I was indulging in some well earned soul-healing with Margaret Atwood when I decided to check the news. Kevin Rudd rubbed shoulders with George Pell and pandered to the World Youth Day Pilgrims. Disappointing but not surprising.

Then I trot over to the Sydney Morning Herald to discover how a “boys club” bullied a woman into committing suicide.

CHRISTINE HODDER, 38, was a much-loved woman with a husband and a three-year-old daughter, and had almost completed her Bachelor of Nursing degree when she killed herself in her backyard.

Ms Hodder, after enduring years of bullying by male colleagues at Cowra ambulance station, where she was the first and only female officer, hanged herself on her child’s swing in April, 2005, a parliamentary inquiry into the NSW Ambulance Service has heard.