Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: When the fast track seems a…, in reply to 81stcolumn,
Imagine what one might choose to shoot at (for fun) in Wellington?
According to David Grant's The Mighty Totara: The Life and Times of Norman Kirk, Big Norm enjoyed shooting pigeons with an air pistol from his parliamentary office.
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Hard News: Masters of Reality, in reply to Steve Barnes,
who would they like to put up and is he a better choice that Shearer?
I believe they had Metiria Turei in mind. $2000 jacket vs $50,000 forgotten bank account.
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Hard News: Masters of Reality, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
their ‘just-the-two-us’ approach
That’s it, sho’ nuff. They hear the crystal raindrops fall on the window down the hall.
Just the two of us
Building castles in the sky. -
Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I wonder if there's ever been any official recognition of these unfortunates. One of the victims listed, a woman who suffered from a severely disabling psychiatric illness, was the grandmother of someone I know. While the official account states that those who died were locked in their wards, her family believed that she was often chained to her bed.
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Deja vu all over again. Saatchi's Wellington attempted a similar campaign for Tower Insurance in the early 90s. Tower staff, supposedly filmed without their knowledge, delivered expansive soundbites about how being in the insurance game was the next best thing to being Mother Theresa. Essentially it was standard issue corporate motivational porn unleashed upon the TV public, and the angry reaction saw the campaign pulled in short order.
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Speaker: Sex with the office lights on:…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Oh, you mean the 1970’s where The Truth maliciously “outed” Marilyn Waring, who could have been legally fired for being a lesbian if she wasn’t an MP or charged with a crime if she was a man?
In 1976. In the quaint parlance of the era Waring was alleged to have “broken up” a prime specimen of the kiwi family, and from Hamilton, no less. I remember someone phoning Truth and pretending to congratulate them on the story. Having won their confidence they then expressed the wish that Muldoon’s alleged philandering would be given similar front page treatment. The truth spokesthingy supposedly said that they’d “love to”, but that there were practical considerations.
Moving forward a little, in about 1990 the Herald ran a relatively low key story about a couple putting on a similar performance to the Chch pair in an Auckland hotel. It happened in daylight, curtains wide open on an upper floor, and was witnessed by the massed tradies of an adjourning high-rise construction site, who made their presence known with loud applause, though they apparently left that until something worth applauding had taken place.
Perhaps Corkery’s civilising presence on the “wireless” was a factor in the media treating the incident with what now appears as a kind of nudge-wink gallantry. That or the lack of smartphones back then.
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If something life-threateningly bad was going to happen to you in the old health department gulag it seems likely that it would have been in one of the institutions designed to deal with ‘criminal’ behaviour, such as Lake Alice or Porirua.
When Kimberley became the Levin Hospital and Training School in the early 1960s signs were erected exhorting the drive-through public to show consideration, as this was ‘a child’s world’. Provided you remained a child in your behaviour the state would look after you while withholding your rights as an adult. If you became violently disruptive, and had the size and strength to present a problem to your carers, presumably you’d have been reclassified as an adult and sent to an adult institution.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Joe, I’m not sure where the linking of psychopaedic nurses and concentration camp guards came from, but certainly not from me.
It was the stuff about the individual kindness shown to patients by their carers being of little value. While I make no claim that they were anything other than functionaries who carried out policy, in the early decades there was a genuine progressive culture of attempting to provide a quality of life that wasn't present at Templeton. While there appear to have been tensions between old school operatives and progressives, the Kimberley I've been at some pains to objectively recall was no haven for ratbags.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
So I take back the allegation that there are unmarked graves from the Kimberley era.
Thank you kindly Hilary. It only bothers me because I know that if it were true it would reflect badly on people who, while their methods might have been of another era, were essentially decent and humane.
But I can still criticise the idea of institutionalisation – whereby society decides who is ‘normal’ and who does not deserve the right to independence and agency so needs to have these choices denied them – and be vigilant about re-insitutionalisation. I also fight against the poor resourcing available to disabled people living in the community and their families.
I have to admit that I was somewhat shocked to read that Brent Swain was admitted to Kimberley as recently as the early 1970s. I'd naively assumed that attitudes had begun to move beyond the idea of institutionalisation for all but the most severe disabilities by then.
A couple of points about Kimberley's history - some of the chronic disabilities that the place once catered for have vanished or been mitigated by advances in medicine. For example, NZ's last sufferer from cretinism, a condition easily cured once its cause was understood, was supposed to have died there in the 1960s. One of the grimmest wards was reserved for those afflicted with hydrocephalus. Thanks to the development of the cerebral shunt, by the late 1950s they were freed from being bedridden, and their carers no longer had the unenviable task of physically turning them over to minimise the risk of bedsores. Then of course there are the various conditions that, again due to medical advances, can be detected in early pregnancy. I have no opinion to offer on that beyond being grateful that it's a decision I've never had to make.
But I also acknowledge there is still a need for happy, safe and temporary respite for many children and families in the Horowhenua region so good luck to those setting up the new service in the building at the edge of the site.
Any move to re-establish Kimberley as some kind of national facility seems like a return to re-instutionalisation. While I remember attendants and nurses occasionally driving individual patients to and from their homes as far away as Wanganui, I always wondered about those unfortunates who happened to live further away.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
I would have to offer that it would only take a small number of bad apples, and enough of the good one’s remaining silent, to give the very real perception to some that indeed the nurses were ‘guards’.
Rosemary, my mother was directed into psychopaedic nursing in 1940 at the age of 18 by the then Manpower Commission. Those familiar with Rita Angus's life story will be aware that she successfully opposed the attempt to 'manpower' her into work for which she was plainly unsuited.
Perhaps my mother might have resisted if she'd been older, smarter, or better educated. As she'd hoped to train as a midwife her level of hardship may have been less than that experienced by others. There seems to have been an element of vindictiveness in some of the decisions made by the Manpower Commission. For example, my mother recollected two sisters, daughters from a Canterbury high country sheep station who'd enjoyed a privileged life with servants, being directed to work at Templeton. One of the sisters suffered a nervous breakdown. On an even darker note she spoke of "sadists" (plural) who "should never have been allowed near those people".
I've seen no evidence that these "sadists" prevailed and made their way to the administration of the early Kimberley. Presumably they moved on to something better suited to their talents once the wartime exigencies had passed. However reprehensible we might find the historic practice of concentrating the disabled in their own community, the culture of Kimberley in its first decades under head attendant Charles Guy was hardly vulnerable to being compromised by "a few bad apples". There's been no mention made here of Health Minister Mabel Howard's oversight of the establishment of the Kimberley Centre. I do know that she visited the place more than once. If we're going to judge people then surely we should make some attempt to learn who they were and how they used their power, rather than resorting to caricature.
This applies today, in the disability field. Shit is happening to some that need care, and others( also in the system) fail to speak up.
This is why I find the ill-informed demonising of our past counterproductive. Battling historical straw people may be fun, but it's a distraction from the sins of the present.