Strange Times

The past is a foreign country, redux

Like many lawyers—and for part of my career, I was at the Bar, so got to play dressups—I enjoy true crime and courtroom drama. Both genres have to be well-done and at least aware of the laws of evidence, criminal procedure etc to retain my interest, though.

I have been known to throw things at badly done police procedurals when they turn up on my tellybox. My sister has been known to behave similarly with medical or hospital dramas. We make a good pair.

With that background in mind, let me share with you a really splendid bit of true crime that also illuminates how different people’s moral values around and towards children were less than a century ago: the key event—a murder—took place on February 8, 1964.

Retired journalist tony thomas starts his story like this:

For reasons that now escape me, I started my part-time studies at WA University in 1959 with two years of German language and literature. My lecturer and guide was Dr Maurice Benn, the newly-installed head of German.

A few years later Mr Justice Hale in the WA Supreme Court put on his black cap with one corner facing forward (actually it’s just a piece of black cloth, of Tudor origin), and sentenced Dr Benn to hang by the neck until he was dead for wilful murder.

I’m writing about Dr Benn to clear some more debris from my cranial attic.

It does not spoil this extraordinary story for you to know that the victim was Dr Maurice Benn’s own son, and that very large numbers of people were sympathetic to him, willing to at least explain and sometimes excuse what he had done. This matured into a state-wide campaign for commutation of Benn’s sentence, something then followed by early release.

At the time parents of unfortunate children got little aid. Some still isolated their offspring at home to protect them from other kids’ taunts. Letters to papers nationally in the wake of the Benn conviction included a number from parents saying they had contemplated killing their child. Some hinted that parents had killed such children in staged accidents. As one woman put it, “Every one of us would have been relieved to see our child die. Perhaps the only reason that our husbands have not stood trial for murder is due to one of two things -- the good fortune to have had a sound spiritual background, or the lack of courage to commit euthanasia for fear of the consequences.”

The male secretary of a Slow Learning Children’s branch wrote that “Mongol” children should be compulsorily admitted to State care: “I know the heartbreak of losing one’s children would be of comparatively short duration – time heals all things. Release these unfortunate parents from their burden by law, and we should never have a crime like the Benn case on our conscience again.” He was immediately sacked.

There was even a letter seeking legal changes to permit some infant children “to be put to rest” via court orders. But others countered that mercy killings of the unfortunate would be no better than Hitler’s culling of the unfit.

Australia in the mid-60s was much like Australia now: orderly, prosperous, well-governed, somewhat authoritarian. It was moderately socially conservative without ever exhibiting the sort of religious fundamentalism one associates with Evangelical Christianity in the US or Islam in Iran or the Arabian peninsula.

The people who wrote into newspapers and spoke to local radio in high-trust Australia in this period signed them with their own names. Stated preferences and revealed preferences aligned.

Now read the whole thing, and see why.

Helen Elsewhere

Last week, I appeared on The Mike Graham Show with Mike Graham, late of TalkRADIO/TV. Before I had this substack, I used to do a weekly spot with Mike on his show, from roughly early 2020 to early 2022. For reasons we discuss in here, my spot got canned and Mike’s own show was moved from mid-morning to early morning.

Then, last October—while I was consulting in the US—Mike got cancelled and sacked. And when I say “cancelled and sacked”, I mean a proper, old-school version. That is, someone who didn’t like Mike but who had “friended” him on Facebook screenshotted something on his Facebook profile and then tweeted it out. This is on Elon Musk’s allegedly all-singing, all-dancing, newly right-wing X. It can still do the cancellation business. Not all lefties have fled to Bluesky.

Mike has thus set up what is basically an incarnation of his most recent show on Talk, but on substack. It features many of the same guests and similar production style, and I’ll be turning up on it from time-to-time.