For the first time in many decades I am spending a long summer break in the land of my birth and childhood. I escaped New Jersey shortly after university, but now events require my presence. Mostly my visits have deliberately avoided the extremes of summer and winter, but this year I have no choice but to sweat it out and put in some hard yakka.

We are halfway through two months of sorting out my mother’s affairs and placing her into assisted housing. Thank heavens for clever and obliging spouse, for without him the myriad tasks with so much process and detail could not be accomplished in this timeframe.

Houses with attics and basements, I conclude, are conducive to the storage of unwanted items and (occasional) treasures. We sold a crumbling box with Kennedy assassination newspaper headlines and even old high school yearbooks.

Burdensome as it is to quickly pack up someone’s life and home and memories, there are some rewards and reminders of the good as well as the bad and ugly dimensions to life in this extremely multicultural society. What a parade of accents and backgrounds have come to look at the ‘estate sale’, and poke around at the house for sale! How nice to speak French with a pretty Algerian woman!

The suburb of my childhood was settled by Germans in the mid 19th century, and still celebrated German festivals when I was a kid. The big wooden beer hall was demolished to make way for a Borough Hall, police station and fire department, as every tiny town has its own full blown facilities. In Australian terms, it would be like Glebe and Annandale in Sydney having separate services, including a Board of Education. No wonder the local taxes can be up to $20K per year in more salubrious areas.

The next suburb is fully Polish, and every shop and business has Polish speaking staff. Other areas are Italian, and you can speak Spanish pretty much anywhere. Turks, Koreans, Syrians, Africans, you name it. The only thing that has changed since my childhood is that the mix has become even richer.

But the tasks at hand require great concentration and much patience. If there is anything more frustrating than a stubborn old German, it is a stubborn old German with dementia. Knowing that the responsible person is often the main target for anger and aggression doesn’t make it more pleasant. She will be safe in the Altenheim:

She is fortunate to be there, despite what she says about her mean daughter. To begin with, the retirement home was founded about 117 years ago. In those days they would only accept northern Germans, not Bavarians like my mother. It is also a non-profit, and one of the few that operates like Disneyland: pay once to enter and after that all care is included.

The staff is of course also a diverse mix of Filippinos, Latinos, etc. A stone’s throw from NY, we have found time to catch up with another visiting Australian, and even lured him into the MOMA to see a show by another foreign observer of exotica, which you are sure to recognise:

Friendly as Americans are, aspects of the culture leave me sweating. The weekend paper has an unhealthy (IMHO) balance of ads to news, and a young guy we met who works in NY (and therefore should be ‘sophisticated’) had never heard of the political party called The Greens.

As I write this, the US news is awash with sadness at the untimely death of Robin Williams. He was an American prince, the best of the best. He was one of the actors you would always go out of your way to watch, and never come away disappointed. Vale.

The Courier Mail headline claims they’re “collateral damage” but it’s just cheap PR spin: “Bikie WAGS collateral damage in Queensland war on bikies”.

In fact these women are complicit – they’re not “collateral” to anything.

Neither are they, strictly speaking, “human shields”, as I’ve claimed, because human shields don’t deliberately put themselves in the way of danger, and there’s no danger of these “shields” being hurt. But the strategy is similar.

If you go out with, or marry, someone who is a member of an outlaw bikie gang, you can’t claim to be innocent of what your partner does.

This type of bikie gang calls itself “outlaw” for a reason, and it’s not because it’s an elaborate joke.

It’s no joke. The gangs regard themselves as outside the law, and are major suppliers of drugs to Queenslanders, as well as enforcement muscle for a number of other shady operators.

If your partner is involved with a criminal organisation it might cause problems for you, but the solution is not to ask the government to go easy on criminals. The solution is to insist your partner leave the gang.

That’s if you are sufficiently troubled by the criminality.

If you’re not, then not only will you stay around, but what you might also do is allow yourself to be used to milk sympathy from the public as a way of allowing your partner, or at least his mates, to continue in their criminal ways.

MUM-of-two Sarah Trappett works in childcare and is a former nanny who doesn’t really like motorbikes. 

Yet this quietly spoken 28-year-old is a bikie WAG.

Husband Chris has been a member of Australia’s largest motorcycle gang, the Rebels, for 3½ years.

And that, according to Ms Trappett, makes her collateral damage because of the Newman Government’s tough anti-bikie laws.

“It’s been very stressful,” she said as she cradled the couple’s two-week-old son Carter. “I just think these laws are ridiculous.”

Not only has her husband been branded a “criminal” ¬because of his Rebels links, he also faces losing his job as a tattooist under a new licensing crackdown.

My heart bleeds for her. And perhaps hers could bleed for other people’s children who are damaged by the drug trade that her husband’s cronies prosecute.

I wonder how the stress of someone whose son or daughter is addicted to crystal meth shapes up against hers – sons or daughters who have lost more than their jobs because of their addictions.

To avoid the “Newman Government’s tough anti-bikie laws” all her partner has to do is walk away. He doesn’t have to give up his bike, just his cronies.

It’s not the government who are using these women, their relationships and their children – it’s the outlaw gangs and their publicists.

On the basis of this article, it’s also the women themselves, who are as much a part of the criminal conspiracy as their partners.