Sikamikanico Blogs

Baby G is three and a half. An only child. A little odd (can't think where he gets it). This is some stuff he has said. We were enjoying the play area at the Newcastle museum when for no apparent reason he bolted for the door at top speed. Upon catching up and asking why, he said "there was a tiger" and refused to elaborate further. Told no because Santa is coming soon when asking for a toy near Christmas: "Santa will be very happy to see me". Play acting a phone call, as he placed the phone in the cradle: "That was a rabbit". "A talking rabbit?" "Yeah, it speaks English". The night before Easter Sunday, told the Easter bunny is coming tonight: "So will there be eggs for me tomorrow?" Coy parent: "Maaayyybe...." "So there may not?" "When I grow up I'm going to buy Mummy a new ipad, because hers is broken" "And how did it break?" (he stood on it) "...the next one won't br

Rumours have been swirling for years; he always did seem a bit slimy, a bit creepy - but today it was confirmed that in 2006 Josh Duggar of the reality show 19 Kids and Counting was investigated for sexually molesting several underage girls over the period 2002-2003. It hasn't been confirmed that these girls were his sisters, but all lived in the same house as him, Josh's parents are named as the victims' parents, and one of them is said to be underage now, in 2015 - his sister, Joy, who was five years old in 2003. I'll wait whilst the bile rising in your throat settles. Josh's father, Jim Bob (yee haw) apparently waited over a year before taking Josh to the police; the investigating officer (who was later jailed himself for child pornography offences) gave Josh a stern talking to but took it no further, the statute of limitations expired, and that was seemingly that. The family reportedly "turned closer to God", Josh married and had several children, a

It's a fairly minor story - an anecdote, really - compared to the horrors being exposed , continuously, at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse; the Catholic school in Ballarat where at one point in the 1970s every teacher was a child sex abuser, the class at that school where 12 of 33 pupils have committed suicide. And yet I tell this little tale of the attitude of a teacher at a Catholic school in the 1980s towards quite probable child sex abuse, to shine a light on how children were viewed at the time, on how signs of abuse were viewed, on how much "pastoral care" was going on, on just how they were able to get away with the whole thing for so long. Whilst I never really had a group of friends, in the late 1980s, in my later years of primary school at a Catholic school in Sydney's northern beaches, I briefly joined a group of girls in my year to draw comics. We all loved to sit on the playground and draw and write stories in stacks o

Just in time for Mother's Day, News columnist Miranda Devine has trotted out a rather bizarre article blaming " mutant feminists " for creating an atmosphere of rape hysteria, where the merest hint of a rape allegation ruins men's lives and turns the accusers into media darlings.  It's the continuing theme of right wing women relentlessly criticising feminism they don't understand, until one of their own comes under attack and they demand to know where is the "sisterhood" (if Julie Bishop, say, comes under sexist attack then I'll condemn that but I still hate her politics). In this case, Devine claims feminists have created such an hysteria about rape claims that . It's telling that Devine uses an example of an apparent false rape allegation from the US; apparently there were no Australian cases worth citing. If we are going to deal in anecdotes, allow me to share one that's much closer to home, literally; a few metres from my house is a

I've seen a couple of remarks from people upset that, following the execution of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in Indonesia last week, the media have been referring to the repatriation of their bodies as "bringing our boys home". One poster who was very upset - you could tell from the lots and lots of exclamation marks - that this is the same term used to describe Australian troops returning from Iraq. They were very disgusted at the comparison, and they are right. You really can't compare them. Because unlike the people who would have used the heroin Chan and Sukumaran would have imported, the people of Iraq got no say whatsoever at being put at risk of death. Because unlike Chan and Sukumaran, I haven't heard too many Australian soldiers who've returned from Iraq admit that the invasion was a grave mistake. That it was based on a lie, that Iraq never posed any threat to Australia, that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed, that the subseq