Spoiler alert: this article reveals plot elements of Girls & Boys
Content warning: this article contains real-life descriptions of family violence and abuse
‘It’s nearly always men. That’s not an opinion or a viewpoint or a controversial statement for you to ponder, it is just a cold, hard fact – 95% of the people who do this are men. We often talk about these men as having snapped. In the papers, the news, amongst ourselves. But nothing could be further from the truth. They do not snap. They plan. They know what they are doing.’
– Protagonist, Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly
When playwright Dennis Kelly spoke to the London Guardian on debut-eve of his striking monodrama on love, family and violence, Girls & Boys, he could have no idea of its searing prescience for Australian audiences.
It was in June 2018 that Kelly said of men's decision to kill their once-beloved family members: ‘It’s such an incomprehensible act. It makes no sense to wipe out the people you love or once loved deeply.
‘But people do it, mostly men, and it’s on the rise.’
One month later, in leafy West Pennant Hills – a Sydney suburb described by locals as ‘aspirational’ and home to professionals – retired financial planner John Edwards, 68, went to the home of his former wife, Olga, and their children Jack, 15, and Jennifer, 13.
In an act described by police as ‘premeditated and planned’, he hunted the children down and shot them dead where they hid under the desk in Jack's bedroom.
Edwards later took his own life metres from where he had stuck at Post-it note on which he had written ‘justice delayed is justice denied’.
The children's grief-stricken mother carried their ashes in her handbag and died by suicide five months later, compounding a tragedy that sent shock waves through parliaments and playgrounds, opinion columns and talk-back radio.
Yet, in the years since, the drum beat of killings by former husbands, partners and fathers has rolled on, the most shocking of which, in recent times, being the slaughter of Brisbane mother, Hannah Clarke and her children Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3, as they set off on the school run.
On the sunny morning of February 13, 2020, the children were burned to death in the family car by father, Rowan Baxter. Their mother died that night in hospital after giving police a lucid description of events.
Baxter had guarded the blazing car, fending off a neighbour who tried to put it out with a garden hose. He died at the scene of self-inflicted stab wounds.
Hannah Clarke was the eighth woman killed that year, and among the 36 who died by ‘intimate partner homicide’ in 2019–20, according to the 2022 report of the National Homicide Monitoring Program.
‘There's more of it than you think, much more ... we only hear about the really juicy ones.’
– Protagonist, Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly
One woman is killed every 10 days in Australia by an intimate partner or ex, in what all governments agree is a national crisis, ‘epidemic’ and shame.
Each time such horrors hit the headlines, the reaction is the same.
As Jenna Price, academic, respected domestic and family violence commentator and co-founder of the Counting Dead Women register has written, there are: ‘So many soundbites, so many stories, so many politicians saying never again. So many people saying the same thing over and over again. So much rage.’
Yet until now no amount of awareness raising has been able to stop such flagrant violence before it starts.
Price has gone so far as to suggest that, despite outpourings of public sentiment – the likes of which followed the vicious death of 11 year-old Luke Batty at the hands of his father, Greg Anderson, at his cricket practice in sleepy Tyabb – ‘it's ridiculous to say that violence against women is never OK.’
‘Of course it's OK in this country,’ she wrote. ‘If it wasn't OK, Australian governments would do something about it. They aren't.’
‘But do you know what it's really about? I'm gonna tell you what it's really about. It's really about control.’
– Protagonist, Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly
Until 2022, translating even the deepest community sentiment into heavy pressure on governments to commit to radical approaches, and even more radical funding packages to end violence against women and their children, has appeared impossible.
But the lamentable lack of progress appears to have been challenged in the nation's new National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children 2022–32, released in October.
All state and federal governments collaborated in drafting the 10-year plan covering prevention, early intervention, response and recovery, and in it, for the first time, are outlines for strong targets for harm reduction.
The new plan notes that while the previous, 12-year national plan brought structural improvements in women's safety, it failed to make any mark on violence statistics. So to ensure this blueprint delivers better, it has provisions to gauge its own effectiveness.
But the necessary extra funding, estimated by Full Stop Australia’s CEO Hayley Foster to be around $1 billion a year, is yet to follow.
Even so, the plan has been met with cautious optimism. It has programs to address misogyny and elevate discussions about men's behavior towards women, the likes of which productions such as Girls & Boys, with its unflinching exposure of the ordinary context in which such violence can occur, contribute to and bolster.
‘This is my life. These are my kids. This is all still mine. You are not leaving, you are never taking my kids from me, understand?’
– Protagonist quoting her husband, Girls & Boys by Dennis Kelly
Dennis Kelly has said he realises ‘you risk running the audience out of the play when it gets hard’, but he dared, quite rightly, because he felt he must. We cannot look away.
And by play’s end, the viewing is undoubtedly hard; made all the more confronting because we have been charmed and disarmed by snapshots of a life that is otherwise ever so ‘normal’.
Our killer is funny, sexy, popular and smart, ‘he looks good in a suit,’ the protagonist tells us. He has experienced success and the love of a gregarious and hilarious wife, and he has not been touched by mental ill-health.
He has experienced one, far from exceptional, life disappointment. And yet, beneath this thoroughly, middle-class exterior lies privilege that festers, a self-pity that spirals out of control.
That this is all so very ordinary is the point that justifies the play’s punch: like many men who feel entitled to take what they want from women – their kids, their bodies, their lives – our perpetrator is not the ‘monster’ we may comfort ourselves by believing him to be.
As the widower of slain Melbourne woman Jill Meagher remarked after seeing his wife’s murderer, Adrian Bayley, speak in court, men who harm women do not exist as ‘a singular force of pure evil who somehow emerged from the ether.’ We cannot ‘insulate’ ourselves intellectually by dismissing violent men as ‘psychotic or sociopathic aberrations.’
Meagher reminds us we have to face the ‘terrifying concept that violent men are socialised by ingrained sexism and entrenched masculinity that permeates everything from our daily interactions all the way up to our highest institutions,’ and men, especially, must do something about it.
In the expert hands of Girls & Boys’ sole performer, Nikki Shiels, and director Kate Campion, this work rivets us in place as it foregrounds the endgame of attitudes to women, and their children, that, though invisible, are very much alive and well and must be challenged on every stage.
In the words of Price: ‘To fix family violence in this country, we need to do two things. One, we need a truckload of cash injected into domestic violence support work across the nation and we need to fix men.’
‘The first we can do,’ she says. ‘The second will take so much time.’ Putting the issue in front us can surely, only help.
If you or anyone you know needs support, you can contact the National Sexual Assault, Domestic and Family Violence Counselling Service on 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732), Lifeline 131 114, or Beyond Blue 1300 224 636.
Wendy Tuohy is a journalist and columnist for The Age focusing on gender equality, women’s safety and social issues impacting women and girls.
Published on 9 November 2022
