PART TWO: Daytip to Nagasaki

(Excerpt from "11 Days in Japan)
© Melina Magdalena (2006)

PART TWO: Nagasaki - January, 2006

Anna and I went to Nagasaki by train. I was vaguely worried even before we got there. Radiation, like poison gas, is invisible. What happened to it all in that place? Surely it must linger somewhere in the atmosphere and dust of nowadays Nagasaki, or is just an urban myth that cars and trucks and factories and consumers have caused the thinning of the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect that is slowly strangling our planet? It’s easier to blame the consumers who have grown dependent on the industry, for our own demise, than lay the blame with scientists, industrialists and politicians.

Maybe the radiation from Nagasaki, Maralinga, Hiroshima and all those thousands of atmospheric, subterranean and ocean nuclear tests has permeated Earth’s atmosphere, and is enacting some kind of logical death-sentence consequence upon the humans who unleashed its evil power? Wanting another child, I did not wish to expose myself to high levels of radiation at Nagasaki.

I made no preparations for the journey, did no research, and had no clear expectations of what I might find there. I knew that Nagasaki was a city, larger than the one where Anna lived, and that she often went there for shopping and particular occasions, as it was the main city of the prefecture where she lived.
If it’s a city, I reasoned, than it must be safe enough. Maybe the Nagasaki we are going to in 2005 is not the same Nagasaki of 1945. Maybe it was rebuilt in a slightly different location?

(Remember at this time I had been in Japan for only two days, and was only just beginning to grasp, with my colonial baby brain, that people had been living, building, thriving just where I was walking for many thousands of years. It took a week for me to make the observation that in Japan it’s not always easy to distinguish the natural, from the manufactured, and to begin to appreciate the intertwining of the two, so that nature can in some cases be enhanced through human intervention.)

When we reached Nagasaki, we got off the train and began our day of catching streetcars and walking all over the city centre. Anna led me up a hill, towards Peace Park. As we left the station, I noticed a marker on the side of the street. It reminded me of similar markers I have seen at Japanese sites in Sydney and Australia – a simple post painted white, cut on the diagonal across the top, with black writing painted on it. I pointed it out to Anna, wondering whether it was some kind of distance marker to do with the bomb.

We walked up a steep street towards the park. It began, when I entered the park and saw the memorials adorned by wreaths of paper cranes. Most of these did not have English signs to explain them, so I could only absorb them through their actual context. A heavy sadness began to descend upon me.

There was no shrine there. This seemed fitting. I observed in Japan that shrines were mostly to be found in the most beautiful of places, celebrating or commemorating nature, not death. On the other hand, the whole place reeked of death, and in some ways, my culture equates shrines and altars, with death.

As we walked deeper into the park towards the hypocenter, I noticed that the people there were almost all Westerners. I saw a man who looked Japanese, who was, perhaps their friend or guide. I wondered what had brought us all to this park that day, and what connection we had with the bomb, Japan and World War II? I began to feel fraudulent. This was not, after all, MY personal tragedy.

As I approached the hypocenter, my breathing became shallow and I could not, in fact, bring myself to go to the centre. I stood on the perimeter of that portion of the park, wondering, imagining and trying simultaneously not to wonder, not to imagine.

There were some beautiful commemorative statues and memorials. I was particularly moved by some of them, which had been sent to Nagasaki from all over Asia and Europe. Mother and child was a recurrent theme. I analysed, with amusement, though I am no scholar of the three-dimensional form, some of the elements of Communist Europe and found it fitting that even after the wallfall and German reunification, the memorial from East Germany remains in the park.

I did not like the blue man. Even after reading what the guidebook had to say about what he symbolized, he looked monstrous and threatening to me, rather like the Incredible Hulk. I could only imagine that he was an angry threatening mutant, resulting from radiation poisoning. But from the back, he looked more at peace. Anna and I photographed him from behind. There was some kind of memorial on the back of the statue. We saw a Japanese family reading there and paying their respects.
All this was bearable. I shed a few tears, but did not disgrace myself. The sadness had descended, but had not yet overwhelmed me.

We went into the Atom Bomb Museum. It was like descending into a pit of hell. Perhaps that was the architect’s intention? We walked slowly down a spiral ramp which parodied a peaceful dome. The walls were white and unadorned, almost windowless. The roof was made of triangles of glass which to me symbolized the international sign for radiation over and over and over again.

It is a well-thought-out space. I cannot imagine anyone going into it and leaving unmoved. I did not want to be unmoved by its story. I found the endorsement of nuclear disarmament and the exhortation for peace rang very hollow though, and was barely uplifted at the end. Indeed, wandering past the testimonials and artifacts of sudden fiery death, I found the sadness pressing in on me so I could scarcely breathe anymore. It became unbearable and I asked Anna if we could leave. By this stage, tears were pouring down my face and I could no longer hide them. If I saw one more word about suffering, sickness and survival, I thought I would melt into a puddle of saltwater.

Later, while in Omura, I looked through an art magazine someone had given Anna, from Kyoto. I saw there a photograph of a state-of-the-art karaoke room, designed to resemble a bathtub, complete with fake shower head, taps and so on. It’s clichéd I’m sure, but still it made me shudder to think of a small group of people ensconced within this chamber ostensibly to make music, but who knows what sinister things might emerge from those shower heads and taps?

I had gathered myself somewhat together again by the time we reached the ramp that led to the exit, so we sat together to watch the video about nuclear testing. It was projected onto a series of split screens. The screens continued to split as the countdown continued, showing more and more flags of nations which have carried out nuclear tests. The footage of the tests outweighed the fragile footage of the protests. This disappointed me, though I had never really grasped the idea of how five million signatures by human beings of Planet Earth on one petition brought to Helsinki could be ignored as just another bunch of ratbag loser activists. (Who are the losers?)

Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were my personal tragedies, but I could not go to Nagasaki without being touched or reminded of those times. I have the impression, Escher-like, of a multitude of shadows in various shades of white and grey, fluttering, fluttering, filling the space like moths. There was no flame, no light that they didn’t flee. In speech without words they managed to convey their confusion, hurt and sorrow for what had just befallen them. There was no single voice, no harmony, no unity, just a jumble of souls trying to come to terms with something no one had planned for, no one had anticipated.

A timeline in the museum which showed the political events and correspondence which preceded the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was made powerfully clear, even beneath Japanese understatement and reserve, that widespread dissension had been expressed before the bombings; that there was no justification for the bombings; and the horror that they were carried out with no prior warning. Yet how could people have prepared themselves to be melted and incinerated in their streets, workplaces and homes?

Channukah candles (Omura)

PART ONE: Daytip to Nagasaki

(Excerpt from "11 Days in Japan)
© Melina Magdalena (2006)

PART ONE: Bergen Belsen - August 1985

At the age of fifteen I went to Bergen-Belsen. I went only in the company of Christa, my German host-mother. To discover why my two host-sisters didn’t go, I would have to delve back into my letters and diary. Possibly, Anke was already in Adelaide, and Ina was at her father’s for the weekend. Christa often took me places without the other two. I had the sense that she enjoyed the opportunity; certainly I hope it was not done solely out of some onerous sense of duty as a host mother. I mostly enjoyed our outings unreservedly. We went to a sculpture park, art exhibitions, several castles and for walks in some glorious parks.

In 1985 I was still firmly closed to my Jewish heritage. This was a shameful secret part of me that would be dangerous to reveal, though with equal measures of shame and secrecy I had been exploring it the only way I knew how – through books that told stories of Jewish families. Most of these books were rather sinister in nature, set around the time of Europe during World War II. A notable exception was Snyder’s The All-of-a-kind Family, though in hindsight I had, during my childhood, been mysteriously drawn to contemporary writers who were Jewish, even when their subjects were secular. At that time I had not yet discovered Chaim Potok. I believed there were no Jewish people left in the world. At least – I had never met any.

Being Jewish was something I never spoke about. To this day I am not sure whether Christa knew that I was Jewish. She knew about my East German relatives, and probably knew my mother’s mother had left Vienna in 1939. She was smart enough to put two and two together. I vaguely remember the shock that I caused when I asked our neighbours upstairs whether they were Jewish, after noticing a candelabra that they owned. Possibly, Christa knew a great deal more than I gave her credit for. She and my parents talked, after all, plus who knows what kind of information my Onkel Immo and Tante Ursul in East Berlin had given her on the phone about me and my circumstances.

There is not much about that day that I remember, apart from the feeling. It’s really quite difficult to even approach the topic, and my reluctance to do so is making itself known by the frantic circles in which my mind is running, spider-webbing connections between other things that happened while I was in Germany, that impacted on me with similar emotional magnitude.

The one time I was really scared in Germany pales in significance against some of the things that really happened while I was there. Having my passport snatched at the East German border and spending a night alone on various train platforms in the limbo land between East and West Berlin was not nearly as frightening to me as the weekend I went away with a friend and her parents to their caravan. I wasn’t at all sure I would come back from that trip. Her father was scary, and I remember thinking he was a Nazi, though I had no reason for doing so, that I can recollect, apart from my emotional conviction. I gave him no reason for thinking he had any cause to eliminate me, but I judged him capable of seeing through my disguise as a white Australian girl.

We drove to Bergen-Belsen on the Autobahn. Ina was not with us this day, but she was with us that other day, perhaps the time we went out to see the fruit trees on the coast, in the country, when Christa’s face grew grim and mask-like in the rear vision mirror. Both us girls were sitting in the back seat and strained to see what she might be looking at.

Christa ordered us curtly not to look, unusually for the woman I knew only as kind and easy-going. She stopped the car and got out.


Ina has a physical appearance – thin, pale-skinned and freckled, with rambunctious red hair and a huge smile – which matches her highly-strung and hypersensitive personality. Neither she nor I dared to peek out the window. We found out what had happened later, via an overheard conversation. A man had deliberately turned his car around on the Autobahn and, at great speed, drove it under the trailer part of a semi-trailer, thus slicing his car and its occupants, neatly in horizontal halves. I doubt it was so neat for those who witnessed the carnage. Christa is a doctor, and had felt compelled to assist, if possible. The horror of that incident, which I cannot in my mind label as accident, lingers with the same emotional tone as our excursion to Bergen-Belsen.

This story is so hard to tell. My body’s reaction is to eat, eat, eat for comfort and distraction. Already I have consumed a bowl of white rice, a peacharine, nectarine and half a bowl of chocolate covered almonds, none of which brought me much satisfaction, let alone nutritional value. I feel jumpy and alert. The sound of a jackhammer at the building site down the street, shot through my head and shot me out of my seat as though whoever is using it had crept up behind me and turned it on in my ear.

So what happened, I ask the part of myself that holds these memories locked tightly away? What did I see, what did I hear, what did I smell, touch, taste, that day? I find it’s not so easy to separate that day from those others, before. And therein lies, potentially, the treacherous web of memory that stretches beyond my time and the other time.

I remember. I was a young woman. I wore a scarf over my dark plaited hair, and a dress I had made myself. The fabric was durable, the colours were dark, and the garment was faded. I wore shoes. Perhaps I had a child or two? We arrived. I do not remember the journey. I will not remember the before or the during. I will not remember my name. It doesn’t matter. We were stripped naked, driven into a room and gassed to death. And then, we were not. That’s all.

At Bergen-Belsen the sky was slate grey and dead. The stones were cold. With one breath I was there and another elsewhere. My senses were disoriented with the dislocation of being simultaneously in two times. It wasn’t the same yet it was.
This cannot have been at Bergen Belsen – there were no gas chambers there. Perhaps we were just passing through?


Christa and I did not join a tour – for that, I was grateful. With my heightened awareness I was able to understand the tour guide in a way that my rudimentary German in my 1985 could not have coped with. I did not want to listen to what that tour guide had to say. I felt offended, squeamish and on display. What she said about that place was anyway a crock of shit; meaningless and watered-down; apologetic because no one who went to that place could possibly speak of what was done there and still maintain their self-respect as a human being.

Perhaps one day I’ll find the courage to delve into my diary and letters and find out what Christa and I did at Bergen-Belsen that day. I have a sense that I misbehaved in some way. This is akin to my belief that there are holes and gaps in my life for which I have no recoverable memories. I am always afraid of what I might have done during those times. Did Christa pick up on my confusion and distress? Did I keep it all in, as we walked through the rooms and looked at the displays of clothing, shoes and jewellery?

Years later, as part of my degree, I chose to take a course about the German Holocaust. This took place during the time of my coming out as a Jew. I encountered Regina Zielinski for the first time that semester, when she came to our lecture and spoke of her experiences in Sobibor. She spoke of how her mother pushed her forward from the line and told the guards that her daughter was an excellent knitter. There was need in the camp for just a few women to knit socks for the German Army. Thus was Regina’s life spared, while her mother and sisters were led to their deaths. Not so long after that, Regina and the others who were still amongst the living were faced with a pile of clothing to sort. The reward was, they might find something to put on their own bodies in the cold, since they had no possessions and no warm clothes of their own.

When Regina described how she came upon her own mother’s coat in that pile of anonymous cast-offs, a clarion bell struck in my memory. I almost laughed in disbelief and horror at the impunity and hubris of what my mind was suggesting to me. It was just another example of my unrestrained and outrageous imagination and my obsession with identifying as a victim at any opportunity. That was not the way to wellness. One of the triggers for me at Bergen-Belsen in 1985 can surely not have been the sight of an article of clothing on that anonymous pile in the museum display that somehow linked me to my life, back then. How utterly absurd.

Our Family Prayer

At the book launch for The Reclaiming Anthology: healing our wounds in December 2005, my mother recited a prayer that we say often in our family, as part of Shabbat services and on other occasions. The prayer attracted a lot of interest, and I've had several requests for the wording, which I'll add below.

I don't know the origins of the prayer, but here's its history as it pertains to my family. My grandmother, Ruth Reiner, fled Vienna with her parents in 1938 just before the Anschluss. They were sponsored by relatives to enter the United States of America, and entered the country through Texas, where they settled. She later married Chris Lucchesi, who was a German immigrant to the USA, and like many Jews whose backgrounds were spiritual but not necessarily orthodox, she brought up her children (including my mother, Sylvia) in the Unitarian Church.

When my mother and father decided to bring our family to Australia, they chose Adelaide as a destination because it has a Unitarian Church. As a child, I spent several years as a congregant at Adelaide's Unitarian Meeting House.

We moved to around a lot to other states of Australia before eventually returning to Adelaide. During our time away from being part of a regular Unitarian congregation, we were able to receive printed materials from the Unitarian Universalist Association. As a teenager, I received a special newsletter several times each year, called "Uniteen". What became our Family Prayer was printed on the back cover of one of these newsletters. I copied it onto cardboard, with fancy lettering. It hung for many years in my parent's home, near the dining room table.

Over twenty-two years ago, there were strange stirrings in my family. As we gathered courage to begin to speak about it, my mother, my sister and I all reached the same conclusion - we all felt secretly Jewish, but had never had a way to express this or act upon it. If we had tried to act upon it, we felt unwelcomed, stigmatised and thwarted in our attempts to reconnect with the public face of Judaism as it existed in Adelaide.

Fortunately, we had had plenty of practice conducting our own spiritual life, and so we began to research Jewish practices and to incorporate them into our lifestyles. When Rabbi Lenore Boehm came to Beit Shalom, (Adelaide's Progressive Synagogue), she assisted our family to finally make the final steps towards reconnection. It was from that time that we have identified as Jews, rather than Unitarians.

Our Family Prayer

Lead us
from death to life
from falsehood to truth

Lead us
from despair to hope
from fear to trust

Lead us
from hate to love
from war to peace

Let peace
fill our hearts
our world
our universe

And so let it be

Tikkun Olam - Heal the World

In Honour of my grandmother
Ruth Nora Reiner Lucchesi Wolverton
(19/3/1922-12/4 2006)

© Melina Magdalena (2006)

I’ve spent so my years longing for release from this life, that I have a strange attitude towards death. Trauma broke my connections with those around me, even my young children, and while these have been restored somewhat, I know we would have shared a much deeper psychic bond, had this not been the case.

And so come many questions that probably could not occur, without this disattachment from life first being present.

So what is the purpose of what happens to us in our lives? I begin from the premise, that life is meaningful and not a chance occurrence in a world of coincidences. For me, this belief is a vital component of the choices I make in my life.

I believe souls contract to come to this world, as we may perhaps to other worlds we know nothing about, in order to fulfil certain criteria, answer certain questions, experience and learn certain of life’s conditions, particularly where these directly relate to this three-dimensional physical realm, and in how embodied people relate to one another, with all the restrictions that entails. As any good teacher knows, when the parameters of observation and experience are reduced sufficiently so to concentrate a student’s attention on one particular aspect of the topic under consideration, learning and understanding takes place almost like magic, because there is little else that is possible in that situation.

Though we live with three, four, five or six senses, most of us have an inkling that there are other dimensions, and perhaps other senses to which we do not have access in this world. In this way, our perceptions are narrowed, pared down, so that life on this planet can offer us specific learning experiences. This can be so, even without our ability to consciously imagine a different kind of life, with a different set of dimensions and senses that might be available to us.

I do not believe that souls contract to make the journey to Earth only to have their lives snuffed out at random. I do not really understand the current western fascination with violence, murder and crime. That in the contemporary entertainment culture there is so little else on the menu of our common imaginations speaks to me of a deeply fundamental disturbance in the pattern of our living, here on Earth.

This having been said, I do believe that when people are met with death, accident, or illness, whether this was planned from some other realm, or whether it strikes us unprepared and unexpected, it becomes us to struggle with these events, and to strive to survive and learn from these experiences as they present themselves.

Furthermore, the vast range of life opportunities for experience on earth offers us so many learning experiences. As a simple example, one could contrast the viewpoint, observations and experiences of a person who is drawn to learning about life as it is lived under the water, with the creatures that inhabit that realm, with a person who has lived solely in the desert. There are the so many modes of living, for example, the various styles of family and community, and the experiences of individuals whose lives are lived along a broad spectrum of diverse abilities and intelligences.

A person might well contract to lead a life which entails a degree of pain and suffering and illness, or equally, to lead a life in which he or she cares for such a person. A life that is simple and pleasurable is not necessarily meaningful or rich in experience, because it lacks challenge. In my life, I value in hindsight even more, my friendship with Sarah, who died at eighteen, having thrived with her multiple disabilities and with the secret knowledge that she would die young. Sarah spent her years bestowing sunshine and reaching out to those around her. I don’t think her life was an accident.

So how does this relate to the immense suffering in the world today – all those souls without sustenance or safety – all those who are killed on the roads, who die at the hands of rapists and murderers? What purpose can be served by the enormously increasing population increase on this planet? Perhaps we humans could find a way to sustain life for the earth’s starving, suffering millions, if we chose to work together, instead of in competitive opposition? Perhaps devoting ourselves to such a great purpose is one way of healing the world? I wonder though, whether there might be other explanations for these things?

Is it not plausible, that these things occur as direct rippled consequences of unplanned, unnegotiated disturbances in the fabric of life upon this earth?

I cannot rationalize that the holocausts and genocides serve any purpose. While these may have existed as possibilities, they were never supposed to happen on this scale. I don’t believe people contract to come to Earth in order to be slaughtered in their millions. We on earth are supposed to be learning how to do things differently and better. We are supposed to remain excited about the world, to go on exploring and learning and creating.

I do not believe that good comes from genocides and holocausts, though I do believe in an endless potential and possibility that good could come if, now that they have occurred, we make the effort to heal ourselves and our world.

If the instigators of these events have anything to answer for, it is the profound disturbances that have spider-webbed themselves through the societies, nations and communities that have been directly affected by them. Perhaps we’re all a little warped as a result.

I have no idea what leads them to do what they do. I’m not sure how I relate to the idea of evil. It seems unreasonable to me that good can only exist in dichotomy, but maybe such violence and hatred is the direct manifestation of evil?

Like dis-ease, ill will spreads and infects those with whom it comes into contact. Souls whose lives were eradicated by intent and purpose exerted solely in an effort to wreak their destruction, return to Earth in an effort to regain what they lost. I believe many of these people wander in a deep confusion mingled with hope that in beginning again, they might pick up where they were forced, so abruptly, to leave off. But the world can never go back to what it was before the destructions occurred.

It makes me wonder whether the disturbances do not affect just this physical realm? Perhaps the feeling that we live on the precipice between life and death is not just a feeling, but a distinct possibility? Perhaps souls are making the journey back to Earth ill-advised, unprepared and misinformed?

As the dis-ease infects our communities, it changes the way in which we relate to one another. Our outlook is altered so that we expect disaster. Instead of good-will and hope, we live in fear and cynicism. There are those who have come in order to reach out and assist, (and everyone alive who has come into contact with one or more of these blessed souls knows what a blessing they are). And there are those in diminishing proportion to the others, who have not yet been directly infected with the legacy of violence, who come to earth simply to live their lives as we have always come here to live our lives. We look upon these people with a mixture of envy and irritation. Their lives appear so bland and simple – how can their outlook be so unsophisticated? How can they live so stubbornly in denial of the terrible burden beneath which which the rest of us labour?

The confusion, fear, grief, cynicism and anger of the many breed hatred and violence. The cycle continues to build and grow. It seems there are not enough sane people in the world. Or if not sane, the proportion of people whose lives will remain untouched by random acts of hatred and violence diminishes in direct proportion with those who are forever marked as a result of such tragedies, unless the balance can somehow be redressed.

This is a little to do with the idea of forgiveness, which is met so often by fortified walls of resistance. What’s to forgive, that my life has been destroyed by the actions of so and so? What’s to forgive, that my children have been senselessly murdered? What’s to forgive, that I have no hope of a future? Truly the idea of forgiveness has never been more difficult than in this day and age.

It’s not that forgiveness won’t help. Forgiveness helps the sufferer far more that it helps those who inflicted the harm. Of course it will help, in releasing people from the bonds that hatred have forged. But forgiveness is a huge demand, and one which suffering souls do not make easily, without the clarity of perspective that time lived during a period of peace can bring. It seems that on earth, such clarity is becoming almost impossible to attain, at the same time that it becomes more and more essential. Those who have been harmed fall prey to the easy trap of becoming those who then go on to inflict harm, because their ability to see that they have a choice in these matters diminishes. The destructive cycle continues uninterrupted.

Tikkun Olam. Heal the world.

Living with PTSD - Part THREE

Bleeding
© Melina Magdalena (2006)

Once upon a time, it was unthinkable for someone to survive rape. Of course, women survived, but it was kept a shameful, silent secret. A woman who was known to have been raped, was automatically labelled “victim” and treated as a worthless used up slag who would have been better off dead.

Rape is considered to be one of the worst things that can be done to a person. In our legal systems, to be charged with the offence of rape is supposed to be equivalent to being charged with murder. Like murder, the crime of rape has suffered from linguistic filtering and legal permutations so that circumstances can be twisted to diminish the legal seriousness of whatever act is alleged to have taken place between a perpetrator and a victim.

One of the things that really got to me when the man who raped me was being fed through the legal machine, was the way in which my experience was assumed by the Court to be known and understood. In my Victim Impact Statement, I wrote at length about the many ways in which being raped had affected my life and impacted on my ability to function as a woman and a mother.

By this time, I myself had already been fed once through the legal machinery when I applied for Victim’s Compensation a year or two before. The police had no idea who had broken into my home and raped me, and as there seemed to be little possibility the man would ever be brought to any kind of justice, I applied for compensation and was eventually awarded a small sum of money which improved my opportunities and quality of life. It enabled me, for example, to purchase a second-hand computer and printer, to get my driver’s license and a car. These are things I may never have attained as a single mother on a pension. They enabled me to pursue my studies and my writing, and gradually, to become less home-bound.

As part of my application for Victims of Crime compensation, I experienced a baffling interview with a legally-appointed psychologist. Baffling, because she judged that the impact on me of having a strange man break into my home in the middle of the night and threaten to kill me and my children unless I allowed him to rape me was minimal, since this occurred just a few months after I had fled my marriage, while I was still also having to cope with the legal ramifications of custody battles and the Family Court, not to mention the Magistrate’s Court, which I had to attend when my ex-husband opposed the imposition of a Summary Protection Order against him, nor the stresses of bringing up two very small children alone, with no income support save the pension.

I am so glad that this is all behind me now, thirteen years later.

However, I remain bemused by my memories of this interview, years of counselling sessions, and the construction of my Victim Impact Statement. In particular, the physical aftermath of being raped is something I still feel is ignored and is widely misunderstood.

This is not the first time that I’ve tried to write about this, and I think I understand where part of the difficulty lies for me. While following media reports of the inquest into the death of Dianne Brimble aboard a cruise ship in 2002, I’ve talked to a number of survivors abut why the men who filmed each other raping her as she died of a drug overdose of the date rape drug ‘fantasy’ were never charged with rape. Their cabins were cleared of all evidence before the police could board the ship and commence their investigations. The video footage and violated body of Dianne Brimble are all that remain as evidence of what happened to her. This doesn’t seem to have provided sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

Today when I logged into my email, I saw articles on the web about the reduction in the sentences that some gang-rapists in Sydney had received*. I looked at the article and my eye was caught by one particular line “In sentencing the men in 2004, Justice Michael Finnane said the victim had the worst injuries he had seen in his 35-year legal career - requiring surgery to her genitalia after the attack.”
There was a section in the Victim Impact Statement form which asked me to describe the pain and physical injuries that I had suffered as a result of the crime. I distinctly recall feeling inhibited about what “physical injury” meant in my case. I was still in the process then, of getting angry about the many times I had felt coerced during my marriage, into having sexual intercourse when I really didn’t want to. With my limited and traumatic range of sexual experience, my confusion is understandable.

Like many people, I suppose I had felt as though rape perhaps wasn’t as bad if it only involved penile penetration of the vagina, as it has whenever I had been raped. Since that is the same as sexual intercourse, had I any right to claim that I had been physically injured through this act? And what of pain? Had it hurt at the time? I made myself numb, believing I was about to be killed. There are areas on my breasts that are still ice cold, parts of my body that I cannot bear to have touched, where that rapist touched them.

I found out later that some of the women who were also raped by the man who raped me, had suffered greater physical insult to their genitalia and other parts of their bodies. My understanding however, of the effect of sexual assault, is that the emotional effects and trauma that is induced can be of as great severity whether the actual assault consists of physical penetrations, mutilations, verbal harassment and anything in between.

The only kind of thing I felt justified in writing in my Victim Impact Statement was the bruising I had suffered on various parts of my body that was photographed as evidence of the attack on me, and my fear that I had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the man who raped me.

Thirteen years after being raped, I can tell you with confidence that the physical trauma continues and has not improved. Furthermore, the trauma is not recognized as such by the medical establishment, and there is no treatment for it. Whenever I raise my physical problems with doctors, I am told that my experiences lie within the range of normal. There is nothing for me to be concerned about. Perhaps I am unlucky, but it’s just something I have to live with unless I want to have a hysterectomy. (Not bloody likely.)

I once presented my doctor with a list of physical symptoms which I wanted to address with her. She asked me whether I thought I might be depressed. (She wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last to take refuge in the panacea of the antidepressant.) I go to see a different doctor now, but she has not been able to help, either. I allow her to invade my body every two-and-a-half years and give me the required pap smear, and I get her to monitor my iron and thyroxin levels.

I have been tested for fibroids on numerous occasions. I have the levels of various hormones and minerals in my blood checked over and over again. I took myself to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital one evening, a few years ago, fearing that this time I might really die of blood loss. They sent me home again and told me to buy super-sized sanitary pads. In all these years, only my iron levels have offered proof of consistent stress and depletion. I’ve been blessed with good health, and cursed by the ignorance and apparent apathy of doctors.

The idea of a link between body, mind and spirit is something I’m familiar with. Perhaps the system between these aspects of self is too complex to manage in any useful manner? The body is an amazingly complex network of interdependent systems. It’s obvious to me, that as a result of being raped, something in the systems of my body has been knocked permanently off balance. It doesn’t help to tell myself that I am causing my own symptoms, or that if I chose to think in a different way, the symptoms would necessarily resolve themselves. It doesn’t help to think that if I chose not to label my symptoms as dis-ease, I would therefore no longer suffer them as distressing.

Every three or four weeks, my body launches an all-out assault upon me. I feel as though my insides are fighting to become my outsides. Several days before my period actually begins, I fall into a deep and suicidal depression for a day. This black day affects me no matter what else is going on in my life at the time. It’s only dangerous when life is not going reasonably well. From experience, I know to keep my thoughts to myself. I reassure myself that it will pass, as it always has, so far. On these days, I try not to react to situations that arise with family members, friends or workmates that will later need to be resolved.

My body begins to bloat. The irritation begins, and intensifies over the next forty-eight hours, as I feel I am surrounded by a swarm of angry wasps. I emanate “DON’T TOUCH ME” vibes, and become clumsy, awkward, impatient and reactive. Nothing is simple, nothing works the way it is supposed to and it’s all my fault.

Then like magic, I wake up one morning and I feel fine. I feel like I’ve lost a kilo or two overnight, and my clothes begin to sit right again. During breakfast it dawns on me that this sensation is what heralds the beginning of the bleed. I leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom to check my supplies. If I’m lucky, I will have bought ahead, but all too often, my period (curiously) takes me by surprise. The irregularity is one factor, but perhaps at some subconscious level I still cling to the hope that if I don’t want to have it, it won’t come!

I often experience cramping for a day before the blood appears. It’s the machinery of my body getting into gear. I go to the toilet often, just to see whether the bleeding has begun. Once it has, it is unmistakable. Floods and fury. I can feel my uterus as it contracts and expands like the instinctive organ it is, sucks blood from outside its walls and pumps it out again. For two or three days this goes on, though mercifully, the cramping usually ends twenty-four hours after the bleeding begins. I go through six to ten super-sized sanitary napkins each day, and two or three pairs of underpants. I wake up twice each night to find the pad, my thighs and my sheets saturated with blood, stagger to the bathroom, change the pad and crawl back into bed for a couple more hours.

By the second day of bleeding, I can barely crawl out of bed, though I do. Despite feeling so wretchedly ill and drained, I mother, I housewife, I go to work and I do whatever needs to be done. The thing I dislike most about this bleeding is the clots. They vary in size, and they fall out of me like I imagine dead fetuses would fall out of me if I were miscarrying. Every month I feel as though my body is telling me I’ve wasted its capacity yet again, to nourish and bear a child. I feel like my body is punishing me.

The scientific link that has been established between certain hormones and fertility is not something that has been helpful in my situation. I spent a year on the birth control pill to see whether this might help. All it did was give me an insight into when the bleeding would begin again, every twenty-eight days without fail. I didn’t require birth control, so I went off the pill after a year. I spent a different year on another medication whose function was to prevent my uterus from sucking up the blood outside itself. This did help a little, but I still clotted and flooded and wept. When the pills ran out, there seemed little point in getting the prescription renewed.

Since being raped, the disruption and malfunction of my menstrual cycle has had a severe impact on my quality of life. This impacts on me far more than any sexual ‘dysfunction’ I might otherwise care to report. The fact that I’m not interested in having sex with men does have some link with being raped, but it’s tied in with many other factors than the purely physical, such as my distinct aversion to spending time in the company of men, let alone inviting a man to have access to my private parts.

I’ve never heard another survivor talk about her menstrual cycle as having been affected or impacted as a result of sexual trauma, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that many of us are affected in a similar way. All of us have probably been told that many women suffer from premenstrual syndrome; that it’s unfortunate if we have pain while menstruating, but it’s nothing that anyone can do anything about.

I would like to be able to include this information retrospectively on my Victim Impact Statement. I would like to see the suffering that I continue to endure every few weeks be considered in the sentencing of the man who was convicted of raping me, and who will be released on parole next year. I sometimes joke with people that men suffer from menstrual envy, but deep in my heart I know I’m just projecting my own terror and anguish onto the men I sometimes encounter, who find reasons to give me a hard time. No man in his right mind could envy my menstrual cycle.

* “Gang rapists have their sentence reduced”, Friday March 24 12:30 AEDT ©AAP 2006, viewed online URL http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=87738 [24/3/2006].