Legal issues:
The question the court must resolve in this case is NOT whether either parent is responsible for inflicting the injury upon Seth.
That is perhaps, a matter for another court, at another time.
Likewise, it is not the role of this court to decide Seth’s fate.
Seth’s parents want Seth to come home. They accept that this is not likely to happen in the short-term but they want to secure their legal rights as Seth’s parents, which would enable them to have him home should he recover from his injuries.
World-renowned experts in paediatric neurology have told this court that Seth is unlikely to survive his injuries, and is currently being kept alive by artificial means.
However it is not the role of this court to assume that the death of Seth is imminent.
It is the role of the court to decide whether the risk posed to Seth by the parents would be an acceptable one, were he to recover, and be able to leave the hospital.
If the court decides that the risk to Seth is unacceptable, it must grant parental rights to the State.
Conclusion:
This court concludes,
a) There is a high likelihood that Seth’s injuries are non-accidental.
b) There is no possibility that they were inflicted by people other than one or the other, or else both, of the parents.
c) One or the other, or perhaps both parents know what happened to Seth but have declined to tell the court.
d) Seth’s injuries are extremely serious.
e) While he survives, Seth remains vulnerable to further attack by one or the other or perhaps both of his parents.
f) There is therefore an unacceptable risk to Seth, should he be discharged from hospital and returned to the care of his parents.
FOR those reasons, it is the ORDER of the COURT that,
– Parental responsibility for Seth Atley-Haines, born 23 December 2005 be transferred from the parents to the Department of Community Services.
– Contact with his parents henceforth be prevented.
Chapter 13
MY FIRST THOUGHT AFTER THE VERDICT came down was, no. I’m not going to take this. This is wrong.
I asked our lawyer, ‘How do we appeal?’
She didn’t really respond, not then, and not in the weeks that followed. I think she’d got bored. Bored, or else she’d figured out that if we couldn’t win this part – the easy part – we’d never get to sue. She’d never get her 48 per cent.
She did say, ‘Well, you can appeal, but that means you’ll have to take it to the Supreme Court. It can take a while to get a time and a date for a hearing in the Supreme Court. It’s expensive, and we might lose.’
I took it from that she wasn’t interested in going further, which riled me, because I was fired up. I thought, okay, if she’s not interested, I can go to the papers with this. I’ll go to A Current Affair.
I asked the lawyer what she thought of that. She said, ‘I always tell my clients, don’t go to the media. It’s the dynamite charge. It can do more harm than good.’
But that was when we were still her clients. That was when she had a whiff of some settlement. Now if we went to the media, we’d be off her back, and so she said, ‘Go for it.’
I thought, well, the media it is. And Haines, he was with me. I think he thought he’d be able to get some money for an exclusive interview. Child abducted by State! Parents accused! Human rights violation!
That kind of thing appealed to Haines. He might have been an idiot but he had an ego like you would not believe. Trouble was, with the lawyer backing away, I found myself in alliance with Haines. Not with Fat – she was falling into a deep kind of fog, but I was in cahoots with Haines. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking straight. It’s like I said earlier, you get into a court battle with a big government department, and you feel like that bloke in The Castle. You want to keep going, for justice. You want a David and Goliath thing. You want a victory.
Haines was putting on a good show, pretending that he felt the same, at least in the early days. He’d rage about the injustice. He’d say, ‘If that smart-arse lawyer is not going to help us appeal, I’m going to take it to Parliament!’
He’d say, ‘I’ll take it to the highest court in the land! I’ll take it to the House of Lords!’ He actually looked that up online. He found out you can take things to the House of Lords. He quoted Neil Cowan. He would say, ‘It’s like Neil Cowan said, you can’t have the courts taking babies away from their mothers!’
He’d say, ‘What proof do they have that we did anything? They have no proof!’
Always, with the proof.
Did I think, It’s a bit hard to get proof, Haines, if you are one of two witnesses and the other one, Seth, can’t talk? I don’t know. Maybe I was still giving him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t anymore.
Anyway, he’d say, ‘I’m going to make up signs, and tell everybody that my son has been taken away, and I’m going to carry those signs on a march down to Parliament House in Canberra!’ He’d say he was going to leave a pile of Seth’s toys sitting on the High Court steps. He’d say all kinds of stuff and Neil Cowan was all for it. He encouraged Haines to do it. He’d say, ‘We’ll start a People Power movement!’ He’d say, ‘People across the country will rise up, and join us and it will be the start of a revolution!’
They had quite a view of themselves, those two.
It was Cowan who got the ball rolling, for the actual march. He said he’d make Seth ‘the poster boy’ for the Shaken Baby myth. He went through our photographs. There was a nice one of Seth in Fat’s arms, taken about a week after Seth was born. Fat was looking down on him with such love. It was the perfect shot. Haines didn’t like it, though. He wanted a photograph with him in it, and that’s the one he went with for the poster, a picture of Fat, holding Seth, but with Haines standing behind her, towering over her, his arms crossed, his biceps flexed, not really making our case that this was a normal, happy family, not with his tattoos and the handlebar moustache, like Hulk Hogan used to have.
Cowan took the photograph, and scanned it. That meant he could put it on his website, and he did. I’m ashamed to see it there now. Seth Atley, the poster child for the Shaken Baby myth.
I no longer think it’s a myth that babies get shaken. I can see that Seth was one of them.
Anyway, Cowan put the photo on the website. It was the first thing you saw when you clicked on the page. He put up all the documents from the court. He put up transcripts, and scans. He said Seth’s case would go ‘viral’. He said that meant that Seth would be famous. His picture, and the details of his case, would be emailed all around the world.
Right from the start, the worldwide attention, the myths, the conspiracies, that wasn’t my bag. I wanted Seth to come home. That was all I wanted. I wanted my daughter to have her baby in her arms. To that end, I signed myself up for whatever Haines had planned. I wish I hadn’t but I couldn’t think what else to do.
I let Cowan set up a username for me, and a password so I could get into the site, and talk to people on there. We were trying to build what he called an ‘online community’ but what that was, I didn’t rightly understand, not until it was too late. He said people who felt the way we did would be attracted to the site, and would unite online, and together we’d bring down the system that was trying to abduct Seth.
He was right about attracting people. The site went up in June of 2006 – not too long after the court case – and straightaway, people started visiting. We could tell that from the site counter. We could also tell how they were finding us, on the web. They were putting words like ‘child abuse’ and ‘alibi’ and ‘shaken baby’ and ‘vaccination risk’ into Google and ending up on our site.
Most people stayed a minute or so and moved on. Maybe they were looking for something quite different. But there were quite a few who hung around – the same ones, every day. Most didn’t give us their real names. They had ‘handles’ or nicknames, things li
ke ‘Warrior for Justice’ and ‘Victim of Injustice’. They used our message boards to talk about child welfare and child support. Some of it was pretty nasty. Blokes would email in, saying, ‘Child welfare workers are lesbian man-haters who steal kids!’ and, ‘How come they’ve all got fat arses?’ and … well, my Mum used to say to me, Your Honour, you lie down with dogs, you get fleas, but I suppose that lesson was momentarily lost to me. I was lying down with dogs. I was getting fleas.
It was part of my job to edit the site. I was supposed to keep the worst stuff out, but still give people a place to spill their guts. I could tell that a lot of these blokes had been dying to tell their story. There were men who had been through the Family Court and lost their kids for abusing them, and they were pretty sure the system was corrupt, especially the judges. They would have been happy to do anything to bring down the system.
Haines set himself up as the hero of the site. He gave himself a nickname: ‘Seth’s Proud Dad.’ He answered some of the mail himself. It was like he was the celebrity, the bloke leading the revolution. He’d been at it about a month when he decided that he would lead a march. He told everyone, ‘Take pictures of your kids and blow them up big! We’re going to carry them through the streets. We’re going all the way to Canberra!’
He set a date for the march – 4 August. We put the date on the website, and we wrote, ‘Join Us On Our March For Justice for Our Children!’ One or two of our readers, the ones who day or night, always seemed to be hovering around the site, popped up with instant messages. They said, ‘We’ll be there!’
I thought, well, if it’s going to happen, I better get with it. I bought poster paper from the Forster newsagent. I made up a few big signs: ‘Bring Seth Home’ and ‘Shaken Baby is a Myth!’
Neil Cowan said I should phone A Current Affair and 60 Minutes and tell them about the march. Haines said, ‘Go with the one who offers the most money.’
I made the calls. I told a receptionist at Channel Nine that my son-in-law – my son-in-law, God help me – Paul Haines had been unjustly accused. He was going to get a photograph of Seth, blown up big, and carry it on his shoulders, raising hell along the road to Canberra to force the politicians to listen, and to return my grandson.
The girl on the phone said a reporter would get back to me. I waited but nobody did call back. Cowan wasn’t daunted. He said the TV stations were sometimes wary because in cases of child abuse, they can’t show anybody’s face. He said, try radio. I phoned 2UE and I phoned the ABC. I didn’t get anywhere there. Cowan said, ‘Well, it’s hard for radio. It’s a march.’ He said, ‘Try The Daily Telegraph’ but they said it wasn’t their thing, either.
Cowan said, ‘Well, that’s okay. When we are on the streets with our signs, a hundred deep, blocking traffic, they won’t be able to ignore us then!’
The day of the march came around. I was up at 5 am. Others had said they’d meet us in Forster, for the first part of the journey. I got myself ready, packed socks and clean jocks. It was going to take a few days to get to Canberra, obviously.
I drove around to the Haines place. I knocked on the door and when Haines didn’t answer, I pushed on it, and went inside and there he was, on the sofa – the saggy, baggy, defeated sofa – with a bowl of mull by his elbow and a blackened bong on the floor. Where Fat was, I don’t know.
I had the posters in my hands, the big ones we were going to carry on the road to the High Court. I said, ‘Are you ready?’ but looking at him, I could see that he wasn’t ready. Not for the first time, Paul Haines wasn’t going anywhere. He was bolted to that couch.
He said, ‘Right, Med. Look, I think we’ve got some operational problems with this campaign.’ He reached for his bong and his lighter and he set the water bubbling. He paused, and with smoke still in his throat, he quickly said, ‘Like, where are we going to stay en route? I ain’t got no money for motels.’ And he exhaled.
I said, ‘People will put us up! That was the plan, remember? When they see what we’re doing, they’ll come out of their homes, put us up! We’ll do meetings in town halls and people will come and support us? Remember that?’ Looking at him, eyes glazed over, I knew what I was saying was ridiculous. Who, of the good folk of Australia, would have that layabout in their home? Who would welcome his smoke-stained fingers around their cutlery, his tufty moccasins under their dinner table?
Not that he cared what I thought. He’d set the amber water bubbling again. His throat was on fire, the tip of his thumb was sore. He was holding back the bong smoke. He said, ‘I dunno, Med. It’s a bloody long way to Canberra.’
He fell back against the couch. He was looking at me, but not in a focused way. He was stoned.
I looked at him. I thought, ‘You loser. You punk. You prick.’ But like every time beforehand, I didn’t say anything. I left my poster signs on the floor. I walked out of there. I thought, ‘What do I do now?’ I’d have to go online, put up a note saying the march was delayed, but maybe it was too late? Maybe people were already massing near the Forster courthouse, waiting for us? I thought I better go there to explain. I need not have worried. There was no crowd. There was one bloke with even more tattoos than Haines. He had a dog with him.
I went home. I went online. There weren’t many people on the site, either, just the same two blokes who were always there. I told them, ‘The march is off.’ One of them replied, saying, ‘What march? Was that today?’
I sat back on my own couch. I’ve got to tell you, it felt strange, having been up early, and bristling with energy, and ready to go, and now to be sitting still and quiet, quieter than I could ever remember it being in my house, just the clock ticking and the dog, who once or twice jerked up to get at an itch under his tail.
I thought, well, what are you gunna do now, Med?
I already had the answer. I was gunna do nothing. And why was I gunna do nothing? Because I’d turned myself into a gunna. You know what a gunna is, don’t you, Your Honour? A bloke who is gunna do this and gunna do that. I was gunna tell Haines to lay off Conan that day at Big Rock, but I didn’t. I was gunna throttle Haines when he took up with Fat, when she wasn’t but 15, but I didn’t.
I was gunna stand up to Haines when Seth went into hospital, because of course I knew, like everybody knew, that he must have done it, but I didn’t.
What I did instead was hook up with him, collaborated with him on that damn website, attracting every kid-basher and lunatic on the internet, and why did I do that? Because I was gunna get Seth back. Oh yeah, that’s what I was gunna do.
Except I didn’t. Reading what I’ve written so far, I can see what I actually did do to save my daughter, and my grandchild, and it wasn’t very much, was it? And do you know what that makes me think? It makes me think I’m as impotent as they said I’d be, on the day Fat was conceived.
PART TWO
Chapter 14
THEY FOUND HER IN THE MIDDLE of Victoria Road in Sydney’s Kings Cross, pacing the white line that separates cars on the left from those on the right.
She was dressed in a long, green military jacket, with insignia on the shoulders. She was naked underneath but had gumboots on her feet.
Her hair was on end; her eyes were wild and desperate; she held her arms wide, in a Christ-like pose.
She was wailing, ‘Stop. Everybody must stop!’ but the cars, they did not have time to stop. They swerved around her, all except a bus. Too big and clumsy to properly swerve, it ran off the road and through the front window of a shop.
Was there sympathy for this woman – this near-naked, hysterical woman, with her bare, puckered belly and long breasts, with her rubber boots that had chafed the back of her calves – whose antics had caused a bus to career into a store front?
There was some – but only some. Had Donna-Faye Atley been streaking through a cul-de-sac in some suburban idyll, then maybe people would have rushed into traffic, brought her to the kerb and closed the military jacket around her, to protect her modesty, but this was Kings Cross.
Kings Cross, never mind the gentrification – the delicious little chocolate shops and the providores, with their pita chips and their free-range chickens – it’s still, for many people, Sydney’s boulevard of broken dreams, of strip clubs and sex shops; of the dazed, lying in pools of vomit; of taxis being used as mobile brothels; of addicts on the nod; of Aborigines, buckled in the gutter; of prostitutes with bruised thighs and sores on their faces, knocking on car windows (‘You want a girl? You want some fun?’); of street kids with new tattoos and facial piercing; of men with teeth like burnt matches; of junkies with arms that hang like meat; of the drunk, the homeless, the angry and alone.
It is humanity, in all its crooked timber – and people there, they do walk into traffic.
That said, the paramedics who picked up Donna-Faye, after the bus crashed and the glass shattered and the situation became serious – they said she wasn’t drunk, and she wasn’t on drugs.
She was shaking, and she had a look in her eye like she was running from something nobody else could see. Not something that wasn’t there, but something that nobody else who was there was able to see.
She was taken by ambulance to St Vincent’s Hospital – it’s not very far; in a pinch, she might have been carried there on a stretcher. Nursing staff searched for ID but she had none. They asked for her next of kin but the man they called – Paul Jack Haines – on the number she gave them, he said, ‘I want nothing to do with this.’
I Came to Say Goodbye Page 14
