Back from break [six minutes at the top of the next hour after Cuff]
“Jesse Morgan” states his name.
He swears by Almighty God.
You have made a statement with the assistance of lawyers.
“In an official role and unofficial role”.
In 2015 he commenced an official role.
Who was in the home when you were growing up as a teenager?
Jesse; mum; brother.
Unofficial role: my mum had significant mental and physical health issues including agoraphobia - she stayed in the house and would stay in her room.
It meant that he had to step up and be more mature than he was and do stuff.
14 years at the time he described - the younger brother was 8 years old.
Jesse had a job and worked 6 days a week to provide for his family while going to school and extracurricular activities while trying to be responsible for himself and his mum and brother.
He ate a lot of pesto pasta - he had the same rotation - now pasta is banned in his household [very funny]!
He didn’t know a lot so he stuck to what he knew - easy things which are cheap because he didn’t have a lot of money.
Jesse didn’t have much support. Mum had case managers and people she would interact with.
Jesse and brother didn’t interact with support - couple fo reasons for that. He didn’t like talking to people.
He had a bad experience with a counsellor when he was younger and he didn’t like sharing emotions and didn’t know whether to deal with them - he decided not to.
The other reason: the constant fear of being separated from each other.
DHS [Department of Human Services] hung over as a fear and if they knew the extent of how they were living and the issues - brother and mother and Jesse would be separated and taken into foster care.
Engaging - he felt that telling people - that threat would be realised.
Practical things he did - another aspect is that you had to take turns to leave the house [Jesse and brother].
Jesse’s turn would be outside of high school and help around the house and when the brother got home took over.
They would end up fighting often - who had to stay home.
Many Friday nights the brothers would have plans - one of them needed to be home.
2015: Jesse’s Mum’s condition. What happened?
Halfway through 2015 something came to a head at the end of the year - she was being poisoned by the medication she was on - she was having hallucinations auditory and visual.
She could feel things in her and on her skin that were there - command hallucinations - brothers have lots of stories about what happened
As a carer he helped her in the bathroom and showering in case she was falling over and other reasons.
She came home from something and had fallen over in the yard. Jesse was sleep and his mum was screaming and she was on the ground.
“I am on fire,” said the mother - she felt like she was on fire.
Jesse needed to call the ambulance but he had a conservation in his head - she doesn’t want to be taken away to the psychiatric ward.
He had a battle inside his head - had he betrayed his Mum’s trust? Did he call the ambulance?
She was admitted to hospital - to Box Hill. She was put on an involuntary order or involuntary hold in the psychiatric ward.
They tried to wean her off her medication. She was put onto a different medication.
Christmas Day 2015 - brothers went to see the Mum at Maroondah - travelled by public transport - the round trip was 5 hours by public transport.
Brother didn’t go because he didn’t want to see Mum in that state - mother didn’t recognise Jesse who did go on.
He spent five minutes in the room. WE went back to have a frozen meal for Christmas.
She spent until March 2016 from admission to being discharged. It was tough for the brothers.
Jesse had to look after his brother and he was almost an adult by 2016. “We were trying our best”.
Mum came off her medication [the majority]. She was treated in a way that was inhumane and like she was almost comatose by the medication.
The boys didn’t recognise her either - she wasn’t our mother.
She was determined not to go back or get in a position where this could happen again.
Now she is empowered and she created and maintained a support network for herself that allows her to get better and better. It was self-driven.
She needs assistance for shopping and lifting heavy objects.
For Jesse is easier - less around physical help and more around emotional support and championing Mum and trying to keep her going and how she is doing a good job.
Commissioner asks about the Carers’ Allowance: he started receiving it in 2015-16 - before he didn’t know he could get it. He was on Youth Allowance and looking for a job that he knew he wasn’t going to take because he was caring.
He didn’t care about the result of it and he just kept looking for jobs.
Social workers pointed it out - Why aren’t you on the Carers’ Allowance?
Jesse’s own mental health issues - his father was abusive from 0 to 6 years old.
It had significant impacts on the brothers and Mum - different mental illnesses for them all.
As a result of the impact of the father - until he was 20 he was an angry person. He was physically violent and verbally abusive - that was the role modelling he received.
How you are meant to deal with your emotions and relate to other people.
That was part of it, and as he got into his teens he started dealing with undiagnosed depression.
He had never got a formal diagnosis - having been around depression and did his research - that is how he felt.
When he had lots on his plate he dropped out of year 12 because of his depression and caring was even harder. He felt like instead of going to school he would focus on one thing that was stressful enough [and that makes a difference when school often doesn’t].
He would often stay in his room because he didn’t want to deal with anything.
What needs to change with the system?
Firstly, in terms of caring, as a young carer, he was listening to Rose and Jesse would like to echo a lot of it. “Everything was hard; I didn’t know what I was doing; deal with own emotions and help Mum and be a crutch for my brother”. The threat of separation hung over. If one thing can change people can look into that and set up support which is not threatening. Peer support would have been great. Mum said “You could have been engaged with peer support - it would have been less scary”. Mum had lots of supports - Jesse and the brother didn’t. Someone to interact with if he didn’t know what to do - having your own case manager.
Statistics into young mens’ mental health is atrocious - suciide is then cause of death in young men - three times more than women. Young men don’t know how to share. His lived experience and his brother’s lived experience and the groups experience - suggests it’s hard to share and tell them that life sucks sometimes. Early intervention into that - and telling guys what being masculine isn’t being tough. Having the ability to say I’m not OK - that’s a hundred times better. [Jesse is crying here]. The Mancave is an organisation he mentions that goes into schools. Emotions for guys to recognise.
Because when I watched Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996; I came to it as a young woman who wrote the lines of Victor Hugo and read Disney Adventures about computer-generated imagery and was awed at the power it took to make the crowd scenes - and maybe saw some wisdom.
[James Surowiecki - 2004 - The wisdom of crowds - which was really powerful in the age of Wikipedia and maybe its height/zenith].
The song which touched me most was Esmeralda in the Church - Frollo's Church - God help the outcasts. And of course: "If God doesn't help the outcasts - who does?"
Outcastery was powerfully explored in the second season of Stranger things which I have watched eight episodes thus far - I watched the third to the eighth episodes. There were good quotes in the third episode which would probably make awesome GIFs.
And the merch, people! Someone had kindly bought me some of the Notre Dame characters like the goat and like Quasi and Esmeralda and Phoebus and Frollo - which are good to use in imaginative scenes; in the bath [laminated scope and sequence cards would be good too - if you find yourself reflecting and learning in the bath or in a shower] or as displays.
If Alexandrina Victoria could imbue a doll with manifest destiny and imperial ambition when she was 13 and realised she would be Queen after she looked at her family tree with her governess - this was 1827 - and if in the 21st century there is the end of International Games Week where people actually dress up and enact characterisations and characterology ... then our puny imaginations have to measure up.
One way to develop an imagination is through shared experience - like shared book experience.
Another way to develop - and protect - an imagination - is to shelter it.
When overwhelming experience becomes real it is encoded through imagination and memory is what happens when you decode it.
Hunchback of Notre Dame was probably one of the last Disney Renaissance movies I enjoyed.
Remembering Margery Fisher, which has been an Aesop of mine for eighteen years:
A children's story must grow out of some memory and contact with childhood.
That was in Intent upon reading - I met it in Criticism of girls' school stories 1949-1994 by Ju Gosling.
Thinking of A little princess and the scene with Sara and her Last Doll Emily. And the moment in which she realises the doll is sawdust. And the way she makes the doll live for Evangeline and Lottie and everyone else - I do believe there is a massive tea party.
And how much I absolutely would have loved to see The hunchback of Notre Dame in Rroma. I suppose you can't for the same reason you don't watch The king and I in Thailand. My love and passion for Thailand did quickly mature - it is a nation with whom I interface through food and the protocols of monarchy.
The Saturday Paper and/or the Good Weekend had a good Rroma story. And in 2009? 2010? I made a Rroma folder full of Wikipedia articles.
So - Drina chooses her own regnal name - Victoria. She is of good German stock - as we see through the Duchess. Her father died very early; her uncle was the King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And she wants one of the advisors to go back to Hanover.
[Hanover Free City - and I remember the whole Hansa union].
The governess - Letchen - what a lady.
And I really enjoyed the servants and the downstairs people.
You do not put tallow candles in Buckingham Palace and expect it not to burn, especially during a court dance where you put frankly half of Europe together.
The chemistry between Victoria and the Russian. [Thinking of Anastasia Krupnik and how she learnt about the Romanovs from her dad Myron - he had been my favourite literary Jew since I first encountered him - the power of a literature and poetry lecture from this man made me change my mind in February 1993 that Wordsworth was my favourite famous person from Albert Einstein - I had lots of imaginative games where I interacted with Andrea Einstein who was from the future. Being what you see; see what you can be. Those games took place around September - October 1992 where I also watched a video about motorsport and a young boy who went to the Monaco Grand Prix and grew up around that culture. And, yes, we now have electric cars and soapbox derbies which I loved when I saw them in The rascals and other engineering efforts].
And the moments which really touched me in my Stranger things 2 binge?
[Yes, a binge. When I am on the computer I do not really concentrate on streaming or on-demand TV - unless it is a 2 or 3 hour music video - like the one about Soul which ran for nearly 3 hours].
I am thinking of Bob the Brain and how he knows how to program and how he designed the Audio Visual programme for the Hawkins students.
A lot goes on in that room.
And I remembered how I know BASIC.
The test of a language - do you talk to yourself in it?
And if computers could talk imagine the things they say ... I made a Kid Pix Companion presentation in my free time based on this idea with a Macintosh microphone. You can make a presentation into its own app. And I have thought - instead of GIFs [no, you do not say them Jeff/Geoff - even if you are thinking of a photographer] make slides like the YouTubers do with their lyrics.
I know the difference between high level and low level computer languages.
Low level [assembly] represents the way computers think.
High level computer languages represent the way humans think for human results.
Pythagoras was right - Man is the measure of all things.
And one way people measure things would be through maps.
In Stranger things 2 we learn that the map is not the territory.
Hardest geographical lesson I ever learnt.
In this case: the territory is Hawkins, and Bob goes through the lakes to find people who have been in the Upside Down.
10 ARRAY 0_0_0_0 20 PRINT ARRAY 30 RUN 40 END
And then Bob went through the database. 0s and 1s - you switch things on and off. Binary code and assembly language.
And I know that there are these gates that you use to put data and information through. Like if you wanted to open or close a door to a presence.
28 October 1984 was a heady time!
We see "Mad Max" at the arcade. She plays games like Centipede; Dug Dug [which later on is an important episode - you need to know Dug Dug to navigate the Upside Down] and one other.
Sense and Sensibility and then arcade games and lots of tickets and small things like stars. I did spend a lot of time in the 1990s in places like Timezone especially playing Shuffleboard and Skeet and skill testers and even driving games.
We learn about the party and the roles people have in it. Like El is a mage. When I would play MacMoria I would try to be a warrior; mage; priest or a paladin depending on the race and class I had chosen.
And I love how Max said she was a zoomer and the Hawkins Middle School gym is full of her skating tricks.
We see even more of Dustin and Lucas - and great scenes with Lucas's family and his little sister.
In another world I might have written an undistinguished thesis about step-siblings in middle-grade literature and I might have used Tracy and Ronald in Does third grade last forever? [For about 50% of people it might last 40-50 years!]
And Dustin and Lucas - there would be a lot of dissembling and disassembling and dissing between them.
Will and Mike - they see a lot of "shit got real" stuff, and indeed was Always Already Real in the Lacanian sense. Or is that another Theory Theorist?
And just the idea of mutations and evolution played out in this way.
That pub-rock mullet stepbrother of Max's? The father when he talks about respect and responsibility - do you realise your ideas could be collated with a Coloradan dog grooomer through the sands of history in the Zen garden of harmful and unsubstantiated practises in lifespan development? You just missed out on being fun to be around.
The lost sister I do not think I will ever forget. Love Kali's team of outcasts and all their personalities. And making Axel dance. Axel F, eh? He was around at that time.
And all the Halloween stuff and the Reagan/Bush election - someone was campaigning for Ferraro and Mondale and we see inside their house.
Cinematography and production design was tops again. I try to take note of the show writers like Jessie Lopez who I think are doing a good job.
Conspiracy theories were big this season especially when Nancy and Jonathan visited Murray.
And wodka? The only real use I had found for it was for sore muscles and/or a bludgeoning tool. And it is also good for getting governesses drunk - and dead. Then you spin it out for nine books / nine terms.
Fortunately Victoria didn't kill off her governess - though she might have wanted to at times.
She certainly makes quick work of her mum and Conroy. John Conroy.
Australians know Conroy as this arch-right man who wants to shut down the Internet or at least bottleneck it.
And when the Senate papers went to 144 as opposed to 12 as they did in 2016 - first big change of that sort since 1984 and the first year of Robert James Lee Hawke - people took delight in putting Conroy last.
Celine Dion - and the last shall be the first - 19 November 1996 video of Les derniers seront les premiers which was on D'eux.
Anyway John Conroy has put the Duchess under his thumb. And people can make the appropriate analogy to Australian politics in the last 10 years.
And Victoria has seen it all - the corrosive influence; the loss of will; the corruption.
She did a big thing when she said she would speak to everyone alone.
Lord Melbourne does help as private secretary. He has a secret sorrow about a family member.
I was really excited when I discovered about Lady Caroline Byron - and Charles and Mary Lamb.
Lots of literary kids - and people with literary pretensions - read the Lambs' Child's tale of Shakespeare. Helen Keller and Macbeth - that text made her tremble.
I think Shakespeare made it very terrible so that people could see how terrible it is to do wrong.
Helen Keller had said the quote above when she was about 10 or 11 and "had a childlike aversion to tragedies".
And that was probably the standards of the Progressive Age in which Keller; Sullivan and Macy lived in.
No, this is the adult aversion adults want children to have. Don't go seeking it out; and when and if tragedy personally finds you ...
Some compare and contrast now - two parties.
In Stranger things 2 Nancy and Jonathan go to Tina's party. The punch is appropriately Halloweeny.
In Victoria the new Queen is accused of not being able to hold her champagne when she asks for an investigation into Conroy - and into Emma Hastings, whom the governess thinks is pregnant and/or with child.
Emma Hastings turns out to be weak and ill.
Nancy and Jonathan - Nancy - under the influence - gives this nihilist rant about how "everything is bullshit". Or at least deeply cynical. And that she "never loved" Jonathan.
This comes into play later on when they meet Murray and delve into Hawkins. A real stick it to the man / the system moment.
Queen Victoria has plenty of these moments too. Like when she goes to the Trooping the Colour and turns her back on the regiments - not on purpose/intentionally.
And she is a strikingly good equestrian, or her actress [Jenna Coleman] made her look that way. And Lord Melbourne is not too uncomfortable on a horse either and they ride through the autumn leaves on this path.
The gardening in this - landscape architecture and design - is so impressive. Very English country house style. And again - the royals set the tone, though it is really the courtiers and the workers who do this.
Emma Hastings was a very good courtier and daughter of courtiers for about five generations which brings us to the previous 100 years [1732 - 1832]. Very nimmy-pimmy and pretty; she does speak her mind though.
The moment when Victoria apologises to her and then tells the Duchess about the apology. That is a delicious moment of ambiguity.
And there was a Crowning Moment of Principle. This may or may not be a legitimate TV Trope. Along with Crowning Moment of Awesome and Crowning Moment of Heartbreak and Crowning Moment of Weird.
It was "I am tired of principles" after the guild-college-woman was working on her hair and taking a little bit for herself - and justifying it for the Crown like they all seemed to do - at least the servants who spoke.
Chandlers / candeliers - they are not exactly an upstanding lot.
And they probably wouldn't have been in Notre Dame either - which was written precisely in Queen Victoria's time. I wonder if she liked to read Victor Hugo and what German authors she and her governess would discuss in their spare/free time.
People like Goethe and Schiller maybe? And she might have liked fun books too.
The coronation part was pretty good. I hope they were able to build a throne which fit.
And when Conroy and the Duchess laughed about her being short, weak and foolish - that really did cut through. Hard.
And the part where Hastings made the List of people not more or less than average height - which is something like 160-165 centimetres back then in the United Kingdom.
[Maman was considered way too tall for ballet. I had a small squat body which was good for getting into things and getting out of things and getting around and through things - hurdles; steeplechase; obstacle courses - like Ninja Warrior - and running around like the Tasmanian Devil and Speedy Gonzales].
Just - the list. Did you not look at any other criteria - like compatibility and companionability?
I mean - even in Rebecca the narrator acts as a lady's maid. And, yes, that was probably at least a hundred years later - probably closer to 50, if my sense of Daphne du Maurier history is right.
And Queen Victoria could have used some of that Friends never lie.
Now I am processing the consequences of the mind slayer. Made a comparison to Buffy really quickly:
"If Buffy is the Vampire Slayer; then who or what is this mind slayer?"
And then found out through that Dungeons and Dragons manual. 4th or 5th edition? The 2nd edition was really famous.
And Russians or aliens? Ah, not so simple.
When you think of the alienists who might have persecuted and prosecuted Queen Victoria - they called her "unstable" ...
There might have been an Elizabeth II 120 years earlier than the one the UK did get. And, yes, the first Elizabeth was a great queen.
There are at least two people who know lots more about British royalty than I do. I printed out a soc.culture.royalty list of succession around the time of William and Kate - and what a big trip they had taken through Germany and Poland with the children within these last three months.
Gdansk and technology. Krakow and Osciewim. And Germany and great-great-great-grandmothers.
I'd like to talk about another holiday. Some of you call it Harvest Home; some of you call it All Hallows Eve [and 1 November is All Hallows] and many of you call it Hallowe'en. And some of you will know about Hallows from the last Harry Potter book - there must have been so many parties from the movies.
At the moment I am reading The portrait of a lady and chapter 6 is about how smart and well-equipped Isabel Archer is.
When it comes to #cultureisnotacostume, I like to make it personal. The young ladies on Mustang FC - Marnie specifically - tried to attract one of their players back on the grounds that these experiences - aka parties - mean fun, friendship and fitness.
Ruby actually said [in the narrative] When will someone tell Marnie that culture is not a costume?
Culture of course is many things, as I learnt when I was reading Critical terrorism studies and Third world - the latter is the journal which printed and then retracted The case for colonialism.
I think people who do not know about "Culture is not a costume" frequently make their own cases - small and large - for imperalism and colonialism.
I have also been reading Debbie Reese's blog about The secret project which is a book about the Manhattan Project. The book begins with this empty [!] desert [!!].
If someone tried to write about the Maralinga that way, or about the Rainbow Warrior and previous and subsequent French nuclear testing in the 1980s and 1990s [chapter 13-14 of Third-formers at the Remedial School expresses my sorrow and shame - and my obliviousness; as does A mother lost a Chaser found - the latter is very litterature verite or actual/contemporaneous - you know, written at the time it was setunlike some of my later excursions into the past or the future] I would try to kick up a big stink about it.
And of course Trident which often appears on Fearless and when I read about in Spiked when James Woydhausen and Rob Lyons write about it.
When you have children and their illustrative desires to consider ...
The book I have just finished reading to read Portrait of a lady is Emily Ballou's Father lands. It was published in 2007 and shows a young girl - Cherry Laurel - and her sisters going to an integrated school in Wisconsin, Milwaukee. This is 1977.
16 March 1977 was the day that changed Cherry's whole life.
She creates this paracosm called Father Land where her father Jackson is. One of my favourite parts of the book is where Jackson and the sisters - Cherry; Ivy; Holly [ "The holly and the ivy when they are both full grown - of all the trees that are in the wood" ] work in the circus with Jackson's new partner Sabine. It is so good. Cherry seems to have a fear of - or prejudice against - clowns.
And so many people do have a fear of clowns. It became really big for me in the early 2000s when a Belgian woman called Florence had her avatar as a classic clown. And several people were afeared of it. A lot of people don't like masks - even of the Venetian and Florentian sort Isabel might have experienced as a kid when she was travelling with her Dad and sisters.
Three 2017 videos on #cultureisnotacostume from three different perspectives.
One of my favourite people to follow is "Safety Pat the clown" - otherwise known as David Alteri. Reward and Consent is the place to look.
In Kick meanwhile, there was a great quote about finding your role in the team and in the teams that you have been and will be part of and are part of right now. It's especially good for us who have not felt like or been team players up to now. And the 12s got to go to Coffs Harbour - they're playing really hard opponents like New South Wales and Queensland.
And Danny was really great when he finally talked to Ruby and told her you can't change teams mid-season in this league. So it was virtually a fait accompli when she stayed with the Mustangs FC.
Ruby is a very focused soccer player. She came from the US and her Mum is a very intense sports coach. She and Ruby practise together in the boxing ring and there are 50 punches with the punching bag. Some good cross-training and fitness involved.
And the part about squeezing avocados and treating them like hoon's cars. When the smashed versions cost so much - Danny has a point here too.
There were sensitive scenes about Anusha and the reader of Wuthering Heights. Would Heathcliff have helped Cathy shop for a bra? I think Earnshaw might have or Linton - getting my Wuthering generations right. The Wuthering Heights reader has blue hair and lives with Marnie for a few days in the week - so does Isabella.
And the party is super awkward because of the cultural appropriation and the diversity involved.
I will admit that I used to love parties like that, especially if they were out of our usual cultural comfort zone. Being complicit; actively participating. Of course the 1990s and 2000s were the time when I was establishing my reputation as an anti-racist or contre-racist [and maybe even a retro-racist].
So many good Hallowe'en memories. For example: bringing a massive pumpkin which had been grown in the allotment and brought to the festival for a pumpkin competition. And Halloween Light Shows are big! I picked the Lee London shows and the Tokyo Disneyland one.
In the early 2000s I would entertain with a weird and wacky record which had a green cover, and in 2001 I had my own record player until the first half of 2006. Now a gramophone is in the main house. There were always about six or seven songs which would be played.
After-school clubs focusing on subjects are brilliant. Or the general GATE lot. The ones I saw in So awkward were for maths [M and C ran that one] - geography and history. It turned out that History Club was watching movies like 10,000 years BC.
And Miss Briggs doing her predictive listening? Oh - the sacredness of listening is that you are in the moment with the interlocutor. She got Jes right - she and Alfie were working on their bucket list. Alfie's goals - a lot of them involve Martha Fitzgerald - and he does get on to the maths club.
Alfie's big talent and passion is cooking. He even thinks about food during the Maths Competition. He would be good for a Functional Maths or Consumer Maths mindset.
And they try to recruit a soccer player who really knows the angles and the physics of it all. Spatial relations.
Hope you use your spatial relations skills and your mathematical reasoning skills as you learn about the history and geography of Hallowe'en.
And remember:
There are lots of good and serious games as well. I am thinking of all those months I spent on SimFarm, as well as the one about the Haitian family and the Darfur is dying game and Third World Farmer.
Three months before Band Aid 30 I downloaded Real lives 2010 on my previous computer. And it was so good to create characters, play with randomised ones and put myself into their places. I kept playing it up until February 2016.
Perhaps there are good ones on your smartphone. And someone from the Majority World can share their games with you.
