The sound of silence
The rape and murder of a young Carlton woman has forced us to confront the gender-based violence that is all around us
I CHAIN my bike to a railing across the road from the cemetery and join the stream of people heading into the soccer fields. This is a road I usually ride down at least once a week, sometimes more often, puffing heavily as I climb the deceptively steep gradient with the playing fields over my right shoulder and the silent gravestones over my left before it flattens out allowing me to roll easily and rest my legs until the road reaches Melbourne University.
But last Tuesday night something terrible happened here. A young woman called Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered, her bodied left like a piece of trash on one of the soccer fields to be discovered by another passerby.
An aspiring and gifted young comedian, she had been walking across the park in the black of night after getting off a tram in Royal Parade when she was attacked, just hundreds of metres from the flat she had grown up in. The tragedy made worse by her alleged killer, now in custody, being diagnosed as autistic. Two young lives ruined.
I didn’t know Eurydice, but I know many women like her. They come into our union office every day: smart, clever, funny, vibrant and confident young women devoted to the performing arts and with aspirations to build a career in theatre or on the big or small screen.
The vigil was in Eurydice’s honour, but it was also a way of reclaiming the park.
I know this park well. I pass it every day to and from work on my bike or the tram. My wife jogs around it a couple of times a week. When my boys were younger, they used to climb on the equipment next to the football club, and as they got older, we played kick to kick in a nearby goal square.
The park does have its darker side — a small number of homeless people take shelter alongside the outside walls of the football club, where they are protected from the rain by the overhanging stands — but hundreds of people make use of it every day to exercise or walk their dog or throw a Frisbee around.
Tonight, up to 10,000 of us come together silently, many holding candles, to pay tribute to Eurydice’s memory and declare that we will not be frightened away from enjoying the open spaces of this city, as is our right. There are women and men, dogs and children. The vigil is in Eurydice’s honour, but it is also a way of reclaiming the park.
My resolve to attend the vigil was hardened this morning when I read that vandals had defaced the makeshift memorial to Eurydice, spray-painting vile messages of hate and spite where the bouquets of flowers lay.
A minute or so after 6pm, the park lights are switched off and for the next 20 minutes there is total silence, interrupted only by the clicking of newspaper photographers’ cameras. Thousands of candles punctuate the darkness. It is a crisp, clear night, and a crescent moon looks down from the west.
Not a murmur from the crowd for those 20 minutes. Even the dogs some have brought sit quietly. Then, finally, the silence is broken by a choir singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, made more famous in the version recorded a quarter of a century ago by Jeff Buckley’s angelic voice. Hesitantly, softly, members of the crowd join in. And when that is over, they press forward to place their candles or flowers on the memorial.
Although the Premier is present, there are no speeches, no hollow eulogies. This is not a political event — that will come later.
We have to see the #MeToo movement not as a threat, but as an opportunity to re-examine our own behaviour and pledge to be better.
Much has been written since Eurydice’s body was discovered about how women have the right to walk our streets in safety, and how it is not women who need to change their behaviour but men. That is all true. But of course, there is a difference between what is our right and what is our reality. And it would be simplistic to think that just by snapping our fingers our streets could be safe.
They are not safe, not for women, but also not for men. I, for one, would not cross a dark park alone late at night, even though it is my right to be safe. I would take precautions and responsibility for my safety. That is not victim-blaming, it’s common sense. Until the misogyny, disrespect and violence — both verbal and physical — towards women is eliminated, and violence more generally in our society, that is the reality we have to live with.
But it is also not enough to just shrug your shoulders and say there isn’t anything you can do about it, as if it’s someone else’s problem. Especially if you are a man.
We have a duty to take a stand against sexual harassment and gender-based violence and to confront and challenge our fellow men when they perpetuate it. We have to see the #MeToo movement not as a threat, but as an opportunity to re-examine our own behaviour and pledge to be better. We must recognise the privileged place we have had in society for centuries and be prepared to share that space with women. We must teach our sons to be respectful, to treat women as their equals and to banish sexism from their personalities.
Progress is being made. I was pleased to see many men standing with me at Eurydice’s vigil tonight to send a message to the women in their lives that we will not tolerate this treatment of women any longer and we will work to overcome the attitudes that make you feel unsafe.
The tragedy is it took her death to bring us together.
