OK to blame all men but not OK to blame all Muslims....hypocrisy, page-156

The scene she has constructed in her mind is so clear she could draw it. Floor, walls, lounge, table, chairs, television, the bodies of eight children and the colour red. The image is shaded and shaped by rumour and speculation; given detail and layered with every whisper she hears about how and why her neighbour, Raina Thaiday, allegedly stabbed to death three of her daughters, aged two, 11 and 12, four of her sons, aged five, six, eight and nine, and her 14-year-old niece in the house at 34 Murray Street, Cairns, six days before Christmas.
Ripene Jacob and her husband drive past the low-set cream and apricot housing department home at 34 Murray Street at least 20 times a day. School drop-off, grocery runs, work, family visits, school pick-up, friends’ houses, netball practice. “All we do is look,” says Ripene, 38. “Look left on the way up the street, right on the way back, every time. Left, right, left, right. Not a day goes by that we don’t look at that house.”
She sees public safety signs and a thick black tarp strapped to a tall steel fence and she sees the scene in her head. And if the scene in her head is so sickeningly dark and awful, she wonders what scenes her 13 children have constructed in their minds, what horrors they take to their sleep, about their eight friends who died in number 34.
“The dead memories,” Ripene says. “They are the dead memories in our heads.” She expected them to fade by autumn, to drift away with that long, hard summer and the darkness of 2014, the worst year for drugs, drink and street violence she recalls in 17 years living in the Cairns suburb of Manoora. She says there are two sides to Murray Street, good and bad, that she tracks in her mind over any given year, a mental ledger for the street she loves, heart and soul. “All the drugs, the drink, the violence on one side,” she says. “Then on the other side there’s God, belonging, joy, friendship.”
Last year, in Ripene’s Murray Street audit, the dark won, its victor’s flag a symbolic eyesore of an endless black tarp wrapped around the home of a once-beloved resident. But lately, just this very week, in fact, six months on from Christmas, as she rests on the sofa on her porch, looking up at number 34, she can see that tarp is fading, flapping and weakening in the wind, whispering rumours of a comeback.
Lunchtime in Disaster HQ. There are no SES volunteers, fire and rescue services or military personnel, but the small team gathered around the meeting table inside Manoora Community Centre in the middle of Murray Street is battling disaster all the same. The centre, which had been closed for three years, reopened after what local government figures lowered their voices to describe discreetly as “the events of last December”. Today’s agenda: the long-time-coming demolition of number 34.
“We’re rebuilding a community,” says Michael White, the Australian Red Cross co-ordinator of Murray Street’s Community Healing Project. “We’re approaching this in a framework that has similarities to when communities go through natural disasters and they’re recovering. You’ve got the same principles. We’re using the framework of recovery, the community rebuilding itself socially, the social fabric of themselves.”
The events of December 19 broke Murray Street, shattered the community as sure as flood and cyclone. Here, a resident’s “immediate family” can mean up to 300 people. Every fortnight Michael’s team gathers in locations that stretch from Raina Thaiday’s place to her children’s ancestral homelands across Cape York’s vast Northern Peninsula to Darnley Island in the Torres Strait, clearing the emotional devastation, the spirit wreckage, caused by the deaths of those eight children. They come not with bulldozers and bandages but with thoughts on how to best speak to a child about death; how to combat depression in remote communities; how to sleep at night; how to process that which can never be processed; how to drag a sister, brother, mother, neighbour back from the edge of disaster.
There are two key questions Murray Street residents have for Michael White and his team, from opposite sides of Ripene Jacob’s ledger. “Where the f..k were you last year?” and “What can I do to help?”
“I wish those services that are there now at the Manoora Centre were there a lot earlier for Raina,” Ripene says. “Because I know she was struggling with her children. If only someone was there earlier for her to reach out to, maybe we could have saved her and the family.”
The street is mute, has been for six months. Quiet but not peaceful. “The ghost street,” says another neighbour, Jason Jackson, who knew Raina when she was a beaming 16-year-old. “No kids riding bikes no more,” he says. “No kids playing footy, no kids in the park. Knock down the house of horrors and that might change.”
Last year, there were parties every night in Murray Street: mobs gathered in the park beside Raina’s house, meandering along the street at 3am, music blaring from boomboxes resting in baby prams. Now those mobs take the long way home, detour around Murray Street. Residents zig-zag around number 34, cross the road if they’re forced to pass it. Mums pass it with their heads down in respect, for Raina, for the girl they all knew as “Aunty Mero”, for the spirits that linger. “Sorry, my sister,” they say as they pass. Sorry for the kids. Sorry for the state you were in. Sorry for not talking.
Raina’s only direct neighbour, a former steel fabricator with emphysema named John, talks mostly now to fellow Murray Street residents Lukey and Richie; the three of them form a triangle of trade in tools, mandarins, taro plants, beers, novels, jokes and wisdom.
“There’s the shoes still up there,” says John, resting an elbow on his garden fence, directing Lukey’s eyes with a pointed finger to a pair of white sneakers hanging on an electrical wire by their shoelaces in front of Raina’s house. “That’s the youngest little feller’s shoes,” John says. “The older kids threw ’em up there one day.”
For six months John has watched those little white shoes swinging in the breeze above police and politicians and paramedics and public snoops and gossips and journalists who flocked to Murray Street and then left just as quickly. “It’s taken something really harsh like this here to be able to shake things up,” the 57-year-old says. “Before, the issues were just shovelled away. ‘It’s just Murray Street, don’t worry about it’.” He can’t take his eyes off those shoes. “Yeah, don’t worry about it,” John says. “It’s just some desperate people going through hell.”
John looks at his manicured front lawn. “They used to play right here, every day,” he says. “They’d sleep over our place. I’d be over her house all the time. She got a lot of plants off me; we worked on her garden together.”
Raina was sweet from the start, from the moment she moved in to Murray Street two years ago and set her eyes on John’s garden
and exclaimed: “That’s what I want!” Besides gardening, they spoke of parenting and relationships. Just as Raina’s kids had five different fathers, John’s seven kids had different mums. He was married twice, divorced, lost a kid to SIDS at three months. Hers was a past of abuse, bad relationships and bad luck, and still her default expression when she leaned over the fence was to smile: “Hey brother, how you grow them bananas?”
John looks at the row of banana trees lining her backyard and he can’t reconcile the Raina Thaiday he knew with the neighbour who allegedly killed those eight kids, those exuberant angels who would drop around to John’s house every day after school. “Knock, knock!” the kids would yell from the fence. “I’d come out and give ’em frozen cup, cordial frozen in a cup,” he says.
It became a daily ritual for Manoora kids, frozen cup at John’s place. “And that’s the thing I miss most. The older kids started coming, too, a whole bunch of kids every day after school buying these frozen cups. But after it all happened I told the kids who came, ‘Nah… I can’t anymore, you know, out of respect’.”
John stares at number 34 beyond the black tarp and steel fence that’s stood for six months as police have carried out forensic investigations and authorities have negotiated what Housing and Public Works Minister Leeanne Enoch calls “legal impediments”, while residents have called to have number 34 and all its darkness turned to dust. “It’s been here that long I’m surprised nobody’s torched it,” John says.
On the left side of Raina’s house is a council park where John goes each morning to pay tribute to “The Manoora 8” at a towering tree that has become a makeshift memorial space coloured with flowers, butterfly prints and keepsakes such as basketballs and football jerseys; notes that read, “RIP, you were too young”.
“The whole thing was a big surprise,” John says. “You can’t get your head around the how and why. She was a very likeable woman, that’s why it’s so hard to accept.”
Lately, John has been dropping in to the community centre to talk with Kath Lowah, a Torres Strait Islander police liaison officer appointed to the community after the deaths. “It’s more fitting to be able to talk to her because she’s in that culture,” John says. “It’s no good asking a lot of white people because they don’t understand the attitudes of the world Mero was in, her culture, what she had in her mind.”
Lukey was born into Raina’s culture and he’s no closer to why. He moved to Murray Street 36 years ago. “This was all white people when I moved in,” he says. “Then, over the years, the Housing Department started buying the houses and then everybody started moving in, the Murri people came in and the white people started selling up.”
Lukey, 57, hasn’t been sleeping since his wife Shaneene died last August. On bad nights he walks to the cemetery to sit by her grave. Lately, he’s been visiting the graves of Raina’s kids as well, eight white rectangles of painfully small dimensions, adorned with teddy bears and glittered butterflies. He finds himself staring at the grave of her two-year-old daughter, “the little bubba” who Lukey and John were always guiding back home from the park or from the road when she slipped out of Raina’s view.
“Eight kids!” Lukey says, throwing his head back, eyes closed to the sun. “It just sorta happened. She was screaming, like she was possessed. Then she was blueing with a lady across the road here. Standing on the other side of that big tree, hitting the fence across the road, screaming out.” He points to the house to the right of Lukey’s. “One minute they were out on the road, then it cooled down. She went back to her home and then she started up again.” Lukey recalls Raina rambling things he couldn’t understand, things drawn from what seems to have been a fervent religious devotion. “She was singing out, ‘I’m the creator, I’m the chosen one, you’ll all listen to me’. That’s when we knew somethin’ was wrong.”
John nods his head. “The children had slept out in the yard for two nights beforehand,” John says. “The most bizarre thing. She pulled everything out of the house and she said she was going to spring clean. Then she took a hose in there and hosed the whole lot of it out, the walls, everything.”
“I just remember that scream,” Lukey says, shaking his head.
“She was arguing with everybody on the street,” John says. “She created her own scene where she wouldn’t have anyone bothering her. It just looked that way to me. She made it so no one would go near her so she had her own personal time.” Lukey nods. “Then that’s when all that happened in there,” he says.
And, inevitably, the pavement whispers spread. The kids were drugged. Police found a steak knife covered in blood. And the eldest boy, Lewis, 20, walked in on the whole twisted mess.
The funeral was called “Keriba Omasker”, “our children” in Raina’s Torres Strait Islander dialect. Some 4500 people, including Prime Minister Tony Abbott, attended the January 10 service for the eight victims of what might turn out to be the worst incident of domestic violence in Australian history. Raina Thaiday was formally charged with eight counts of murder in a bedside hearing in the Cairns Base Hospital where she was promptly assessed by psychiatrists. In January, Magistrate Suzette Coates said the “most appropriate” way for Raina’s case to be considered was in the Mental Health Court, which decides the state of mind of people charged with criminal offences, and adjourned the case until June 24 while legal reports are finalised.
In her office in Cairns CBD, solicitor Rebekah Bassano – a former principal solicitor for the Queensland Indigenous Family Violence Legal Service – sits amid a collection of open multi-coloured folders for family violence and Child Safety department cases that see her travel regularly from the streets of Manoora through Cape York and the Torres Strait Islands.
“Somehow, Raina has slipped through the cracks,” Bassano says. “There would have been something. Notifications. Were things followed up? Something significant has gone wrong in that whole set of circumstances. Not even from a lawyer’s perspective, but from a human perspective. Why didn’t someone call the police earlier? That kind of behaviour doesn’t go unnoticed. And why didn’t she ask for help?”
She asks her questions rhetorically, then takes a long breath that suggests her answers are many. “People with the larger families are already on the back foot,” she says. “They’ve often had dealings with Child Safety, with police, and if it’s not them they know someone who has. There’s always that intervention, Child Safety, police fear. They can’t trust anyone because they’ve seen what’s happened to their friends. But maybe it gets too much, people can’t cope. You could see that on a daily basis in these areas. To ask for help, in Raina’s culture, can be seen as a sign of weakness as well, but, also, you are inviting a whole lot of problems into your life with unintended consequences.”
Raina’s closest neighbours, John and Lukey, are well aware of such consequences; everybody is in Murray Street, which is why nobody rushed to phone police when they saw Raina’s erratic behaviour in December. “She was no different to any other family around here,” says John. “You hear yellin’ and screamin’, well, you keep out of it. You can interfere to the stage where it can come back at you.”
Says Bassano: “They have great case workers in Manoora and they are great to work with but they’re understaffed because there is so much going on. Greater and greater workloads. You’ve got Child Safety workers on one side with more power than the police. On the other side you’ve got parents who are really struggling, and if they ask for help they’re worried about Child Safety coming in and taking their kids away. There’s a housing issue too, such a shortage of public housing and you don’t want to lose your home.
“So what is the likelihood of them calling services for help? They won’t. My instant reaction is that they need to find someone they trust and they will ask around first and then they will only go to someone that someone else has vouched for. That’s how I get a lot of clients and that’s how they access services.”
Kath Lowah is someone they trust. A Murray Street woman knocks on the door of Kath’s office in Manoora Community Centre. “My licence?” the woman asks.
“Yes, darlin’,” Kath says, reaching into her desk for the woman’s licence, found by a stranger yesterday and dropped in to Kath.
“I’d like to come and have a yarn with ya later,” the woman asks.
“Of course,” says Kath.
“I’ve been having a lot of problems. I was gonna ring the mental health police. My case manager, he’s terrible. I need to have a cup of tea.”
“You come back later, ’ay,” Kath says.
Another woman enters the office wanting help to secure a blue card for working with children. “I can do that,” says Kath. She waves goodbye to the women and smiles. There’ll be 10, 20 more where they came from just this afternoon. “This is how it goes,” she says.
Kath has spent her day overseeing plans for the destruction of number 34. Raina’s family want the house destroyed. The community wants it destroyed. But Kath must carefully negotiate the cultural wishes of a street whose residents – Aboriginal, Anglo, Torres Strait Islander, Cook Islander, Maori, Papua New Guinean, African, Filipino – all have their own systematic approach to what’s happened. “They are all spiritual,” says Kath. “The cultural groups have their own stigma around the house itself.”
It’s Kath’s job, among many, to build connections between Manoora mums of different cultures. “This is about bringing together those people who do have hard times,” says Kath. “It’s all about, ‘Let’s not be judgmental, let’s help. Let’s just roll up our sleeves and do it’. Torres Strait Islanders, especially, come from headhunters and warriors. So we have that stigma that we are supposed to be a strong people. And we are, but this western society we live in is so contemporised that it’s very different from living on an island in a village. Very different.”
A few houses down from number 34, Eleanor Wasaga considers the similarities she shares with Raina Thaiday. Same age, 38 this year. Same heritage, Torres Strait Islander. Same number of children that Raina had, nine. Same street. Same stresses. “F..k,” she says, looking from her front porch up to number 34. “I didn’t even know she was having hard times.”
It’s not easy being a mother of nine on Murray Street. Employment stress, money stress, breakfast stress, dinner stress, school stress, earache stress, hole in your kid’s shoe stress, snot running from your kid’s nose stress. Eleanor talks about it because every day she passes number 34 her heart hurts for not talking about it with Raina.
She wants to rewind, go back, walk up this street a hundred times again and each time she passes Raina Thaiday ask if she would like to drop her kids at her house. She wants to put her hands out and touch her neighbour’s shoulders with both hands and look her in the eyes and say, “I f..king get it, sister”; tell Raina of her years of depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder, the years she spent barely functioning as a young mum on Horn Island in the Torres Strait. “You name it, I knew it,” she says.
“It’s hard for our women to say that. We don’t talk about doing it tough. Back in the Torres Strait, if you express your feelings to people they will look at you like you’re a bad person. They’ll be judgmental. When you walk away, they’ll start talking about you. If you told anybody about your business, your struggles, they’ll talk about you.
“I constantly drank alcohol. I had no support from family or anybody else on Horn Island. I was going through depression but it was never identified by anyone. It took me to smash every window in my parents’ house to get somebody to notice I was struggling. Then I got locked up in the watchhouse and I woke up the next morning and I knew I needed help.
“I sold my greatest possession – a dinghy with a motor – for $500 and got on the plane and came to Cairns. I walked into Wuchopperen [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health centre, a short walk from Murray Street] and I said, ‘Help me’. I went into rehabilitation for six months, went back to the island 10 months later as a new person. They were all like, ‘Oh, you got help. Oh, good for you’, and I was, like, ‘No! This is how we support each other in this community?’ No one put their hands up to say, ‘Eleanor, there is something wrong’. I took bread and butter out of my children’s mouths by selling our dinghy just so I could find someone to help.”
She shakes her head. “Nup,” she says. Something fierce in her eyes. “No more. I’m on a little mission, a healing. I’m putting a group together for the mums of Murray Street. I want them to come together because they need it. They need that little time to themselves, that ‘me time’. The stay-at-home mums, the busy mums at work, we need to get together and heal. I want everybody to come out and stand in the street and have a good talk. Just talk. No discrimination. No judgment. I want them to shout out, ‘Aaaarrrgggh, these kids are driving me mad’. And then we leave it all out on the road and go back inside and love our kids again.”
Tears form in Eleanor’s eyes. She’s thinking about December 19, when she returned home from an errand to find Murray Street swarming with police cars and ambulances. She looked instantly to her own place to see all eight of her kids who still live at home lined perfectly along her front porch. “And I was just looking at them standing there, thinking, ‘Eight kids, eight kids’.” She collapsed in that moment, weeping in front of her children, repeating those words.
But the thing that stayed with her was how beautiful her kids were that day, how strong and well-mannered and peaceful. She remembers every kid on Murray Street being the same in those long summer days afterwards: quiet, polite, supportive. Months later, Eleanor asked her children why they were so well behaved. The older children told her straight: “We thought if Aunty Mero could do that to her kids, maybe you could do that to yours.”
It’s early June, and Raina’s next-door neighbour, John, has decided to resume his afternoon frozen cups for the kids of Murray Street. Fifty cents for a cup of frozen cordial. “We all have our own ways of healing,” he says. “I just said to myself, ‘They didn’t die. They just moved away’.”
John loves his street more than ever. “It’s not the slum people think it is,” he says. “There’s pride here, people who care. It’ll take a long time, probably 20 years I think, but we’ll have some new people here one day who won’t even remember what happened at number 34.”
Ripene Jacob walks up her street and takes another look at number 34. The house is coming down. The black tarp opens up to allow access for demolition crews, access for the light. It’s a slow, careful process, more jigsaw dismantling than wrecking-ball destruction. Piece by piece, the house of Ripene’s dead memories will disappear from Murray Street. A memorial will be erected in the home’s place, hopefully unveiled on the anniversary of the children’s deaths. The Murray Street park will be extended and there’ll be a patch of new, fresh lawn for Ripene’s kids to play in. Ripene will keep looking at this space at number 34. As the years pass, and her children grow, she’ll keep looking left and right and left and right again, until the day she sees something new. “The good memories,” she says.
Soon a crowd of people are surrounding her, watching a house turn to dust. Ripene looks at the faces of her neighbours, the people of Murray Street, its sisters and brothers and fathers and mothers, all standing out on the road. Talking.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/li...ory/5de5d9441f1f6ba2a308ea1ba3e82146[/BCOLOR]
The coroner was involved , but as yet I cant find it, any help would be appreciated.
Raider

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