There was a violent carjacking just a couple of streets over from us in Stonyfell last night. According to The Advertiser, local resident Don Bolton had just pulled into his Grevillea Crescent home about 2.30am on Saturday when two men wearing balaclavas cornered him in the driveway. One of the men punched him in the mouth while the other grabbed the keys and sped off in his white Mercedes Benz sedan. Mr Bolton told 7 NEWS one of the men threatened him as he demanded the keys.
“He told me in a few certain terms that if I didn’t hand over the keys, he was going to finish me off,” he said.
Mr Bolton then went on to say that what upset him the most was that his tools, which he uses for volunteering with Scouts SA, were in the back of the car. Apparently, the police checked the area and couldn’t find the men or Mr Bolton’s car.
That is scary, and it scares me a lot. I have talked about how, at night time, I get incredibly scared — so much so that I think it has affected my sleep — so I stay up all night and sleep in the first half of the day. I am hyper vigilant at night; my mind experiences a home invasion almost as if it were real, and at times it can be horrifying.
When I’ve talked about it with a couple of people, I have said it’s because it is a bigger house — there are multiple entry points. I have lived alone in units before and haven’t really had too much trouble, but it’s this bigger house that makes my imagination run wild.
I talk to Mum about it, and she makes me feel ridiculous, and more than once she has said that if I feel scared, she’ll pay for me to stay in a hotel for a few nights. But it’s not a case of running off to a hotel and then coming back to the same place, only to relive the same fears every night.
I want to live in an apartment in town, with a doorman or a reception desk. I know it probably sounds absurd, a 44 year old woman experiencing something like this, and I guess it is. The funny thing is, it’s gotten a lot worse the older I get.
In some ways, there is a degree of arrogance in thinking that an intruder would come to our house out of all the houses on the street and Mum has made a point of making remarks with a similar sentiment. I think that’s true too, but it is an involuntary feeling, and I know it is really bad for your health to be in a constant state of fight or flight.
That carjacking in Stonyfell makes me think about what kind of people are lurking around here. I’m always up at 2:30am, and I can often hear cars hooning about. I always assume they are young men in their twenties, still living with their parents in the big houses around here. But maybe the men behind the wheels of those cars are a little more sinister than I first thought.
David Penberthy recently wrote an opinion piece for The Advertiser titled "Mount Gambier MP Troy Bell’s sentence shows the inconsistencies of SA courts", and I really think he made a very good point. To place the article into some context, I will tell you about a letter to the editor which was referenced in the piece.
Hotelier Peter Hurley criticised the lenient sentence given to Samuel Ajal, who assaulted three Arkaba Hotel employees and caused more than $80,000 in damage. Despite the violence, Magistrate Davis told Ajal he was a “good person” who had simply done a “stupid thing.”
Hurley argued this response ignored workers’ rights to feel safe, noting that Ajal received only a suspended sentence, a good-behaviour bond, and no order to compensate the hotel. He said the decision failed to meet community expectations and showed a justice system more concerned with the offender’s comfort than the victims’ wellbeing.
In contrast to this, Penbo went on to say that The Advertiser reported that former MP Troy Bell was found to have stolen more than $400,000 from the not-for-profit Independent Learning Centre, and used the money on home renovations, flights to Los Angeles, and to offset his mortgage.
His punishment for this: five years in jail, with a minimum non-parole period of two years and six months.
I liked the comparison of these two criminals because their sentences highlight a startling truth about our criminal justice system. It’s simply not good enough. I look at victims of violent crimes which, even when they don’t end in death, leave a lifetime of trauma and fear. Yet in court, we so often watch the status of “victim” shift from the person harmed to the person who caused the harm. It feels as though people can get away with anything.
And how is it fair that Samuel Ajal gets zero time behind bars? I’m sure judges and the courts would defend themselves by saying they have some sort of formula for the way they determine sentences. If I hadn’t been so busy gawking at the judge when I was working as a court officer, I might have paid more attention to the laws that allow thugs and violent criminals back onto our streets.
As Penbo asked about Troy Bell:
"Did he physically or emotionally hurt anyone? Did he hurt a child? Is there anyone in the South-East who will never recover from the impact of his misconduct? Or did he just sneakily stick a whole stack of donated money into his offset account and use the interest accrued to underwrite his lifestyle?"
I sometimes think the rich get away with more crimes than the poor, simply because they can afford decent counsel to represent them. But then, sometimes, I think judges take it upon themselves to back the underdog — to back the offender who has been abused, had a rough upbringing, or had some unfortunate circumstance bestowed upon them in this cold, cruel world.
But the thing is, Your Honour, we’ve all been abused, had rough upbringings, and had unfortunate circumstances bestowed upon us in one way or another. And despite the fact that I am, in fact, a convicted criminal, I don’t go around assaulting hotel employees or causing $80,000 worth of damage to pokie machines, then laugh at the fact that I don’t have to compensate the owners for their significant loss.
Are the judges administering the law, or are they just granting wishes and dishing out second chances to those members of our society who do not deserve them? Are our jails really so full that they only have room for people like white-collar criminal Troy Bell? Are you telling me there's not one single spare bed in any of our correctional facilities for an offender like Samuel Ajal, who inflicted pure terror on honest, hard working people and business owners?
In my opinion, the judge that I fell in love with was soft on crime too. At the time, I thought it was admirable, but I don’t now. It’s not good enough for me. I do believe in rehabilitation and restorative justice, but there has to come a point where the judge says, “It’s not good enough for me either.”
Today is Saturday, which is one of my favourite days because I volunteer making calls to isolated elderly people on the weekends. I have a list of people in South Australia that I call every week, but often on my list I’ll have clients from around Australia.
This morning, I called a lady from Queensland who was talking about how she didn’t have a smartphone, which is why she prefers we call her on her landline. I don’t know what came over me, but I told her she should get a smartwatch. I said that if she were my family member, I’d recommend one and then I told her how my auntie recently had a fall. She was wearing a smartwatch, and the watch called the ambulance and notified five family members.
I personally think that’s an incredible thing, and I thought that if this lady could afford it, she should get one. I don’t know why I told this particular woman; I think it was because she sounded a lot older and isolated. She told me she was very grateful to learn about smartwatches and said she would get one.
When I hung up, I didn’t know whether it sounded like I was pushing the idea on her but I really do think they’re valuable, even priceless, tools. Especially for elderly people living alone.
I know you can get those alarm devices you wear around your neck, and if you press the button it connects to an ambulance. Nanny used to have one of those. But with a smartwatch, it makes the call for you when it detects that you’ve fallen. It’s amazing technology. I’m going to get one for Mum for her birthday, which is just before Christmas.
I have a new favourite client. It’s another man — the one I was telling you about last week who’s interested in Ancient Astronaut Theory. Lately, he’s been telling me stories about how he’s travelled around Australia prospecting for gold. That’s something that really appeals to me. Sounds like he’s got the dreamer’s disease.
He’s found a lot of gold over the years and uses those metal detector machines to find it. For a brief moment, I imagined myself doing something like that but the truth is, I’d never go out into remote areas with a metal detector on my own. Where there’s gold, there’s always someone who wants to steal it.
Something about this man really makes me sad. He has a dog who has travelled all around Australia with him. He lives alone, and this dog is his absolute best friend and companion. The dog is dying. He told me he can’t bring himself to put it down. It makes me so sad to think about, because I know how much pets have meant to me over the years. In his circumstance, his dog is very much the centre of his world.
I saw a story on the news that I find simply magical. A family cleaning up Wharton Beach near Esperance, Western Australia, discovered a World War I message in a bottle written more than a century ago. The letter, penned in 1916 by South Australian soldier Malcolm Alexander Neville to his mother as he sailed to Europe aboard HMAS Ballarat, was found sealed in a glass bottle buried in the sand.
Neville described life at sea with humour, noting that the food was “really good” except for one meal “buried at sea.” The letter was signed “Somewhere at sea, August 15th, 1916.” He was later killed in France in April 1917, aged 28.
Finder Debra Brown said her daughter uncovered the bottle during one of their regular beach clean-ups. After carefully drying it, they were able to read the letter and trace Neville’s descendants, including a 104 year old relative who still holds some of his wartime correspondence.
A second letter was also found in the same bottle, written by Private William Kirk Harley, who survived the war. Brown plans to return both letters to the soldiers’ families while keeping the bottle itself.
The discovery adds to Esperance’s history of remarkable finds — in 2018, one of the world’s oldest known messages in a bottle, dating back to 1886, was also found nearby.
The idea of a message in a bottle is both romantic and mysterious, and I absolutely love it when things like this are found. There’s something hauntingly beautiful about a message surviving time and tide, waiting for the right person to discover it. It makes me think about connection — how words, once released, can travel vast distances and outlive us entirely.
The other night, when I was donating blood, the nurses and phlebotomists were talking about the TV show The Golden Bachelor. It’s essentially The Bachelor, a show centred around one man — the bachelor — and a group of prospective bachelorettes all in their golden years. They’re all of a certain vintage.
I decided to watch it, so I logged on to the Nine Now app on my TV, where two episodes were available. I won’t give you a boring recap — which may, in fact, spoil it for you if you’re thinking of watching — but the bachelor himself is a very attractive 61 year old man named Barry “Bear” Myrden. He’s actually Canadian but has lived in Australia for the past 20 years. He’s a widower; his wife died of a brain tumour 14 years ago.
The women they’ve matched him with are all in their fifties and sixties. There were no women in their forties, which surprised me. Some of the women are incredibly accomplished and beautiful, and at first, I thought the show might be inspiring — especially for women entering or approaching their golden years, and the idea of finding true love later in life.
But the more I watched, and the more I watched Bear, I began to see what was really going on. He was kind and charming to all the women in his age bracket, but the one he seemed to have the most chemistry with was a woman in her early fifties — someone who looked much younger. It doesn’t matter how accomplished you are or how good a person you try to be — you simply cannot beat youth.
I also did a bit of reading about The Golden Bachelor online and found a whole heap of rumours. Since the show has already finished filming, some reports claim that Bear ended up running off with the host, Samantha Armytage. She’s denied it, of course — but if it were true, that would certainly be a twist!
When I was 31 years old, I went to Melbourne for a one week glass blowing and glass art class with a renowned American glass artist. I actually didn’t have a lot of experience working with an open flame, which is what we ended up doing. My lack of experience made it a little intimidating at first, but it didn’t matter in the end.
The American glass artist — who I’ll call Ryan — had long grey hair and would wear ACDC T-shirts. The other women in the class were a lot older than me, mostly in their fifties and sixties. I think there were five of us altogether. Ryan was 61 years old. He was a little dirty — the kind of man who’d make small sexual remarks and occasionally look at me in a way that made me wonder if I was imagining it. This was just after what happened with the judge, so I wasn’t sure if I was misreading him.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been interested in a man like Ryan — not because of his age, but because he reminded me of one of those heavy metal types I can’t relate to. But he was an absolute genius with glass. He made some of the most spectacular pieces I’ve ever seen. I remember him creating a glass geisha as a demonstration and giving it to one of the women; she was so grateful I thought she was going to cry.
Ryan had an assistant, Louanne, who was an older woman in her sixties — maybe even seventies — and she travelled with him from America. Ryan had something of a cult following in the glass world. I know he’d been to Adelaide a number of times. The women in the class were very taken with him — one in particular was quite amorous.
We spent long hours at the flame and then went back to a nearby hotel at night. On the last night, after we’d all finished, Ryan came back to the hotel where we were staying. I smoked at the time, and so did he. We were standing out the front having a cigarette when the group of women came over to talk to us. The one who fancied him — the woman in her fifties — actually said to me, “Why don’t you go back to your room now?”
I couldn’t believe it. But I wanted to see what would happen if I asked Ryan to come back to my room — would he? To be honest, it was my way of testing myself. I wanted to know: should I have been more forward with the judge? And I still wonder what he would have said.
The women eventually left, and when they did, I looked at him and asked, point blank, “Do you want to come back to my room?”
He said yes and we went back to my room. Before we went inside you won't believe what he said to me. "Listen, I'm a 61 year old man, I'm a grandfather — are you legal?" My jaw dropped. First of all he thought I was under 17 years old and secondly I was 31!!! We laughed about it after I told him my age and then we went inside.
The thing I’m most ashamed of in this whole scenario is that he was married. He said he and his wife lived in separate rooms, but who knows how much truth there was to that. We ended up sleeping together and then talking for most of the night.
At one point, I found myself giving him advice on how to get back into his wife’s good books — something he found hilarious, but which I now see as both audacious and quietly offensive.Then he started talking about the older women who fawned over him at his workshops. He said it happened everywhere he went, but that he didn’t find them attractive because of their age. He told me he wanted to be with someone my age instead.
It’s funny looking back on it now — that woman who told me to go back to my room so she could spend more time with him, and then him telling me later that women her age didn’t do it for him. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’m now almost the same age as the woman Ryan found so unattractive, and sometimes I wonder: if I fancied a man close to my age and he was giving all his attention to a much younger woman, what would I do? Would I tell her to go back to her room?
Then there was a moment that said everything about who he really was. He went to the bathroom and called me in, saying, “Check this out.” I went to see if he was alright, and realised he was just being ridiculous — he was peeing up the wall. I could see right then and there why he didn’t like older women. He was, in so many ways, still a boy.
