It hasn’t been the best month in Australia. As we hurtle towards the year’s end and summer takes hold, the headlines have been far from the usual froth and bubble of December lifestyle journalism. This year, more than most, Australians have been enveloped in reminders that in the midst of life, we are in death.
It all started on 27 November. The national mourning triggered by the accidental death of a cricketer, Phil Hughes, after he was hit by a fast ball to the head, was succeeded within a week by the news of the sudden death of prominent disability activist and journalist, Stella Young. Stella and Phil were both well-known, public and beloved people in their 20s and early 30s respectively, and to say that the Australian media response was sombre, shocked and full-blown would be an understatement.
Things really took a turn for the worse on 15 December, the day that Australia was saturated with running news of a gun siege in a café in the centre of Sydney. A lone individual, Man Haron Monis, held a restaurant full of morning coffee-seekers and staff hostage at gunpoint for almost 16 hours, with the progress of the siege being narrated on every news service in the country. The tragic end of the siege resulted in the café’s manager, Tori Johnson, and customer Katrina Dawson, a barrister, being shot dead, along with the gunman himself.
Long before this culmination in the early hours of 16 December, though, the media and the Australian public were busy looking for causes, and places to lay the blame. Monis, a discredited sheikh, displayed a flag resembling the ISIL flag at one point, and demanded in one of his frequent phone contacts with police that an actual ISIL flag be delivered to him.
Some Australians, already made fearful of potential terrorist attacks by years of cultivation of paranoia by cynical politicians, started to manifest furious Islamophobic responses, but there was a counterpoint too, in the #Illridewithyou campaign on Twitter which snowballed into a national show of support for Australian Muslims who were feeling at risk as a result of this rhetoric.
The Sydney siege ended in the small hours of last Tuesday, and barely 72 hours passed before Australia was once again in bed with horror, with the discovery on 19 December of the bodies of eight children in a house in the northern Australian city of Cairns. At the time of writing this, the mother of seven of the eight children (and aunt of the eighth) is under arrest for the killings. (Although the mainstream media has decided to name the suspect, I will not do so, as this would serve to identify the dead. The family involved are Torres Strait Islander people and naming the dead is a cultural taboo).
Through all of these ostensibly disconnected events, there has been a palpable grasping at a narrative, a story that would make sense out of nonsense. What’s remarkable – or, perhaps given Australia’s recent history, not so remarkable – is how the narrative has skewed between the deaths which were the result of human violence (Monis and his victims, and the children in Cairns) and the accidental / natural deaths (Hughes and Young).
The accidental death of Hughes was accompanied by an almost frenzied and universal assertion that this was effectively an act of God; unavoidable, unpredictable, just one of those terrible things that happens sometimes. The motivation behind this absolute denial of any causality in this death was not hard to see – there was much genuine sympathy for the young cricketer who bowled the ball, and a strong desire to spare him further distress for the unintended consequences of his fast delivery. (You could argue, were you so inclined, that a desire not to cast a pall or question mark over Australia’s iconic summer of cricket was also a factor here). Young’s death, likewise, provoked a flood of warm remembrances, but was entirely absent any narrative around fault, blame or responsibility.
Contrast this to the stories that are already shaping and being debated backwards and forwards across Australia regarding Monis and Cairns. A sizeable chunk of the Australian right-wing media is sticking with the narrative of jihad as an explanation for Monis, while a more robust narrative has cast him as a disturbed lone wolf who acted alone and simple seized on a familiar symbolic platform for his actions.
What both camps agree on, however, is that Monis’s considerable and unedifying criminal history, which included, among other things, alleged sexual assault and the making of threats of violence, was a red flag that someone, somewhere, should have recognised. The fact that Monis was known to the Australian Federal Police, that he was out on bail for his various offences, has shaped a strong story that has a familiar ring to Australians dealing with the aftermath of human violence: This should have been predicted. This was preventable; why wasn’t it prevented?
The terrible events in Cairns are still shadowy, with the release of information being scanty as the investigation is still underway. However, within minutes of news of the arrest of the mother, speculation was afoot that mental health may have played a part in the tragedy, and, with it, a narrative was taking shape around the inadequacy of mental health support services in Cairns. If the mother had had better/different/more supports, the story goes, this would have been averted.
Absent actual facts, the popular narrative is using a well-worn trope to cast the mother as “mad rather than bad”, whereas Monis is certainly being assigned “bad rather than mad”. In both cases, though, the plaint is audible: This was predictable. This was preventable. Why wasn’t it prevented?
In this, these cases echo an almost universal theme in the way Australians, and the Australian media, process crimes of human violence. There is not just a hunger for causes – the search for causality is, I think, a ubiquitous thread in the way we deal with tragic events – there is also a conviction that human violence, unlike natural disasters or accidents, is completely preventable, should be prevented, and when it isn’t, people other than the perpetrator share some of the blame.
This is played out often, and to toxic effect, in family violence killings. The murder of 12-year-old Luke Batty by his father in February was accompanied by a rash of commentary around the father’s violent history and the predictability of this outcome. A sub-strain of this, although fortunately a relatively minor one, picked up the dismal theme of maternal culpability, with Rosie Batty, the grieving mother, the target of blame for “allowing” her son to be killed.
The Hunt familicide in rural Victoria in September 2014, in which the farmer-father killed his wife, three children then himself, was surrounded not (as you might reasonable expect) with a deepening of the discussion that Australia needs to have around family violence. Instead, it was a mess of speculation around mental health and social supports for farmers, despite the lack of any evidence indicating that Hunt suffered from any difficulties.
So why is it that Australians seem to think all deaths by human violence are (or should be) predictable and predicted, preventable and prevented? Why do we accept that some matters are out of our hands (illness, fires, fast cricket balls) but are so certain that the complex behaviour of other people is somehow completely controllable?
I think the answer to this will be multi-layered and probably worthy of a PhD or three, but I suspect that our recent history has something to do with it. Australians have some powerful models for public policy interventions that do appear to have actually altered the course of violent deaths, especially ones inflicted by strangers.
The most potent is the change to our gun control laws which occurred after Australia’s biggest mass murder, the Port Arthur Massacre of 1996. After killer Martin Bryant was able to slaughter 35 people at the tourist stop with his legally obtained weaponry, the Australian government moved to severely limit the legal ownership and use of self-loading rifles, self-loading and pump-action shotguns, and heavily tightened controls on their legal use. Although this wasn’t without controversy, it had widespread community support, and the narrative was satisfied and vindicated over time – never since has Australia experienced a gun-based spree killing.
Port Arthur and its aftermath is THE reason, I would contend, why Australians were not only horrified and sickened, but utterly bewildered, by Sandy Hook. In our favoured national story of preventability, the idea that gun violence would not trigger changes to prevent future gun violence is shocking, negligent, and unconscionable.
The narrative of preventability has its upsides – gun control is one obvious one, but there are others, in terms of increased and better targeted interventions in risk situations. That is can also be pernicious in its effects is also undeniable. Australians have been asked to accept ever-increasing anti-terrorism, data monitoring and data restriction laws in the name of prevention of possible (but not provable) harms. It can also serve to re-victimise the survivors who surround the situation. “YOU should have predicted / prevented…” the sullen murmur often goes. “It shouldn’t have happened…”
Perhaps it shouldn’t have. And perhaps, nonetheless, there was no butterfly effect to be interrupted with a hand wave, no moment to turn matters around that would have made a material difference, no chance other than chance itself that brought this specific person to this specific action. But that is a story too grim for us to contemplate, here at the world’s end.