Battler Sport

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by politics • Tags: , ,

So John Coates thinks it is un-Australian not to increase funding by $100 million to "elite sports". Well, as John Howard would say, can't get much more Australian (greatest Australian who ever lived I think Mr Howard believed) than Donald Bradman, who famously practiced his cricket by batting with a cricket stump instead of a bat and bouncing the tennis ball off a corrugated iron water tank. At very little cost indeed. And Keith Miller, arguably a greater cricketer than Bradman, used to famously turn up to play cricket after a night on the town. Herb Elliot ran barefoot up sandhills. Marjorie Jackson trained, in second hand running shoes, on a country grass oval lit by car headlights . Footballers used to work all week as garbage collectors. And … well, you get the idea.

I think John Coates is so un-Australian that he doesn't understand Australians. He was going on about how the public would be disappointed if we didn't win everything, and, heaven forbid, slipped down the Olympic medal table to tenth, beaten, oh the shame, even by Britain. I don't reckon Australians really give a stuff about that, although whichever television network is showing the event, at enormous cost, will pretend that we do. And I don't think we are too impressed by the well known fact that you can, essentially, buy your medals – that the number of medals won is directly proportional to the money spent. Nor do I think we really like the idea that someone has won because they have had all the best equipment, best facilities, all the best coaching from overseas. Instead we like the idea of the battler from the bush who turns up with no running shoes and beats the rich kids. We really do, even now, in spite of all the propaganda from the Olympic Committee, support the underdogs. Remember the film Chariots of Fire? Change a few names, a few accents, and that could have been any rag tag bunch of Aussies turning up to take on the might of the Americans or East Germans. But that didn't mean we wanted to become Americans or East Germans, and that is where Mr Coates has got it wrong.

And then there are those other Ausssie battlers from the bush – the country hospitals with crumbling walls, the country schools ditto, the poor transport facilities, and, yes, indeed, the country sports ovals with no grass, and the pools with no water. There are so many things you could spend $100 million dollars a year on that didn't involve buying Olympic medals. Indeed, bearing in mind that this was just the EXTRA $100 million dollars that bitter tears were being shed over, how about we look at removing pretty much all the money from "elite sport" (a term itself an invention of people like Mr Coates in just the last few years, because elite sport of course must get elite money)?

Let's start a new program in the kind of country towns that produced Bradman and Jackson, let's try to develop elite hospitals, and elite schools, and elite railways, and elite ovals for local football clubs.

Say no to elite sport – elite sport is so un-Australian. Say hullo to battler sport.

You can't eat gold medals.

All David Horton's earlier writing is here.

Less light than heat

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by Climate Change • Tags: , , , , ,

I confess, and it is like confessing to a murder, that I was once a smoker (I stopped 18 years, 3 months, 5 days, 6 hours ago, but who's counting). There was a lot of it about in the fifties and sixties. My uncle and grandfather both smoked, pretty much all the men I knew did. Film heroes on screen smoked, and so did their audience. Doctors smoked, patients in hospital smoked, James Bond smoked, sportsmen smoked. Many of my peers smoked, in fact the coolest guy in school, Robert Patterson, used to smoke behind the sports pavilion while the rest of us played cricket – how cool was that? So I began smoking. Who knew there was a problem eh? There were giant billboards with cowboys smoking, ads on buses, television ads of really cool guys and gals in tuxedos smoking, radio ads, full page newspaper ads. And there were doctors and scientists who swore on a stack of chesterfields that smoking wasn't harmful (lies, damned lies and statistics, where was the proof?), and tobacco company executives who swore nicotine wasn't addictive, good heavens no, what an idea. Little did anyone know that the executives were lying, knew they were lying, but that not only were they being paid big dollars by cigarette companies but so were the scientists and doctors in their white coats.

All of us smokers agreed with each other in pubs and restaurants, in trains, in cars, in planes, smoking was doing us no harm, oh my goodness gracious no. Coughing in the morning was from dust in the bedroom, sneezing was hay fever, perfectly natural in Summer, breathlessness was just old age, lack of appetite was weight watching, inability to smell and taste – never been good at that. It was in fact, good for us, calmed the nerves, slowed us down, cleared the lungs, made a natural end to a meal, was essential to accompany coffee. And we knew, or knew of, smokers who lived a long time. Not many, but one was enough to prove that there was nothing to worry about, smoking didn't damage health. Anyway, we could give up, or at least cut down, any time we chose. Not addicted at all, just enjoyed it, why, at times I could avoid opening that third pack of cigarettes in a day. Willpower was all that was needed, and if I ever thought I needed to, could cut down slowly, steadily. So no need for alarm – doctors, mothers, friends, children – panic merchants, alarmists, totally over the top.

But as I got older the symptoms got worse, the cough constant, the blocked nose also, and playing sport became a memory. And then there was that odd sensation in the lips, and mouth. What was that? Finally, a bit chopped out, and "pre-cancerous" the last stage before developing something that would kill me, quickly, nastily. And I stopped, not quite cold turkey, but with help from the chewing gum and patches that eased me towards being a former smoker. Not easy, but what was the choice?

And it all came back to me – the self-deception, the denial, the anger at well meaning friends, the acceptance of fake experts and the rejection of real ones, the refusal to change anything in my life even at the certain risk of losing it – these last few weeks listening to the so-called skeptics among the Liberal and National parties (the Labor skeptics have their heads down). It could have been me talking about cigarettes 20 years ago. But where I was just being stupid on my own behalf (and, well, I suppose, family and friends), these parliamentary representatives of the people of Australia are being stupid on behalf of 21 million Australians. Particularly stupid on behalf of rural Australians, in the front line as the continent fries and dries and burns. That awful image last week of a fire burning through, and destroying, a mature wheat crop, should be played over and over to all members of parliament, as a symbol of what we are in for.

And I wonder how those SA Senators, in particular, trotting out the most arrant rubbish (some coming from the same "experts" who, funded by tobacco companies, denied the harm in cigarettes – coincidence or what!) while refusing to listen to a delegation of actual climate scientists felt as the state they represent broke more and more temperature records and catastrophic fire warnings were issued?

Guilty, I hope. But I wouldn't count on it.

There is a place in hell for climate change denialists, particularly those who should know better – it's called Australia.

All David Horton's earlier writing is here.

Fed to the lions

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by Media • Tags: , , ,

When my grandmother seemed about 100 years old (though in reality she was only a young thing about the age I am now) she would turn to the obituary columns of the morning newspaper first. In the charming way know-it-all teenagers have I would scold her, suggesting that she was being morbid, and that she should be reading the news first, find out what was going on in the world, take an interest in political events, worry about the environment. But she unaccountably ignored my opinion and kept turning to the part of the paper where paragraphs were edged in black. And every so often she would exclaim "oh, so and so's mother has died" or "oh, so and so has died and they were only 62". It was a very practical interest. Her husband had already died, and she was at an age where the parents of friends, and the friends themselves, were starting to die off (in those days with a somewhat lower life expectancy than now), and she needed to know in order to grieve, express sympathy, offer help, attend funerals. She had also lived through two world wars, in one of which a husband and four brothers had served, in another where she had a son and son in law involved. And she was now in a time where her grandson and other people's grandsons had Vietnam looming as either an actual or a theoretical danger.

So an interest in death was a practical matter, information she needed to have to function in her society. But I suspect, looking back from a vantage point of someone about the same age she was then, that there was also a psychological aspect. She was at an age, as am I now, where your own body starts to give you echoes of mortality, near or far. In seeing the black-rimmed announcements of those who had died you were failing to see the ones of those who were still alive. And by implication, if your circle of friends were all still ok, then your family was still ok, still safe and secure, and so were you yourself. But the interest and the reassurance was at a very personal level. She had little interest in the deaths of strangers, why would she? And since all of her friends were behaving in the same way, for the same reasons, the newspaper was providing an obituary page as a service for those searches. Occasionally a death would emerge on the front page, but it would either be of someone important, like a prime minister, or involve some particular tragic circumstance.

This remained the pattern of media representation of death for many years, but in just the last few years a major change has come over the role of death in commercial television news. A typical bulletin now has the first third devoted to death. There will be car accidents, house fires, industrial accidents, people falling down cliffs, murders, drownings, plane crashes, disease, "bashings", sharks, home invasions. Bodies or body parts will be found, corpses will be recognisable or unrecognisable. People will have long "battles" with cancer, or die unexpectedly. The cameras will be there while the police search for bodies, find bodies, and load bodies into ambulances. They will be there when the grieving family chokes back tears to mourn their child or mother, will be in the church where children break down in reading eulogies, will get close ups of teary faces of pall bearers and widows, will be present later at memorial services, will follow up with images of the victim's family in situations where court cases deal with cause of death. We can't be far away from cameras in ambulances, emergency operating theatres, at autopsies, in morgues. In fact the first two are already beginning to happen.

Now this is not a service to viewers in the way the obituary pages are, this is a wallowing in the grief of strangers for the sake of entertainment. The programmers are betting on public necrophilia, that viewers will absorb all the death they are offered, will get, perhaps, some kind of thrill that they are still alive while someone else has died horribly. Will love sticky-beaking at other people's grief. Will love being scared silly by all the disasters that could befall them but haven't yet. Will picture themselves in the position of grieving widow, their children as orphans, their body racked with cancer, their home invaded, their brother stabbed in the street, their car engulfed in a ball of flame, and be glad that it wasn't them.

Programmers have no concern, it seems, for the invasions of privacy, the cheapening of emotion, the deadening of sensibility, the distortion of public policy, that all this exploitation of death involves. They see it as part of modern tv programming, on a par with reality shows that deliberately humiliate and damage contestants, "factually based" series for the glorification of gangsters, television programs in which the level of violence and sheer nastiness continues to escalate. Life it seems, is once again as cheap as it was to the Romans, watching murder and mayhem in the arena; or to the Elizabethans watching public floggings, burnings, hangings, and eviscerations.

Is that really how we want our society to develop? Or should the television front page go back to informing people about the issues that matter?

All David Horton's earlier writing is here.

Your shoes get so hot

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by Climate Change • Tags: , ,

Roses blooming outside my window. Birds nesting and singing outside my window. Grass and clover growing outside my window. Echidnas and stumpy tail lizards strolling outside my window. Must be Spring, hooray.

But unlike the chirpy weather presenters on television I don't say "hooray, Summer is coming". That lovely thick grass that is creating contented fat sheep will soon begin to dry. I will watch as the hillsides go from green to brown, leaving just a fine network of green lines along the gullies; and then from brown to yellow with no green lines. And just down the road, last weekend, billowing clouds of smoke from a neighbour's paddock gave me an awful scare until I realised that the number of fire trucks meant it was a training exercise burn. Fire season underway in Victoria, and Queensland has had major bush fires already. And the snake in the grass is climate change, the warmer and drier it gets, the more, and more severe, bushfires we will get all over southern Australia.

If stumpy tails are strolling on my door step then snakes will soon be slithering over it, and a few days ago I saw the first one hurrying over my driveway. Always seems to be the way with farming – rain gets the pasture growing but also can lead to worms in sheep and will certainly lead to long dry grass that can be a fire hazard. Warm weather brings on the growth of flowers but also brings the snakes out of hibernation.

Is it just me that dreads summer? Maybe it is, maybe the whole population of Yass would be cheering on the Sydney weather presenter who in the record high temperatures a week or so ago strolled on to Bondi Beach, wriggled her high heels firmly into the sand, and proceeded to tell us how wonderful it was that it was already hot enough for the beach and Summer couldn't come fast enough. Funny isn't it that these people always present the weather from the beach on these sweltering days and not, say, from a bare paddock on the hills around Yass.

Come to think of it, isn't it funny that the climate change deniers (of whom my one time favourite National Barnaby is now sadly a leader) always make their pronouncements about how there is no such thing as global warming from the air conditioned environment of parliament house in Spring, and not from that same bare Yass paddock in Summer? Same reason I suppose.

Look I know Winter can have its down side on the southern tablelands. What's that you say? "Grim"? Well, yes, it can be grim. But you can always dress up warmly, stoke up a fire, close the curtains early on a dark evening, eat a roast hot from the oven. And Spring and Autumn can also have miserable windy and wet days. But those nine months don't have you watching your step for brown snakes in the long grass, or wondering whether one is visiting the shed to hunt mice around the feed bags.

And they don't have you anxiously scanning the horizon for columns of smoke, don't have you wondering whether you can smell smoke, don't have you feverishly reading weather bulletins to see how high the danger levels are going to be. Summer is tension for me, digging my fingers into the yard rail, not digging my toes into Bondi Beach, and I don't relax again until well into Autumn, endlessly grateful that the bush fire brigade people are hard at work on our behalf.

I bet they hate Summer too.

All David Horton's earlier writing is here.