Buried in the labyrinth

They photographed the children meeting, and then they got photos of Jones putting out his wheelie bin. The walking bus left. The reporters asked Jones whether he had anything to say to his victims. Of course, he didn't answer them. He put his head in his hands, ran inside and telephoned staff of the Office of Corrections, who came and whisked him away.

By the time the children gathered to go to school on the 15th, the first vigilantes had also gathered. None of them was from our neighbourhood. They were people with pinched and florid faces - the angry crowd from central casting. They frightened the children more than Jones had had a chance to do. For the second time that week, the walking bus departed in fear.

That night, lying awake, I thought about what might have happened. If I had seen Jones standing on his porch, I would have wished him good morning and chatted to him. The children would have seen me do this. What then if, one day, they were on that street corner alone, and the nice man in the little house invited them in? All this had been prevented by the Herald Sun, the same newspaper that had brought the vigilantes - who, even as I lay awake that night, could be heard chanting in the street, holding their vigil at a now-empty house.

I was writing a column for The Age at the time and decided to write about the rights and wrongs of media exposure. I rang the spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, a woman called Ingrid Svendsen, whom I knew quite well. We played telephone tag. Finally we spoke. I asked how the house had been chosen.

"They would have done environmental scans," she said.

What kind of scans?

"Whether children lived next door, that kind of thing."

I told her that children did live next door. I told her about the walking bus, and the layout of the house in relation to the street. I asked again what checks had been done and she told me that the exact nature of the checks was confidential.

"Come on, Ingrid!"

"No, really, I can't say any more. It's confidential."

I hung up.

On July 25, I lodged a freedom-of-information request with the Department of Justice about Brian Keith Jones. I asked for two things: the nature and timing of the environmental checks done before Jones came to live among us, and whether there had been any reviews of these checks to assess whether they had been adequate.