Margaret Gregory

Establishment of new Community Support Centre at Monash Children’s Hospital 

 

Kidsafe Victoria has successfully pioneered child injury prevention in Victoria for over 35 years with campaigns on a range of topics including child car restraints, children left unattended in cars, backyard pool safety and driveway safety. In 2017 Kidsafe Victoria will enter a new era when they open their new Community Support Centre at Monash Children’s Hospital.

 

Kidsafe Victoria, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the prevention of unintentional injuries and death to children aged 0-14,  is seeking help from  the public to help fund the fit out of the new Community Support Centre through a crowdfunding campaign which will be run over the next month. Each year hundreds of thousands of Victorian families have contact with Kidsafe Victoria’s programs, resources, campaigns and events.

 

Kidsafe Victoria CEO, Melanie Courtney, said the Kidsafe Community Support Centre will be a hub for parents and carers in the South East, where they can visit and receive expert child safety information, resources, advice and support.  A range of safety products will also be available for purchase.

 

“We are currently working in a secluded office in Fitzroy, with no space for direct interaction with parents and carers.

 

“The new Community Support Centre will allow Kidsafe to have a physical presence in the Victorian community, granting us direct exposure to parents and carers in the South East.”

 

Kidsafe Victoria has already secured carpet, walls, lights, painting and the electricals for the shell space, but still need to raise $15,000 to cover the cost of essential items such as office joinery, shelving and equipment.

An Architect’s impression of the Kidsafe Victoria Community Support Centre

 

How Companies and the Community can help:

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by Virginia Woolf

with Peta Hanrahan

Last week La Mama showcased a production in which four performers narrate and depict the four corners of Virginia Woolf’s mind as Woolf tackles the subjects of ‘women’ and ‘fiction’, in A Room of One’s Own.

 

I, Madison, attended the La Mama Courthouse and was immersed in the brilliance of both Woolf’s feminism and language, and Director Peta Hanrahan’s ethereal production. Below is a very insightful gaze into the brilliant, and talented mind of Hanrahan.

 

Madison: The raised issues of fiction and women in A Room of One’s Own, how relevant are they today?

 

Peta:

 

The beauty of this text is its flexibility; the multi-layering of metaphor and symbolism from a dramaturgical standpoint is a gift. ‘Fiction’ for me in context with this work, as I believe it was also for Woolf herself is a representation of all art, and in turn all women creatives, be they writers, composers, painters, actors or in my case directors of theatre.

So if we subtly shift the definition of the word for a moment and translate ‘Fiction’ to ‘Art’, one then reads ‘Art and Women’. Now we can clearly see that the questions Woolf poses in the novelette has a greater universal resonance and is not as seemingly specific to one discipline as in first read or listen. What we also start to see, through the course of the narrative, is that Art and its relationship to, for, with and from women has been almost exclusively experienced and recorded historically from the male perspective. She – all women, have had their voice (Art) muted and taken from them, ‘Not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time’. (A Room of One’s Own – Cambridge Press. P 112.)

 

(and, or)

 

In the works contextual relevance for today, I see it this way – I am a woman and I am still alive, I am not yet a part of history, or the past, I am relevant because I am still breathing, therefore if this literature speaks to my heart, my day to day experiences and to my understanding of gender driven social inequity, then that makes it relevant. If 51% of the worlds population are still being treated as a ‘sub-culture’ what indeed does that say about the irrational and profound imbalance of all cultures?

 

 

Madison: The use of language has changed dramatically since the 20^th century, what drew you to Woolf’s essay? In terms of language.

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05/05/2016 04:33 PM EDT

After delivering almost 7,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station, including the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft is set to leave the orbital laboratory with valuable science research and return to Earth on Wednesday, May 11. NASA Television will provide live coverage of Dragon’s departure beginning at 9 a.m. EDT. (Wednesday, 11 May 2016 at 11:00:00 PM AEST)

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A survey of more than 780,000 cattle slaughtered in New South Wales between 2013 and 2015 revealed that 5.5 per cent were infected with hydatid disease. Hydatid disease results from accidental ingestion of eggs of the tiny “hydatid” tapeworm that infects domestic and wild canids.

According to Dr David Jenkins, who will discuss the impact of the disease at the Australian Veterinary Association’s Annual Conference, these figures represent a financial loss to the abattoir of more than $450,000 from disposal of offal not fit for human consumption.

“Other annual losses included $1,200,000 due to reduced body weight of animals infected with hydatids –an unrealised loss for farmers.

“These results suggest that there are important financial impacts in cattle production due to hydatid disease. A vaccine developed for sheep against the disease has been trialled with cattle but it will be sometime before this vaccine could become commercially available,” Dr Jenkins said.

Hydatid disease leads to fluid-filled cysts in the lungs and liver, and less commonly in the spleen and heart. The major source of infection in cattle is from worm eggs shed by wild dogs and foxes, not domestic dogs.

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