News & Blog by Caroline Overington
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
EVERY single time you read a story in the newspaper about a child murder, you can be sure that the journalists know a great deal more than they are telling you. Most reporters feel sick about it. They want to tell the truth, the whole truth, but there are new laws that make it impossible in almost every circumstance to show the faces of young children who have been killed, or even to use their...
I suppose readers know I've got a book out at the moment. It's called I Came to Say Goodbye. It's essentially a long and passionate letter from an ordinary Australian bloke, Med, to a judge. He is trying to convince the judge not to make one of his grandchildren a ward of the State. It isn't easy. His family has been torn apart by mental illness. There is a catastrophic crime at the heart...
It is difficult to write about child murder, even in the newspaper, without creating the impression that people who are mentally ill are extremely dangerous to the community. In, fact, they are far more likely to hurt themselves than they are to hurt others. My eyes were opened to this by my colleague, Lanai Vasek, who joined us at The Australian last year. Lanai was raised in foster homes,...
It is difficult to write about child murder, even in the newspaper, without creating the impression that people who are mentally ill are extremely dangerous to the community. In, fact, they are far more likely to hurt themselves than they are to hurt others. My eyes were opened to this by my colleague, Lanai Vasek, who joined us at The Australian last year. Lanai was raised in foster...
As a reporter, it seems to me that people who kill their children come in two types, too: first, there are the monstrous, who are motivated by revenge, or money, or power, or rage, or some combination of the above; and then there are the truly, terribly insane. The monstrous often try to pretend they were insane, when they murdered their little ones. Others like to say it was an accident. When...
Who is left behind when a family falls apart? Caroline Overington Will be our guest blogger this week, starting tomorrow!! I CAME TO SAY GOODBYE by Caroline Overington It was four o'clock in the morning. A young woman pushed through the hospital doors. Staff would later say they thought the woman was a new mother, returning to her child - and in a way, she was. She walked...
