Barry Dickins - One Punch: The Tragic Toll of Random Acts of Violence

For Caterina

Contents

IT IS RARE to meet brave people but I have met them here in this book.

I have sat in their kitchens and listened to their stories in cafes and wondered whether I am capable of asking them the right questions and understanding how they are feeling.

It is such a different experience to hear about random acts of violence on the television or radio than it is to speak with the mother or father of a murdered son who has fallen victim to One Punch. I have watched news bulletins where parents or partners have been given an infinitesimal amount of time to speak, so in this book I wanted to allow those who have been touched by violence their chance to speak.

I have seen the power of not just being truthful but fearless in their insightfulness and overwhelming candour. I have also been moved by their courage as they have set out to make a difference by discussing violence with schoolchildren and parents, candidly and freely, a most eloquent gift to society.

Barry Dickins

I SAW CATERINA POLITI on the news the other night. She was outside the Supreme Court with a loud crowd of supporters, celebrating something that was rather a breakthrough for victims of crime: the handing down of a ten-year sentence to a man who killed a doctor outside Box Hill Hospital.

Sitting in my home and watching Nine News, I called Caterina to see how she felt about it.

We meet at a cafe not far from her work to discuss sentencing and other matters, and I ask her how it felt when the ten-year sentence was handed down.

Very emotional, she says. I said to myself aloud, This is for you David! But it felt like a hollow victory, since it wont bring my son back to me or the doctor to his family. The media outside the court said, Are you okay? I just shook my head and burst into tears.

The coward punch manslaughter law with a ten-year mandatory minimum was introduced in 2014 as a result of the campaign run by STOP.One Punch Can Kill, which was founded by the family and friends of Caterinas son, David. Caterina says that she expected the sentence to be more than a pitiful few years, but the ten-year result took her by surprise because it was the first time the law had been applied even though there had been similar cases since 2014. She sat at the back during the proceedings, trying to see what was happening, her attention focused on the judge. It was the same judge who presided over the cases of the three perpetrators in her sons death.

At the plea hearing for McCluskey-Sharp the judge indirectly blasted me for my victim impact statement. She would not allow it. This devastated me, as she made me feel like I was on trial. I had done nothing wrong. Caterina saw the doctors widow, and reached out to her through the police to say, Im thinking of you and your family.

Caterina says that it was a comfort to be at the sentencing, surrounded by so many media. Together they fight to make the public aware of the dangers of One Punch.

But the effort of being in court was exhausting. I felt so completely and totally drained watching the Box Hill Hospital case in court, because it all came back to me!

I ask her how she feels the campaign is progressing.

Weve had a few more deaths. Jaidyn Walker was killed outside the lounge of The Cherry Bar. But weve seen some good come out of the campaign. I tell my son that, every time I see him. Every time I speak I see him there with me.

After a long chat, it is time for her to return to work and for me to remember where I parked. Caterina does not seem any older than I last saw her a year ago, but the mental fatigue and all the running and rushing about, trying to make people more aware of the dangers of so casual a blow, must burn the fuse and attack the stamina.

The groups she has formed and shared her platform with, in schools and halls and meeting rooms, must wear her down. It is a commitment to wake sleeping people up from their slumbers.

Perhaps she can find respite via engagement with others and provide an offertory of truth instead of clichd, instantly forgettable paragraphs inked up for the amnesiac public. She offers to converse humanely and freely with others in an entirely new way, refreshing in its truthfulness and spontaneity. This compulsion to speak out is the only means to see a future after the blow has landed, ending everything except love.

I walk out into the busy street and look for a small moment at the comfy well-offs, hurrying up the path with fashionable umbrellas and clicking along on well-heeled shoes, and I wonder if any of them have a clue about the cessation of life due to one punch.

To re-educate my own intelligence inside a head that by the way has itself oft been kicked and punched, I have made myself open to chance observations in the street. A month back, stopped at a red light on the corner of Spring Street and Edwardes Street, Reservoir, I saw a brawl.

Before I could see what was going on I heard hard punches landing on a small rough-looking guy who was lying in the gutter. A much heftier man stood over him, pelting him over and over and those blows seemed to go straight through my dashboard and appeared to reverberate it. The fellow on the ground was getting caned.

Those big Popeye punches just kept on pounding, as a crowd of bored passers-by stood around. One guy observed the assault with a look of jadedness and boredom. It was about nine in the morning and most people were dashing across the road, towards the railway line, just being missed by the narrowest of margins by truck drivers and eager pizza deliverers aboard whining motorcycles that ponged of nauseating pizza mixed with diesel. Nobody who witnessed the degrading bashing did a single solitary thing about it.

There wasnt a thing I could possibly do as I didnt have a mobile phone to assist in this urgent and upsetting incident and I was exactly like all the indifferent witnesses who watched it as youd watch a cartoon.

I think that only when you personally are an eyewitness to punching in private or on the street does it come through to you just how violent these blows can be. Suddenly, as in Spring Street, Reservoir, the furious punches arrive in reality and not via a court summary or as depicted in the media.

The rapidity of the blows, and the excited onlookers, and bored onlookers, are a salutary lesson in modern times. The one remaining horror of this spontaneous assault was the guy standing there by the affray enjoying two hot meat pies, which made me think of the punches as a form of public entertainment at least.

I GREW UP LOVED and probably over-protected by a pair of honest and hardworking parents who inspired me from infancy to be kind above all else, although a kind of theatricality was inevitable since both my mother and father were often satiric. Make-believe was our common language and domesticity was full of exaggeration and great big comforting eyes that we couldnt look away from.

My father was never thoughtless towards my mother; in fact one of my earliest recollections is running home from school along our potholed road with my elder brother John, and when we went in through the back flywire door we could hear Mum and Dad billing and cooing exactly like pigeons do.

My father worked as a printer and in the early fifties set up shop in our garage. In his neat-as-a-pin grey cotton dustcoat and immaculate short-back-and-sides haircut, he used to quip that it wasnt far to go to work and I believe that was the perfect joke because we always laughed at it.

We were busy being babies and having fun swimming in puddles and wrestling one another, although never hurting or being cruel because all the arts of hitting and hurting were verboten in a house happier than a whispered fairy story or a nice crabapple.