BARE TRUTH
Tracey Spicer’s writing can be laugh-out-loud funny, but as an advocate against domestic violence she dishes up serious food for thought
Tracey Spicer is known for many things, from anchoring national news and current affairs programs to weekly columns in metropolitan newspapers. It would be good to think her best still lies ahead of her as she rattles the cage of the establishment in this funny but very serious look at the obstacles women have had to negotiate.
The nation watched as she used her profile to help boost the antiTrump protest, but her real value to debate in Australia right now could lie in what she has to say as an advocate against domestic violence.
Spicer has weathered the worst of “the cruel and shallow money trench’’ of television, through an era in which for women anyway, it was all about bosses decreeing that females on the front line should “stick your tits out’’ and “lose two inches off your arse’’.
She reveals incidents in her life that are sadly and outrageously too common – being knocked over and molested, and being groped by a relative. She did the unthinkable and took legal action against a network when she was sacked by email after having a baby.
As a media commentator she has not held back, once calling Tony Abbott “a creep’’ after the then-PM winked and grinned while a talk-back radio caller phoned in to explain how as a pensioner, she had to work in the sex industry to make ends meet.
Spicer can be hilarious and provocative, all rolled into one.
Her previous appearance in this column stemmed from her contribution to a book titled Best Australian Comedy Writing.
Hers was probably one of the funniest chapters, discussing “the seven sins’’ and giving an eyewatering account of her teenage experiments with a boy, Eamonn, the son of strict Catholics who marched up to her parents’ front door to declare: “Your daughter has damaged our son’s penis.’’
That episode rates a mention in her new book too.
But for this reviewer at least, in a city where domestic violence has killed an unacceptable number of women – indeed, there is no acceptable number – Spicer’s description of an incident when she was a young radio journalist in Melbourne helps bring the matter into focus. Spicer was on police rounds. Apart from working the phones, establishing and nurturing contacts and asking questions – all tools of the trade – she would also sleep with a police scanner next to the bed and drive to wherever trouble reared its head.
One day she was awoken at 2.47am by the crackling sounds of reports of an incident at Broadmeadows identified as a “code 10’’, known to the public as “a domestic’’.
Therein lay a major hurdle that continues to be a major problem in Australia.
As Spicer writes, back in those days news managers weren’t interested in covering such cases, and that attitude prevailed across society.
“A woman may be beaten to within an inch of her life, but we’re not allowed to broadcast it,’’ she writes of that time.
Here in the Gold Coast-Logan City region, back then some cops and media would refer to domestic bashings as “(insert suburb name) foreplay’’.
Spicer writes: “What goes on behind closed doors stays there, according to the (all-male) powersthat-be. ‘It’s a personal matter’; ‘Happens all the time’; ‘She was probably asking for it’.
“If a man bashes another man in Fitzroy Street it leads the bulletin. But if the victim is female and at home? It’s like a tree falling in the forest. Did anybody hear?
“I decide this is a bit of bulls--t. It seems to be a silent epidemic. Women are suffering and we’re doing nothing.’’
Spicer drove to Broadmeadows and walked towards the brown brick house where the incident was reported, only to be tackled to the ground by a Special Operations Group copper armed with an assault rifle. “What the f--k are you doing here? See that arsehole in there?
He’s threatening to kill his wife. But, right now, he’s pointing the rifle out the window, offering to take pot shots. He’s off his nut,’’ the policeman tells her. They race to cover as the man fires at them, but this gives the wife a chance to escape out the back of the house.
Spicer tells how police carry the woman to safety and how the victim is apologising, as though it’s all her fault.
When the gunman surrenders, his wife suddenly bolts and embraces him.
Spicer files a story – “a 30-second wrap’’ is all that the overnight newsreader wants – and after a couple of bulletins it is dropped because “it’s just a domestic’’.