There’s a documentary series on telly right now in “Australia” – I Was Actually There. In it, people who experienced defining moments in our recent history share their story.
The subject of episode 6 is Todd Russell, who was trapped underground alongside Brant Webb in Beaconsfield, lutruwita / Tasmania, when the goldmine they were working in collapsed.
Prior to that shift, the men didn’t really know each other. For 14 days, they lay partially crushed in a space 1.4 metres squared, one kilometre beneath the ground.
I was 16 years old when it happened, and it captivated the nation.
“If I liked Ford, he liked Holden,” Todd explains of Brant. “I liked huntin, he liked fishin.”
What they both liked – and knew all the words to – was Kenny Rogers’ song ‘The Gambler’. They were singing it together on their fifth night underground when rescuers first made contact – lured by the sound of their voices.
My friend Kaihla regales us with this tale from atop an inflatable galah, bobbing in the shallows of the Clarence River on Bundjalung, Gumbaynggirr and Yaegl Country.
Mardi, Kate and I sit around her in camping chairs, water up to our knees, swigging wine from plastic cups as we take turns tossing river rocks at a hole in a partially submerged log.
“Do you know the song?” she asks. “I’ll put it on.”
Kaihla heads to shore and flicks her car speaker.
Cos ev’ry gambler knows that the secret to survival,
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowin’ what to keep.
And ev’ry hand’s a winner, just like ev’ry hand’s a loser.
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.
We listen, holding our cups to the sky, imagining the men reaching for connection in the darkness.
*
By sunset, we’re hoeing into a girl dinner by our cars a safe distance from the river.
“Does anyone need to pee? I’m gonna get back in the water.” Mardi asks. She’s still in her bikini.
I do, but I need to put my bathers back on first, so Mardi goes ahead. A man from the neighbouring camp intercepts her when she’s ankle deep.
He is in his 40s or 50s, holding a stubby: part of a crew of eight or so older blokes with utes and swags on stretchers camping 30 metres from us. We watched a couple of them earlier determinedly re-rising their Australian flag after strong winds tore through and dismantled everyone’s awning.
Kaihla, Kate and I eye Mardi and the man chatting on the water’s edge. The scene looks awkward, but we suppose she doesn’t need rescuing. I am frustrated because I want to get in and pee, but I don’t want to have to interact with him.
After 10 or so minutes, when Mardi returns, she’s doing the face: eyebrows up at the middle, pursed smile, chin turned up slightly. The one you do when a man was nice and you feel a bit sorry for him, but he also made you uncomfortable.
“Guys I haven’t even peed,” she laments. “He was sweet… If we get bored we can come and ‘join a buncha old farts’. He said they’re going to cook beef brisket later.”
Though we are the type to find pleasure in both random encounters and free food, we’re unlikely to get bored. We ponder his motives – concluding harmless enough, and maybe even just nice. A nice man reaching for connection at the campsite.
I notice there are many other cars like ours camping on the river, but he doesn’t ask anyone else to join his all-male group.
*
“The average Australian is still awkward in female company,” reads a high-school textbook published in 1967.
“He is devoted to masculine interests and content to frame a large part of his life on a principle of sexual apartheid. Perhaps the fact that the male-female ratio for the first half-century of our existence was 10-1 has something to do with it.”
The year that book was published, men still outnumbered women in “Australia” – a legacy of deliberate social engineering.
Between 1788 and 1852, the British penal system forcibly transported 132,308 incarcerated men to its newest colony to do indentured labour. 24,960 women were rounded up and shipped alongside them as “tamers and breeders” – not too many though, as the authorities believed all-male environments would be easier to control, military style, when building certain parts of the settlement.
Two-thirds of these “convicts” were being punished for something like petty theft – usually a first offence.
At the time, poverty was widespread. The common lands peasants shared to farm got privatised, so people had to move to industrialising cities where a dense population made for hellish living conditions (life expectancy was as low as 15 in Manchester).
The rise of machines in Europe meant people either had no work or were toiling in mines and factories (e.g. spinning cotton picked by enslaved people in the Americas), with no rights to unionise and no government support.
Jails were crowded, so to make space, you could be executed for minor offences. Transportation to the new colony had the same effect:
Free Great Britain from its unsightly poor!
Accompanying the prisoners were around 200,000 soldiers, officials, free immigrants and their families. This group was also predominately male, as were later migrants from other countries.
State violence in the penal colonies was extreme. It governed the lives of the people and seeped into the social fabric, legitimising interpersonal violence as a means of resolving disputes and asserting power.
A systematic and deliberate genocide was waged against Aboriginal people, whose lands were violently seized and communities decimated through massacres, forced displacement and disease. Convicts and settlers were both witnesses and perpetrators, further hardening their violent psyche.
According to stats from the National Museum of Australia, (and acknowledging the shortcomings of colonial government data due to bias/motive/positionality etc), by the early 1940s, non-white people made up 2 per cent of the Australian population: genocide survivors, formerly enslaved people from the Pacific Islands, descendants of Afghan cameleers and Indian hawkers and Japanese pearlers and Chinese miners who’d migrated in the 19th Century, and whoever had managed to pass Australia’s impossible entry test that could be given in “any European language” (migrants from the UK would get English; migrants from outside the UK were asked in whatever language would be unfamiliar to them, like Welsh. The only Brit I can find who had this test used against them was a 25-year-old woman who had “caused trouble” with men, so was given a test in Italian).
This savage environment – shaped by state violence, genocide, white supremacy, racism, isolation and legions of trauma – was made worse by the extreme gender imbalance.
Convict and settler men competed against each other for sex, for domestic partnership, for access to land, for work and for power, and were left with limited tools and opportunities to develop intimate relationships with women. Life was brutally hard, depression was rife, violence was relentless.
A strong cultural narrative of stoicism emerged from the need to endure hardship without complaint – one modelled by Todd and Brant in 2006 when they were transported to ground level from the depth of the mine shaft and refused to be put on stretchers. Instead, they walked into the ambulance, signing autographs along the way.
“Today, another convict was found dead by his own hand,” wrote Reverend Robert Knopwood in 1805. “Such tragedies are no longer rare in this forsaken land where no solace, no wife, no family exists to comfort the soul.”
“The colony’s system is rendered unmanageable by the lack of women,” wrote the Lieutenant-Governor of “Van Diemen’s Land” (lutruwita/Tasmania) in 1824. “The men, without restraint, turn their strength against each other and upon the weak.”
“The absence of women breeds hostility, debauchery, and crimes too shameful to name,” wrote Dr. John Dunmore Lang in 1834.
“It is my belief,” wrote Governor Lachlan Macquarie in 1811, “that the introduction of women would alleviate the hopelessness that drives some to the grave.”
From the 1830s, the authorities kicked into action: actively luring young single and widowed women to “Australia” from what was then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
Bounty schemes began in earnest, with girls and women in orphanages and institutions for the poor especially targeted.
Those “of childbearing age” (which was 15 – 30) and “of good character” (aka willing to become a wife and/or a domestic worker) were offered free passage to “Australia”.
It wasn’t until 1976 that “Australia” finally achieved man-woman gender balance. Home Affairs is still trying to attract foreign women to “heavily gender-segretated” industries like mining and construction.
The scars of this run deep at an individual and community level – and we know that, because when we look at parts of the country that were historically the most male-dominated, they remain the most affected.
Last century, men in towns with the highest male populations were most likely to volunteer for WWI: a conflict that killed and injured hundreds of thousands.
This century, men in those same towns are more likely to work in male-dominated industries like mining, agriculture and construction – which also means they are more likely to get injured at work.
They are more likely to have a stronger stigma around mental health problems, are more likely avoid health services, and have significantly higher rates of completed suicide.
They are also more likely to be violent towards other men, be abusive towards their partners and children, and sexually assault women.
*
After surviving such a confronting workplace accident, and what with all of the attention on the “Beaconsfield Miners”, Todd’s mental health began to decline. With it went his ability to maintain a healthy relationship with his family.
“I reckon I went, what, 18 months before I spoke to somebody because I thought I was okay,” he told A Current Affair.
Even before the ordeal, Todd said he’d be “good for a week, a month or two months, but then all of a sudden I’d go off and do the boy thing.”
“[One day] I came home and [my partner] Carolyn and the kids were sitting in the car with their bags packed, ready to leave because of the person that I had become,” he told the ABC.
“I needed a reality check, which Carolyn gave me, to go and seek the help that I needed from the right people [about] the PTSD and the depression.”
Todd has been seeing psychologists and psychiatrists for 17 years now. He considers himself to be “travelling reasonably well” – only having bad days occasionally.
“I’m continuously trying to rebuild that relationship [with my kids]. I’ve got a one-year-old granddaughter. She’s absolutely beautiful, so I’ve got that to focus on now.”
*
As Carolyn found, to love an Australian man often means loving someone with mental health issues who isn’t getting help.
Of the 3,000 lives lost to suicide in “Australia” each year, 75.9% of them are men. Women ideate and attempt suicide at a much higher frequency, but men are less likely to access help and more likely to use a violent method of self-harm that actually results in death.
Men are also far more likely to die from alcohol and drug abuse.
As well as being a danger to themselves, these men can be a danger to women and other men.
As I write this, I read of the 92nd femicide this year in “Australia” – meticulously and devastatingly tallied by Sherele Moody. The majority of these women were murdered by their current male partners, their former male partners or their sons. (In contrast, my research tells me no men in “Australia” have been murdered by their daughters or woman partners this year).
On average, 13 women are hospitalised per day with physical injuries from their male partners in “Australia”. It’s the highest cause of illness, disability and death for my age group (22 to 44 years).
This year’s Man Box Study showed that men who hide their softer emotions, feel pressure to act tough or desire being in control are 17 times more likely to say they’ve hit a partner. They’re also 35% more likely to have been violent if their woman partner earns more than them.
When State of Origin is on between Queensland and New South Wales – an annual series of NRL games in the name of “friendly neighbourhood rivalry” – there’s a 40% increase in reports of domestic violence and a 71% increase in male-on-male assaults.
Feminism – as I understand it – is the movement to dismantle gender inequality and the oppressive systems that uphold it, including patriarchy. It’s necessary the world over, with women’s most pressing issues being access to healthcare, education, reproductive rights and safety.
The movement also acknowledges the myriad ways patriarchy harms men – in my culture, being the deathly legacies of emotional suppression, lack of support and societal expectations surrounding things like work, violence, parenting and the military.
Feminists seek a world where men can be free to express their emotions, experience happiness, find safety, treat themselves with kindness and have healthy relationships – all while causing no harm.
In “Australia” right now, things still aren’t great for women, or even safe – disabled women, Aboriginal women, migrant women, trans women, mothers, older women, working women, sex worker women, wealthy women, women on welfare, girls.
I was four years old when it finally became illegal to rape your wife nationwide. Women in my country are still raped by Parliamentarians, their teachers, their relatives, their friends, strangers. In NSW, only 15% of sexual assault incidents are reported, and of that, only 6% end in a conviction.
At a structural level, for every dollar a man earns, we earn 78 cence. Women are still underrepresented in Australian Parliament, and we do the vast majority of all domestic labour and childrearing.
Despite this, 32% of Australian men think they have “lost out” economically, politically and socially “as a result of feminism”.
In fact, 20% of Australian men think feminism should be violently resisted.
Violently.
*
Hours later, after considerably more stubbies, the man camping next to us walks over again. Everything is dark, and we are all snugged into bed in our vans, except Kaihla, who is still fussing about the campsite alone by phone torch.
He’s back I whisper to Mardi.
“If you want us to give you a hand building a fantastic fire,” he slurs, “or if you wanna come hang out with a buncha old people, we’re having a great fire over there.”
I can hear in Kaihla’s tone that her eyes are flashing. She tells him we are quite capable of making a fire. She intakes her breath sharply: a moment of silence while she contemplates schooling him further.
Then she relents.
“It’s bedtime for us!” she announces, almost comically. “We’re having a lazy one tonight.”
“Yeah we’re tired!” one of us, maybe me, chimes in. We know exactly when and how to humour.
The man has another crack at suggesting he build us a fire. He tells us again that he and the fellas are just over there. Then he walks away.
“Have a great life… night!” he calls back. He yelps out a single laugh.
We wonder whether his slip was an accident, what he told the boys he was coming over to say, whether they encouraged him or just shrugged with a, “Yer alright mate.”
We discuss his age – if he was even older, perhaps it would feel less threatening. But in his 50s, maybe even 40s, he’s within a greater window of risk for acting this way on the basis of thinking that he has a chance.
A chance at what?
We say goodnight to each other, Milky Way twinkling above us.
I reason that it’s safe enough to sleep with the door open a crack, and put my earplugs in.