Wake in fright
I started the podcast How Do You Sleep At Night? to challenge listeners to empathise with people they’d normally judge.
“That’s my trophy photo of my giraffe,” Bec said to me as she scrolled through her Facebook photos despite patchy reception in the Victorian high country.
I’d seen the photo before, maybe a month earlier, when I started researching big game hunters for my new ABC podcast How Do You Sleep At Night?
I wanted to speak to people who face judgement for the things they do or the beliefs they hold. And as I looked through Bec’s page and saw photos of her with dead baboons, a dead zebra and a dead giraffe with its beautiful neck slumped, I admit it: I judged.
Bec told me that the first time she realised that not everybody approved of her lifestyle was when she started posting her trophy shots on social media. She and her mate Sharna — also a passionate hunter — read me the comments they’ve become accustomed to.
“Stick your rifle up your c*nt and pull the trigger,” was just one.
Before they started sharing pictures online, they were used to people encouraging their lifestyle. Bec told me she’s a sixth-generation hunter. “Everyone who’s been anyone in my family has hunted,” she said. In her community, hunting is normal. It’s celebrated.
She and her friends call people who don’t hunt “antis” — meaning anti-hunters. The main communication they have with antis comes as a barrage of abuse served up in their inbox, which they have learned to block and delete.
I had been thinking for some time that our worlds are feeling smaller and smaller. Our news is funnelled to us via algorithms that have learned to predict our tastes and our opinions. We are fed a diet of all our favourite things.
I had wanted to make a series that challenged us to look outside our own bubbles — a sort of empathy test for people you may have written off. I wondered whether, if each of us spent even just a little bit of time in worlds we weren’t accustomed to, we would have our minds challenged or even changed. Would we able to find common ground with someone that could kill a giraffe? I wanted to find out.
The subjects in How Do You Sleep At Night? are different from each other in almost every way. But they are united by being easy to judge.
When I told friends and colleagues about my idea, they thought it would be hard to get people to agree to take part. But when I explained to each of the subjects that my motive was to explore the judgement copped by these people, they all agreed.
Some needed assurances of my motives. The hunters, rightly or wrongly, felt the media was constantly attacking them. They wanted to be sure I wasn’t trying to stitch them up. The abortion clinic protesters invited me to meet them before they agreed to go ahead with the interview. They wanted to make a call face to face about whether I was coming to the story with an open mind.
Ultimately, they all agreed to participate. They felt judged, and they wanted to help other people explore what that feels like. A lot of us feel judged, I learned. My subjects were keen to tell their stories from their perspectives. To set the record straight, as they see it.
Sometimes this meant speaking to people I didn’t agree with: hunters and abortion clinic protesters and even a man who killed two people. Sometimes it meant speaking to people who face judgement from others: a man who made his fortunes off the pokies, another who lobbies for tobacco giant Philip Morris and one who manipulated the stock market to try to stop a coal mine. It meant asking them about their motivations and then listening to their stories. And it meant challenging them with the opinions of the people who judge them.
One thing I want to make clear is that I’m not suggesting a moral equivalence between the various things these people do. The uniting factor is simply that they face judgement.
Outside an abortion clinic in Sydney’s Surry Hills, a row of protesters clutched their rosary beads and prayed shoulder to shoulder alongside their A-frame signs with pictures of bloodied fetuses and small rubbery fetal models.
When 80 per cent of Australians think women should have the right to an abortion, I wondered what it’s like to show up on the other side of the debate, in full view of the judging passers by.
As women walk into the clinic, the protesters ask them to stop. Their critics say they harass women, but the protesters deny this claim.
Spend enough time here, and you’ll see tempers boil over. I watched as a young woman yelled at a middle aged man: “Women have the right to do what they want with their own bodies!”
“No they don’t!” the protester, Paul Hanrahan, fired back.
“We’re getting belted big time,” Hanrahan told me. “We are losing the battle, but we’ll win the war.”
The exchanges outside the clinic were rarely civil and I understand why — it’s an emotional topic for many people. But spending months trailing the abortion clinic protesters changed my perspective. I went in wondering how they could justify being there. I listened to their reasons and I got to know them.
I found that the caricatures we form about people rarely stack up when you spend time with them, meet their families and hear their perspectives. I still think women should have the right to an abortion. That’s not the point.
What I have now that I didn’t have before is an understanding of the protesters’ motivations. I hope that episode gives others that understanding too.
How Do You Sleep At Night? is my little attempt to interrogate the basis of our judgements and chip away at some of the assumptions we all make about people who are different to us, through listening.
We don’t have to agree, and that’s the point.
Sarah McVeigh hosts and produces How Do You Sleep At Night? She is a reporter on Triple J’s youth current affairs show Hack.
Sam Wallman is a political cartoonist based in Melbourne.
David Bromley is an artist based on the mid-north coast of NSW.
