigation led to potentially a much bigger investigation with far reaching ramifications for for many unsolved crimes across the state of Queensland. And it did sound like you’ve mastered the technology as you rush tonight to, to re-edit episode 26 of that story. And I think we all got a glimpse tonight of the emotional investment you make as a journalist, when you investigate those unsolved crimes, and where the expectations of those people close to the victims who are just literally searching for closure. So hopefully, I’ve done justice to the conversation. It was absolutely compelling. I was stuck from moment to end just listening and wishing it could go on. But again, thanks again for a wonderful evening.
Coming up next, Kerry will be joined in the big house by two outstanding leaders in the field of mental health, education and treatment, Hugh van Cuylenburg and Professor Patrick McGorry AO. Hugh’s work with the Resilience Project brings into focus decades of active campaigning to educate young people and their parents about positive mental health strategies. His work with schools, sporting clubs, community groups, and corporations has enabled him to not only reach hundreds of thousands of people, but also to refine both his thinking and his practice around mental health education. Professor McGorry AO is a psychiatrist known worldwide for his development of scaling up early intervention and youth mental health services and for mental health innovation, advocacy and reform. He is Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, founding editor of the journal, Early Intervention in Psychiatry, and the first psychiatrist to become a fellow of the Academy of Science. And if that wasn’t enough, in 2010, he was selected as Australian of the Year and became an Officer of the Order of Australia. Professor McGorry and Hugh will join Kerry here at HOTA on the 22nd of November, so little under three weeks time, for the final edition of a better future for all for 2022. Thank you very much.
Dr Riona Tindal
Senior Disability Advisor — DSSP
Student Disability and Accessibility, Student Success
Student Life, Griffith University
Relying on Auslan interpreters can be empowering and disempowering at the same time. You just must trust they will translate what you are saying correctly, and you are constantly monitoring what the audience is responding to the voice over. When you see an expression on the faces start to happen out of context with what you are signing, you feel that dreaded hot feeling rush over your face, start to sweat, start to feel sick, and quickly you have to decide if you need to stop and ask the interpreter to repeat back to you what they voiced over, or switch over to different signing, and try to gloss over the faux pas.
The Good
Deciding which interpreter best works with you, then the anxiety of waiting for agencies who are booked. The interpreters are the conduit of powerful communication… but, but, but… it only works if they are good, only works if they are talented, only works if they have a great Auslan contextual grasp of the lexicon. Your meetings, your presentations, your comments — it can go in either direction of being awesome or awkward or bigger faux pas.
You struggle to find the appropriate words in Auslan, especially when you are hard wired for English language, not Auslan language, which has its own grammar and structure. It is a very rich evolving sign language, expanding its scope of specific jargonised vocabulary. It means I am bilingual. I think in two languages every day.
The Bad
The costs to access interpreters in the workplace is prohibitive and not adequately funded, as an example:
In the workplace, the Employment Assistant Fund (EAF also known as Job Access) provides a minimal $6k for interpreting support over a calendar year, in comparison to supports provided by the NDIS of $20k-50K a year (for interpreting outside of the work environment).
Working life is 38 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, give or take. Personal life use of NDIS interpreters is average 3-4 hours a week over 52 weeks. When I asked if we could apply to increase funds, Job Access said — use captions or noter takers as this is cheaper — and it was my responsibility to manage the EAF funds — yes, they said that, and I have the email to prove this! The funding level remains unchanged since my first job in 1991 with EAF — I have changed jobs many times and my EAF account travels with me, and the evidence required to prove how deaf I am, has been done already long ago, a humiliating process of measuring your deafness and your speech capacity.
Ok, I don’t mind captions, but how can I participate in a conversation? It is very awkward when I am part of a group conversation, workshop or webinar, and the organiser didn’t factor in any interpreter access, saying captioning is universally accessible.
I can read people talking… then my own whole world comes to a screeching halt when they ask me a question. I must gesture, “look down”… pointing at the chat function and gesture “type” in the chat, and proceed to type. Often, they don’t see this, and they keep talking on, looking confused. Sometimes out of sheer embarrassment, I write on a piece of paper and state: Check the chat function please: but sometimes they are so audio based and do not “see”, and I feel myself shrinking in dismay, as the opportunity for participating is gone. I am often left feeling very annoyed, frustrated with tears, or just quit the whole workshop.
As a Deaf person, you have intelligence, but your speech does not always work well as a conduit of your thoughts, and therefore, bad speech automatically delegates you to dumbness, a low IQ and makes communication awkward, slow, difficult, too hard or too tiring…
You have thousands of words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books worth of information, stories to tell in your head… but you can’t get them out.
The Ugly
Auslan Interpreters… I love and resent them, as they present power that we have to rely on — good interpreters never make you feel inferior, but more as allies. There are those who prefer to accept work, only if there is travel time included, and for a minimum 2 hours interpreting, some won’t accept a job because it is too far, too late, too early, too inconvenient, too tiring, “I don’t like that interpreter working with me, I can’t stand him/her”. You see your NDIS drain rather quickly, so you have to find local interpreters, and have to tolerate less satisfactory interpreters if the preferred ones are not available.
If an interpreter is readily available, you instantly become suspicious inwardly, and wonder if this is because this interpreter is not good enough and more available. These awful unhelpful thoughts swirl around your head. In my defence, they are available because they were cancelled by other agencies and had time to be booked.
I become friends with a lot of interpreters, as they do share a rather personal part of your life, which is a privilege to have, yet you must trust them to keep it confidential and hope they do. There is a lot of trust in that. I enjoy the deaf time. When interpreters charge such a high fee, you can’t help but think a few things. They must be good, they must be not getting enough work and must charge higher, they have it easy, and want to ride on our NDIS gravy train, or they are so good and am happy to pay them that much.
Interpreters are extremely valuable, but they are nothing without us, and we can’t voice well without them, so we need to work together as allies. Diversity, flexibility, and support go both ways.
That is a lot of burden. I am tired.
This week, for our very first Inclusive Futures: Reimagining Disability Blog, we are joined by a selection of guests who represent the Deaf and hard of hearing community as part of the National Week of Deaf People (NWDP).
An initiative of Deaf Australia, the National Week of Deaf People is a week-long national celebration of Deaf individuals and the Australian Deaf community, which includes celebrating the International Week of Deaf People (IWDP) and International Day of Sign Languages (IDSL), which are initiatives of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFDEAF).
Deaf Fatigue: The Longest Day
Cathy Easte
Cathy Easte
Manager, Student Disability and Accessibility, Student Success, Griffith University
Some days I go home so exhausted, one would think I was physically lifting boxes all day. I am tired, too tired to chat, to focus or interact with others. I just zone out — which in summer months I might do by gardening late in the afternoon or early evening (something physical), maybe even walking my dogs, or vegging out in front of the TV for an hour or so…
I am not tired from physical work, but tired from trying to fill in the blanks in communication gaps all day long. Listening fatigue, concentration fatigue, Deaf fatigue (whatever the term — they mean the same thing) — listening can be mentally and physically exhausting and not just challenging, if you cannot hear. It takes a lot of energy to be attentive, lipread, process words not heard correctly (words you may never have fully heard in your lifetime) and constructing meaning from what you have heard — filling in the blanks… your mind can be processing a lot — then you must also reply, and participate in meetings, and in a lot of situations also look and sound intelligent. It does not matter how deaf or hard of hearing you are — even with mild hearing losses the fatigue can be as real. It sucks.
Communication and C(r)aptions
I cannot count the number of times I have missed the opportunity to share my expertise or look intelligent to others due to missed communication. Or the number of times I have been misunderstood by my responses, or the times I have said something so late in the communication trail I receive weird looks. The times I have spoken, and someone is still speaking, and I am unaware (embarrassing when it is your superiors you do this with). It can be harder if you are a deaf person with good speech, as it is almost guaranteed that others will often forget you are deaf. The days I have back-to-back meetings and the only access I have all day is auto captions — or none — are the hardest.
As a Deaf person with good speech, my needs can often be overlooked. Many will assume auto captions work well — but some days, for whatever reason the captions just do not work. These past two weeks, there have been four important meetings where I was going to rely on auto-captions, and they just did not work — I logged out and in again and tried everything — no captions at all — that is the worst. If I am in the office, I cannot turn the computer sound up loud enough to enable me to understand some (lipreading and auditory clues) — without captions, as that would disturb others — so I am stuck lip reading alone, gleaning what I can from PowerPoints — turning on captions on my phone or other options, while missing about 10 minutes or more of the meeting, trying to establish access. It is even harder to fill in blanks or know if auto captions are correct or not, when one has missed a significant chunk of a meeting / interaction.
Auto-captions are also not always accurate, which is why many refer to them as craptions (crap captions). You really need to use them regularly to notice the ‘crap’. They have improved significantly in recent years and are a good back up for when there is no other access. Real captions, generated by a real human listening and typing the captions are more accurate — I say more, not fully. Yes, they can be significantly more accurate, but they are typed using a stenotype machine with a phonetic keyboard and special software — they are still behind in time to real time speech, and phonetic typing can still lend itself to errors. A Deaf person is trying to watch the captions and the people speaking at the same time and this is still more mentally taxing — they also still need to fill in the blanks, adjust the errors (typically with workplace jargon the captioner is unaware of). Even with access it is more mentally taxing, than just listening. When there is a meeting with numerous speakers — even more so — as you do not hear changes in voice, do not see the facial expressions only words on a screen. All this makes it so hard to know, if the person is joyful or annoyed or sarcastic or any other emotion — spoken words typed verbatim on a screen do not convey the emotion expressed in tone, and on a face — and you are trying to watch both at the same time.
Auslan, Interpreters, Captioning and the Big Sting $$$
I am much more relaxed when I have Auslan interpreters for access. Auslan interpreting conveys the emotion in the speech and thus one does not have to mentally fill in the blacks as much — still we need to watch who is talking, trying to keep pace with who is saying what — but it is much easier than words on a screen. There is a shortage of Auslan Interpreters in Australia — so this is not always possible in all my meetings. I cannot plan to have such support, captions or Auslan Interpreting, in all my meetings as I am limited to $6,000 in support every calendar year. That does not go far at all. Job Access, the Federal Government Support for workers with disability — caps the amount of Auslan or Captioning support at $6,000 per individual every year. It’s been the same for 18 years — never increased along with Interpreter and captioner wages and CPI, zero increases! All other disabilities and equipment support costs have increased and Job Access has paid these increases — just not with Interpreting or Captioning.
This week alone I have 12 meetings, 14 hours of time in meetings — if I booked captioning for all these meetings, I would be spending over $2,600 in a single week. If I booked Auslan Interpreters, I would be spending up towards $4,000 — as I need book two interpreters for a minimum of two hours each (even for one-hour meetings). I could schedule and shuffle meetings and sometimes, in shorter meetings, try for a single interpreter and lessen that to around $3,000 — but still… you see, my support dollars will be exhausted rather quickly. I can access more hours and dollars in my NDIS plan for Auslan Interpreting for leisure, than I can for work supports (note: just think I am at work more days than I am not in a calendar year) — this is wrong — it really makes the statement (intentionally or unintentionally), that we do not really want people with disability in the workforce, particularly in professional or leadership roles. This is why Deaf staff go to meetings without support or rely on minimal support (craptions for example). We are forced into these situations, or would have to decide to have only three weeks of support if we are in professional careers, three weeks in a 12-month period!
Forging a Career in an Inaccessible World
Dylan Alcott at the Federal Government’s National Jobs Summit recently, made the statement “Some people want a job, for sure, but do you know what else some people want? They want a career. They want a leadership position.” In leadership positions, we want to be supported to showcase our best selves. I can be more than I am — but I do not have the access those with hearing have. Access is more than captioning and Interpreting — it is also understanding and partnership with those with differing needs. Partnership in allowing plenty of notice for arranging supports, partnership in taking things slower at times to allow participation and response. To not speak all at the same time, to watch the auto-captions yourself in some meetings so you know when they are wrong for your colleagues. Pause. Take breaks in meetings, between sentences, between speakers, limit the background noises, use only captioned videos and perhaps ask your deaf colleagues how to help them in meetings. To understand in back-to-back meetings are a nightmare, and Friday late afternoons are the worse in energy levels to follow important meetings.
I can walk out my front door and put up a wall, a persona that allows me to function — hopefully appearing as a successful leader in my field — in an inaccessible world. I will feel uncertain in hearing environments, feel anxious even, and I will not always successfully mask this, such is not a great look in a leadership role, sigh. Just remember it is not always because I can’t — it is because I do not have the access. I am comfortable as a Deaf person — just not always at ease in a hearing environment. Even though I speak very well, I am more comfortable with Auslan Interpreting support, though I use this sparingly as there are limited interpreters available and I choose to leave this for those where this is an only option for access — or for students studying who really do need this support.
Just don’t judge us, we are not lazy, rude, or indifferent. It is just a lifetime of missed social engagements and missed communication gaps that can leave a void (in knowledge and communication) and we are mentally working hard behind the scenes trying to fill the void.
A new smart planter is set to provide a simple and efficient way to green buildings and surfaces where conventional planting is impossible.
Griffith University PhD student Majed Abuseif has just been announced as a finalist in the QBE AcceliCITY Resilience Challenge for his project using artificial intelligence and simulation models to incorporate green infrastructure into building and the urban environment.
The global competition seeks entrepreneurs whose ventures use smart city solutions to address risk, equity and sustainability in our urban environments and has narrowed it down to the ten best solutions.
Working as an architect and landscape architect, Mr Abuseif’s PhD focuses on the implementation of trees on buildings, and building science and environmental simulations.
The smart planter box
“The smart planter box enables us to green buildings and surfaces, indoors or outdoors, in any environment,” he said.
“It is a novel modular system capable of supporting standard plants and trees.”
Scientists have been trying to redress the growing ecological imbalance caused by urban development by incorporating certain types of green infrastructure such as green roofs and walls, but unfortunately the technologies available to date have been limited and need infrastructure to host them.
Putting plants on buildings generally presents risks that hinder their implementation, such as plant roots, wind loads, waterproofing, irrigation requirements and other problems.
Mr Abuseif engaged with industry partners and worldwide experts trying to integrate trees on buildings by incorporating rooftop gardens.
“I found some traditional technologies that could be used on buildings, then started developing a design based on a modular system that can be put on any surface and any location,” he said.
“The planter box can be integrated into existing infrastructure, or act as a stand-alone planter.
“It can calculate anything the green infrastructure needs — from the amount of water the plant needs, to the temperature of the leaves, or even how it will perform inside the built environment.”
The system can even be connected to Smart Cities and Smart Building models, so councils and developers can obtain better insights on climate change and urban heat islands to help with development of mitigation strategies.
Mr Abuseif said the smart planter box is a closed system so it can mimic any environment.
“We could put this system in a forest and develop it to mimic a bushfire situation, so when there is a risk of a bushfire it will give us the alarm and we could act before a disaster happens,” he said
“Because the system has a water compartment, it can harvest water, so it can also help mitigate stormwater flooding issues in the city.
“We can even use this system to predict the energy consumption of buildings, and to validate the environment aspect of a building.
“Architects will be able to use this as a design tool and a research tool, which will help in designing sustainable buildings as well as monitoring them.
“The next step is to deliver my skills and design for people around the world, helping to save our planet and enhancing people’s lifestyles.“
Distinguished Professor Paul S.C. Taçon
Dr Riona Tindal
