The Memphis - Sydney Siege

The papers today are full of the Sydney lockdown - a terrorist alive and well in Martin Place, the centre of  Sydney's finances and the American Embassy nearby. He is one lone and deluded Muslim extremist who eventually was killed by the police assailing the Lindt Chocolate Cafe and and in the wake two other innocent workers were killed. We don't yet know how the two people died. Whatever, it was the world's biggest news for an hour or so, and even took over twitter and Facebook for a few hours.

A sunny day at Cafe Memphis

Feeling good...

Reading bad news...

The owner with friend having breakfast

One more female literary genius casualty

I read the Dominion Post and see in its retrospective page the story of a Kiwi writer named Robin Hyde. This is a typical tragic story of a greatly talently female writer stifled by the sexist ranks of the New Zealand newspaper industry at that time. She went on to write and publish some great works but her life ended by suicide in London at the all too early age of thirty-three. She suffered the awful toll of sexism of the period and paid for it eventually with her death. Born Iris Wilkinson she assumed the name of her infant boy, Robin Hyde, who died soon after birth, in Sydney, the father being an older married Kiwi man who of course did not want paternity. Such were those 'bad old days' when women were so disenfranchised, although ironically by law, the Kiwi women were the first to be given the vote. 

 There is here a strange mixture of enlightenment and a backward society, resulting in harming the unfortunate individual. I wonder how  deeply embedded sexism is here still. The great female Prime Minister Helen Clark, now set to become the next United Nations Secretary General, one of the biggest jobs in the world, of course had to leave New Zealand to achieve her goals. That is its major problem, it is so islolated and ignored to a large extent by the rest of  the world, while at the same time providing the world with some of the brightest and highly achieving talented people.

Later today I am picking up a hamper from NZAF to distribute; I really am not into the excessive consumption over Christmas and the further away I can get from it, the better.

I am just back from Tiwhanawhana which I go to every Tuesday night. It is held at the excellent NZ Prostitutes Collective, a progressive organisation formed to look after the rights of working prostitutes in all NZ. It is a perfect place for all the Tatakataapui to come together for their Kapa Haka (Maori performing group)  and feel safe and practise the Waiatata and the Poi, both of which I am slowly learning. I love being there in their supportive atmosphere and am learning to be more physically expressive like all of them. It is one of the biggest experiences I have learned in NZ and will take away with me, this sense of 'whanau', belonging to a family. They are all very loving.