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Soon after this conversation, I went along to an event run by Amnesty International and met another girl who shares Amelia's intuitive passion for the idea that boys and girls should be equal. Sally Chapman is doing an arts degree at the Australian National University, specialising in development studies, and hopes to work in India when she graduates. "I'd like to work for the empowerment of women at the local level," she says.
At the tender age of 22, Sally has already travelled extensively in India, Africa and South-East Asia. She always likes to travel alone. Doesn't she ever feel afraid when she's alone in strange places? "Not at all," she says "Being alone forces me to communicate and I can do what I want." As I listened to this adventurous young woman, it struck me that she is exactly the kind of woman that little Amelia might grow up to be. And, in fact, Sally Chapman is determined to do what she can to ensure that girls like Amelia are able to have all the opportunities that boys have, no matter what part of the world they happen to be born in.
For the past 12 months, Sally has been the volunteer co-ordinator of a women's team for Amnesty International in Canberra. They have been working on Arnnesty's "women's rights are human rights" campaign. This international campaign puts a particular focus on strategies to prevent female genital mutilation in the 20 countries in which it occurs, and on honour killing in Pakistan, where hundreds of women are murdered each year to maintain the honour of their family. These women's campaigns arise from Amnesty's support for the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. This is the convention whose optional protocol our federal government recently refused to ratify, to the "disappointment" of Amnesty, according to its interim national director, Deb Stringer.
If you saw the documentary on honour killings on ABC-TV a couple of weeks ago, you'll know this is a particularly gruesome manifestation of discrimination against women. If a woman in Pakistan tries to choose her own marriage partner, seek a divorce or report a rape, she is considered to have injured the honour of her family, in the Punjab region alone, 286 women were reported to have been killed for honour in 1998 because they brought shame to their family. Often the male relatives who commit these murders receive little, if any, punishment. This is because there are special legal provisions relating to honour killings. Also, many police are reluctant to take action in what they consider to be private family matters. Amnesty has highlighted the case of 36-year-old Samia Sarwar who was shot dead in her lawyer's office in April 1999, at the instigation of her parents, because she was trying to escape an abusive marriage. No charges have been laid.
Seeking to change discriminatory practices like honour killing and female circumcision, which causes health problems for an estimated 110 million women worldwide, is a desperately difficult endeavour. Long-standing cultural traditions embed these practices and women themselves play an active role in the maintenance of these traditions. Increasingly, Amnesty works in partnership with local non-government organisations and individuals who are seeking to bring about change from within their own cultural context.
It is tough reading Amnesty's reports. It's clear that hate and cruelty are thriving. I'm grateful that these activists have got the passion to keep on battling for a better world. And I respect their commitment to independence. Amnesty refuses funding from all governments and political parties. That's why volunteers are selling candles today to raise much-needed funds. I'll be buying one for Amelia.
It turned out he was fine. Well, sort of fine. He appeared to be a homeless man who was taking the opportunity of a long train trip over the Great Dividing Range for a snooze in a dry place, locked away from prying eyes. This guy was not one of life's winners, but at least he didn't fall into that category of especially vulnerable people, the injecting drug user who has really let it rip.
This week, the death of Paula Yates - British TV presenter, partner of Michael Hutchence and mother of four - reminded the world again that wealth and fame cannot protect the polydrug user from sudden death. The exact cause of Yates's death is still to be established. Media reports have left us with a picture of an unconscious woman, alcohol and drugs by the bedside, with her four-year-old daughter, Tiger Lily, wandering around the house. This child's father, rock star Hinchence, had already died prematurely with drugs and alcohol in his blood stream.
There are two pieces of TV footage of Paula Yates that have really stuck in my mind. They were broadcast around the world when her death hit the news. In one sequence she is walking from a car into a building. She wears a gorgeous black, low-cut dress and she's smiling. But there is something odd about the way she is walking. She rolls and leans a little too far back. Her arms flop behind her. She is sexy beyond words and disturbingly vulnerable. To put it bluntly, she looks off her face. In the next bit of footage we see her sheet-covered body on a trolley being slid into the back of a car.
Suddenly, we could be watching those last shots of Marilyn Monroe, with tousled hair and big cardigan, before she's found, as the press must tell us, naked and dead in bed. Or it could be the devastating footage of jazz icon, Billie Holiday rasping, out a last few notes from a throat now ravaged by the needle and the bottle. Or it could even be Hutchence himself, blasting raw sex appeal down the camera's lens, before he drops into a luxury hotel to end his days and begin Tiger Lily's journey towards being an orphan.
This month the City of Melbourne has launched a draft drug action plan for public comment. It is full of sensible ideas designed to reduce the number of people, mainly young people, who die from overdoses in the CBD. The proposals include an overdose service, outreach workers in high-usage areas, purity testing kits, vending machines for needles and community workers administering Narcan. Fatalities resulting from heroin overdoses have doubled in Victoria in the past two years. There were 359 deaths in 1999. The City of Melbourne has the highest rate of drug-related fatalities in Victoria, but non-fatal overdoses are also a big problem, with 690 in the last six months of 1999 alone.
Harm-minimisation strategies are essential to save lives. But it's great to see calls for detoxification and rehabilitation services too. Because, as the litany of the dead, both famous and unknown, makes clear to me, for some people there is no safe level of drug and alcohol use. Abstinence is the only way that some of us can safely promise our kids that we'll be around long enough to watch them grow up.
The capacity of relationships with animals to improve our mental health, lower the blood pressure and encourage us to get some exercise has received a fair bit of coverage from the media circus, I guess stories that offer the opportunity for appealing pictures are likely to get a run. So we've heard that nursing homes are keeping dogs on staff to calm dementing residents and offer comfort to the confined. And there are intermittent reports that people with depression experience an uplift in mood when they go swimming in the sea with dolphins.
But it is rare to see a piece that tries to talk about the grief it is possible to experience when a person loses an animal with which they've genuinely shared their life. Indeed, the only stock media story that endeavours to enter this territory of pain is the occasional depiction of pet cemetries. But these stories tend to be faintly satirical and to somehow imply that anyone who goes to all the expense of burying their pet, or putting up a monument, must be some sort of loser with an inadequate life. The exception to this pattern of implicit derision was an interview I saw earlier this year on the religious program Compass on ABC TV. The reporter interviewed a minister of religion who works full-time with people who are grieving over the loss of a pet. It was the only time I've ever seen someone treat this topic with the sensitivity and respect it deserves.
As you must gather by now, I believe the grief people feel when a pet dies can be as authentic and as profound as the suffering experienced when a much-loved person dies. I lost my faith as a child when my dog died and nobody could help me understand why. Frankly, as I've whizzed about my busy working, life, since the vet told me what must happen to my dog, I've divided the people in my life into two categories. Those to whom I can give an honest answer when they ask me, "How are you?" And those to whom I simply say, "Good, thanks" - because I'm not confident they'll comprehend the significance of my sad news. And for some reason I couldn't bear it if anyone made some remark that underestimated the importance of losing this old, brown dog to me,
I can honestly say that some of the most contented moments I've experienced in the past 15 years have been when I'm driving around in my car with Red sitting on the seat beside me-just the two of us. Silent. At peace with each other's company. Its also pretty good when we cruise about a park together. He sniffs. I look about me and let my mind drift into neutral. It is one of the rare moments of truly relaxing down-time that I have in my life. Nothing is expected of me, We just "are" together. When he was young, we spent a lot of time in the bush. It was a time of long walks in lonely places with me roaring at him in guttural tones to stop him chasing kangaroos.
It's when I learnt that a woman needs to adopt a deep "Aussie bloke" voice if she wants to control a dog with the scent of 'roo in its nostrils. But the old bloke needs precious little controlling right now. The toughest part is explaining it all to my step-children. One thing is for sure, I'm taking their sorrow seriously. It is as strong as my own.
When the principal, Barbara Barraclough, first came to the school as a history teacher in 1981, 60 per cent of the girls were Anglo-Australians. The Greek girls were the biggest immigrant group, making up 20 per cent of the students, closely followed by the Italians. Now in the year 2000, only 2 per cent of the girls are Anglo-AustrAians. The biggest group today are the Arabic-speaking girls, mostly Muslims, who make up roughly half the school population. (When you walk into the senior classrooms, nearly a quarter of the girls are wearing the hijab or scarf.) The next largest group are the Vietnamese, who make up 15 per cent of the girls. Then there is a mix of Indians, Pacific Islanders and the daughters of refugees from the former Yugoslavia and Africa.
It's not just the many languages that make Bankstown a challenging place to teach. This is the first point of settlement for most of these families, so the cultural traditions of their homelands still dominate. And then of course, there's poverty. When I asked the principal to describe the socioeconomic background of the families, she drily commented, "They're not from the big end of town."
When you walk into Bankstown Girls' High - indeed when you walk into Bankstown's shopping mall - you walk into the heartland of "multicultural" Australia. Here, mulficulturalism is not a policy made up on a distant planet called Canberra. It is the reality of daily life. The shop signs are in Arabic and Vietnamese, and if you go into one of the cheap restaurants that are packed with customers at lunch time, your waiter is unlikely to ask for your order in English.
What does this ethnic mix of recent immigrants mean for the teachers at Bankstown Girls' High? According to the principal, "the greatest challenge is to achieve functional and political literacy so our girls can live in mainstream Australian society and function in daily life". As she simply sums it up, "literacy is crucial for survival". It is so critical that the school runs literacy and computer classes for parents as well. But Barraclough has much higher hopes for the girls than mere survival: "We want to give the girls the kind of opportunities educationally that they may have been deprived of due to their immigrant or refugee status."
It seems the risk of missing out is not simply a matter of cultural dislocation or limited parental education. Even where the parents of the girls were well-educated in their home country, it doesn't always translate into the Aussie context. "Often back home the education was of the chalk-and-talk variety, with the teacher out the front and in control. It was a passive kind of learning," Barraclough explains. "But here we value the capacity to communicate ideas and to express opinions. This kind of active learning can be a big cultural challenge for some of our girls."
I visited the school as part of a special day for Year 11 girls to help them prepare for their I trial year of schooling. I watched the academic co-ordinator for the senior years, Sue Cole, who has taught at the school for more than 15 years, use warmth, encouragement and energetic questioning to stir even the most reticent girls into active participation. Cole and Barraclough are passionate about helping these girls develop the vital skills of critical thinking and independent learning. Drawing on her own experience, the principal pointed out why this is essential: "The historiography of World War I has changed so significantly in recent years; almost everything I was taught is now considered to be plain wrong. Our girls need to learn that what we teach them today won't be the truth forever."
Well over 30 per cent of these Bankstown students qualify for university each vear. Many more go on to TAFE or employment. It is a tribute to these committed teachers.