Features

Feature Examples
Contents
Page 1. Sellers, F. (2011, January 17). Hunting home sapiens: What fun! The Dominion Post [reprinted from The Washington Post], B5 ............................................................................................... 1 Chisholm, D. (2009, June). Steel balls and lemons. Metro, 50-59. ................................................................................................... 5 Morton, F. (2007, July). A new dawn. Metro, 50-56. ................................ 13 White, M. (2006, February). Another wreck on the highway. North & South, 38-48. ......................................................................... 21 White, M. (2004, March). Christmas in Iraq. North & South, 52-61. ................................................................................................ 33 Spence, A. (2002, November). The death of a horseman. North & South, 78-89. .................................................................................. 43 Chapple, G. (2001, July 15). Year of rage and forgetfulness. Sunday Star-Times, Features. Retrieved May 21, 2003, from: http://www.stuff.co.nz ............................................................... 55 Brett, C. (2001, November 17). Mother courage. The Press, WE1. Retrieved May 21, 2003, from: http://www.stuff.co.nz............. 61
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Study Guide Feature Examples
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219.232 Feature Writing and Freelancing
Sellers, F. (2011, January 17). Hunting home sapiens: What fun! The Dominion Post [reprinted from The Washington Post], B5
Chisholm, D. (2009, June). Steel balls and lemons. Metro, 50-59.
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Morton, F. (2007, July). A new dawn. Metro, 50-56.
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White, M. (2006, February). Another wreck on the highway. North & South, 38-48.
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White, M. (2004, March). Christmas in Iraq. North & South, 52-61.
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Spence, A. (2002, November). 78-89.
The death of a horseman.
North & South,
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Chapple, G. (2001, July 15). Year of rage and forgetfulness. Sunday StarTimes, Features. Retrieved May 21, 2003, from: http://www.stuff.co.nz
YEAR OF RAGE AND FORGETFULNESS

Twenty years on, Geoff Chapple suggests how and why the Springbok tour protest of 1981 disappeared from New Zealand history.
My son, exploring with a high school mate through the basement recently, came upon the cricket box, the chest protector, the half-pipe PVC limb armour, the ice hockey mask, weighed them significantly in his hands and said to his mate with a grin: "Yep. My dad served." Thus was I - or so I thought - gently mocked. And the point is not whether I was mocked, but that it was conceivable in my own mind that I could be. For were we not heroes of a kind? We who impacted smokily on to Rugby Park, Hamilton on July 25, 1981, like something from outer space? Who stopped the scheduled clash of South Africa v Waikato on that day, and for the next two months of the New Zealand tour by a racially selected Springbok team, went hard out. Who cut cables on the Sugarloaf transmitter above Christchurch, shut down the main TV transmitter at Waiatarua Auckland, and TV relays at Mt Studholme, south of Timaru and Mt Cargill above Dunedin, dropped the flagstaff at Waitangi, halted Wellington rail with an early morning gelignite bomb, detonated a big helium balloon over Lancaster Park, hacked through the conductor cables at Aucklands Moirs Hill microwave relay, and flour-bombed from a light aircraft the test match at Eden Park. We whose big set-piece actions blocked airports and highways and bridges. Who took baton blows that turned the world yellow with concussion, that split our eardrums, ruined our cheek bones and the orbital floor of our eyes. Who turned street intersections, with splashes of blood, with teeth, rocks, and broken batons, into places of such deadly magic that for hours, no one would walk across them. Something like 150,000 of us turned out on the streets - the biggest mass protest New Zealand has ever seen. Our efforts to stop the 1981 Springbok tour, got 2000 of us arrested and fined, mostly for breaches of the peace, disorderly behaviour, obstruction and trespass, and put four of us in jail for a year, (riot), and one for eight months (operating an aircraft to cause unnecessary danger). And though some of the action was grim, the carnival kept rolling, and its numbers kept growing partly because so much of it was also such fun. In the spirit of the R. Cobb dictum of the 70s - Remember kids to keep a smile on yer face when yer smashing the State - we turned a New Zealand Rugby Football Union office into a Black South African Embassy for a day, thousands of us tried to run Christchurch dry of water with the famous Tap Campaign, and always there were streets full of people who hooted and cheered through the
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spontaneous street theatre of each new day, joining the call of the marshalls bullhorn with our massed response: "Right weve been accused of being communists, so were going to talk communism and nothing but communism here today - "Karl Marx!" No, No! "Frederick Engels!" No, No! "Leon Trotsky" No, No! "Barry Crump!" Noooo! These were our pleasures and our pain, and the police played their part. Sometimes they were simply good cops under intense stress, sometimes they were sinister. I could never watch the highly-trained Blue and Red squads, their greatcoats, helmets and visors, the jabbing of their PR 24 batons and their stepping advance keyed to the "move, move, move" chant, without thinking of George Orwells description of the Nazi goosestep, stamping eternally on a human face. But that was then, and this is now. Twenty years on, pouf, its gone. Those intense 56 days attract only low-level interest. The memories are strong enough. Talking again about the subject over the last week, in the course of other work and with quite random people, two things struck me. People remembered where they were, and what they were doing, when they heard the Hamilton game was cancelled. It was a time stopper, like President John Kennedys assassination on November 22 1963, or Princess Dianas death on August 31, 1997. And everyone has anecdotes. I talk to a graphic designer and he recalls, under orders to link during a Wellington demo, looking up to find himself holding the hand of Brian Edwards. I talk to a South Island photographer, who force-landed a Cessna in a turnip field in 1981 after cloud closed down the mountain pass in front. Relieved to be alive, reporting the misadventure as quickly as he can to police, he finds them interested only in whether a mad passing protester can jump-start the abandoned Cessna out of that turnip patch - has he removed the keys? Or the policeman, Grant OFee, now District Police Commander of Tasman, but back then a sergeant, and a sniper in the Wellington Armed Offenders Squad, whose inspector turned to him some days after Pat MacQuarrie had aimed his aircraft at Rugby Park and asked if, given a helicopter platform, OFee could take a rogue fixedwing pilot out - "It was tongue in cheek," says OFee now, "but it was a reflection of the time." The Tour was huge, the Tour was memorable, but the Tour also seems peculiarly devoid of historical heft. That is the reason that many of us who "served" tend toward jokes, tend toward an ironical tone when discussing the subject, drag our makeshift armour out of the closet never, and remain sensitive to any hint of mockery. Can the Tour, for example, foot it with our military history - the battlefields that are by-words and after which streets are named, the glorious dead, the RSA clubs, the Anzac Days and the ongoing security treaties or trade relations that flowed from the big blood sacrifices? Fairly obviously not. Can it foot it with the Great Strike of 1913? The country swerved close to a revolution then, the workers waved revolvers and under the command of the government, naval machine gunners stood ready. The strikers were cleaned out finally by scab labour and baton-wielding horsemen, but - and heres the historical heft - 1913s jailed leaders organised and fought back over 20 years and more to emerge as the famous first Labour government of 1935. Historically, The Tour seems not to compare.
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Can it foot it with the 1951 Waterfront Lockout? Strong personalities traded insults then even within the labour movement, and a hostile government hit the wharfies with emergency regulations that mobilised the armed forces, and made it an offence even to give food to strikers children. But the deregistered wharfies rose again, Terminator style, over 20 years and more, to key positions of union power. Again, although police recruited "specials" and called in army support in 1981, the Tour seems hardly to compare. The Tour protesters had no institutions - no political party that emerged from it, no Trades Halls to hallow the myth. For they came from every walk of life. If youd paid attention during the Wellington test day march youd have seen Ron Trotter, capitalist, marching with Pat Kelly, unionist. Lady Kate Acland, National Party stalwart aged 71 was there but so was Donna Awatere, young Maori firebrand, whos in the Act Party now, and indeed, theyre all over the place. Theyre CEO of the Lotteries Commission, and wondering if Powerball is going to restore the commissions fortune, or theyre been running a Wellington restaurant and thinking about re-stocking the pinot noir. Its hard to find any predictable pattern, except perhaps for John Minto, who is Head of Department, Science, at Tangaroa College, and still, as senior vice-chair of the Quality Public Education Coalition, on the side of the just. We scattered, and our finest hour sank, it seems, almost without trace. From 1981, government diplomacy and then the law courts, took over the issue. Nelson Mandelas African National Congress, already in rapid ascent, learned to deal with governments, rather than its old street allies. By 1992 when the All Blacks, with ANC approval, played the Springboks again, it was all over. It was over, and over quickly. And yet, and yet, maybe the Tour protest, which was far bigger than 1913 (16,000 workers on strike) and 1951 (22,000 workers locked out or striking) deserves a more secure place in our history than its been given. One consults the oracle to discern how and, Delphic as ever, it says this: Listen to the music. The Tour produced crowds that chanted with a single throat. Mostly the chants were ordinary. Amandla Ngawethu, the ANC freedom chant, always felt transplanted, self-conscious, false. Two, four, six, eight - Kick the racists out the gate, was to the point, but boring. Tahi, rua, toru, wha - We dont want South Africa, was indigenous but uninspiring. Yet just occasionally the crowd went chillingly on song. Standing in the human heat of Rugby Park, Hamilton, on July 25, some anonymous genius must first have thought it, then muttered it, then listened in astonishment as the phrase was adopted and swelled by the most fearfully passionate 300-voice choir that ever sang on New Zealand soil - The whole worlds watching! The whole worlds watching! That was dead right. The whole world was. And again, as the tour protest closed up after the third test at Eden Park on September 12, 1981, the returning crowd began a low chant which I hadnt heard before, which was taken up and spread like the wind, and which was also dead right. Muldoon must go! Muldoon must go!
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As Leader of the Opposition coming up to the election of 1975, Robert David Muldoon was the man who kept repeating, emphatically, a distinct brand difference between the National opposition and the incumbent Labour government. He said hed welcome a Springbok tour. It was bad boy stuff - it flew in the face of Commonwealth opinion, but it played well in the provinces. It helped Muldoon to what had seemed an impossible win in the election, but as a direct result of it, and a few other insults traded between Muldoon and black African leaders, 29 black nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics of 1976. As New Zealand prime minister, Muldoon was then forced, under threat of further boycotts to the 1978 Commonwealth Games, to sign the Gleneagles Agreement of 1977, in which Commonwealth Heads of Government accepted "the urgent duty of my government vigorously to combat apartheid by taking every practical step to discourage contact with South African sports teams . . ." The New Zealand prime minister did not like being told what to do by Gleneagles. As the scheduled Springbok Tour of 1981 approached, he put no direct prime ministerial pressure on the New Zealand Rugby Football Union to call it off. In June 1981 the prime minister did say he thought the tour would be a disaster, but nothing more, and as calls to specifically honour Gleneagles mounted, he scheduled his first and last direct appeal to the NZRFU, to be televised live on July 6, 1981. Everyone tuned in. Most people expected a strong call to the NZRFU, but they should perhaps have factored into their expectation the impending election of November 81, and the critical importance to National of the rugby-mad provincial seats. The prime ministers speech that night was best described as odd. It recalled the bond between South Africa and New Zealand - how the soldiers of each had fought and died together in World War II - and it drifted on to its limp conclusion: "I say to them (the NZRFU), think well before you make a decision." I wrote around that time, and see no reason to change it now: "For its own political advantage the government had steadily reeled in the tour. But on the night of July 6 came the flash. A lot of people looked back and saw what the government was doing. They saw too that the government had lost footing on a basic integrity - internationally at Gleneagles, internally with its choice to step back from fundamentally opposed forces within the society. So that the social contract broke and the tour was not just reeled in on New Zealand, but the tour and everything which lay clumped around it pulled everyone down towards a hovering sense of death, to broken bones and smashed faces, to burned churches and stadiums, to prison sentences and hatred of the police and rugby." The social contract did break. The law did not hold. There was a hovering sense of death. Twenty years on, I still have on my desk a five-sided stone about half the size of your fist. Four of the facets have been carefully painted with single words, so as you turn the stone over in your hand, the message reads - SPIR WILL PAY YOU. On the fifth side is a skull and crossbones. The stone rolled off a roof on the night following the protest invasion of Hamiltons Rugby Park. It is a small object, intended to intimidate. New Zealander turned against New Zealander that night. Animal guts in your letterbox, milk bottles through your window, obscenities on your house, death threats through your phones, doorways spotlighted by the headlights of high-revving cars, shop windows smashed, an ambulance wrecked. You defended your turf that night with baseball bats. Pro-Tour people invaded and wrecked houses, left anti-Tour people unconscious on the lawns. 58
That night suggests another reason 1981 disappeared from New Zealand history. A small country unused to polarisation and civic violence suddenly had it in spades. Small towns pilloried their own people. Workmates sent other workmates to coventry. Even in the family home, the splits were - literally unspeakable. There was no shelter. The new society that had prided itself for 140 years on having left every sectarian prejudice of race and religion back in the old world, recognised the appearance in its midst of an ancient visceral hatred. But all this, was it the reason that - Muldoon must go? It wasnt. The truth of that chant was 15 years in the making. The Vietnam War. Womens Lib. Nuclear ships. Apartheid sport. The prime minister had cut his political teeth on students and student issues since the mid-60s. He and the students were natural enemies, they defined each other as polar opposites, and hed swung haymakers on at least two of them. Coming up to 81, hed been prime minister and also finance minister for five years - a concentration of power New Zealand hadnt seen in modern times. He controlled wages and prices, the Think Big projects, subsidies for unwanted production of wool and sheepmeat. Many New Zealanders, unsophisticated in economics or the trends in other western economies, were blind to it but there was an inchoate feeling that something was wrong. A dislike, too, of the personal destructions Muldoon wrought along the way. New Zealand had become a cage of Muldoons making and a lot of people had begun to shake the bars. Muldoon must go! The Tour protest was powered by 15 years of frustration. When it finally spilled on to the streets, it was less a protest than a popular uprising. Had it targeted Wellington with the energy it targeted the rugby fields, it could have been as historic as the French student and worker rebellions of 1968 that brought tanks on to the Paris ring road and forced the French President Charles De Gaulle to flee in a chopper. New Zealanders were angry enough to topple Muldoon. He had a working majority in parliament, but his mandate was not fireproof, having pulled less of the popular vote in 1978 (39.8%) than the Labour Party (40.4%). In 1980, even his own party had trembled on the brink of dumping him. But the movement hit only the rugby fields. And to be realistic, anything else was beyond it. For the Tour movement did not have the critical support of the unions. The Federation of Labour formally opposed the tour. One Trades Council - Wellington - was solid enough in support to assign two paid delegates to do Tour work. But other Trades Councils, and shop floor New Zealand saw the protest simply as wankers denying them the heart of Saturday afternoon. The internationally sophisticated Seamens Union staged two 24-hour strikes, but no other union followed and the FOL, knowing that a call for a general strike would fail, never tried it. The protest weakness was most obvious at the moment of its greatest success at Rugby Park, Hamilton, and was thoughtfully summed up by the then Federation of Labour secretary, Ken Douglas: "Standing on that field were students, teachers, professional people, and liberal Christians, and pelting them with beer cans were working class trade unionists."
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And so the Tour came and went and the 1981 election two months later left Muldoon still in power, though with a parliamentary majority of just one. Muldoon must go! He hadnt. The marginals seats in the provinces proved to be the key and his victory was a further blow to the Tours historical heft. The Tour protest looked like just one more pawn manouevred by a master political player. Yet 20 years on, its possible to draw a longer bow. I have an entirely personal view of New Zealand history of the last 40 years - the "Two S" theory. Over that time the soldier generation went head to head with the student generation. The soldier generation - Muldoon himself had toted a tommy gun in Italy - held the formal political power. It was as sure of things - the military alliances, the command economy, the proper place of rugby and the proper place of women - as chooks are about when to get up in the morning and when to go to bed. The post-war baby boomers, the student generation, put the soldier generation under challenge. It made its presence felt with street protest as anarchic, the soldiers would have said, as headless chooks. But there was more to it than that. By 1981, the student generation was in its 30s and 40s. It staffed the professions and institutions, was highly knowledgeable about the outside world, the social issues, and getting thoughtful about economic direction. History has in it periods that may last many decades, but which are, one from another, distinctly, qualitatively different. The change between those periods, when it occurs, is usually years-long, hard to recognise when youre living through it, but clear in retrospect. Just such a change occurred in New Zealand 20 years ago. I would draw a distinct line across the early 80s, three years wide, for it was not until 1984 that Langes Labour government - which was stacked with the student generation finally took power in a landslide from the soldier generation. But that reflected a fundamental shift in outlook far bigger than just the election itself, and it began in 1981.
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Brett, C. (2001, November 17). Mother courage. The Press, WE1. Retrieved May 21, 2003, from: http://www.stuff.co.nz
MOTHER COURAGE
Vicky OConnor is made of tough stuff. Just as well, given what she and her girls are having to endure, as CATE BRETT reports.
The four OConnor girls leave the Opposition backbencher for dead when it comes to shutting down the Labour member for West Coast-Tasman. Bantam-weight chief whip, two-year-old Emily thrusts a fistful of pink wafer biscuit in her fathers face, momentarily saving him from one of the toughest debates hes faced this term in Parliament. Tougher than the debate over sustainable native logging, or the expansion of GRD Macraes Reefton gold mine, or whether DB should get away with brewing the West Coasts signature brew, Monteiths, in Auckland. This debate concerns the bald-headed slip of a child perched proprietorially on his knee, demanding he stop his talking and take her out into the sunshine. Despite the girlish clothes and pink hat, Emily Rose OConnor fixes the world with the wary eyes of an old woman who has lived through the horrors of war. Which, in a small way, she has. In the past year her 11kg body has survived brain surgery, 18 general anaesthetics, half a dozen lumbar punctures, aggressive chemotherapy, regular blood transfusions, and more than 120 days in hospital. Another seven months of the same lie in store. If she survives the treatment, she has a 60 to 70 per cent chance of beating the 8cm malignant tumour excised from her brain last December. Emilys most crucial asset in this battle, her mother, Vicky, stands a little aloof from the party, observing with a wry smile the excited chaos as her three elder daughters, Bridgette, eight, Genevieve, five, and Siobhan, four, mob their father during what might unkindly be described as one of his "guest appearances" at the familys temporary Bryndwr base. And its this, the conflicting interests and responsibilities of Damien OConnor, member of Parliament for the vast and beleaguered West Coast-Tasman electorate (running from the northern edge of Fiordland to the tip of Farewell Spit), against those of Damien OConnor, 43-year-old husband and father of a family under siege, that are up for debate - for the umpteenth time - this afternoon. The siege began on Emilys second birthday, on December 18 last year. Somewhere between unwrapping presents (a toy lawnmower and a pram) and party preparations, Vickys instincts took over. For the second time in 24 hours she presented her child at a doctors
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surgery, seeking reassurance that a GPs diagnosis earlier in the week of a viral infection remained the most likely explanation for Emilys rising irritability and extended sleeping. "Shed wake in the morning and say `Mummy sick and hold her mouth, and a clear fluid would dribble out. Shed cry and hold her head and say `Sore head, Mummy, sore head and then shed sleep for hours." After listening to the childs symptoms, the locum who saw Emily that Monday did not hesitate: Vicky had half an hour to drop the other three children with Damiens parents and get on the road to Nelson hospital for a CT scan. Twenty-four hours later, with the brain tumour confirmed, Vicky and a child who seemed to be slipping away before her eyes were flown to Christchurch by air ambulance. "Suddenly I found myself confronted by Martin MacFarlane (the neurosurgeon); up went the X-rays on the window and it was a matter of `Heres the tumour and this is how big it is, and this is what were going to do and lets get cracking, and Im sitting there thinking, `A few hours ago I was washing dishes at the kitchen sink in Westport worrying about party food and here we are making life-and-death decisions about our daughter." In the time it takes to digest a meal, the OConnor familys world was turned upside-down. The lack of a pediatrician on the West Coast, combined with the long distances and severity of Emilys condition (requiring a 56-week course of treatment) left the family no choice but to shift to Christchurch. For Vicky, accustomed to sole-charge mothering as a result of Damiens all-consuming political commitments, the wrench from their Westport family and support networks has been tough. The chance discovery in June of a hole and a cleft in eldest daughter Bridgettes heart, necessitating open-heart surgery at Aucklands Greenlane Hospital next week, has created a whole new set of pressures and logistical problems as the family tries to juggle a mind-boggling number of demands and unknown variables. Which goes a long way to explain the hot interest in the debate over the domestic versus constituent demands on Damien OConnors time. In private lives as in politics, exhaustion and months of corrosive compromise can undermine the best of partnerships. But as the OConnors both know, there are no glib solutions to be had here: Vicky herself is first to acknowledge that asking her husband to step down from politics to help steer his family through these rough waters is a non-starter: "If I took the politics out of Damien there would be no Damien left." And in a sense, she says, to surrender now would mean the first tough eight years of marriage to a driven West Coast politician were all for nothing. Nor, says Damien, is it easy to soft-pedal: politics is like riding a bike uphill - youre either pedalling like hell or youve fallen off.
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"The reality for my electorate is that if I dont represent them, nobody is going to. Its not like Auckland or Wellington, where there are another dozen MPs to fill the breach. The need for strong representation for an isolated electorate like mine is much more acute." More so in an election year. Since the OConnor familys forced relocation from their Westport farmlet to Christchurch, Damiens already staggering travel log of 1500km a week has blown out to the point where he feels he is in a state of perpetual motion. "Now, instead of coming home to my electorate I come home to Christchurch and then drive to my electorate." Within any 24-hour period it is not uncommon for him to traverse Wellington, Nelson, Westport, Hokitika, Kumara, and Christchurch. (Not surprisingly, he has collected his share of speeding tickets in the process, last year losing his licence for three months after a third infringement.) Although he sometimes manages a night at home midweek when the going has been particularly tough, taking extended leave from his parliamentary and electorate duties is not an option he has seriously contemplated as yet: "I guess, if Im honest, Id have to say if I wasnt able to do the job properly I wouldnt want to do it at all. "The reverse analogy, of course, is `What about being a good husband and father? People might say it doesnt look as if Im doing that job properly, either. "But as difficult as it is, I wouldnt be much different from any parent in this situation where you have no choice but to carry on running your business or turning up for work during a health crisis in the family." But not every breadwinning parent must be away up to five nights a week, and in reality the only way this family has come close to coping is through the efforts of Damien and Vickys mothers, who have made Christchurch their second home these past 12 months, allowing Vicky to take up her hospital bed next to that of her daughter. For Damien, the toughest aspect of the past 12 months has been his inability to be physically present when his tiny daughter has been undergoing many of the traumatic interventions that have arisen unexpectedly along the way. "Ive had to become hardened to constantly having to walk out the door." As if on cue, a taxi rolls up the drive ready to whisk Damien OConnor, MP, away to a meeting in Auckland for the night. Tomorrow night, Saturday, it will be the St Bedes old boys dinner. Sunday morning he will be there to see his eldest, Bridgette, make her first Holy Communion at St Matthews, Bryndwr. While Damiens lot has been to constantly walk out the door, his wifes has been to stay put. In March, while Damien was enjoying a rare moment of national adulation in his campaign to keep DB honest and Monteiths brewed on the West Coast, she was wheeling their daughter into surgery once
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again as doctors were forced to implant a mechanical shunt into her brain - which will remain for life to relieve the pressure from the build-up of fluid in her cranium. In August, while he was rallying the truculent West Coasters over Conservation Minister Sandra Lees veto of GRD Macraes plans for an expanded gold mine at Reefton, she was watching Emily suffer up to 17 spasms a day as a result of the vincristine poisoning she had developed in response to one of the mainline chemotherapy drugs she has been receiving fortnightly since January. And while children drag their parents to the Canterbury Show, Vicky and Emily are back in residence for more chemotherapy. Vicky removes the latex gloves she must don to change Emilys nappy and perches on her childs hospital bed, exchanging a few routine medical notes with the oncologist who has been overseeing Emilys latest chemotherapy treatment. The methotrexate, she explains, causes ulcers and strips the mucus lining from the childs throat and digestive tract. They must wait until the drug has been eliminated from Emilys body before they can go home. Vicky OConnors common-sense farming pedigree is stamped all over her lanky, handsome features. She is armed with clear-files crammed with detailed medical notes about her daughters condition and treatment, including the casual jottings of surgeons and oncologists. She speaks about their childs treatment and prognosis with a certain dispassion: its as if by colonising the medical jargon - Emilys tumour was "an ependymoma in the fourth ventricle of the cerebellum" - she gains some small control over the overwhelming medical processes. But after 11 months of being a tower of strength, Vicky admits her Pollyanna-ish determination to be positive is starting to crumble under the weight of exhaustion and loneliness. At a more visceral level she displays a strung-out skitterishness born of nervous exhaustion; a lionesss fierce protectiveness towards her offspring; and an overwhelming empathy for the other children and parents who share the forced intimacy of the child cancer ward. "After 11 months Id have to admit to being pretty traumatised by listening to parents sobbing and children crying in pain. Im traumatised by holding down my child for yet another procedure. Ive hit the wall. "I think I could have made it to 12 months but Im just getting tired. Shes getting tired, her bone marrow is getting tired; everyones getting tired. "I know Im running on empty now and I think Im going to be asking Damien more and more to come and hold her down while they put another tube in or needle in." Had everything gone to plan, the OConnors had hoped to be back in their Westport home by Christmas, but a number of setbacks, including glandular fever, mean Emilys treatment is likely to stretch well into 2001.
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Vicky pulls herself up whenever she hears a trace of bitterness or self-pity creep into her story. As with the other 120-odd parents whose children are diagnosed with cancer in New Zealand each year, the OConnors know there is so much to be grateful for. Such as instant and free access to top-flight neurosurgeons such as Christchurchs Martin MacFarlane, who somehow managed to extract the 8cm tumour that had wrapped itself around both main arteries and down into Emilys spinal cord; pediatric oncologists such as Rob Corbett and Mike Sullivan; a panoply of chemotherapy drugs; blood transfusions to restore Emilys blitzed platelets and white blood cells; aggressive frontline antibiotics to combat infections creeping in over her lowered immune defences; MRI scans to monitor progress and signal problems; lumbar punctures to relieve fluid buildups; and as an added insurance at the finish line, radiotherapy, to minimise the chances of the tumour re-emerging in a few years. Precisely the same war chest is available for each of the 45 child cancer patients who are treated at the South Islands sole child cancer unit, here in Christchurch, each year. The cost per child - met entirely by the State - varies between $50,000 and $250,000, but averages around $90,000. And as Emilys oncologist, Rob Corbett, points out, thanks to the ever expanding array of treatment options survival rates for child cancers have risen exponentially over the past few decades, with 60 to 70 per cent now being cured against 20 per cent or fewer in the 1960s. But here in the unbearably claustrophobic - and supposedly temporary - child cancer unit at Christchurch Hospital, you would not be human if you did not occasionally find much to curse as well. Like the death a few weeks ago of Emilys little fellow traveller from the West Coast, 3-year-old Renee Tomasi, who endured a gruelling 19 months treatment only to die. Then there are the treatment side effects. Listed almost as a postscript in the medical protocols, these are at times unbearably tough for tiny bodies to endure and heartbreaking for parents to observe. They include everything from the mundane - mouth ulcers, nausea, hair loss, and damaged teeth buds - to the momentous, including the possibility of infertility. And while Vicky hates the idea of her family being singled out as different - her situation somehow better or worse because of her husbands status - the fact is theirs is an unusually difficult plight. Corbett says a rare combination of factors has come to bear on the OConnor family, including the length and intensity of Emilys treatment, the absence of shared-care pediatric services on the West Coast, the presence of three younger siblings, and a parent required to be away from home for extended periods during the week. Perversely, while some might assume a politician might receive Rolls-Royce treatment, the reality is that the OConnors have fallen into one of the few holes in cancer support services. Corbett says that while a number of reasonably generous forms of assistance are available to families coping with treatment away from home - including a weekly accommodation grant - the system fails to address the significant childcare needs of families in the OConnors situation.
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Vicky is eligible for a set number of so-called "Carer Support" days a year, but these can only be used when Emily is in the house - not for minding other siblings while Vicky rushes into hospital with her daughter when a shunt malfunctions or her blood needs transfusing. For these exigencies she must rely on her own resources - which in Westport would have been many but in Christchurch are few. Vicky has been both surprised and dismayed to have found such blindspots and inflexibilities in the Ministry of Healths systems. It has also made her think twice about the endless well-intentioned but sometimes poorly targeted public campaigns to raise funds for child cancer. "Trips to Disneyland and cuddly teddy bears and lighting candles for child cancer are all wonderful gestures, but as a mother Id like to see the focus on providing better practical support for families and siblings. "While this year has been incredibly tough on Emily and Damien and myself, its been very tough, too, for Emilys sisters and their grandparents. "The whole family is living with this diagnosis and the whole family needs the support." Not that she is ungrateful for all the cards and letters and well-wishers that poured in last December. And for the continued understanding and support of the West Coast community. Its just that after 11 months away from her friends and rose garden, she could do with a cuddle. So she can stand up and do it all over again next year.
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