How much do the stories by Alice Duncan-Kemp tell us about Aborigines before white settlement?

The article below is rather hagiographic but considerable skepticism about it is warranted. The author claims that the stories concerned tell how the First Australians lived. But ignores the salient fact that Duncan-Kemp was a 20th century author, writing long after 1778. And there are many indications that her stories were romanticized and in part possibly imaginary

So her stories at best describe a late period in the influence of white settlement on Aborigines. They describe Aborigines who were the product of contact with whites. Were the activities she described white-adapted or "original"? "A bit of both" is the obvious verdict and disentangling them would be a very speculative enterprise. They tell us NOTHING certain about Aborigines before white settlement

It’s hard not to be enchanted by the lost books of Alice Duncan-Kemp when they resonate so deeply with the nation Australia would become. A photograph of her, on a winter’s day 90 years ago, shows her tapping out tales of her childhood on Mooraberrie station, a speck in the red dirt of southwest Queensland’s far-flung Channel Country. The story of boom and bust in the bush, of hope given over to despair, of cattle dying of thirst one day and drowning the next in a frothing flood, is as old as the Outback ­itself. We know it by heart.

What sets Duncan-Kemp apart – and why the rediscovery of her work is causing a stir in academe and out in the field where scientists use it like a “road map” to unlock the secrets of how the First Australians lived – is the detailed and partly disputed account she provides of the contact era. A voice like hers was rarely heard at the time: ­admiring of the tribal ­Aborigines she grew up with, heavy of heart for a way of life in its death throes. Recalling the Aboriginal nanny who helped raise her on the family beef run, 1200km west of Brisbane, she wrote in 1933:

The seed of my knowledge, of that corner of sand-hills, was implanted within me as a mere babe straddling Mary Ann’s hip, or toddling with little black mates after the billy-cart. In later youth the seed grew and fruited. The secret lay in a profound respect for the aborigines (sic) and their customs. In return, these trusty folk taught me to read, with wonder and pleasure, in Nature’s Infinite Book of Secrecy, the reading of which was as simple as ABC to them.

Duncan-Kemp’s name and oeuvre – running to five out-of-print volumes and many more unpublished manuscripts – was forgotten by all but her family until a new generation of Australian historians dusted them off. Tom Griffiths, of the Australian National University, was 14 when he chanced across her second book, Where Strange Paths Go Down. He loved it, inspiring a lifelong passion for her work. Decades later the W.K. Hancock Professor of History would extol “the exciting truthfulness of her memoir – one tinged by innocence and nostalgia and prey to the glitches of memory, but faithfully told. A precious possibility emerges that Alice’s books comprise one of the richest ethnographic sources Australia possesses”.

University of Queensland archaeologist ­Michael Westaway began tracking down the scenes and places she described. There were dead-ends, of course. (“Alice was a bit airy-fairy on distances,” her grandson Will explains.) But in instance after instance, 21st-century technology and old-fashioned legwork confirmed her observations. Traces of sizeable Indigenous villages were found where she said they had been; a thriving trade in the narcotic pituri leaf did indeed span the length of the great inland ­rivers, from northwest Queensland to Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, just as she described it; the jarra-jarra millstones she saw Aboriginal women sweat over to grind grass seed and other bush “grains” came from vast quarries dotted across the nearby desert; rare medicine plants continued to flourish in the out-of-the-way spots she had documented.

“It’s a bit like following the Iliad to find Troy,” says Westaway, referring to Heinrich Schliemann’s 1870 feat to unearth the ruins of the fabled city in Turkey through clues in Homer’s text. “You know … we’ve been able to go through what she wrote and test it as a hypothesis: here’s a site or activity or plant she mentions, so let’s go and find proof of it.”

But some things haven’t changed. The critics are still at it, chipping away at Duncan-Kemp’s credibility. Take this 1961 review of book three, Our Channel Country. “Mrs Duncan-Kemp ­proceeds to unfold improbable tales of her childhood which dwarf most previous ‘tall ­stories’ of the outback,” the Sydney Morning Herald’s man sniffed. “It is impossible to take many of them seriously.”

These days, the carping is couched in more academic terms. The revival of interest in Duncan-Kemp engaged serious people in serious research that underpinned a successful Native Title claim by the Mithaka people of southwest Queensland in 2015. At the same time she was quoted approvingly by Bruce Pascoe in his polemic Dark Emu, which challenged the ­orthodoxy that Aborigines were “hapless” hunter-gatherers prior to European settlement and argued that they had developed the makings of an agricultural society. That willing skirmish, as we will see, has spilled into the reappraisal of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s work and legacy and in turn the national debate over the Voice, with its denouement at today’s referendum.

Linguist Dr David Nash has picked apart her writing phrase by phrase. An honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University’s School of Literature, Language and Linguistics, Nash compiled dozens of examples of her ­appropriating Aboriginal vernacular and plagiarising text from other writers. “Users” of her work need to be wary, he cautions.

Will Duncan-Kemp is a keeper of the flame, carefully tended in a two-bedroom cottage in Toowoomba cluttered with his grandmother’s manuscripts, papers and family memorabilia. Bearded and full-bellied, the retired geologist, 66, wouldn’t look out of place in the sepia-tinged photos we’re looking through. He points to a faded image of Alice and her sister, Laura, as young women, standing beside a flooded river, backs to the camera, about the time she started on her debut book, Our Sandhill Country. “It was a hard life out there,” he says quietly.

Then as now, the vast chameleonic landscape on the edge of the Simpson Desert defied the efforts of mere mortals to tame it. The region, cut by intermittently-running rivers such as the Diamantina, Thomson, Barcoo and Cooper Creek, wasn’t even explored by Europeans until the 1860s; Burke and Wills would have approached the western boundary of Mooraberrie on their ill-fated trek through the interior. The pioneering Durack family settled there before embarking on a cross-continental cattle drive to open up the Kimberley in 1883. When Alice’s father, William Duncan, ­arrived eight years later to manage the 93,000ha station, ­violence with the Mithaka clans was still an ever-present threat. Native Mounted Police ­detachments – death squads in all but name, ­according to the ANU’s Griffiths, made up of Aborigines from outside tribal groups under the command of a white sergeant – would roam the Channel Country terrorising the black population.

Occasionally the young warriors would strike back and spear an unlucky squatter, unleashing a fresh round of bloodletting. The Mithaka refused to lie down. In her celebrated memoir Kings in Grass Castles, Mary Durack captured the raw brutality of late colonisation, citing the settlers’ belief that far southwest Queensland would only be made safe when the last of the Indigenous inhabitants had been killed off, “by bullet or by bait”.

Still, some graziers were sympathetic. What became known as the Debney Peace was ­brokered by a friend of William Duncan in 1889, ending the vicious frontier war. Scottish-born Duncan was himself an enlightened figure among the hard-nosed settlers, well-read and deeply interested in the emerging science of ethnography. After securing the leasehold to Mooraberrie, he would refer to the Aborigines as his “landlords”, making them welcome on the property. Alice, the second of the couple’s four children, became “twice born” at the age of two during a midwinter drama on a raging Bulloo River. Negotiating the flood in 1903, her father had slammed their horse-drawn buggy into a semi-submerged tree, nearly overturning the carriage. Then a heavy bough crashed down on where the infant lay swaddled, gravely injuring a harnessed colt. Somehow, Alice emerged unscathed. The astonished black stockmen accompanying them, Wooragai and Bogie, lit a ceremonial fire and started up a chant: from then on, she would be the reincarnation of a spirit sacred to the Aborigines.

In due course, she was initiated and given the name Pinningarra, or leaf spirit. But there were limits even for her open-minded parents. Duncan put his foot down after the red-hot stone tip of a naming spear was drawn across the little girl’s chest, leaving a welt. There would be no more ritual scarring, he insisted. But for the rest of her life, Alice wore the faded mark above her heart with immense pride, a visible link to the Mithaka.

The death of her father in a riding fall when she was six reinforced their role as her second family. Between showering her with affection, Mary Ann Coomindah – Bogie’s wife and the sisters’ nanny, who possibly breastfed them as infants – taught her to see the world through different eyes. Years later, Duncan-Kemp would write of the day Mary Ann took her on a long walk through the bush with Laura and ­little Beatrice. (Their older brother, David, had died of diphtheria aged four.) They were hours from the homestead when the sky clouded over. Mary Ann sniffed the air and told the children a wildfire was bearing down on them. Hurry! Their only chance was to get to Teeta Lake, 2km away. Running through the reed beds, they were overtaken by Indigenous families and wildlife fleeing to the shallow water. Mary Ann ushered the frightened girls into the deepest part of the lake, leaving only their heads exposed, shielded from the radiant heat and falling ash with strips of wet bark and sacking – and when that failed, with her own body. Leading the children home, testing every step to make sure the scorched ground was safe, the selfless woman said nothing of the second-degree burns she had incurred. Instead, she whispered to Alice: “This is our country, missee.”

You can only shake your head at how the ­settlers clung to their heavy British clothes and customs that were as out of place as could be in this remote corner of the Outback. One ­summer, Duncan-Kemp would write, the ­thermometer hovered between 123F and 125F (50.5-51.6C) for three endless days and nights. Her mother, now managing Mooraberrie on her own, hung blankets set in tubs of water across the doorways and windows in an attempt to cool the place down.

The homestead was built of pale anthill clay, the 60cm thick walls paired with 3.6m high ­ceilings. Drinking water was hand-drawn from an outside tank; what was needed for cooking, laundry and personal care came from the waterhole at the back, past the open-sided kitchen shack that was washed away the year Farrar’s Creek erupted. Regardless of the outside temperature, meals were prepared in enervating proximity to the wood-fired range; well into the 20th Century, carbide-powered lamps lit the living spaces after dark.

Young Alice would sit on the canegrass ­veranda listening to the stockmen talk of epic ­cattle drives and the characters they met along the way; for the women, life was a drudgery of caring for children, cooking and housework. The nearest town, Windorah, lay 210km away across the empty blacksoil plains. Yet where other Europeans saw arid desolation, Alice perceived beauty and the promise of renewal; when they complained about the heat and the interminable, all-consuming waiting for rain, she enthused about “one of the healthiest ­climates” going, dry and clear unlike the “clammy” coast, in the “great heart of Australia stretching away for hundreds of lonely miles beyond the Cooper, Diamantina, beyond Birdsville, Bedourie and Alice Springs; destined yet, with the advent of railways and population, to pour out through countless channels a hidden wealth that will command wonder and envy”.

Yet to the Mithaka, the world was held in Yamma-coona’s net, tethering every living thing by invisible silken threads to a mythical witch. Yamma-coona held court with the spirits of the trees and the air beneath a needle bush, while her left hand spun the lives of people. Those who strayed too far felt a tug at the heart that made them ache for home. Her net, the blue sky, was set in the morning; at night, the spirits drew it in and gathered the souls of the dead, Alice recounted.

At first the bush frightens and repels; the loneliness of the open spaces, lack of companionship, the hardships, dangers and privations, seem too big a price for so little a gain. Then by degrees the bush awakens interest; the open spaces begin to have a magnetic charm all of their own; the ‘bush sense’ develops. At last, it holds men’s souls in an iron clasp that relaxes only with death. The woman wizard makes magic and entangles them … spinning, spinning, always spinning her net until the strands of her captives’ lives run out.

Along with her sisters, she spent most of World War I at boarding school and then worked on another station as a governess. On returning home, she married a bank clerk, Fred Kemp, but was adamant she would preserve the family name to become Alice Duncan-Kemp. They moved from post to post in southwest Queensland with Fred’s bank, raising cattle and sheep on the side. But Duncan-Kemp, by now a softly-spoken woman in her thirties, busy with her own family, never let go of her childhood with the Mithaka. As a girl, she had always jotted her thoughts down in a notebook and now she began writing her memoir in longhand, ­typing and retyping drafts until she felt ready to approach a publisher, Griffiths discovered.

Our Sandhill Country, completed while she was staying at Mooraberrie with Laura, who’d taken over from their mother, was released in 1933 by Angus & Robertson and did well enough to be reprinted. But Duncan-Kemp wasn’t finished yet, not by a long way.

Scattered over the river-flats and highlands maybe seen the remains of humpies, circular impressions where a one-time humpy stood with earth scooped out and piled around the back and sides to form a moat or drain for river waters; yerndoos, or cracking stones, where they cracked their shell food before or after cooking; jara-jaras, or large sandstone grinding slabs, some with elaborate hieroglyphics and carvings upon them; stone chisels and bluestone tomahawks; burnt-out clay ovens; charcoal ridges in the soil that denote middens and the dead ashes of many campfires; a few battered wooden or flint weapons; old wooden coolamons and smaller pitches corroded by age and sands; mounds of red and yellow ochre, in chalky slices of lumps mixed ready for some long forgotten corroboree; glittering mounds of crab and mussel shells bleached white by sun and winds – are all that remain to record the passing of the original owners of this bushland. To anyone who troubles to read them, these mute records unfold a poignant story.

Michael Westaway made it his business to absorb just about every word Duncan-Kemp had published. The 52-year-old archaeologist reached out to Griffiths in 2017, keen to recruit him to what would become a multifaceted exploration of the region’s pre-colonial history. Supported and guided by Mithaka elders, field teams comprising dozens of scientists and support staff from three universities have been busy excavating sites and cataloguing native plants identified through her writings. What they found partly vindicates the Dark Emu ­theory that Aborigines developed village-like settlements and technology beyond that of ­nomadic hunter-gatherers. Westaway, however, stops short of Bruce Pascoe’s contentious conclusion that they were early agriculturalists who behaved much like subsistence farmers the world over to till the soil, sow crops, irrigate, and build dams and permanent stone homes, their lives rooted to a single spot.

The reality, he believes, was more nuanced. An ever-changing landscape, never far from those extremes of feast or famine, demanded mobility and quick-stepping adaptability for these people to survive, let alone thrive. In the absence of written records – rock art and artefacts such as stone tools or weapons can only say so much when there was no textual ­language, Westaway says – the observations of the explorers and first settlers are critical. Sadly, detailing their experiences, if any, with Indigenous populations wasn’t a priority for most of them. This is where Duncan-Kemp comes in. She grew up only a generation removed from the fraught contact period in the Channel Country, schooled by Mithaka teachers still steeped in the ancient ways. “She provided a ­diverse social history of these communities at a time when they were basically disintegrating, when all of this accumulated knowledge of the country, traditional practice and lore was being lost,” Westaway says. “You would never see any record of that in the archaeology alone; we could never hope to reconstruct it from the archaeology. So what we’ve done is go, ‘OK, Alice says people did this or that at a given place we can identify from her books’. We treat that as a hypothesis we can test – we go out on country and look for the proof. We’ve been doing this for seven years now and I feel we’re very much in the early stages. But … there’s nothing really that we’ve been able to detect to say that she was bullshitting. Nothing substantial at all.”

One eye-opening finding was that the ­Mithaka practised “industrial-scale mining” – Westaway’s words – for millstone. The quarry fields contained tens of thousands of pits, so vast their scope could only be seen with satellite imagery. The scale of the enterprise suggests the completed grindstones, typically weighing 6kg-7kg, and often elaborately carved, would have been traded up and down an Indigenous silk road tracking the great inland rivers. ­Nicotine-laced pituri leaf, prized for ceremonial use and as an everyday pick-me-up, was carried on human backs to destinations as far north as Arnhem Land and south to the red-rock Flinders Ranges. The footsore porters returned with rock axes, red ochre and razor-sharp stone knives.

Duncan-Kemp’s account of the Debney Peace is the only known record of the 1889 agreement to end the frontier war in the ­Channel Country. A ceremony to seal the deal brokered by George Debney, manager of ­Monkira station, was attended by more than 500 people from the local clans. ANU’s Tom Griffiths, who is writing a biography of ­Duncan-Kemp, says the colonial authorities kept the accord secret, probably to avoid having to acknowledge the standing it conferred on the Indigenous parties to the peace.

Clearly, Duncan-Kemp could not have been writing from first-hand knowledge. But her ­father kept a meticulous journal, which she had access to. (Griffiths believes the Debney Peace might have been one of the factors that drew William Duncan to Mooraberrie, after which he married Laura, the daughter of a ­Sydney ­solicitor. Her sister also wed a local grazier.) Duncan owned an impressive library filled with the books and journal articles of early Aboriginal anthropologists such as Walter Roth, one of the many unattributed sources Duncan-Kemp would later use and, in some cases, ­appropriate. This brings us to the thorny new question that hangs over her writing: how much of it was the work of others?

After the release of Our Sandhill Country, she struggled to find a publisher for the planned ­follow-up. In the event, life would have intruded on the busy young mother’s time: while she juggled family responsibilities with managing the cattle properties that she and Fred acquired, the 1930s devolved into the Great Depression and a Second World War. Her next book, Where Strange Paths Go Down, building on her experience of growing up with the Mithaka, didn’t come out until 1952, almost 20 years later. It was followed by Our Channel Country in 1961, Where Strange Gods Call in 1968 and People of the Grey Wind, published privately by the family after her death in 1988, a few months short of her 87th birthday.

The dismissive reviews continued. The commissioned historians of western Queensland’s Barcoo Shire scoffed that she had been “only a child or a very young woman” during the period she was writing of, and couldn’t possibly be taken seriously. It must have hurt. Yet Duncan-Kemp kept at it, typing and retyping drafts on her old Remington Rand.

More here

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/when-shes-accurate-shes-mindblowingly-accurate-rediscovering-the-work-of-trailblazing-historian-alice-duncankemp/news-story/6fd65c2c743e19c5afa1216ca956a49e

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The feminist hatreds of Clementine Ford

By ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

On December 16, The Weekend Australian published my review of Clementine Ford’s new book, I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage. My review was unflattering. I underscored the hatred Ford has exhibited toward men, the inconsistencies in her feminist scholarship, and her glaringly white, middle-class point-of-view.

“All men must die.”

“Have you killed any men today? If not, why not?”

“Honestly, the coronavirus isn’t killing men fast enough.”

These are some of the things Ford has published. As I wrote: “While there is no question that some of the points she makes in I Don’t are accurate, the degree of disgust she expresses for men is more than disturbing; it should be illegal.”

I also criticised Ford’s abusive attacks on Zionist women, many of whom have been waiting since the 7 October attack on Israel for a show of solidarity from Western feminists like Ford. It is not disputed that Hamas terrorists raped and shot Jewish girls attending a music festival, taking some hostage, and leaving others to die in the desert.

Ford has described Zionist women, most of whom are Jewish, as “enthusiastic supporters of a murderous regime that has been killing children for over 70 years’. She has also said: “I don’t care that you felt betrayed or let down, and I especially don’t care that you want to have a big crybaby rant ... You’re pathetic, you disgust me, and I pity you for being so basic and gross”. She has referred to Jews as “colonizers” — they have been worshipping in Israel since the time of King David — and she has said of their desire to remain in Israel: “Honestly, you actually can’t get any whiter than that.”

After my piece was shared online, Ford’s fans — mostly young, white Australian women – began to weigh in on my Instagram page. In the main, they ignored the points that I — a Catholic by birth; white, left-wing and unrelated to any Jew — had made about Ford’s inadequacies as a thinker, and focused instead on Ford’s campaign for a “free Palestine.”

An Instagrammer calling herself “Reanne” wrote: “For the record, people like ‘me’ couldn’t give two shits about the Jews ... Jew women are supposedly not centre of attention (because) the thousands of babies slaughtered are. Grow up you imbecile.”

Ford is not the only high-profile white mummy blogger figurehead abusing “Zionist women” while manipulating their predominantly female followers with emotive footage of dead or dying babies.

On December 11, Lauren Dubois, a 42-year-old mother of three and formerly of 2GB and the ABC, posted a video to Instagram in which she said: “If somebody touched my child ... I would be homicidal. I wouldn’t need an army. I would hunt them down myself. I would find them and I would tear them limb from limb with my bare hands” (a relatively unlikely threat?) After some tear-jerking melodrama about how she would never survive the death of her own child, Dubois carefully asks: “What kind of bloodthirsty, primeval creatures think this way?”

Why, the Jews, that’s who!

Historically, Dubois’s dehumanising adjectives – bloodthirsty, primeval, and so on – are, of course, resonant. As she stresses in her post, such monsters “don’t belong in a civilised society”.

In a November 13 post, Dubois was photographed wearing a keffiyeh, a Palestinian scarf, protesting with a placard at Parliament House. One side read, “ALBO WONG YOU WILL NEVER WASH THE BLOOD OF PALESTINIAN BABIES OFF YOUR HANDS”; and “BOMBING BABIES IS BAD”.

More here:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/clementine-ford-didnt-like-me-book-review-the-response-was-disturbing/news-story/f54c8f29402c3239d9abe098a5d3bbca

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Sperm donor issues

Bridgette Chesters had always longed for a house filled with children. But seven years ago there was a hitch: her husband John discovered he had a condition that made it difficult to conceive and he also carried the cystic fibrosis gene. A sperm donor would be their only hope of having a family.

So the couple got sperm from an Australian donor through an IVF clinic and Chesters fell pregnant with Lola, now four, on the first attempt. Settling on a donor through the clinic was easy, she says. Full blood tests and screening were done and she was matched with three compatible donors.

“There’s no photos and very basic information about them. We chose one that we thought from the description might look most like my husband,” the ­Sunshine Coast mum explains. “We must have chosen well because when our daughter was born people who didn’t know the situation said how much she looked like him.”

Eager to grow their ­family, they returned to the clinic in January 2019. But this time it was not so easy. Chesters endured three full rounds of IVF and suffered four miscarriages. “Each time I was left questioning myself and if it was something I was doing, if there was something wrong with me,” she recalls. “It was devastating.”

Over the following two years it cost the couple upwards of $60,000 for IVF, which included $900 to buy each package (known as a “straw”) of sperm as well as legal and counselling costs – mandatory when using donor sperm. With credit cards maxed out and superannuation depleted, Chesters decided a new approach was needed. In January 2021 she took a deep breath and put an ad on the Facebook group Sperm Donation Australia explaining her story.

“It was quite overwhelming at first and you feel very vulnerable, but there are so many men out there looking to help and expect absolutely nothing in return,” she says. “John was a bit apprehensive initially, but once we met our donor, he was fine. It cost us nothing aside from some road tolls and a bottle of scotch,” she laughs, cradling seven-month-old Lawrence who was born from this union.

“Using our donor through the group was hands down the ­easiest thing we’ve ever done. No invasive procedures, no ­medications, no pressure over numbers. It was relaxed and easy, done at home using a kit we bought for $50 from Sperm Donation Australia with an insemination cup and a syringe. Our donor was willing to go above and beyond for us.”

“Each time I was left questioning myself and if it was something I was doing, if there was something wrong with me. It was devastating”

Chesters, 37, says she and her husband drew up their own ­agreement with the donor, who from the outset made it clear he wouldn’t seek parental rights. Genetic testing was not undertaken but she was assured he had been tested for other diseases.

“Our donor has been open and honest with us, and if he wasn’t we wouldn’t have proceeded,” she says. What started as writing long missives to the donor before meeting has now blossomed into an ongoing, friendly relationship with him and his partner. “We gained a family when we made the decision to use a known donor, something we will always be grateful for.”

But although the Chesters’ experience was positive, others warn of the risks involved in private donor arrangements. The legal situation is murky. In the case of “prolific donors” there’s a risk of sexual relationships occurring between siblings.

Women and couples are turning to assisted fertility in ever increasing numbers, and demand for donor sperm has soared. In the first nine months of this year, Monash IVF received 60 per cent more inquiries for donor sperm than for all of 2021, and reported a 25 per cent increase in donor sperm inquiries in 2021 compared with the previous year.

As for those using private sperm donors or going ­overseas for egg donation, exact numbers are impossible to know – it’s ­unregulated, after all – but there is no question that more and more people are doing that, too. Professor Fiona Kelly, Dean of La Trobe University law school and an expert in family and health law, says lockdowns exacerbated existing low numbers of Australian sperm donors in clinics.

“We have seen an increase year on year of sperm and egg donors, but we’ve seen a bigger increase in demand, largely due to the increase in single women seeking ­treatment. Single women are the biggest users of donor sperm in Australia,” she says. “As demand outstrips supply in clinics, an increasing number of Australians are turning to the private online market for donors. Private donation has always existed, particularly in the lesbian and gay communities, but the scale of what’s happening now is new. Private sperm donors are donating to many women, easily brought together online through web pages that resemble online dating sites.”

A key player in the online boom is 37-year-old Adam Hooper, a father of two with more than 15 donor children throughout ­Australia and the world to his name – a number that deeply ­concerns regulators and some donor-conceived people. Hooper, from Perth, lives a nomadic life travelling around Australia and internationally on “sperm tours”, donating to women and recruiting men. He established Australia’s largest donor community, Sperm Donation Australia, in 2015. The group has more than 15,000 members, and a backlog of people waiting to join. Similar groups exist in the UK and the US.

Hooper began on this path after meeting a lesbian couple who explained how expensive it was for them to use a fertility clinic. “Everyone in my family lived until their 90s so I thought it was something I could do,” he says. He makes his money ­selling home insemination kits and says he’s motivated by helping others and becoming an “icon” in the donor world. His group allows donors and recipients to meet, connect and determine the type of ongoing relationship, if any, they wish to have. In contrast, with a clinic there’s a presumption of anonymity that cuts both ways. “If you donate in a clinic, you don’t have the peace of mind or fulfilment you get donating privately,” Hooper says. “Many men say they donated at a clinic and didn’t think about it, but four years on they wonder about the child.”

In cases where a clinic is used, there are laws regulating contact between donors and the recipient ­family – but they differ from state to state. Under Victorian law, recipients with minor children can apply at any time for the donor’s identity and, if the donor ­consents, the information will be released. Donors can also apply for identifying information which will be released if the recipient or donor-conceived offspring consents. If the donor-conceived child is over 18, the donor’s identifying information can be released without consent. In other states, children conceived after 2005 must wait until they are 18, except in Western Australia where it is 16. Parliamentary inquiries in South Australia and Western Australia have recommended legislation similar to the Victorian model and Queensland recently held a hearing covering early contact.

Hooper says his recipients are all connected through a private Facebook group and meet regularly, allowing the donor siblings, or ­“diblings”, to grow up knowing they are part of an extended family. “When I ask my own children if they want me to stop donating, they say, ‘No’,” he says. “They have a cool life getting to go out with their friends and hold babies and were brought up knowing they would have more siblings than normal.”

Hooper says he vets every member before they join Sperm Donation Australia, as well as enforcing procedures and moderating the group. “We want to see they are decent people,” he explains. “Sometimes I’ll even call them to get a feel for them. Many of the men are already fathers and appreciate the gift of life and how ­special it is to be a parent.” However, he won’t advise on the laws regarding donor family limits. “When we get enough donors, no donor will have to be relied on to help as many people,’’ he says.

Greta French-Kennedy is typical of many of the women searching online for a sperm donor. The 37-year-old yoga teacher and health coach from Adelaide spent her 20s focused on her career. When she began thinking about having a family in her 30s, the fairytale story of meeting a man, falling in love and having a baby didn’t happen. “I don’t want to put pressure on myself or a man to have a baby immediately. That’s not how love works,” she says. “Ninety-five per cent of men my age or older have had kids and don’t want any more. It’s the reality for me and a lot of women.”

Ready to go it alone, she went to a clinic – but as there were ­virtually no local donors, it was only able to offer her sperm from California at a price of about $2000, with the total cost rising to $10,000 when IVF fees were included. French-Kennedy looked at the overseas donor database. “I saw these photos of the men as babies. They were total strangers and I thought, ‘This little human [I will carry] is going to be a part of someone else and I have no idea who they are’,” she says. The reality of having to go through the highly medicalised process of IVF also hit home. “My whole business and life is built on natural health and even though my cycle was regular, I’d be injecting hormones into my body, going under a general anaesthetic and creating an embryo in a clinical setting, and it just didn’t sit right,” she says.

She’d been following a lesbian couple on Instagram, and through them she found Sperm Donation Australia. In March this year she put her ad up seeking a donor and 15 men replied. “Adam [Hooper] has very clear guidelines about what to put in a post about the method you want to use, artificial insemination or natural, ie sex, and whether you want to co-parent,” she explains.

French-Kennedy settled on a man who lived nearby and they chatted online before meeting. “He is married and has no children. We had some mutual friends on Facebook. He was fit and healthy, which was most important, and he is a part of a group which looks at the needs of the donor child,” she says. They drew up an agreement stating he was not liable for child support and didn’t want to co-parent but was happy for updates. Unfortunately, after trying for three cycles, she has not been successful. She plans to wait now until the summer and her donor gets more tests done.

The increasing use of overseas egg donation is also provoking an angry response from clinics. Natalie Hart, a 47-year-old from Melbourne, met Glenn, the man she wanted to marry, seven years ago; desperately wanting to start a family, she came off the pill – only to experience her first hot flush. Blood tests showed she was perimenopausal. “It was gut-wrenching. It’s not the news you want to hear when you are trying to start a family,” Hart says. “You know straight away you’re running an uphill battle.”

She began aggressive IVF, but her body didn’t respond to the medication and resulted in two cancelled cycles. Her doctor suggested donor eggs. Hart knew someone who’d used donor eggs in South Africa, so the process was not a complete mystery to her. “The specialist basically said don’t bother buying frozen eggs from the World Egg Bank [the main source of donor eggs at clinics in Australia]. You could try to find a donor here, but it could take some time. She advised us to just go overseas,” Hart explains.

“It was a journey Glenn and I had to research, and work out if that was the right path… when you are new into a world, you know nothing about it – it’s very overwhelming. You don’t know what to take as truth and you are dealing with the loss of your own genetics, but your desire to be a mum is so strong.”

After settling on South Africa, Hart went through an egg donor agency and was able to search its online database and see pictures of the donors as babies or young children, as well as a little biography. “It felt like online shopping in a weird way, but once you start reading the profiles you emotionally connect with them,” she says. Once she had chosen a donor, the agency advised the clinic. The donor underwent testing before Hart started IVF and the donated eggs were then fertilised with Glenn’s sperm.

As Jenson, now four, has grown, Hart has reflected on how much he looks like the donor from the pictures she’s seen of her as a toddler. “He has the donor’s nose and beautiful blue eyes,” she beams. “I feel he’s a very good mix of all three of us and I’m just happy because he’s a beautiful little boy. I do love seeing parts of the donor in him, because if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t be here, and I couldn’t imagine life without him.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/couples-turn-to-private-sperm-donors-shunning-ivf-clinics/news-story/254ff436d50a8b3b6991a752379eff29

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Was Calide C blown up?

There are some very destructive Greenies

Private investors in Queensland’s Callide C power station have launched legal action to force a fresh independent investigation into the explosion that crippled the Queensland grid in 2021, after the failure of its state-owned operator to deliver results from its own review of the debacle.

The explosion of the C4 turbine at Callide C in May 2021 forced the evacuation of the plant, and immediately stripped about 10 per cent of Queensland’s generating capacity out of the east coast grid.

The loss of the plant – which is still yet to return to the electricity market – helped push up household and business energy prices, and has indirectly contributed to the energy shortfall facing NSW amid soaring summer temperatures.

Callide C suffered a second mysterious catastrophe in October 2022, when part of the cooling towers collapsed. The generator is due to return to partial service on January 24, but on current estimates will not be able to deliver its full 990MW capacity into the grid until July 2024.

The plant was operated and half-owned by the Queensland government’s CS Energy, and half by the privately held Genuity Group – which in turn is 25 per cent-owned by Czech energy investor Sev.en, with China Huaneng Group and Guangdong Energy Group controlling the rest.

Genuity called in Deloitte as administrators in March 2023, after a dispute between its owners over funding for the estimated $390m cost of returning Callide C to service.

But, more than two and a half years on from the explosion at the coal-fired plant, an expert review of the incident – commissioned by CS Energy, and being conducted by forensic engineer Sean Brady – has still not been delivered, and Sev.en has headed to the Federal Court to demand answers, and potentially prepare the way for a damages claim against CS Energy and the Queensland government.

Sev.en’s lawsuit asks the Federal Court to appoint FTI Consulting’s John Park and Benjamin Campbell as special purpose administrators to Genuity subsidiary IG Power Callide (IGPC), giving them the power to “conduct investigations into the cause or causes of the two catastrophic incidents at the Callide C power station”.

Their powers would include the ability to hire independent technical experts to conduct an investigation, as well as significant powers to demand the production of documents related to the power plant failures, and seek court orders allowing compulsory examinations of witnesses – potentially including CS Energy executives – that had knowledge of the events.

Court documents show Sev.en is also seeking to give the special purpose administrators the power to “commence and prosecute any legal proceedings” on behalf of the collapsed company.

Deloitte is understood to be considering a number of potential offers for Genuity’s half of Callide C, after a process to take bids for the company closed in mid-­December.

Documents filed by Deloitte with the corporate regulator in November show a CS Energy subsidiary had expressed an interest in taking full control of the plant, through pre-emptive rights triggered by Genuity’s collapse into administration.

Under the terms of the agreement, the documents show, CS Energy has the right to buy Genuity’s half of Callide at the lesser of either its fair value or book value – as set by independent valuers and auditors.

Energy market sources say Deloitte is also considering other offers to recapitalise Genuity through a deed of company arrangement, with Sev.en and its Chinese former partners seen as the most likely alternative ­bidders.

Deloitte declined to comment on Friday, as the matter is before the courts, and will not file its submissions in response to Sev.en’s application until early in January.

It indicated that it is likely to oppose the application, however, given it is still considering offers for the company and believes the imposition of special purpose administrators could delay its ability to put those offers to creditors.

But the court documents filed by Sev.en suggest the outcome of any investigation into the causes of the explosion and subsequent collapse of the cooling towers could also be a critical factor in any valuation of the Genuity group of companies.

If an investigation found that CS Energy was responsible, potential legal claims against the state-owned company could be a potentially significant avenue for returning cash to the company’s creditors – including Sev.en, which claims to be owed about $88m from the group, according to Deloitte filings to ASIC.

The claim by Sev.en also seeks to prevent Deloitte from agreeing to any sale terms which include provisions giving up the right to sue over the causes of the explosion or cooling tower collapse.

The report commissioned by CS Energy is still to be finalised. But an 2021 report into the incident by the Australian Energy Market Operator hinted at failures by the state-owned company, noting that maintenance to backup power supplies appeared to be a contributing factor in the disaster as it meant sensors and protection equipment at the plant were not operating.

In October 2023 the Australian Energy Market Regulator fined CS Energy $67,000 for running the Callide C power station without the proper regulatory registration required by market participants – which CS Energy dismissed at the time as an “apparent historical oversight”.

The chief executive of CS Energy at the time of the disaster, Andrew Bills, left the company in February to take up a role running SA Power Networks. Its chairman, former Brisbane lord mayor Jim Soorley, stepped down in July, shortly after CS Energy flagged further delays to the return of Callide to service. He was replaced by Adam Aspinall.

Queensland Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said on Friday he was “fully confident” in the leadership of CS Energy. “The newly appointed Chair of CS Energy is absolutely focused on rebuilding the Callide plant, as safely and quickly as possible,” he said.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/czech-company-asks-court-to-appoint-special-administrators-to-investigate-plant-explosions/news-story/2a3432fd582234fa32f4b556f6be6b2b

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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