Delma.

I have never been physically violent with a woman although I have been emotionally manipulative, psychologically abusive and unfaithful in a previous relationship.

It is frightfully easy to do.

I tried to make amends after it was all over, my behavior was morally reprehensible and inexcusable at the time.

I guess being in a foreign land at the time away from my mother and relatives to keep me in check I was left to my own devices, although thinking about it I was probably too pig headed to be kept in check.

I write this because a young mother and three children died here in Brisbane in what is suspected to be a murder suicide a couple of days ago.

My mother was a feminist in a pretty hostile male dominated society, she was my mother and father at the same time when I was younger.

She was a dominant presence in my life and even though I would try to ignore what she was trying to teach me at the time it all makes sense now.

She was a staunch feminist but what can you do in a society where wanton use of force against women was a daily occurrence,ignorance expressed by violence.

As she aged she slowly became frail and her voice became a little more than a whisper when I went back to the village to say my goodbyes for we knew she was going.

Even as frail as she was then there was still that spark in her that would argue with anyone or man.

She taught me to always be respectful to women.

I remember an incident as a young man, whilst at a relatives place in Rabaul town, East New Britain Province,Papua New Guinea, waiting for a meal of fish to be cooked for me by a female relative of the same age.

Feeling guilty that I wasn’t helping her cook i talked her into letting me scrape the coconut for her to use in the meal.

Coconut scrapers are like a small bench that you sit on with one end having a round serrated metal scraper affixed where you would scrape the split coconut halves flesh into a bowl beneath.

After much cajoling, she begrudgingly let me,so positioned on the veranda overlooking the street below I endeavored to scrape the coconut.

Halfway though the first nut half a group of four to five youths appeared outside the fence I was overlooking and started to laugh at me.

You see they were so used to women scraping coconuts that it was funny that a ‘man’ was doing it, I remember feeling embarrassed and a little bit silly, a bit like a fool but i finished scraping.

I did that because my mother taught me to but just by that simple act I was seen as weak, an object of derision, an outcast.

I say now,real strength is respect of others regardless if you can belt the living day lights out of them or not, respect doesn’t involve force, abuse,sarcasm, threats and coercion.

My mother was not cowed in the end, she was Iron Man on the inside.