Veronika Wild

-Image by Roel Wijnants licenced under CC ND Saturday, 27 April 2024 I had hoped to finish on a happier note this month, but this weekend women all over Australia have been marching in protest at yet another murder of a mother and her three children. Quite a few men have been marching too, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.  Many are calling for a Royal Commission, but I have little faith. The Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody which ran from 1987 to 1991, resulted in 399 recommendations, very few of which have been implemented with the result that 470 Aboriginal people have died in custody since. The huge expense involved could have been better spent improving conditions for Australia’s indigenous people instead. Much the same can be said with respect to the Royal Commission into Aged Care in 2018. It too, revealed many tragic stories of abuse and neglect and resulted in a large number of recommendations, but again, so far very little has changed, though not fo

  Poppies by the Roadside  Many thanks to Pamela Kelly for this image  It’s Anzac Day again, the day that Australia commemorates its fallen servicemen and women. There won’t be many if any, of the original Anzacs left, since that tradition began after the First World War – you know, the one that was to end all wars, but let me tell you if they knew about Gaza and Ukraine and all the useless wars we’ve fought since, they’d be turning over in their graves. So would those who fought so valiantly against Fascism in World War Two. They would be horrified to see those ideas gaining traction again in so many countries around the world. Some people never learn or have extremely short memories.  Lest we Forget THOSE OTHER VICTIMS While we are mourning the loss of life in war, we should also consider another group of victims who did not lose their lives in battle, but committed suicide on returning home. We did not hear about them after World War Two, but perhaps they were not counted previou

  This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA If it’s difficult for an individual to change long standing habits, it’s even more difficult to change a culture, especially if it has a long tradition behind it and is fairly consistent across a society. I have been thinking about how the change towards non -violence occurred in the West. It began in the post -war period really when, seeking to prevent such horrors in future, people asked themselves, “How could people have become so unspeakably cruel” and why did they just “follow orders.” The upshot was that other ideas about child rearing which had been circulating just below the surface, such as Steiner’s views and that of psychologists such as Freud , Jung and others, began to gain wider attention, along with Piaget’s discoveries about how children learn. Broadly, the conclusion was that children who didn’t experience, trauma, violence and neglect, were less likely to become violent adults. AN ANTI - AUTHORI