A FATHER’S DAUGHTER

There was something obscene on television last night. Not an X-rated movie. Sixty Minutes. A happy couple went on TV to show off their nine months old baby. Nothing unusual about that except the baby’s father was also her grandfather. He had impregnated his own daughter.  In this country that’s called incest.

The father-daughter team, now living in connubial, if illegal, bliss are  61-year-old John Deaves and his 31-year-old daughter Jenny from Mt. Gambier in South Australia.

Jenny’s parents separated when she was about one year old. And the TV story stressed that she had only seen him a couple of times in the intervening three decades.

How did they meet up again? Because Jenny got married, had two children and thought they needed to get to know their grandfather. Not as well as she got to know him.

Posing for happy snaps they tried to justify it. It was grotesque. Jenny said ‘It’s just a normal couple relationship’. No it’s not. She said all they want is ‘a little bit of respect and understanding’. For what? Having sex with your father? Bringing a child into the world whose father is also her grandfather?

John Deaves comments were interesting. He said ‘I knew it was illegal, of course I knew it was illegal, but you know, so what?’

Well, I’ll tell him ‘so what’. It’s illegal for good reasons and not just for moral or ethical ones. In-breeding can cause ghastly deformities in a child. Deformities and health risks that can be passed from generation to generation.

His child was six times more likely to die at birth.

There’s an incestuous tribe in Africa called the Ostrich People because they pass on foot deformities that make all babies have only one giant toe that looks ostrich-like.

John Deaves’ rationalisation of what he has done reminds me of what I call the Woody Allen Syndrome.  He was the father figure when he ran off with Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon Yi. A little girl he had seen naked running around the house and probably bathed her. Mia Farrow lost a child and a partner at the same time. It would be enough to send any woman mad and that’s why I have never seen a Woody Allen movie since.

On Sixty Minutes there was footage of John and Jenny Deaves cooing as they splashed little Celeste in the bath tub. I wonder if her grandfather looked at her and thought: Ohmygod. I used to do that to her mother when she was a baby.

The couple was charged with incest and put on a three-year good behaviour bond. One condition was that they did not have sex.

Why would you believe they’ll honour that –unless they have a sheriff in the bedroom? After all, as Deaves said, ‘ Emotions take over. There are times where emotions rule the heart and the head’.

Forget about such old-fashioned things  like decency, and parental responsibility. As I said, this is truly obscene.

Monday, April 7, 2008

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2008