Helen Martineau's Blog

I had a startling experience on November 24. It was a Friday. I opened my email inbox to find loads of messages encouraging me to enjoy the 20%, 40% etc discounts on all products 'Today Black Friday only!'  On Black Friday?! In Victoria, Australia, my home, there are certain days, black days that mark the most horrific bushfires, the unbelievable devastation and death, and the blackened land left in their wake. For example, there was Black Saturday of 2009 and one of the earliest devastations recorded (by European Aussies) on Black Friday, 1939. I wasn't alive for that one but it's  our history, the history of people pushing too carelessly, without understanding, into a dry, heat prone, vulnerable and threatened land. Bushfires were my nightmare w hen I lived in the country . I still dread hot north wind summer days in case, in case ... I have walked through the aftermath, lost a friend in a bushfire and can barely imagine the horror of being in one.  Oh,

                                                   The battle for and against assisted suicide, what used to be called mercy killing, is always fierce and heartfelt. But in the State of Victoria in democratic Australia an act to make it legal for the terminally ill is close to being passed in parliament’s Upper House. And then it will become legal. In some countries it is legal already. To take the responsibility for ending a life, even your own, is momentous. And there has been plenty of passion around the euthanasia debate, with valuable and compassionate considerations on both sides. These are widely accessible and most likely you will know them. I want to look from a different direction. Humans have a complicated, conflicted and often irrational attitude towards taking the life of another human being. There’s a universal injunction against it that lies at the heart of who we are, and we believe we have evolved beyond the days of human sacrifice. Yet we are still killing people, an