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Flight of the Dancing Bird
Tanjas Darke

UK Price £12.34         $17.49 in US 

REPUBLISHED BY JOHN BLAKE PUBLISHING LTD:

Flight of the Dancing Bird is Tanjas Darke's remarkable and moving account of her life, told in her own words. It is a story of enormous courage and triumph over appalling adversity and child abuse. Remarkably, she has survived and has found the strength to write about her experiences in this powerful and balanced autobiography. With honesty and inspirational courage, she offers a rare insight into the reality of dominance and mind games played by abusers. More importantly, she shows how the cycle can be broken and the abuser brought to justice. In a final chapter, she relives her father's trial and describes her feelings while giving evidence against him. Tanjas Darke is now in her forties. A gem carver by profession she has, at the time of publication of this book, returned to Europe. There, she, her husband and her many pets are enjoying life to the full and are finally happily settled. This extraordinary - yet ultimately positive story, was made into a documentary by "Greenstone Pictures.com" with the aim to give other abuse victims a message of hope while also providing a rare insight into a situation that seems incomprehensible. "To Hell and Back: Tanjas' Story" has now been shown around the world, including Poland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, and New Zealand.

About the book and the author

Van Der Plaat did not just keep his daughter as a sex slave. He kept her, for 23 years, in a state of total bondage - which went far beyond the sexual torture he submitted her to.

His preferred tools of physical bondage were handcuffs, chains and clamps, while his preferred tools of psychological bondage were many and varied.

In later years she cooked, cleaned and earned the only household income. Although she had a job and a cheque book, she was not allowed to buy anything, or even to go to the corner shop.

Van Der Plaat put her head in a padlocked box while he raped her and filled her ears with wax. He didn't need padlocks to ensure that her entire life was lived within a prison.

There were long periods when she was not allowed to leave the house in Vanuatu. She would sit on the balcony, read, and look out at that which had offered so briefly a glimpse of a childhood paradise.

"It was like being on a ship at sea," says Darke. "You could see the land but you couldn't touch it."

When she finally managed to move into her own flat in Auckland (she was pregnant to him and persuaded him that it would provoke speculation that he was the father if she was still living with him) he harassed her unmercifully. He refused to let her take her cats and refused to feed them, ensuring that she would visit every day.

Darke and her father had been deported from Vanuatu after independence. They were "undesirables" - a label likely to have been a consequence of the rumours about their "relationship", whispered about in the tiny township of Vila for years.

When it became apparent that they were going to have to leave, Van Der Plaat, in one of a sickening series of bizarre moves, forced his daughter to see a doctor to demand a note indicating that she was still a virgin.

The doctor refused, but did provide a letter that said: "[Darke] did not show signs as such from sexual intercourse."

However, she had shown signs of abuse from an early age: she was described by her primary-school teacher in Vanuatu as a child who didn't smile, laugh or talk. By the time she was 12 she had been treated a number of times for sexually transmitted diseases.

When, 30 years later, Darke tracked down one doctor who had treated her, she had only to say her first name before he said that he had been waiting to hear from her for years.

The TV documentary "To Hell and Back" does not delve too deeply into the story of how Van Der Plaat was able to get away with it for all those years, or of how a mother could leave her child to him, telling her that she could "rot in Hell".

Or why a doctor, waiting for a phone call for decades, didn't make his own phone call decades ago to somebody about a small girl in trouble.

Van Der Plaat is in prison now, and Darke says she wishes him no ill. "I just basically don't want him to get at me."

Tanjas' story is one of shining courage and spirit. But do be warned: it is a story that will get at you. 

Thankfully, this is a story with a happy ending. Darke eventually escaped from her hell with the help of a gem of a man who became her husband - who was, in fact, a gem cutter! He taught her his trade and together they live peacefully with their loyal and adorable pets, three Boston Terriers. Tanjas is presently writing her first novel. Now living in Europe, she occasionally visits her home country, New Zealand.

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