The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 12

1 2 The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday, August 22, 1991 Agenda Suffering of the unwanted child POCKETS DEEP oh? QTOSisnmBB revere to) mm When the time" comes to give to charity, Australians are not quite as big-hearted as they think. Catherine armitage reports. 4 rff 2.o SSIjiOClE5G3lA3 1 I 1 1.5 "A -n-mr zr ja SH I CillliSGP'TGR 1 3 3 I. 1 'law 0 Jf mss- 1LXJH ATf.ni.irK: 5) in Australia governments contributed $3.4 billion or just $200 per capita. "The fact is we do very little," Dr Lyons says.

"We are down there with Japan and the US as among the very poorest and most highly discriminatory welfare states. The fact is the government is small, we have a comparatively big voluntary sector, but we don't give a great deal because the perception is the opposite." Of course it may be said that Australia's social problems are not as great and thus per capita needs are lower. Yet as governments move further towards minimalism in public sector management, welfare groups are concerned that the burden of charity will increasingly be shifted onto the private sector under the jargonised rationale of "efficiency in service At the recent conference of the NSW Council of Social Services, the Premier, Mr Greiner, warned that there was no alternative to further reductions in government spending on welfare, and flagged the move to a "brokerage model" for funding for community welfare groups whereby grants would be dependent on their complying with agreed targets. Also the Centre for Independent Studies, a right-wing think tank, argued in a 1990 paper for a reduced governmental role and greater private role in charities, partly on the premise that growing public welfare spending has "crowded out" private donations. Mr Lyons points to the US experience as evidence against this argument.

Between 1981 and 1984 in the US, government social spending fell by SUS42 billion, including cuts of SUS12 billion in direct support for non-profit agencies. Private donations increased in the same period, but only by enough to replace 25 per cent of the lost revenue. Charities made up the shortfall by increasing their fees and charges. "Decreased government expenditure forced the non-profit sector to reduce the level of services it provided to the poorest Americans and to increase services to those Americans who could afford to pay," writes Mr Lyons. He predicts a similar "disastrous" outcome if such a policy were adopted here: "Low-income Australians would be the big Whether or not governments rein in welfare spending, there is no doubt in the mind of Brian O'Keefe, principal of fund raising consultancy O'Keefe, Panas and Partners, that pressure on the charity dollar will truly test Australians' philanthropic tendencies.

"There is going to be much more pressure for that dollar throughout the '90s than there has been before," he said. many show resentment that may last for years. When women are denied an abortion in their first attempt to obtain one, they often seek an abortion elsewhere. Up to 40 per cent of women in some of the studies reviewed have the abortion completed elsewhere, depending upon the availability. Contrary to common belief, relatively few of the children born to women denied an abortion are put up for adoption.

The majority of children born of unwanted pregnancies are raised by their biological mother. Thirty percent of women examined in the few long-term studfes available continue to report negative feelings toward their child and experienced difficulty adjusting. Children born to women denied an abortion "have numerous, broadly based difficulties in social, interpersonal, and occupational functions that last at least into early Dr Dagg warns that "with increasing pressure on access to abortion services in North America, mental health professionals need to keep in mind the effects of both performing and denying Dr Kenneth Rosenberg, a psychiatrist at the New York Hospital and the Cornell University Medical College in New York, said the Toronto study was He said that "sadly, the children of mothers who do not want them are more likely to grow up always unwanted and unloved. The list of pathologies highlighted in this study is as tragic as it is Dr Rosenberg was surprised that the Toronto study did not find a definite link between abortion denial and child abuse. Unloved and rejected children were often more likely to become victims of child abuse and were themselves more likely to experience early pregnancies, often before they were prepared for them.

"Pregnancy is sometimes a means of escaping from a unloving home," he said. The findings of the Toronto study are generally consistent with what Australian research exists on the subject. For example, in a 1985 study published in Healthright, 32 women were interviewed in depth one year after having an abortion at the Fertility Control Clinic in Melbourne. The author of the study, Jo Wainer, writes that "most of the women felt stronger and more in charge of their lives after carrying out their -decision, and all but one of them would have made the same decision if replaying that part of their Dr Stephen Juan lectures at Sydney University. 1- vmm'wtrHrrt Source Impact: O'Keefe Panax Pannen success seems to be that it is "part of tht ethos in.

The Army has been operating in Australia for more than 100 years, and he says most families would know someone it has helped. Mr O'Keefe says many people give because they have a strong social conscience. Tax deductibility and guilt may be factors, he says, although "the guilty donation is not a large Major Pack of the Salvation Army reports that people are equally generous in proportion to their wealth and income across the spectrum of rich to poor suburbs. This year, though, many people were unable to give as much as previously because of their tough financial situation, while the better off gave more: "They felt that they ought to share the virtually" every aspect of economic activity, especially social welfare. But once again the figures belie the theory.

Dr Lyons points to studies of welfare states which have shown that "Australia is a miserly welfare In 1986-87 non-profit organisations in the US received $85 billion from governments, or $350 per head, while FILM1 'Arts By STEPHEN JUAN KI EW Canadian research strongly suggests that when a woman is denied an abortion, the child born is more likely to grow up to be a criminal and to suffer mental illnesses requiring psychiatric care. The new study is being hailed by North American mental health professionals as demonstrating beyond a reasonable doubt that, as a group, children born to women denied an abortion "suffer greater negative When compared with children from carefully matched control groups, the study found that children born to women denied an abortion suffer more criminality, more conduct disorder, more unstable homes, worse school performance, more neurosis, and a greater likelihood of needing psychiatric care later in life. The Canadian study appears in the latest issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Led by Dr Paul Dagg of the Department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, the study reviewed the world's research literature on the psychological impact of abortions when either performed or denied, analysing 225 studies. Among the study's findings are: When women have an abortion, adverse consequences occur in only a minority of women.

When such symptoms occur, they usually seem to be the continuation of symptoms that appeared before the abortion and are on the wane immediately after the abortion. In fact, the majority of women express positive reactions to the abortion, and only a small minority express any degree of regret. Moreover, negative feelings present before the abortion disappear. Nevertheless, "ambivalence" or "not freely making the decision" are the two chief factors leading to what the study calls "post-abortion Other reasons for this distress are when the abortion is undertaken "for medical or genetic when there is "a history of psychiatric contact before the or when the abortion occurs late in the pregnancy. When women are denied an abortion, their painfully awkward courtship is expertly handled.

But what sends the film into a nosedive is the overdose of heartstring pulling which occurs at around the half-way mark. At least Home Alone had the decency to save its greatest moment of sickliness until the end. felt, was that most cinemas were charging more than SI 1 for a 90-minute film which could have been part of a double bill (the Avalon Hayden charged six dollars). American box office figures show that Australian audiences were not alone in cold-shouldering the film. In the US it grossed less than SUS 1,500,000 in what Hoyts describe as a "pretty awful" run.

However according to one local cinema manager, Alex Meskovic, of the independent Mandolin in Sydney's CBD (which didn't screen the film), Johnson failed locally because it was not given the specialist promotion a film of its nature required. "Films like Terminator 2 and Kick-boxer promote themselves," he said. "Films appealing to intelligent audiences who are discriminating have to be promoted in an intelligent way. "Promoting Mister Johnson they used the wrong ad and the wrong look. They made it look like any other picture rather than being something special.

They didn't concentrate on the star performance and the strength of the film." A video release date is yet to be decided upon. USA Can. Bguns show deflations to dwMes txpmsed osa of Cms Owner PrxxbxX 300 in 1989 1990 200 100 Robert USTRALIANS' favourite way to gve is face to face, on their own doorstep. They are least likely to respond to a telephone request. The most generous are women aged over 55, and the least generous are males under 25.

And country people are more likely to give to charity than city dwellers. These are the findings of a 1990 national survey by the fund raising consultants O'Keefe, Panas and Partners. It found that four out of five Australians make a cash donation to charity each year, and the average donation is about $80 per head. Donations by Australians to charity in 1990 totalled $1.1 billion. Social welfare groups attract the highest number of donations, with $223 million in 1990 coming from about 62 cultures and histories.

An American academic, Mr Robert Carbone of the University of Maryland, has suggested that one constraint on the development of a strong philanthropic environment in Australia was the export of much of Australia's early wealth back to Britain. This precluded the development of huge individual fortunes such as were loose with the kind of masculine film conventions that have been long overdue for upsetting. With an appearance of effortlessness, it's both the kind of fast-moving film that David Lynch's Wild at Heart was so desperately (and unsuccessfully) trying to be, and a lot more besides. For the women's journey is a metaphorical one in which they discover a momentary feeling of freedom and empowerment as they rewrite the rules of their male-dominated lives. Sometimes they do this with a girlish delight in wickedness e.g., during a hilariously polite armed robbery of a store.

But measured against the conventions of the average male body-count movie, their actions display a marked degree of restraint and responsibility. Louise, for example, is so upset by the initial shooting that she soon afterwards throws up when did you last see a male action hero feeling this kind of remorse? Significantly, when they take revenge against a sexually harassing oil tanker driver, it's property, not the person, they hit. Far from reducing all men to rapists and stereotypes, though, the film places them on a kind of sliding scale, in hich some are pathetic, some charming-yet-untrustworthy, others, like Louise's boyfriend, generally well-meaning. Details like this that make the script by newcomer Callie Khouri, a rock-video producer and former actor herself hard to argue with. Ironically the hyped-up US debate about the film's ideology has distracted attention away from what are some genuine flaws.

At times the story is implausible, e.g., the police watch a video monitor of Davis's store hold-up within moments of it happening, and still find it hard to catch up with them (oh A phone relationship between Sarandon and Keitel is handled less than convincingly. And the visual gloss is laid on so heavily that the film often looks like an extended Marlboro Man advertisement. Yet these foibles are easily forgiven because of the way that the film manages to work at some deeper, mythical level. It's as fresh as today's tap water, yet, like a Beatles tune heard for the first time, you think you've lived with a memory of it for years. Thelma Louise is a film Hollywood should have made at least 20 years ago, and it's hard to believe that it didn't But don't see it out of a sense of duty, or because it's meant to be See it for Sarandon and Davis, who turn on the kind of exuberant, screen-hogging double act of which movie dreams are made.

Am. iU USTF Ms USTRALI ANS like to think themselves as a gener ous lot. In keeping with our ethos of egalitarian L.JT.. mateship, we support each other, especially in times of need. We can modestly congratulate ourselves that the Salvos made 101 per cent of their fund raising target even in this most recessionary of years.

And we can think of few greater insults than to call someone stingy. So it comes as quite a shock to learn that we are much less generous than those conspicuous consumers, the Americans, or even the (dare one say it) parsimonious Poms. According to research by Dr Mark Lyons, Associate Professor in the School of Management at the University of Technology, Sydney, Americans give about seven times as much per capita as Australians to charities, and the British give about three times as much. Total donations including business and foundation gifts as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product in the US is 1.9 per cent, Canada .72, UK .55 but Australia, .32. But, "within the picture of miserliness, Australian business shines like a writes Dr Lyons in the August edition of Impact, the bulletin of the Australian Council of Social Services.

Business in Australia, particularly small to middle-sized business, contributes 28 per cent of total donations, while in the US business chips in only 5 per cent. Individual donations constitute 83 per cent of the total in the US compared with 50 per cent in Australia. The tax deductibility of donations is roughly the same in both countries. Dr Lyons cautions that international comparisons of this nature are in their infancy, and "fraught with all the usual difficulties encountered by any attempt to measure and compare the characteristics of one country with Yet, he says, "the differences displayed by some of these figures are too striking to be a statistical He suggests that differences between the two nations' giving patterns are deeply embedded in their different FILM LYNDEN BARBER LOUISE Directed by Ridley Scott Written by Callie Khouri GU city and selected suburbs. Rated THE LATE 1970s the Swiss director Alain Tanner made a film called Messidor in which two young female hitchhikers turned outlaws after escaping from a would-be rapist.

I distinctly recall watching it with an elderly woman sitting behind me who tutted loudly at each moral indiscretion the pair committed. Stylistically, Thelma Louise is different it's fast and unashamedly American. But its plot outline is remarkably similar, and, in the US, at least, the tutters are at it again. While some women in American cinemas have reportedly burst into cheers at key moments, a few self-appointed moralists and conservative male commentators have also spluttered in outrage. Time magazine emblazoned the words, Why Thelma Louise Strikes a Nerve, across its front page beneath a photo of the two leads, Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis.

All this fuss and all for a zippy, unpretentious and stylishly directed little road movie. Davis (wonderful) is Thelma, a housewife chained to the microwave and attached to a routinely chauvinistic husband. Sarandon (equally wonderful) is the older, streetwise Louise, an overworked coffee-shop waitress with a musician boyfriend. When the women go away for a weekend together, they expect a good time, but they go armed in case of psychopaths and wild animals. What they get is a man who takes Davis's flirtatious bonhomie in a roadside cowboy bar as a cue to rape her across the hood of a truck.

Sarandon interrupts, and when the rapist retaliates with shockingly degrading language, she shoots him dead in a moment of rage. The worldly Louise reasons that their chance of getting a fair trial is negligible, so they spend the rest of the film racing towards Mexico in an open-topped convertible, while a police team led by a sympathetically portrayed detective (Harvey Keitel) tries to, hook onto their trail. Directed in a high-gloss style by Ridley Scott, Thelma Louise is a pop fantasy with a viewpoint rooted in the kind of everyday reality that Hollywood routinely denies, playing fast and Parkinson per cent of the population, but church organisations get the most dollars $278 million in 1990. The average annual donation to churches was $107, compared with $26 to social welfare. The biggest fund raiser in Australia is World Vision, which according to Mr Brian O'Keefe of O'Keefe, Panas and Partners raised about $63 million in 1990-91.

Runner-up is the Salvation Army, which raised just under $313 million in the latest financial year, followed by the Red Cross (about $10 million). Mr O'Keefe says a crucial factor in determining whether or not a charity is supported is its credibility. Major Chris Pack, Salvation Army appeal director, says one reasons for the Salvos' fund raising partly bequeathed to charitable causes by the great US industrialists of last century. In Australia, too, the social safety net has long been provided primarily by government through a comprehensive social security system. Carbone suggests Australians have learned to depend on governmental initiatives in Keturn of Big Oh No ONLY THE LONELY Written and directed by Chris Columbus Hoyts and suburbs.

Rated NLY THE LONELY starts out strongly before turning into Only The Baloney. Written and directed by Chris Columbus, who last directed the cartoon-like hit Home Alone, this lowbrow romantic comedy finds the rotundish John Candy doing his by now familiar and not unlikable routine as a jolly bachelor who's really a lonely and sensitive guy underneath. This time out he's a mother-dependent Irish-American cop Officer Danny Muldoon of the Chicago police who has never found the wherewithal to leave home. Life looks brighter when he starts dating a pretty but bitterly shy mortician of Sicilian-Polish extraction (Ally Sheedy), only to find his bond to his FILMS IN BRIEF THE LAST WOMAN Revival of Marco Ferreri's mid-'70s film that ends with Gerard Depardieu dismembering himself. One week-only (Walker).

2001, A SPACE ODYSSEY Second of a three-week season for Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's mind-blowing space masterpiece in a new, 70mm print. (Cremorne Orpheum) IF LOOKS COULD KILL James Bond-inspired action romance in which Richard Grieco plays a man mistaken for a spy. Unpreviewed (Village City and Parramatta). Top 10 films at the box office, August 15-18 1) Backdraft Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves Dying Young Not Without My Daughter The Silence of the Lambs Dances With Wolves 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) Too Hot to Handle 8) Proof 9) Out For Justice 10) Death In Brunswick (Figures supplied by Motion Picture Distributors Assn of Australia) i Susan Sarandon, left, and Geena Davis turn conventions on their heads in Thelma Louise.

Wind does not mean hot air CLASSICAL MUSIC PETER McCAlLUM THE ELMS COLLECTION: Baroque and Beyond Lauris Elms; Amadeus Wind Players, director: Robert Johnson Music: Handel, Bowen, Beethoven, Schubert. Lachner Conservatorium. August 18 Ol ODERN wind-players are used ij to playing arrangements of music not originally written for their instruments. How else could they gain access to all those wonderful pieces written before the modern flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon or horn evolved? And to purists who scoff, they could well point, for example, to Mozart's arrangements of his own music in Don Giovanni and to his tampering with Handel's. This Elms Collection concert contained one arrangement, Handel's Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, and one arrangement of an arrangement, Christopher Bowen's arrangement of some songs from the 6 An insubstantial vehicle for a formidable artist like Elms.

singing teacher's bible. Arte Antiche (itself a collection of baroque arrangements for voice and piano). Bowen's arrangements seemed a little dark and bound to the middle register at times. I'm not sure whether a better way of presenting these pedagogic pieces might not be to restore the original composer's instrumentation, obscured in the teaching book by unstylistic editing. It was a rather insubstantial vehicle for a formidable artist like Elms, particularly since her second bracket, a song cycle by Michael Easton, was cancelled due to copyright problems with the text.

From the Amadeus Wind Players, directed by Robert Johnson, we heard the Beethoven Sextet in flat. Opus 71, a Schubert Minuet and Finale in D.72 and the Octet Opus 156 by the amiable, but best forgotten, early 19th-century German composer, Franz Lachner. The Beethoven had moments of vitality but was undermined slightly by intonation problems in the bassoons. In the Schubert and Lachner, the intonation was a more general concern, although in passages where they were both warmed up and confident, the playing was incisive. Despite the problemfj.it is clear that Robert Johnson is a conductor of some talent, who deserves encouragement.

Milo O'Shea's presence as a cliched bar-room Oirishman adds further droplets of hokum, ditto Anthony Quinn, as an amorous neighbour. Despite this, much of the first half is entertaining, with Columbus showing again that he knows how to pace a gag. Candy and Sheedy are in form, and office performance, although had been "well below our At the Academy Twin in Paddington, one of five Sydney cinemas where it was screening, the film was given two showings a day in its opening week, but attracted only 406 people. As a consequence, in its second week it was moved into the 4.55pm slot, with no evening screenings at all. Why do films which would on the surface appear to have everything going for them sometimes fail spectacularly at the box office? Talking to exhibitors, no great theories emerge concerning Mister Johnson, The odd thing is that nobody seems to have anything bad to say about it.

In this instance, says the Academy Twin publicist Angus Clunies-Ross, the film failed "basically because there's too many other films around at the moment From what I've heard Mister Johnson has had good feedback, but it's one of those films which have been lost among other films." Paul Brennan, manager of the Avalon Hayden, thought it was "a likable little movie, but that's as far as it One reason for its short run, he domineering, xenophobic and intensely jealous mother (Maureen O'Hara) continually upsetting the relationship. In her first screen appearance in many years, O'Hara draws on her fiery role opposite John Wayne in the very Irish The Quiet Man for inspiration. By LYNDEN BARBER Pi LANNING to see Mister John son, the new film from the Aus tralian director Bruce Beresford set in the colonial West Africa of the 1920s? Forget it. Only three weeks after opening in Sydney, the film virtually disappeared from Sydney screens, with only one suburban cinema, the Avalon Hayden, holding out for a further five days before terminating its run on Tuesday. Keeping up with the latest films can at the best of times be difficult When quality movies disappear after only three weeks, the task can be next to impossible.

Beresford's film, based on Joyce Cary's book of the same name, is a humorous and poignant story about a Nigerian clerk who believes he is more British than the British. A new discovery, Maynard Eziashi won the best actor award at the Berlin Film Festival for his performance in the leading role. The film has attracted some good reviews both overseas and locally, and according to Scott Neeson, general manager of the film's distributor, Hoyts, has received "good word of mouth" from those members of the public who have seen it. But its box.