It's not the done thing to recount a murder in "polite" circles - unless you're among journalists or emergency workers.
Way too "confronting" - but I ask you, can you empathize? Will you finish reading this story?
I was 24. I sat at the end of a pew - a graduate journalist from Brisbane who shared house with young teachers from Brisbane.
Bundaberg's Holy Rosary Church overflowed with frightened people grieving for another young Brisbane teacher named Therese who was murdered in the provincial sugar town.
I was not in church to pray - do you think this was "confronting"? I was there to report about the evening memorial service - police hunting for a killer. Would you do it?
That newspaper office, that church, the police station, the courthouse are embedded in my memory.
It's not a trauma though. I went on trying for years to winkle the unspeakable memories out of war veterans on ANZAC Day - this was a task dreaded annually by jaded journalists.
A terrible grief to relive for veterans. So much depends on your perspective doesn't it?
Communications - no matter how high-tech or how moving the words - are weak dramatizations of intense personal experiences.
If you ask the question "why" you have to go up close and personal - you have to empathize, even with a villain.
I remember being disappointed by Truman Capote's novel, In Cold Blood, which established his celebrity and was hailed as the first nonfiction novel.
The 1965 publication is so tame - but back then only the New Yorker magazine had the guts to publish something so "confronting".
Is there something wrong with this picture?
Thomas Keneally, Steven Spielberg and his team they went there.
They got up close and personal to tell a story that put you in people's shoes - it's "confronting" but these story tellers had a good reason. It was a plea for tolerance and compassion.
When tragedy becomes a media play thing: the dismemberment of a young Australian girl in the United States, the rape of a young Australian in PNG, two road workers killed by trucks backing over them overnight ... it's more sane to switch off.
Are you being empathetic by watching or reading? It may be more empathetic to switch off, if the media is like a greedy, myopic, yappy chihuahua that runs around the table getting excited by a whiff of the meat on the table and waits for scraps.
I think that a person's ability to empathize actually stops them from becoming a media cretin chihuahua. And they blame computer games.
