Setting ourselves up for a whole ship-load of regret
PHILOMENA Lee. Remember that name because in the oldest tradition of storytelling it’s one you’ll soon be hearing. First a book, now a movie starring Judi Dench, it’s a story that’s stayed with me long after I read journalist Martin Sixsmith’s mesmerising tale.
To precis: Philomena, played by Dench in what is being heralded as an Oscarworthy performance, is the true story of an unwed Irish woman whose threeyear-old son was taken from her and adopted out to a family in America.
For 50 years she kept the secret, finally confessing the truth to her daughter who persuaded Sixsmith, a celebrated foreign correspondent, to investigate the case.
The film is going to be huge — not just because it’s brilliantly executed by director Stephen Frears ( The Queen), or because the interplay between Philomena and Sixsmith ( played by Steve Coogan) addresses such timeless themes of shame, cruelty, cynicism and hope. Rather, Philomena will dominate the slew of awards ceremonies next year not just because it entertains for 98 minutes but because it stakes a corner of your soul.
In my business we call them ‘‘ human interest stories’’ and if you want to be taken seriously as a journalist, you avoid them at all cost. They’re the ‘‘soft’’ stories, the human tales designed to leaven the boredom of politics and economics by creating emotion, sympathy or humour. Sick children are ‘‘human interest’’. Dogs, too.
Indeed, dogs that save or inspire sick children are stars of the genre.
But 20 years ago when my first editor packed me off to London with a reference noting ‘‘Angela has a particular facility for human interest pieces’’ I could have killed him. It’s a sentiment echoed by Sixsmith who’s presented with Philomena’s story after a glittering career as a BBC correspondent and political mover and shaker.
He doesn’t do ‘‘human interest stories’’, he tells Philomena’s daughter, because they’re stories about ‘‘weak-minded and ignorant’’ people written for the kinds of newspapers read by weak- minded and ignorant people.
If Philomena exposes a tragically harsh episode in Irish Catholic history which saw thousands of teenage mothers robbed of their children, it also explores the true role of journalists. For however cerebral or entertaining we may like to see ourselves, in the physiology of news, policy is the skeleton and human interest is its heart.
In London, relieved of my twenty-something arrogance, I swiftly learned there is no greater honour than being entrusted with someone’s per- sonal story; that facts resonate more deeply when fleshed out with feeling.
At a hospital in Bristol, children were dying by the dozen due to the ineptitude of cardiac surgeons. It took an anaesthetist to blow the whistle; it took my newspaper publishing the photographs of every single lost child to provoke the authorities to act.
The anaesthetist now works in Geelong where he and his team are justifiably proud of their low mortality and wound infection rates.
It was the telling of thou- sands of ‘‘human interest’’ stories that led to the apology to the Stolen Generations; it’s the revelation of many more that prompted the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Movies have been made — Rabbit Proof Fence, Oranges and Sunshine — and through the humanising of the headlines there has come understanding and contrition.
But one story remains out of bounds, swept offshore or dealt with in places journalists are unable to penetrate. The victims are nameless, faceless, storyless. They drown at sea or wither for years in detention centres where they’re often separated, like Philomena, from the people they love. Occasionally, a fragment of a story will leak out like that of 31-year-old Latifa who was recently separated from her newborn baby and sent back to a detention facility while her son remained sick in hospital. The boy’s father was not allowed to see his son.
There is no ‘‘humanising’’ of the asylum seeker story, merely dehumanising. Those who should know better persist in calling them ‘‘illegals’’ and as Tara Moss pointed out on Q and A this week, children seeking asylum need their own advocate. Currently, she argued, ‘‘ their jailer and guardian are the same thing’’.
A friend who visits Villawood Detention Centre each week tells shocking stories of family members separated from each other, lack of support and the deadening effect of year after year of incarceration. He points out the irony of the second verse of our national anthem: For those who’ve come across the seas/ We’ve boundless plains toshare.
As I re- read Philomena Lee’s story this week I was incredulous that something so cruel and unjust could ever have happened.
Will we look back in 50 years and see our treatment of asylum seekers in the same light? Will there be another apology, another feeble attempt to try to right the wrongs? Who knows. But without wanting to give away the end of Philomena’s story, there is one emotion that no apology can ever erase and that, sadly, is regret.