Joel Deane Profile picture
May 27, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read Read on X
You may have heard about the killing of #WillowDunn.

If you haven't, I'm sorry to share the news.

Willow was four. She lived in Brisbane with her father.

Willow's mother died when she was born. And now Willow is dead, too.

Her father has been charged with her murder.
I'm not going to name the father. This post is not about him.

I'm not going to go into the details of the crime, either. This post is not about the horror of it all.

This post is about Willow.

You see, Willow had Down syndrome -- and so does my eldest daughter.
People ask me what it's like to have a daughter with Down syndrome.

Let me tell you what it's like.

This morning, my eldest got out of bed and hugged me good morning.

That's not special: she hugs every member of the family good morning.

Then she got ready for school.
You see, my daughter is studying year 12.

After school, she cooked us dinner: pork rissoles. It was tasty, but she's a messy cook.

Then we all ate dinner and laughed a lot.

We usually do. And, as usual, my eldest was the funniest. She's kept us sane during COVID-19.
After dinner, my eldest chilled out.

She listened to music (everything from AC/DC to Queen to One Direction) and watched TV (a sci-fi kung-fu thing).

Then she tried to order a lunch order on my iPad (Thursdays are lunch order days) but couldn't.

The tuck shop is closed. COVID.
This annoyed her. She was stroppy until her mum promised we'd buy her sushi (her favourite meal).

Then she hugged us all and went to bed.

That is what a day with a person with Down syndrome is like.

My point: Willow Dunn was not someone with a disability.
Willow was, like my daughter is, an individual.

A person.

Someone with the same capacity for love and life and joy as you or I.

In fact, if Willow was anything like my daughter, her capacity for love, life and joy was greater than yours or mine.

Far greater.
In other words, Willow knew what was happening to her.

She would have felt the pain. She would have felt the hunger. She would have felt the fear.

She would have felt it deeply.

She knew everything.

That's why I'm crying for Willow. And I don't want to stop.

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More from @joeldeane

Jan 4
I’m a poet. I’m also a former newspaper journalist. I just read the News Corp piece claiming that a poem by @omarsakrpoet accuses Bluey of genocide. I then read the poem.

Let me list 10 problems with this beat up.
1. It places genocide in quotation marks (“genocide”) which usually means that Sakr uses that word. He doesn’t.
2. Therefore the article is based on a fabrication.
3. The journalist did not contact Sakr or his publisher to ask about the intent of the poem. This is a basic requirement in fair reporting.
4. Therefore the article is based on a fabrication and non-reporting.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 23, 2020
I grew up in a newsroom. I believe you can’t have a healthy democracy without a strong, independent media. I know how hard it is to be a good reporter. I know there are plenty of good journos. So why do I feel betrayed by the profession I love?
1. For 25 years it’s failed to come to terms with the threat of the internet.
2. It’s allowed bean counters to run the industry, leading to clickbait churnalism and the clearing out of newsrooms.
3. It’s given too much power to too few publishers and broadcasters.
4. It’s tried to turn news into entertainment.
5. It’s aided and abetted the rise of Pauline Hanson.
6. It’s allowed the political class in Canberra to obsess over tactics for 20 years instead of holding them to account for not value-adding to the nation.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 19, 2020
Bolt is peddling BS. Read Blainey and Pascoe. Both detail the ingenuity of Aboriginal Australians.

Blainey in 'A History of Victoria': 'The way of life varied ... depending on the terrain, the climate, the foods available, the traditions ... and their own ingenuity.'
Blainey: 'The northern plains possessed no suitable stone from which axes or spearpoints could be made, and so the stone arrived as part of a long chain of barter. The finest quarry of such stone in Victoria in the past 5000 years was Mount William.'
Blainey: '[At Mt William] a hard, dense hornfels or greenstone was quarried by Aboriginal people from about 250 circular or oval holes, and the discards from the quarrying now cover an area the size of a small racecourse.'
Read 7 tweets
Jul 23, 2020
I see Ita Buttrose has sparked another intergenerational shit fight where the old farts annoyed everyone, the young farts blamed everyone and the middle-aged farts bleated that they've been forgotten by everyone.

But the Boomer v Millennial v Gen X blather misses the point.
The real issue is economic.

There is a large and growing underclass of working (and increasingly not-working) poor in Australia who largely missed out on the boom times.
And they're old and young.

And they're male and female.

And they're the ones who will be done over if the Federal Government uses the COVID Recession as political cover to make our already too-insecure workforce even more insecure under the guise of 'flexibility'.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 20, 2020
I interviewed Sue Salthouse on March 30, 2020. It was a wide-ranging conversation about the past, present and future of the disability rights movement in Australia. Sue was an insightful, generous, deeply impressive person. We've lost a giant. Vale. #disability Image
Sue Salthouse: 'People gravitate to the people who are most like them and unfortunately people who look different, sound different, act different doesn't fit into that spectrum, so, that there is inherent discrimination around us for people with disabilities.'
Sue Salthouse: 'Unless we've got a secure income and a roof over our heads we can't address the other things, because a woman particularly doesn't have autonomy if she has to stay in that house because she hasn't got economic security so she can be abused and she can't leave.'
Read 10 tweets
Jul 6, 2020
Regarding the @VerityLa blow up over Stuart Cooke’s ‘About Lin’: I’m a poet. I’ve also worked in politics as a press secretary. That’s the communications equivalent of crisis response. With that in mind I have some advice for the editors and author.
First of all: it’s not about you. It never is. You have to listen to and try to understand why people are upset. That should be pretty easy in this case.
Second: be honest. Spin never works, especially when there are two parties involved, because there’s always a gap between your story and the truth. And that gap kills you.
Read 7 tweets

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