About 10 years ago I upset alot of people. Before I get into that, I'd like you to take a moment and consider the make-up of a family, the reason will become apparent. You have a man and his wife and their three or four children. You have the children's partners and their children. You havethe man's siblings and their partners and children. You get the idea, and that's just the man's side of the family, that's not counting friends and their partners etc.
I upset a man with this type of family and friends and I also upset a councillor, a local newspaper and some people in the media, specifically channel 9 and 7. I made them look like idiots, and I dared snub the councillor, I didn't trust myself to speak to him without losing my temper or crying so I just glared at him, and this was in front of other people, he was livid.
So how did I manage to alienate half of Australia (that's what it felt like at the time)?
We bought an extremely run down house in a regional town. We were aware that our neighbour was keeping chickens, you couldn't miss them, the enclosure encompassed part of our shared wooden slat fence, which we didn't mind. Once we moved in we became aware that he also had roosters, lots of them. We discovered to our dismay that roosters do not only crow at dusk and dawn as we had naeively assumed, they crow any damn time they want, and if there is more than one of them, they get into competitive crowing. I know this sounds amusing, but up to a dozen roosters crowing at 2am and 3am is not. For those of you who have no idea of how loud a rooster can be (as we had no idea till then), think barking dog, it's the same only higher pitched. Now think 12 barking dogs, you then have some inclination of what we were putting up with.
When we mentioned the noise of the roosters (which had mysteriously only appeared after we moved in), the neighbour told us that he had a special permit from the council to keep them. We tried to live with it for a few weeks, hoping we'd get used to it, but the lack of sleep was taking it's toll. My husband had to get up at 4.30am to get to work and I had to get the kids up at 6am so I could drive them into Runcorn, to their schools, we had promised them they could stay at their schools when we moved. It was a 45 minute drive each way.
We tried the friendly approach, I asked him if he could just keep the roosters quiet at night, he said no. My husband tried to talk to him, as he was an older man and might react more positively to being approached by another man, but he got the same answer.
Eventually we decided we had to do something, there had to be something that could be done about the noise. We rang the council and were told that in order to put in a noise complaint we had to pick up a form and keep a record of the crowing times and duration for a week, then drop the form back. We did this and waited two weeks, when we heard nothing I rang the council and they said they had no record of our complaint, so we had to go through the same process again. We did, and the same thing happened. Eventually I wised up and got the person I gave the form to, to sign a copy, that I kept, stating they'd received it. When I rang again I was told an inspector would come out to assess the situation.
The inspector said that he could hear the noise as he came up our driveway. He said the enclosure was illegal because it should have been built at least a metre from the fenceline. He said you could only keep 12 poultry in a suburban area. We told him the neighbour told us he had a special permit - so he went next door to check. When he came back he said the neighbour did not have a permit. He was told to reduce the number of poultry down to 12, from approximately 100, to apply for a permit and to move the enclosure. The inspector said that once he had complied with those by-laws he would come back and assess the noise again.
Nothing happened. We were all severely sleep deprived, the kids schoolwork suffered, I got ill and our marriage suffered because I wanted to move but my husband said no-one would buy our property when they heard the noise and we couldn't afford to just walk away. He said we were right and would win in the end. I argued that I didn't think it would be worth the toll it was taking on us all. When I rang the council and asked how everything was going, they didn't know what I was talking about. When I asked to speak to the inspector, I was told he had been promoted and no-one had yet taken his place. So we did the only thing we could, we kept filling out noise complaint forms and dropping them off.
Then things got nasty. We started getting rubbish thrown onto our property, including but not limited to , soiled nappies, beer bottles and chicken bones. I had to start leaving our dog indoors when I took the kids to school because when I got home he would be cowering under the house and our yard would be full of golf balls. The neighbour's son said he would break my neck. Sometimes I would be followed in my car. Then one day I came home from dropping the kids at school and there were cars and people everywhere. There were people on our veranda looking in our windows, up the driveway, in the backyard, everywhere. I was accosted as I opened our gate by someone from Today Tonight. He told me that our neighbour had called them and A Current Affair, who were currently at his place, and told them I was persecuting him and trying to get the council to take away his prized poultry. A neighbour from across the road told me later that the Today Tonight guy told him "They're going to crucify her."
I told both TV channels that we didn't care how many birds he had, all we were asking for was that he keep his roosters quiet at night, so we could sleep. One female reporter even noted that there was a crowing every couple of seconds. I mentioned how it had gotten progressively worse and I suspected he had a tape on some sort of loop, because after a while I noticed a pattern. i told them how he didn't even sleep at his own place but walked a few blocks away to another property at night and returned early in the morning. I told them that the neighbours on the other side of us told us they had spent $10,000 sound proofing their bedroom. They confirmed this but did not want to appear on camera. I told them how on two occasions that I knew of people with one rooster had been taken to court and fined $1,000. for excessive noise.
The local councillor and another councillor also turned up, and, seeing it was a crowd of people against one person, me,they naturally sided with the voting mob. The councillor granted the neighbour a special permit, and said he would sort the matter out. I got into to my car, drove to Karawatha Reserve, where a red car that had followed me all the way pulled in beside me, our windows were down, I was sobbing and he said into a mobile phone, "She's crying".
So I started driving to Karawatha after dropping the kids off at school and trying to sleep in my car during the day. God knows how the kids and my husband coped, I think they just flaked out. People thought it was funny that we were battling rooster noise, some people thought I was the nasty portrayed in the media and were rude. I had to endure comments by strangers when I went to the supermarket or up town. A few people sympathised but due to continuous articles in the local paper - showing our neighbour and his prize winning poultry and naming me as his tormentor, most people either avoided me or were outright rude. His family and friends conducted a successful 'letter to the editor' campaign ensuring I was hardly out of people's thoughts, at least locally. I approached the paper twice trying to see the editor, or even a reporter, to get them to print our side of the story, telling them it wasn't only me involved, which their articles implied, but three children and my husband as well.
Once when my husband was on a job site in Brisbane someone in the smoko room said "Have you heard about that bitch in xxxxx(name of town), she's causing so much trouble..."My husband interjected and said "Hey, that's my wife and you don't know half the story". Obviously character assassination worked quite well. My husband tried to get something done when he had a meeting with the council's CEO. He was told to record the noise on video and drop it in. We recorded a night in our bedroom, during which they crowed several times. He dropped it off, nothing happened. In desperation I rang the ombudsman and he couldn't believe what we'd been putting up with. After contacting him the council offered our neighbour a sound engineer free of charge who could suggest how he could alter his enclosure to reduce noise, he refused the offer. A private boy's school a 10 minute drive away offered to build him a state of the art enclosure on their grounds, they would pay for food and upkeep. He would still own them and could see them whenever he wanted, all they asked in return was that he share his knowledge of poultry keeping with boys who were interested. He declined. A woman wrote to the local newspaper suggesting that friends and relatives of the neighbour each take one rooster home and keep them in their backyards to reduce the number he was keeping. No one took up this suggestion, possibly because their neighbours might object to the noise.
I wrote to the authority that oversaw print media and told them about the continuous negative coverage I was receiving from the local paper. I mentioned trying to get my side of the story told and how it came across as just one nasty woman, myself, but children were also involved. Soon after the paper rang us and said they were sending someone to get our side of the story. Our two youngest children had drawn pictures of how the roosters were affecting their sleep. We had sent these to the council. The paper printed one that showed our daughter sitting up in bed crying and roosters crowing outside. They also took a family photo in front of the enclosure. It was about this time that the council finally realised two things, one - that for our neighbour it wasn't about his poultry, it was about annoying us, and two - if they didn't do something after what had been nearly a year of this debacle, we could move to any part of (the town) , get ourselves a couple of roosters and watch them try to take us to court when the neighbours complained about the noise.
We received a phone call one night about 7pm from someone claiming to be from the council telling us that a sound engineer would be coming round the next morning at 5am to record the noise. When I asked for this in writing, he said that it was just a courtesy call and he called outside of office hours so that our neighbour wouldn't get wind of it and keep the birds quiet. WTF?
The sound engineer agreed it was an unreasonable level, equivalent, he said to someone using a weed trimmer, a noisy one outside your bedroom window, ironically it was one of the quieter mornings.
A couple of weeks later my husband got a call from the council saying that the poultry would be removed the next day by the RSPCA. Our neighbours (sound proofed ones) sold their house and moved so fast you couldn't see them for dust, they took the first offer on their home, I think they were afraid the roosters might come back. We stayed on for another four years, doing the place up, we liked the house and yard but the neighbour and his family and friends never forgave us. Even though it was ultimately the council that took them away. They particularly focused on me as I was the one that had most of the dealings with the council because my husband had to work. The insults and rubbish throwing continued. I just put on rubber gloves and picked it up. I suspected situations were being 'set up' to try and catch me throwing rubbish back (thus making it look like I was throwing the trash). We sold up and moved to (name of new city) hoping to start anew and put it all behind us.
I got a job at Australia Post as a casual mail sorter. I was employed through an outsource company. At first everything was fine, then the men started looking at me like I was undressed and the women avoided me. People stopped talking to me. I noticed the red car from (name of previous town) in the carpark and guessed what had happened. I tried to ignore it even though the harrassment was intolerable on some days - the money was very good and I had two girls formals coming up. An example of the abuse I put up with: one time I was about a minute late walking back to the machines and I had to walk through a group of six male permanent employees, they all put their heads back and started howling like wolves or dogs. I asked if the security cameras had picked this up but was told they didn't always have all of them on. Ladies who had been quite friendly to start with would avoid me and one of them muttered 'I should be ashamed', the thing is I didn't know what I was meant to be ashamed of. Another time I was walking past a large metal cage and I got caught on it. I went to the toilet but I couldn't see any rips so I went back to work. People started laughing and one guy took a photo on his phone as I bent to pick up a box of letters. I went home at lunchtime and found a tear in the lower butt area of my cargoes, when I had looked earlier the rip was in a fold of fabric, it was the way I was standing, not one person said a thing, they all let me walk around like that. I had a bloke bend down behind me when i was working on the parcel machine, and when someone asked him what he was doing he said "looking for her balls". Another time I turned up at work to discover I was the only casual worker on. Totally alone, when I asked where everyone else was I was told "You're the only one that turned up, the others have gone into town, to find out about some sort of training or something'. I tripped and fell up (luckily not down) some concrete stairs, no one asked me if I was alright. Perhaps the most disturbing thing that happened whilst I was there was when one of the permanent workers walked past me and slapped me on the back, ostensibly to say 'good work', but when he slapped my back I felt a sharp jab, like a pin prick. That night I asked my husband to look at my back to see if he could see anything , he said he saw a small red spot, he dismissed it as nothing. That night in bed I got terrible pain in my heart region, it was so bad I couln't breathe without it causing pain, I lay there for ages, breathing as shallowly as I could to avoid pain, but it was continuous, my husband asked if I needed an ambulance, but I said 'no' I should have though. When the pain finally abated, I started shaking uncontrollably, this went on for some minutes, then that too finally stopped. Afterwards I felt totally drained, like I had been hit by a mack truck, so tired I could hardly move and there was some residue pain. I took it easy for a few days afterwards, resting and doing only what really needed to be done. I believe the jab was something to induce a heart attack. The list goes on and on, it was hell. If I had any doubts about who was behind the harrassment, it went when in the smoko room one day one of the men started talking in a loud voice about "a bloody big rooster on the hill, must be a leghorn or something".
I spent the following year a virtual recluse, studying at home doing a tertiary prep course through the University of Southern Queensland by correspondence. I passed the exams and was considering entering university when my husband dissuaded me saying I was getting older and didn't want a HEC'S debt at my age. So I applied for and got a traineeship as a bus driver for (name of large metropolitan city) Transport. This involved needing police clearances from both Australia and New Zealand. One of the ladies training with me was a journalist, she failed the final driving test and I saw her on TV a couple of years later, she is related to the neighbour in (previous regional town of rooster infamy). It was the same old story, most people were nice to start with but then the comments and attitudes changed. I liked driving buses, I was good at it and I liked the contact with the public, in my experience it was mostly positive. But back at the depot I would hear comments about my weight, my age, speculation about my sex life and even speculation that I had had a sex change. The men were either hostile or too friendly and the women avoided me. I could handle this as it wasn't anything new to me and I loved the driving part of my job. Sometimes I'd give out lollipops to my passengers and at Christmas I gave out candy canes, I enjoyed getting a smile.
But then the neighbours in (new regional city) got involved. They have always been very clever about it, only saying things - like accusing me of being a slut - when I am home alone. It would happen whenever I went to hang out my washing or watering plants or going to the letterbox.
My husband works all day and the one daughter we still have living at home goes to uni and spends the rest of her time on the computer with headphones on. Sometimes there would be two or three of them in the neighbour's carport and they would mention things that happened at work. I took note of the car rego of the person that would be there when the harrassment was at it's worst. At work my rosters would be changed without notifying me so that I would turn up for some shifts to be told I wasn't rostered on, and couple of times I would be rung up asking where I was because I hadn't turned up for work. I started photographing the roster sheets and that stopped. I went to the union rep and said I was thinking of putting in a complaint of harrassment (he said not another one, meaning I wasn't the only one) I told him that I could handle it at work but it had started at home via the neighbours. I would like to point out at this point that I have seen our old (previous regional city) neighbour driving past our house in his 4WD and also the councillor.
I had a meeting with the depot manager and the union rep, and I told him about the harrassment and he asked me if I knew who was behind it. I told him I had the car rego, and I also told him that the only people I could think of who would hate me that much were the people from (previous regional city). I proceeded to tell him about 'roostergate' as I'd taken to calling it and during the telling of it I started to cry, it brought back lots of very bad memories. I also mentioned how rumours had been spread that I used to be a prostitute. He said "I assure you that I wouldn't hold it against you." I said excuse me? The union rep groaned and got a red face but didn't say anything, the manager repeated what he'd said. I was furious, I came to him about harrassment and he dished some out with a cherry on top. I thought I would rather just deal with the harrassment at home and from colleagues. He was sympathetic until I mentioned the councillor's name, then his whole demeanor changed and I was told he'd look into it. I took the next day off work, but worked the following two days then had the weekend rostered off. When I returned to work I was told to go to a meeting with the manager, that my work was covered. The manager had a nasty cut on his upper cheek. The manager proceeded to tell me that he was worried about my state of mind and was standing me down without pay until I had been medically assessed by a council medical officer. I asked if everybody that cried in his office had to be medically assessed and he said no. I told him I felt that I was being punished for putting in a harrassment complaint - he said nothing. So now instead of there being an investigation into my complaint, I had to prove my sanity.
I saw the council's medical officer, she kept referring to a letter she had from my manager, she asked me if I thought everyone was out to get me. I told her that I didn't think everyone was out to get me but that I had been harrassed at work and at home by the same people. I pointed out that a lot of the drivers lived in the same area as me and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that they could know or have gotten to know my neighbours. I also pointed out that if the manager had been that worried about my state of mind why did he let me work for two days before standing me down. I told her that I cried in his office, I didn't scream or shout, I wasn't hysterical, I just cried. She asked me if I enjoyed driving and I said that I did. I had to chase up work to see what was happening. The manager told me I needed a clearance from a psychiatrist, I could wait - possibly months - for them to arrange a meeting or I could do it myself. I chose to do it myself. My GP wrote me a referral to a psychiatrist she had used in the past, when I rang to make an appointment I was told that the psychiatrist no longer worked there but that I could use the referral to see someone else there, so I made an appointment.
The woman I saw was very nice but when I told her how I came to be there and that I needed a clearance to be able to go back to work, she said she didn't want to get involved with the council, it could take months, get messy, she told me I needed to see a forensic psychiatrist and practically pushed me out the door. She told me that she wouldn't accept the referral letter and consequently I had to pay her $300.00 as a private patient for a farcical session. I told my GP about this and mentioned that before the psychiatrist knew the council was involved she commented that I seemed ok. My GP said that the least I should get for my $300.00 was a letter stating her impression that I seemed ok. She rang her and asked for such a letter and was refused.
My GP kept urging me to quit, she said I couldn't win against them. But I got a referral to another psychiatrist, who at the first meeting said I seemed fine but wanted to check some things with my GP and would need to see me a second time. At the second meeting he said he didn't know what went on in the manager's office, no one but me and him, and the union rep did, but he said if he had to guess I may have had a psychotic episode brought on by stress . He stressed that this was most likely a singular occurrence and he said he would write me a letter saying he could see no reason why I could not go back to work, he also said he would recommend I get a transfer to avoid any further harassment. I didn't think I'd had a psychotic episode, but agreed anyway, I wanted to get back to work.
This letter did not satisfy my manager and he arranged for me to have drug and alcohol testing and to see a psychiatrist in the council's employ. I was accused of psychiatrist 'shopping' supposedly to get one that would say what I wanted. This was not true, the first one didn't want to get involved. I was happy to comply and I also applied for worker's compensation due to stress and financial loss I'd suffered.
The council's psychiatrist is a forensic psychiatrist. He concluded that I had most likely "not had a psychotic episode" brought on by stress and therefore was not entitled to workers compensation. He stated that I was fit to drive a commercial vehicle. Two psychiatrists and my GP had stated that I was competent to drive yet that was still not enough for my manager. He wanted me to notify the Driver's Authority and see a doctor they wanted me to see. I refused. Finally I was sacked.
I retreated into myself again and got so depressed i considered suicide. I saw another psychiatrist, this time on my husband's insistence as he was so worried about me. Ironically this psychiatrist also said he would write me a letter stating that I was fit to drive a bus, but by then it was too late.
When 'roostergate' fiasco was happening we had just moved over here from New Zealand, we had no family or friends over here for support and no-one wanted to befriend us openly for fear of our neighbour or because they believed the vitriol. At the time this was all happening we wondered why
we were being 'stonewalled' by the council and villified by the local press. We couldn't understand how the TV could twist things so that we looked like the persecuters when we were being persecuted, we did not retaliate at the time because we felt sure that anything we did apart from we legally could, which was doggedly keep putting in noise complaints, would be used against us to 'prove how terrible we were'. It was obvious why the councillor took the neighnour's side, we were 'blow ins' and he and his family and friends comprised a large part of his voting public, we couldn't even vote back then, we can now.
Why would so many people hold a grudge for so long? I think it was because our neighbour's activities didn't just involve breeding poultry, and even though we never asked for it, his birds were taken away due to his stubborness and refusal to accept the help the council and other people offered him. Things only started to go our way when we succumbed and let our children get involved, we had tried to keep them out of the public eye.
I think we broke up a cock fighting enterprise and having the spotlight on him curtailed other activities he had been involved in. Namely the moving of livestock (stolen?). At times he would have a horse or a cow in his backyard for a day or two and then he would move them in a covered trailer. It was a suburban backyard! The neighbours (sound proofed) had told us that he had two sons who were 'very intimidating'. Other strange things went on next door and he knew that I knew and he didn't like it. One night we arrived home to two police cars outside our neighbour's place with lights flashing and several police on the scene. It turned out that the neighbour had refused to give his grand daughter, who was about two or three at the time, back to her mother. He said that the child had told him she didn't want to go,but (I didn't tell the police this, he hated us enough), I had heard her crying for her mother and being told to shut up. There were other incidents as well, but knowing something and proving it are two different things.
As recently as a couple of months ago a man shouted from next door (new neighbours) that he 'wants to cut my head off'. I texted my husband and said I wanted to call the police, but he said it would just be my word against theirs.
I have made a crucial mistake, I am after all human. When I was walking my dog last night a man came up to me and told me that the neighbours were pointing some sort of laser at me. He didn't say who he was or how he knew. I had heard comments like, "I want to watch her burn" and "she's getting some rays" from over there but thought they were just the usual, a change from calling me 'old cow' or 'slut'. But then I got worried, I have been feeling really hot, in fact sweating just sitting here, and had headaches and redness around my throat and a hot spot on my head, so hot that I had to put an ice pack on it to cool down. I started to worry that 'they' had decided to try and cause me to get cancer, they couldn't just outright attack me, because I have written everything down. My journal entries will follow. Some of them. Anyway, I went out to get some pamphlets from the letter box this morning and saw the neighbour's wife, who liked to call me the old cow, until I snapped one day and said "I may be an old cow but at least I wear underwear, you slut". That's another story for another day. So went up to her sitting in her lounge near the window with the window open WHY DIDN'T I SMELL A SETUP? and I said "why are you trying to kill me?" of course she replied very reasonably, "I'm not trying to kill you" I said "I'm writing everything down" and she said "why don't put some make up on you might look better". As I walked away a male voice said "You did well". So yeah, now they have what they want. It won't matter what I say they've got me probably on tape, saying to my neighbour "why are you trying to kill me?". I look like a looney.
Now we get into the realm of what surely, must be fiction.
A female officer or agent is determined to 'get me' because , in her words "because of her (me) I lost all credibility with the agency". This I think referrs to a failed 'operation' where she decided (most probably as a tip off from the new neighbours) that we'd hidden/stored
/ not sure which, something illegal, not sure whether weapons or drugs on our remote property. We kept a locked box up there, originally to keep concrete dry. Apparently there was a scramble up to our property after we'd been there one day and nothing was found. I gather it was a waste of time and resources. Speaking of which, resources, that is, she would have considerable. Apparently I am a bitch and therefore need to be punished. Look out all you bitches in the world, don't get on the wrong side of these people. Between the old neighbours, the new neighbours, the transport company, and the crooked cops I am between a rock and a hard place. It will be telling to see if my stupidity of this morning will appear on TV. and if it does which channel/s?
When they say a channel 7 or 9 'special investigation', they don't reveal that they have most probably bugged the person's home, illegally I might add, followed them, which I suppose is not illegal, and baited some people to get a reaction.
I've written enough for one day.THEIR MODUS OPERANDI, DISCREDIT, DEMORALISE, DESTROY. Whether you think this is fact or fiction, it's now out there.
