By PIERS AKERMAN
IT is impossible to feel anything other than the utmost disgust as the tragedy of Diane Brimble's death unfolds in the NSW Coroners Court. There are just so many revolting aspects to the awful story.
Mark Brimble, Mrs Brimble's former husband, said on Friday that "the past 24 hours" had been particularly distressing, and that a taped police interview with Letterio Silvestri, one of the eight South Australian men named as "persons of interest", made the morning "a very dark day for the entire family".
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As most Australians and many people around the world now know, Diane Brimble, a mother in her 40s, was found naked and dead on the floor of a cabin shared by four of the men on the P&O cruise ship Pacific Sky less than 24 hours after the ship sailed on September 23, 2002.
She had died of an overdose of the date rape drug gamma-hydroxybutyrate (known as fantasy and GBH) while on the "holiday of a lifetime" with some members of her family and friends. She was not known to be a sexual adventurer. A P&O poster party-girl.
We know this because Deputy State Coroner Jacqueline Milledge, a brave woman in the tarnished legal world, has now heard from other passengers and some P&O employees how the men, Silvestri, Mark Wilhelm, Matthew Slade, Dragan Losic, Petar Pantic, Ryan Kuchel, Luigi Vitale and Sakelaros Kambouris, managed to create a sense of sleaze and fear within hours of embarkation.
It would seem however that sleaze was actually one of the attractions that P&O hoped would attract passengers, if the slogan on its "Seamen wanted" postcards issued as a marketing gimmick by the company AFTER Mrs Brimble's death is anything to go by.
P&O, which has apparently disposed of the ill-fated vessel, now says that the postcards were "insensitive" and did not represent its "values". That's odd, they must have been approved at some level, in someone's advertising or marketing budget.
Nor do other P&O staff appear to have been selected for their compassion or intelligence.
Though there were security men on duty on the ship, some passengers have told how the men drunkenly propositioned women, some as young as 15, and offered their liquid drugs to others. There has been mention of cocaine, the GBH, ecstasy and Viagra, as well as lashings of alcohol.
Much the same suite of drugs, incidentally, as reportedly used by the late John Marsden when he was cruising with youths of questionable age. Marsden has of course notoriously been eulogised by such luminaries as High Court Judge Michael Kirby and NSW Attorney General Bob Debus, and a smattering of the usual idiotic apologists for libertarianism such as broadcaster Mike Carlton and the civil liberties lobby.
Some reports of the inquest have described the drugs as "recreational", as if date rape is the new recreation for 21st century homo sapiens Australiensis bent on pleasure cruises, or perhaps just bent.
Some of the evidence would certainly indicate that these cruises routinely feature orgiastic behaviour. Not so much a considered behaviour as a general exchange of bodily fluids with conscious or unconscious bodies.
Intrusions into strangers' cabins, naked passengers in the corridors, and photographs, instant digital photographs of sex acts, of the dead, capturing the grotesquerie for recall at the press of a button until the batteries run out. For an audience, a foul audience.
The story also has women passengers who were invited by the droogs to go and look at Mrs Brimble's corpse. As some form of amusement.
It has a cruise entertainment organiser who apparently threatened the ship's magician with dismissal if he discussed the nightmarish death. It has security officers who didn't want to know anything about anything and it has a cavalcade of Keystone cops who came aboard to investigate and wound up joining in the dancing.
Now, it has such additional curios as lawyer Henry Heuzenroeder who presented the novel argument for his client, Wilhelm, that he should not be forced to give evidence that may incriminate him under foreign laws pertaining to the waters the ship might have been cruising in.
And there will be more, but above all it has Ms Milledge, who, like the courageous Margaret Cuneen, the fearless prosecutor of the cowardly pack rapists who boasted to their victims of their Islamic faith, has displayed an extraordinary understanding and an ability to restore dignity to the defenceless.
Ms Cuneen was, of course, targeted for persecution by the disgraceful Marsden for speaking out about some of the nastier aspects of the legal profession but her toughness and resilience, backed by the confidence which truth bestows, appears to have carried her through.
This is a case which could easily have been lost at sea. There was discussion, apparently, of a body going overboard, but that has not happened and Ms Milledge will hear from the persons of interest just before the hearing closes.
Mrs Brimble is indeed fortunate that Ms Milledge is fighting her corner when so many others wanted the matter to simply just disappear.
akermanp@sundaytelegraph.com.au
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