Review: Allegedly by Sarah Monahan

Like many kids in Australia who grew up in the 1980s and early 1990s I was familiar with an Australian sitcom titled Hey Dad...! and would tune in every week--in fact to this day I can tell you that in Adelaide new episodes of Hey Dad...! used air on SAS 7 at 7.30pm on Wednesdays, and remember the distinctive opening credits that used real photos of each of the actors. And just like the rest of the Australian public, I had no idea of the horrific abuse that took place on the set, until the story became public. 

In fact, it was the first time in Australian history that a former child actor had come public with such a story--and, more shockingly, one that had been known on the set of Hey Dad...! for almost the whole of its eight year run, though no one would do anything about it.

Sarah Monahan played Jenny Kelly, the youngest member of the Kelly family. She was abused by Robert Hughes, the actor who played Martin Kelly, her on screen dad and the star of the series, and who now, thanks to Sarah's bravery, is serving a lengthy jail sentence. Hughes was also charged and convicted of abusing a number of other women. (Many other women came forward about their own horrific experiences with Hughes after Sarah Monahan's story became public.)

In Allegedly Sarah Monahan tells us her story--that of a child who found herself working in the adult world of television with limited supervision and how she grew up to be a strong and capable woman who not only had the guts to speak up about what had happened to her on the set, but who served with the US military (Monahan is a duel Australian/US citizen,) has worked in IT, who cared for her husband after he was attacked and who has travelled extensively. The book itself is written in a friendly, but matter-of-fact style and focuses on the importance for justice for victims of abuse. 

A very real story of bravery and resilience. Recommended. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more