Su Dharmapala's Blog

‘if Ms Meagher had been “more faith-filled” she “would have been home in bed” and “not walking down Sydney Rd at 3am’ – Catholic Priest, Melbourne 2015

This. This people, is, the ground zero of misogyny in the world today and has been for two thousand years. Clearly nothing much has changed since Adam and Eve, and women are always to blame.

Yes, yes I know that Catholic Church representatives have apologised for the offence caused by this priest – but please note – they apologised for the offence and not for the hateful misogynistic content of their message. They still do not get it.

They still do not get that Jill’s belief in God had nothing to do with the vicious crime that ended her life, but rather the evilness that rested within Adrian Bayley’s psyche. Supposedly, a man that God created in his own image.

They still do not get that because of misogynists like them, and this perception that women are somehow inferior– women have endured the worst abuse known to humankind. Women have been killed in their millions, raped, tortured and abused all because there is this flawed perception.

The fact that this message was delivered to primary school children is even more appalling. Brain washing children is the forte of most organised religions. My only hope is that these innocent children were able to instinctively call ‘bull-shit’ and treat this woman-hating homily as white noise.

Like I did. When I was a little girl.

The first time I called childish bull-shit was not at the story about how vanilla milk comes from white cows and chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

My first call of religious ‘bull-shit’ was when I was about five – I had just been told that being born a woman was a result of bad karma by my local Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka. I knew instinctively he was wrong. Without any shadow of a doubt in my mind.

That was my ground zero of feminist activism.

I naturally raised the fact that I didn’t agree with what the monk had said with my parents. My father said that it was the absolute truth though my mother couched it in terms of the fact that women bore children; and to bear so much pain – well – that was a result of your bad karma.

Still that did not compute. I loved babies and I thought it wonderful that one day, I could be like my mum and have babies. I saw it as a bonus rather than universal retribution.

I would quiz my mum and debate with Buddhist monks on this point over and over again until I was told to shut up and look pretty.

Eventually, I decided not to be a Buddhist – there seemed to be too many gaps in what I knew to be true and the dogma expounded by the Sinhala Buddhist monks. These monks seemed to only converse with men and the second class-citizenry of women really got to me.

My early twenties saw me research Wicca and finally find a base of feminine spirituality that I so lacked in the traditional Buddhist household I’d grown up in and in the Catholic education I had had. I finally understood that my femininity was in itself divinity. To treasure and value the live-giving capacity of my own body. That it was the balance between feminine and masculine that brought about harmony.

However I found that Wicca lacked depth when it came to explanations of the nature of life and a framework of ethics. This eventually led me back to Buddhism. Only this time, in my early thirties, I started reading the source material, the Tripitaka, instead of listening to monks.

I found that there was no theological basis for the concept that female life is inferior to male life. Not a single utterance. Not a single line in both Mahayana and Theravada scripts that said women are born because they have done bad karma in a previous life.

Indeed the Buddha advised his followers that the Buddha of the home is a mother. He prized women, ordained them and encouraged equal access to spiritual development. As many women became arahants (people who break the cycle of birth and death and attain peace of nirvana) during Buddha’s life as did men.

So really, the fact that women are discriminated against, murdered, raped, treated with contempt and denigrated across the globe has got nothing to do with their karma – but rather the work of man.

Which brings me back to what this Catholic priest said last week.

Jill’s relationship with God cannot be measured by whether she was home in bed. Her being out for a drink with her friends is no measure of the depth of her faith! Indeed a person of faith ought to be able to walk down Sydney Road at 3 am and be safe!

All it shows is that this misogynistic Catholic priest blames Jill more than Adrian Bayley – the vicious monster who murdered this beautiful woman.

 

So kids – do as I did; call this priest out on his lie. BULL. SHIT.

Nila wasn’t born beautiful and is destined to go through life unnoticed� until she becomes a saree maker.

As she works, Nila weaves into the silk a pattern of love, hope and devotion, which will prove to be invaluable to more lives than her own.

From the lush beauty of Sri Lanka, ravaged by bloody civil war, to India and its eventual resting place in Australia, this is the story of a precious saree and the lives it changes forever. Nila must find peace, Mahinda yearns for his true calling, Pilar is haunted by a terrible choice, Sarojini doubts her ability to love, Madhav is a holy fraud and Marion¹s understanding of the very meaning of love is challenged and transformed. Each teeters between joy and pain, and each is touched by the power and beauty of the saree.

A breathtaking story of beauty, oppression and freedom� and of an enduring love that can never be broken.

I know this sounds completely weird for a person who is now a writer, but I could not read. Unlike my brother who taught himself to read by the time he was three, I could not read. Sure I knew my alphabet but I could not put letters together to form words nor could I string words together to form a sentence. And in a family where reading and literacy has held in very high regard, there was no faster way to get dunce cap firmly placed on my head for it.

But in actual fact, I could memorise whole sentences my mum would read to me and recite it perfectly back to her to prove to her I could read. I would hold a book up and parrot out words with a great deal of flair and drama. But the shite hit the fan when  I got to grade school and could not fudge my way through life.

To add to my frustration, I loved stories. Always have and always will. I loved the textures and images that words could create. The feeling on being a part of a world that was safe and secure. The melody and rhyme of poetry. It frustrated me to no end that I could not read the words and make the pictures for myself. So, the year of my ninth birthday, I swore I would learn to read or else (can’t quite remember what the “or else”  involved, but it had all the elements of the melodrama heard in a Sri Lankan radio drama).

The key for me was phonics. My previous educators perspective that reading could be taught by memorising endless lists of word spellings had not worked for me. I could often remember the beginning and the ending of words but would completely botch up the middle. So when my English teacher linked letters to sounds to me, I caught onto the game and my whole world opened.

I went from reading nothing to reading chapter books within weeks. So I skipped many of the children’s classics like “Where the Wild Things Are” and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and went straight to “Anne of Green Gables”, “Pollyanna” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

And I can almost punctuate every major event in my life with the anthology of what I was reading at the time.

During the 1983 riots in Colombo, I was reading “The Far Away Tree” by Enid Blyton. When my father had his first heart attack in 1988 and when we rushed to his bedside in intensive care, I had five copies of contraband “Sweet Dreams” romance books stashed in my bag.  I read Georgette Heyer’s “Regency Buck” on my flight over from Singapore to Australia. When I was struggling with so many things in Year 12, I found so much comfort in Sally Morgan’s “My Place”. And when I was pregnant with my son, I devoured Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, though in hindsight I wonder whether the overwhelming feeling of nausea was entirely related to my pregnancy.

The Indigenous Literacy Foundation of Australia works to provide access to books and literacy resources to over 200 remote Indigenous communities in Northern Territory, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales. This is important work. Being able to read is not just a life skill. It is a life saving skill. And I don’t just mean being able to read danger signs.

See because it was through my reading that I have been able to make sense of so many things that happened in this world. By reading “The Art of Happiness” by the Da Lai Lama, I was able to make sense of the overwhelming feeling of anxiety that grips me sometimes. And the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey helped me teach myself the discipline required of a writer.

The fact that children in remote Indigenous communities may not access to all the tools and resources needed to help them read is simply not right. You can help these children by donating directing to The Indigenous Literacy Foundation of Australia or by simply following @indigenousX on twitter. For every person who follows @indigenousX from now until Thursday, Luke Pearson will donate 1cent. It is a great way to start 2013. And I personally pledge $50 by Thursday regardless of whether the 10,000 followers on twitter is reached or not.

Reading is not a privilege. It is a necessity of life.

 

 

 

What makes Dinky Di Dinky Di?

I have always found it easier to be Australian when I am not in Australia. When I am in the United States, Europe or in any part of Asia, my Melbournian accent is automatically recognized as one of the plethora of nasally sounding Aussie tones that make up the accents so unique to the great southern land.

Yet when I am in Australia, I struggle to be recognized as that. I could not count the number of times I have been asked; “So, where are you from?”

Me: “From Vermont.”

Q: “But where are you really from?”

Me: “I am really from Vermont. I have lived in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne for some twenty years.”

Q:  “So where were you from before that?”

Me: “Singapore.”

Q: “Really? You don’t look Singaporean.”

Me: “No, I was born in Singapore to parents of ethnic Sri Lankan descent. Actually my great-grand father was born in Japan in 1880 and would you like to know my bra size while you are at it? 10F thank you for asking. Small back big cups, genetically engineered to look hot in a saree! Jeeze!”

In pubs, clubs, work places and even once in a changing room at the swimming pool.

And in Australia it would seem that a neither naturisation certificate, parentage, heritage nor straightforward genetics is enough to define your Australian-ness. And now we have authenticity enter the debate as a yardstick for inclusion in a racial group.

Really? Is it possible not to be authentically something you should by have by self- identification anyway? And if someone is not authentic, then they might be then inauthentic? Confused? I was.

Since we’ve all been running to the Macquarie Dictionary lately just to be sure to be sure, I did too.

Authentic is defined as 1. Entitled to acceptance or belief; reliable; trustworthy: an authentic story. 2. Of the authorship or origin reputed; of genuine origin: authentic documents.

I struggle to understand how the word “authentic” could be used to define a race, a nationality or have anything to do with anything as complex as identity. More than genetics, looks or physical characteristics, self-identification has a greater significance on the question of racial inclusion rather than anything else. It does in my book anyway.

See I grew up with someone really special in my life, Aunty Seetha (not her real name).

Now Aunty Seetha was born in Singapore near the end of World War II. The story goes that she was born around the time Nagasaki was bombed and found abandoned in a ditch not long before Singapore was handed back to the British. Her father was a Japanese soldier and her mother..well her mother could have been anything; a Eurasian, perhaps even Russian. She does not know and looking at her, it is hard to tell. She is just a beautiful lady.

She was found by a Sri Lankan man and raised by his family. She speaks fluent Singhalese (English, Malay and Chinese as well might I add) and grew up for all intents and purposes a Sri Lankan-Singaporean. She is a devout Buddhist and is a stalwart of the Sri Lankan Aunty Brigade in Singapore.

So much so that she was asked to officiate at my menarche ceremony. As I reached womanhood, she was one of the four ladies asked to induct me through my rites of becoming a Singhalese woman. She brought water from the river to bathe me, tied gifts of gold around my neck and whispered a secret blessing in my ear as she handed me my first saree. The same necklace and saree I will give to my ½ Dutch, ¼ Aussie, ¼ American 100% Australian goddaughter one day.

Is Aunty Seetha Sri Lankan? Hell yes. Is she authentic? Of course she is. No one scares the bejesus out of you like a Sri Lankan Aunty and Aunty Seetha is very good at that. And she a valued and treasured member of the Sri Lankan community. In many ways, she is more Sri Lankan than I am and I doubt you’d ever find packet curry paste in her pantry!

So can we stop alright already with this question of what a person is or what a person is not? I know who I am. I am Australian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What makes Dinky Di Dinky Di?

I have always found it easier to be Australian when I am not in Australia. When I am in the United States, Europe or in any part of Asia, my Melbournian accent is automatically recognized as one of the plethora of nasally sounding Aussie tones that make up the accents so unique to the great southern land.

Yet when I am in Australia, I struggle to be recognized as that. I could not count the number of times I have been asked; “So, where are you from?”

Me: “From Vermont.”

Q: “But where are you really from?”

Me: “I am really from Vermont. I have lived in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne for some twenty years.”

Q: “So where were you from before that?”

Me: “Singapore.”

Q: “Really? You don’t look Singaporean.”

Me: “No, I was born in Singapore to parents of ethnic Sri Lankan descent. Actually my great-grand father was born in Japan in 1880 and would you like to know my bra size while you are at it? 10F thank you for asking. Small back big cups, genetically engineered to look hot in a saree! Jeeze!”

In pubs, clubs, work places and even once in a changing room at the swimming pool.

And in Australia it would seem that a neither naturisation certificate, parentage, heritage nor straightforward genetics is enough to define your Australian-ness. And now we have authenticity enter the debate as a yardstick for inclusion in a racial group. Thank you Mr. Abbott for tossing that tablet of chlorine into the already crystal clear waters of the Australia identity!

Really? Is it possible not to be authentically something you should by have by self- identification anyway? And if someone is not authentic, then they might be then inauthentic? Confused? I was.

Since we’ve all been running to the Macquarie Dictionary lately just to be sure to be sure, I did too.

Authentic is defined as 1. Entitled to acceptance or belief; reliable; trustworthy: an authentic story. 2. Of the authorship or origin reputed; of genuine origin: authentic documents.

I struggle to understand how the word “authentic” could be used to define a race, a nationality or have anything to do with anything as complex as identity. More than genetics, looks or physical characteristics, self-identification has a greater significance on the question of racial inclusion rather than anything else. It does in my book anyway.

See I grew up with someone really special in my life, Aunty Seetha (not her real name).

Now Aunty Seetha was born in Singapore near the end of World War II. The story goes that she was born around the time Nagasaki was bombed and found abandoned in a ditch not long before Singapore was handed back to the British. Her father was a Japanese soldier and her mother..well her mother could have been anything; a Eurasian, perhaps even Russian. She does not know and looking at her, it is hard to tell. She is just a beautiful lady.

She was found by a Sri Lankan man and raised by his family. She speaks fluent Singhalese (English, Malay and Chinese as well might I add) and grew up for all intents and purposes a Sri Lankan-Singaporean. She is a devout Buddhist and is a stalwart of the Sri Lankan Aunty Brigade in Singapore.

So much so that she was asked to officiate at my menarche ceremony. As I reached womanhood, she was one of the four ladies asked to induct me through my rites of becoming a Singhalese woman. She brought water from the river to bathe me, tied gifts of gold around my neck and whispered a secret blessing in my ear as she handed me my first saree. The same necklace and saree I will give to my ½ Dutch, ¼ Aussie, ¼ American 100% Australian goddaughter one day.

Is Aunty Seetha Sri Lankan? Hell yes. Is she authentic? Of course she is. No one scares the bejesus out of you like a Sri Lankan Aunty and Aunty Seetha is very good at that. She is accepted and a treasured part of the Sri Lankan community. Just because she may not be genetically ethnic Sri Lankan makes not one iota less Sri Lankan. In fact, if we look at genetics as a yardstick for anything, there is less than 2% genetic deviation between humans and chimps.

So can we stop alright already with this question of what a person is or what a person is not? I know who I am. I am Australian.

Meet Shani – she’s thirty-two, single and has a job to die for.  And she likes her life just the way it is, thankyou!

So why do her family and friends insist on trying to convince her that the only way to the perfect life is meeting the perfect man?

When Shani’s horoscope miraculously reveals that now is the best time of her life for marriage, Shani’s mother decides to take control. Turning a deaf ear to Shani’s protests, she arranges a parade of potential grooms, in the hope that her shamefully unmarried daughter will salvage the family honour by finding — finally! —Mr Right.

But true life, like true love, can get very complicated.  Amidst a riot of hilarious dates with would-be husbands, Shani has to cope with a minor Machiavelli at work, a house that is literally falling down around her ears, and a neurotic mother with serious cultural baggage.  Worst of all, her best friend, who seems to have it all, is sliding into depression, and Shani seems powerless to help.

Through a flurry of curry, cricket, sarees, and sumptuous ceremonies, Shani comes to learn that love comes in many disguises — and degrees of satisfaction — and that life is a one-shot game, even if you do believe in reincarnation.

 

 

 

Su Dharmapala is social media commentator, writer and blogger.

She was born in Singapore and grew up between Singapore and Sri Lanka before immigrating to Australia in 1989. She completed her Bachelor of Arts (majoring in French and German) and Bachelor of Science at Monash University in 1997.

After graduating from University, Su worked  in technology for some of Australia’s Fortune 500 companies.

Su took a two year break from her professional career after her son was born and it was during this time her love for writing was re-ignited. Su blogs on all things mothering  and her posts are often syndicated on kidspot.com.au.

When she is not writing or mothering, she is an avid watcher of that bad reality TV show that is Australian politics while cooking scrumptious feats for friends and family.

Currently under construction

Enough! I have truly had enough!

I am sick and tired. Sick and tired of being presented with soft porn or even main stream every time I turned a corner on the road, visit a shopping centre or even chose to rally for a cause I feel passionately about – animal rights.

Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) are about to launch a xxx website to draw attention to animal cruelty (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/8304...). As a long time proponent of animals rights and a vegetarian for much of it (until I became pregnant and craved KFC – but let’s not go there), I am at a loss as to how the debasement and exploitation of women can in any way improve the plight of animals. I hope you are having a ‘huh?’ moment as much as I am.
Peta have long been known to use shock tactics in the form of pornography to drive its message (http://www.rachelstavern.com/uncatego...). In doing so, has appealed to a demographic I would hardly consider at the tipping point of progressive activism – Neanderthal males without a clue.

Peta have not even generated positive controversy as it is the want of many sagacious advertising agencies (for example, the Pure Blonde ad). All sex sells is….sex. Research suggest that sex-based advertising get in the way of the consumer remembering the brand or the product ((http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/mark-...).

Really using sex to sell is the hallmark of sloppy, uncreative marketing wedded to the concept of shock tactics (though sex has now ceased to shock due to overexposure!).

And the mainstreaming of pornography has a host of other social ramifications – none of them associated with animal cruelty – including:
a)      Increase in child on child sexual abuse
b)      Pervasive increase in STDs
c)       Poor self image for young people (and now older!)
d)      Depression

And the list goes on – trust me.

And gone are the days parents could sit and watch TV with their child. Honestly, I hardly know how some of the music video clips shown on Rage of a Saturday morning get past to be shown in the morning time slot!

The debasement of human intimacy as a poorly scripted, exploitative performance art is in process of debasing ourselves. As a mother, this concerns me greatly as I do not want my child growing up thinking that what is shown in porn is intimacy. It is not. I do not want my son to think of women objects to be used for his gratification.

Please, please join me at Collective Shout – and organisation devoted to working against the objectification and sexualisation of women and children in popular culture (http://collectiveshout.org/).

Enough is truly enough.