some brock questions

A couple of questions at the risk of igniting your ire again today. They concern the aftermath following the tragic death of car racing King Peter Brock a week ago.

I wonder if some other people are going to cop any of the bile and insults and curses that I had fired at me after I went on 3AW and pointed out that Peter Perfect was less than perfect.

It was ‘disgusting’. It was ‘obscene’. I was a sewer rat, I was lower than a snake’s belly and even my parentage was questioned. Especially because Brock’s state funeral had not even been held when I said it.

Will the same verbal attacks be made against family and friends who, over weekend, were publicly discussing who would get what and when in Brocks’ will? It was on the TV news and in the Sunday newspapers in Melbourne and in Sydney.

At the same time we could see more attempts to sanitise history as in the David Hookes case.

Over two full pages in the Sunday Herald Sun Brock’s partner and namesake for nearly thirty years, Bev Brock  -- the woman he walked out on to start a new life with her friend, and his best mate’s wife, Julie Bamford.

The Page One pointer said ‘Bev reveals joy, pain and other women’ in a story I presume she was paid for. And that was run, in all its personal detail, before his funeral.

She touches on rumours that Brock was a wife-beater. And the story says  that during his short-lived marriage to Michelle Downes the former Miss Australia took a drug overdose, and was admitted to hospital with injuries to her body and head.

Bev Brock, preserving the Brock image said ‘no,no,no. He never raised his hand to her’. She obviously hasn’t talked to doctors or emergency staff. And to paint the saintly picture even more strongly she said ‘not once in the 30 years I have known him have I seen him lift a finger to anyone or anything.’

She claimed in the article that ‘half of the wives in Australia’ would have left their husbands for Brock. ‘And the women kept telling me that. But he never left’.

Not until last year. And now he has left this world while a former partner and his friends and racing mates try to paint a man as perfect off the track as he was on it.

And to paint women who know otherwise as being unbalanced, malicious, even liars. They all know though where the truth lies.

Monday, September 18, 2006

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2006