The Cage, By Geoff O'Callaghan

Cage The
£12.00


By Geoff O'Callaghan
ISBN: 978-1-84747-396-7
Published: 2007
Pages: 94
Key Themes: self-harm, mental health services, recovery, Australian author, abuse, fiction
Description
After World War 2 it took a long time to get rid of authoritarian attitudes. In Australia, children were often victims of officially sponsored violence. There were several scandals - the so-called 'Stolen Generation'whereaboriginal children who were taken from their parents. 'Child Migration' schemes meant that orphan children were imported and sent to abusive institutions.
The discovery that many underprivileged children were being fostered into abusive homes and the fact that neglected, disturbed, and delinquent children were being treated in brutal reformatories were a shock to the nation of Australia. State governments have had to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to pay compensation to those who survived. It is difficult to believe the intense cruelty that was meted out to these young boys.
'The Cage' is the fictional story of two such juvenile detention institutions. They didn't reform kids, they created the some of the most vicious criminals in Australia. This book describes how many of the children committed suicide, went insane, or became serial killers. This is a very strong and, at times, disturbing book which, despite being a work of fiction, exposes the state-sponsored criminal abuse of an entire generation.
About the Author
Geoff was born in Jersey, then under German occupation, during World War II. Soon after the war, his family moved to Brisbane, Australia. He was educated at All Souls’ School, Charters Towers – a rather traditional boarding school after the English style. He had a way with words, and was a skilled debater.
After secondary school Geoff took to teaching, graduated, and then obtained a post-graduate diploma in Aboriginal Education. For the next thirty years, he lived with remote aborigines in the Great Western Desert, firstly as a primary school teacher, and later as a School Principal and Administrator. During this time, he took up writing, mostly short stories and film scripts. It was a good way to while away the lonely hours of the desert evenings.
Returning to the Northern Territory, Geoff was asked to write 13 episodes of 'The Jabiru Trail' for the North Australian Film Corporation, and created the initial stories for 'Police Rescue'. He also wrote 'Extinct, but Going Home'. Retiring from Government service, he founded 'Young Actors World' to teach kids to act for commercials and feature films. He also took up advertising and ran “Top End Fliers” – one of the largest advertising distributors in the Northern Territory.
Diabetes and Heart surgery made Geoff retire from active life, and he settled in the mountain town of Stanthorpe, Queensland, where he lives quietly writing science fiction and film scripts for teens and young adults.
Geoff has a long-term interest in child welfare and has fought hard to get decent facilities built for them juvenile prisoners across Australia. He remains a committed advocate for children’s’ rights. His stories, which are often rather gritty, are often based on fact.
Book Extract
I came back to consciousness lying on a blanket. A group of men stood around me and lifted me to a stretcher. I closed my eyes and tried hard to get back to the land of black silence. The ceiling moved over my head as I was wheeled along the corridor. I tried to move, but nothing happened. Everything was turning inside out, and I felt completely weird. I couldn’t speak or call out. Everything I looked at with my left eye was bright and shining with a halo of light, while my right eye saw things normally. Later, I found out that I’d had a minor stroke. Sick bay was not an option, so they transferred me to the town’s hospital. They didn’t want to take me from the institution, but they had no choice.

BIG DICK, little dick By Stephen Broughton

BIG DICK, little dick
£12.00


By Stephen Broughton
ISBN: 978-1-84747-079-9
Published: 2007
Pages: 236
Key Themes: humour, suicidal thoughts, abuse
"Can someone be broken and yet 'whole' at the same time? Is it possible to live in the light and at the same time suffer torment in the darkest pitch? Stephen Broughton proves that we can; that human endurance, intelligence and a natural God-given talent for empathising with others can set us free. The damaged child can own his pain, integrate it, live, learn and love." - Anni Meehan, Biodynamic Therapist
"Unsparing yet never self-pitying, he recalls what went wrong and how he has set about rescuing himself. His account is absorbing, sometimes wryly funny, and wonderfully evocative. Inspiring, too - the child he wanted to be was destroyed but Broughton was not". - Shaun Usher, broadcaster, writer & critic.
Description
Very funny, very sad, very moving and very strange - this is the book of one man's journey of discovery seeing mental ill health as a gift, rather than a curse. In this book Stephen attempts to understand his own dreams and suicidal thoughts on the way to meeting the man he should have been - little dick. While it was his alter-ego BIG DICK who survived an upbringing with a narcisstic mother and a disinterested Father. An honest and endearing book on schizophrenia, this is a worthy addition to the new genre of 'mad' literature.
About the Author
Author Stephen has been a trustee of his local MIND group for nearly 20 years and has had suicide as his Plan B for as long as he can remember. He presents 'Thought for the Day' on BBC local radio, sings in a choir and runs marathons very slowly. Stephen is a Solicitor, often described by clients as 'not like a real solicitor' which he takes as a great compliment. Most of his friends seem to be mad as well.
Book Extract
We all dream and we probably dream every night. But have you wondered why we only remember some of the dreams and the others are consigned to some cerebral recycle bin? And why we sometimes have the same dream over and over again. I have had, for so long as I have known, a dream where I suddenly discover that I have a house. A tiny derelict house with an over grown garden.
Hidden away with no proper path to it. And when I look at the house I see that there's so much work to be done to make it into a place to live that I know it’s beyond me and that makes me very sad. And there's another dream where I've killed someone a long time ago and nobody but me knows and I'm afraid that someone will some day find out the terrible thing that I have done. And I wake up believing the dream is true not knowing how I can live with myself having done the terrible thing that I have done. So this book is about how I found out about the person I might have killed and how I first found and then set about rebuilding the house that was nothing but an empty shell with a gaping hole in the roof.
And have you ever wondered why we have the memories of our childhood that we have? Sometimes trivial every day memories. Like a video running in our mind which never got erased by the other trivial every day memories that we record each day. I have always remembered as if it was yesterday, the day when a white van drew up outside our house and a man in a white coat got out. Our dog was a corgi we called Lightie. The man came into our living room. Lightie was behind the sofa and he picked her up in his arms and took her away. And I never knew why I remembered that so well. Many years later when I had gone past the age they call middle age I told my mother about that memory. She was amazed at what I said because she said I could only have been about 12 months at the time. I had just started to walk and the dog was getting old and no longer as reliable as it needed to be with a toddler around.