Listen. Peter Miles and those like him are not Good Blokes, and they have to stop being described as such. This doesn’t mean they were incapable of doing good deeds. Turning murderers into "Good Blokes" only reinforces an underlying community belief that there are circumstances in which men (and it’s always men, because nobody defends women who murder children or describes them as “awesome”) can be driven to this kind of response. That indeed the pressures of being a man can be so intense and suffocating that they feel they have no choice but to end the lives of everyone they’re "responsible" for. Massacres become tragedies, victims’ names disappear into the swirl of commentary and all that’s remembered is that something awful happened but he was a Good Bloke at the end of the day and that, my friends, is perhaps the saddest part of all of this. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video This was a horrific act of violence. The framing of criminal acts like these as being somehow the result of depression or financial struggles or just a lack of appropriate emotional support cannot help but infect the circumstances with an air of sympathy and understanding. It’s dangerous to immediately valorise the people responsible for this kind of behaviour. It is an act of valorisation to focus on the so-called "awesome" traits of someone who has just slaughtered their entire family. More importantly, it’s a valorisation of traditional notions of masculinity to regard a homicide like this as a father and grandfather’s misguided way of protecting his family from the stress of his own suicidal ideation.

In the case of this homicide in particular, the repeated references to the children’s autism invites an additional layer of ableism into the picture. Some people already find it far too easy to empathise with the idea of a depressed man (who almost always conveniently happens to be white, middle class and heterosexual) who sees familial murder as his only way out of crushing anxiety. But when one or more of those family members have a disability, the narrative shifts even further into the obscene as people begin to say things like, “Well, it was probably for the best.” When Geoff Hunt murdered his wife and three children in Lockhart in 2014, much was made of the fact that Kim Hunt had recently acquired a disability in a car accident. In this case, the “quiet grain farmer” was described as having suffered “considerable pressure and tension” following the crash, and that police believe this might have been what caused him “to snap”. Much of the public’s commentary following the murders was sympathetic to Hunt. Again, feminists were urged to consider the plight of mental health and not to use this as a way to demonise men. If refusing to discuss domestic homicide as anything other than an incomprehensible act of violence with no excuse is "demonising men", then we have a long way to go. If there is any demonising to be done, it is of the structural system called patriarchy that informs men – even "good" ones – that they shoulder the responsibility for familial care and order. In the case of Geoff Hunt, the coroner’s report later found "it was the result of an egocentric delusion that his wife and children would be better off dying than living without him”. Perhaps most damning of all though, is the message being sent by this narrative to the men who are active perpetrators of family violence.