While Sydney casting agent, Liz Mullinar, had the zany job of casting pigs’ ‘voices’ for the hit movie ‘Babe’, she was going through turmoil in her life. She had just discovered, under hypnosis, that when she was in hospital aged five, she was raped by her doctor.
Before ‘Babe’ casting began, she had been struck down by an illness doctors could not diagnose; she was confined to a wheelchair and could not sleep. She was persuaded by an alternative healer that possibly she was hiding deep down in her mind a sexual molestation.
"I went to see one of Sydney’s top psychologists and under hypnosis, and by reading my rapid eye movement, it all came out. Once it all starts, even away from the psychologist’s rooms, all the memories come flooding back. You have, for all those years, put up all the barriers to prevent yourself remembering because it’s too painful to remember. As you remember, you feel the pain."
She says she discovered that as a child she had been raped by a doctor as she lay for a week in hospital with a greenstick fracture of her arm.
Recently Liz flew to England with a serious, dedicated mission: she wanted to find other women, who, like her, had been raped by the same doctor.
"I don’t even know if the doctor is still alive; but he would be very old if he was. I went to London and asked a women’s magazine if they would do a story about what happened to me. Because I am sure there were other women who had suffered at the hands of the doctor. I have no compulsion now, to go and find him and confront him. I just thought it would be amazingly validating if I could reach out to these other women and we could meet together; just to reassure ourselves that it did happen; that we are not alone. It is the feeling of aloneness that is destructive."
Liz, Australia’s most successful casting consultant and Board member of the Australian Film Commission, had always been an insomniac, now she began at last to sleep soundly; she regained her physical and mental health and ‘as part of an ordained grand plan’, decided to quit her lucrative Sydney consultancy, to found - with three others - Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse; and to go into the Church as a minister. "I quite surely feel," says Liz, who is 50, "that what happened to me as a child, gave me strength. I was sent on earth to make the public aware of the sufferings of survivors of child abuse and to stop it; and to heal them through faith."
On the day she talked to me, she had spent hours with a woman who was suicidal because of what had happened to her sexually. "I told her that there is a power of good, whether it is God or whatever it is; and that it does help. I have worked through prayer with survivors of sexual abuse and I am a great advocate of anything that actually works."
Advocates for Survivors of Child Abuse is now active in all states and has 500 members, growing by about 10 a week and with a target of 2,000 members by the end of the year. It meets monthly and its newsletters highlight stories of sufferers so they will not feel alone and their experience go unrecognised.
Lawyers, officials from the Department of Public Prosecutions and psychologists attend the meetings to explain what victims can do when long-buried experiences of childhood molestation have been revealed. The danger of false accusations is slight, says Liz; a ‘tiny’ number compared with the reality of long-hidden incidents of abuse.
Liz is now studying to be ordained as an Anglican priest. "I will study for three years at theological college and preach with ‘L-plates’ on," she laughs. "Not in the Diocese of Sydney which rejects women as not being equal to men. I will go to the Newcastle Diocese."
When she turns her back on running her thriving casting agency she knows she will leave behind her some actors with a grudge against her casting activities. "Auditions are a ghastly process and I have always been conscious of the vulnerability of actors who of course feel inside them they are great actors and that no-one is recognising it. So they often get bitter when they are not cast. I care passionately about actors and their rights and their need for greater recognition."
Liz says she regretted for a long time that she did not use her acting ability in the London theatre. She was born the daughter of a vicar and studied at the famous Guildhall School of Music and Drama, winning an award for best character actress. Then, before she could tread the West End boards, she married and she and her husband migrated. "I felt for many years that I’d go back to acting and become a wonderful next Ruth Cracknell," she laughs. "But what I am going to do with my life now is going to be much more exciting."
And ‘Babe’? "‘Babe’ was the biggest casting job I have ever done. We auditioned 500 actors for the roles and the animal voices. We had to ask ourselves: ‘Do the pigs have human voices?’ You couldn’t have ‘animal’ voices, as Disney does it, which is an exaggerated cartoon voice. And if they were to be totally human it wouldn’t work. We had to find actors with an extraordinary quality of voice to give the pigs.
"We had a wonderful meeting where people sat around for hours, looking at photographs of pigs, deciding just where a black patch on the pig should be.
"These were serious people gravely discussing whether it should be over the right ear or the left!" She also cast for the hit-movie ‘Shine’ which she believed would be almost as big.
This yarn sounds like a load of absolute hogwash to me, frankly.
Since when have they ever kept anyone in hospital for a week because of nothing but a busted arm? They reduce the fracture, bung a cast on the arm and send you home in my eperience of breaking my arm very badly at about 4pm one day. Since I had had a big lunch they waited till about midnight to operate because I needed a general anasthetic to fix it. Next morning, they gave me breakfast and then sent me home. I was in hozzy for less than 24 hours.
It sounds to me like this poor lady Liz has had the idea that she was raped implanted in her mind by a hypnotist with weird ideas, frankly.
