Category: Friday on My Mind

From the archives (2) Blogging and human rights

blogging-human-rights
Iranian protest photo Christopher Rose

In case you were curious, the word blog in Farsi looks like this – وبلاگ. Iranians who didn’t like the way things were going in their country started وبلاگ’ing like crazy after the 2000 crackdown on Iranian media. Iranians who interact with the internet are by definition risk-takers.
Photo Christopher Rose
As recently as late 2016, five Iranians were sentenced to prison terms for writing and posting images on fashion blogs. The content was decreed to ‘encourage prostitution’.
The Independent quoted lawyer Mahmoud Taravat via state news agency Ilna that the eight women and four men he represented received jail time of between five months to six years. He was planning to appeal the sentences handed down by a Shiraz court on charges including ‘encouraging prostitution’ and ‘promoting corruption’.

The immediacy of blogging appeals to those who live under oppressive regimes. They use the online diary to inform the world of the injustices in their country as and when they happen. I cited Iran (Persia) as just one example of a country where expressing strong opinions contrary to the agenda of the ruling government is extremely risky business.
The founder of Iran’s blogging movement, Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian-Canadian blogger, spent six years in prison (the original sentence was 19 and a half years), before being pardoned by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Derakhshan also helped promote podcasting in Iran and appears to have been the catalyst that spawned some 64,000 Persian language blogs (2004 survey). Clearly there is/was a level of dissent among people who think the right to free speech is worth the risk of incarceration or worse.

Blogging can be a lot of things in Australia, but risky it rarely is, so long as you are mindful of the laws regarding defamation and contempt of court. Not so for bloggers or citizen journalists of oppressed countries who try to get the facts out.
It is no coincidence that most of the countries guilty of supressing free speech are among the 22 countries named by Amnesty International as having committed war crimes. They include Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan and, closer to home, Myanmar, where persecution and discrimination persists against the Rohingya. Amnesty’s national director Claire Mallinson told ABC’s The World Today that not only are people being persecuted where they live, 36 countries (including Australia) sent people back into danger after attempts to find refuge.
Amnesty’s 450-page Human Rights report for 2015-2016 does not spare Australia from criticism, particularly our treatment of children in custody, with Aboriginal children 24 times more likely to be separated from their families and communities. We are also complacent when it comes to tackling world leaders and politicians accused of creating division and fear.

Still, at least if you live in Australia you can openly criticise something the government is doing (or not doing), apropos this week’s Q&A and the Centrelink debt debate.
According to literary types who seem to have warmed to my turn of phrase, FOMM is not a blog as such, but an example of ‘creative nonfiction’ which I am told is not only a genre, but also something taught at universities.
I never knew that.
Bloggers in comfortable democracies like ours use blogs to write about cats, dogs, goldfish, cake recipes, fashion, yoga, raising babies, travel adventures and produce how-to manuals about anything you care to name.
The definition of a blog is ‘a regularly updated public website or web page, typically run by an individual or small group, written in an informal or conversational style.’
Scottish comedian and slam poem Elvis McGonagall, who you met last week, satirises the blog format with this entry.
Monday:
Woke up. Had a thought. Dismissed it. Had another. Dismissed that. Stared at the cows. The cows stared back. Scratched arse. Shouted at telly. Threw heavy object at telly. Had a wee drink. Had another. Went to bed.
Tuesday to Sunday – repeat as above

The definitive blog is an online daily diary, kept by people while travelling, carrying out some stated mission like preparing for an art exhibition, producing an independent album, dieting or training for a triathlon. Most of these literary exercises are abandoned at journey’s end, or on completion of the mission. A fine example of this is folksinger John Thompson’s marathon effort to post an Australian folk song each day for a year. He did this from Australia Day 2011 to January 26, 2012.
Some of the tunes have ended up on albums by Cloudstreet, Thompson’s musical collaboration with Nicole Murray and Emma Nixon.
The social worth of a blog, though, is when an oppressed human being writes a real time account of what atrocity or infringement of human rights is happening in their third-world village, right now.
There are millions of blogs circulating on the worldwide web, many of which are concerned with marketing, selling, promoting and luring readers into subscribing to the bloggers’ products and/or clicking on sponsors’ links. It is nigh-on impossible to find a list of blogs independently assessed on quality, although some have tried.
The Australian Writers Centre held a competition in 2014 to find Australia’s best blogs, dividing entries into genres like Personal & Parenting, Lifestyle/Hobby, Food, Travel, Business, Commentary and Words/Writing. The competition attracted hundreds of entries which were whittled down to 31 finalists.

The AWC told FOMM it has since switched its focus to fiction competitions but has not dismissed the popularity of blogging. Even so, continuity is an ever-present issue.
The 2014 winner, Christina Sung, combined travel and cooking, two topics which spawn thousands of blogs worldwide, into The Hungry Australian. But as happens with blogs, the author has somewhat moved on since then. As Christina last posted in September 2016: ‘Hello, dear readers! Apologies for my lengthy absence but I’ve been working on a few writing projects lately’.
Likewise, the author of The Kooriwoman, the Commentary winner for a blog about life as an urban Aboriginal in Australia, has not posted since January 2016.
It is not uncommon for finely-written blogs like those mentioned to have a hiatus or disappear without notice, for a myriad of reasons linked to other demands and distractions in the authors’ lives.
The few lists of Australian blogs you can find tend to rank them on popularity (numbers of followers or clickers). The top 10 blogs in this list are all about food or travel.
http://www.blogmetrics.org/australia
Hands-down winner Not Quite Nigella is a daily blog curated by Lorraine Elliott who according to blogmetrics has 28,523 monthly visitors. It’s not hard to see why – the blog is constantly updated with recipes, restaurant reviews, travel adventures and the like, featuring mouth-watering photos and a chatty prose style.
So there are those like Lorraine who make a living from blogging and those who start with a skyrocket burst of enthusiasm and fall to ground like the burnt-out stick.
Whatever your absorbing passion in life happens to be – cross-dressing, wood-carving, wine-making, writing haikus, collecting Toby jugs, quilt-making, proofreading or growing (medicinal) marijuana, you can bet someone out there has created a blog.
Just yesterday for no reason other than a bit of light relief after months of heatwave conditions, I searched for ‘grumpy spouse blog’ and got 22 hits. Have a look at this one – it’s choice.

From the archives (1) Bedside Manners

bedside-tables-manners
Bob’s bedside table (an example) Zoom in to see what he’s reading

So I’m visiting John in hospital and it’s just as well I didn’t come the day before, he says, because he was in a world of pain. Knee operations are like that. Hospital rooms evoke all kinds of memories, most of them not very pleasant, even a private room with a TV, telephone and a view of the painless world.

John was telling how his daughter phoned on his world of pain day to see how he was. The phone, on the bedside table, just out of reach, rang and rang. Somebody had moved the bedside table so they could set up the contraption that monitors one’s vitals.

There’s a small fortune to be made for someone who invents and promotes a bedside cabinet suited to the largely bed-ridden. It may well be that someone already owns the patents or has actually produced a prototype. They would go well in hospitals. The standard hospital brand tends to be a metal box on castors, usually with two (lockable) drawers and a cupboard to store your clothes, shoes and toiletries.

What is really needed, if you happen to be supine in bed and unable to roll over and reach out, is a bedside table that will come to you. I’m not an inventor, designer or cabinet maker, but I envisage the patient with a remote control pressing ‘turn left’ and with a barely perceptible whir, the bedside table obediently turns so it is facing the bed. The patient presses ‘rise” and the table rises, until the patient presses ‘stop’. ‘Open top drawer’, and the top drawer slides open, to offer an array of things one might need:  reading glasses, hearing aids, wallet, mobile phone, private medical insurance card.

Those of you quick on the uptake will immediately see the broader commercial opportunities of such a user-friendly bedside table. The home model would have a built in power board for mobile phone, e-reader, MP3 player or whatever gadget you keep in the bedside cabinet that might require recharging. Ahem.

At this stage of musing it is important to note the debunking of the myth that one risks brain cancer by keeping a mobile phone next to the bed.  The ABC’s Catalyst program is under attack for a program this week linking Wi-Fi and mobile phone use with brain cancer. According to the Australian government’s radiation safety agency ARPANSA, there is “no established evidence” that low levels of radiofrequency radiation from these devices cause health effects. The Conversation, an excellent source of analysis by academics and journalists, asked experts for their opinions.

If you search ‘bedside table’ you will find hundreds of designs (and prices) but nearly all follow the basic principle of a night-stand – a vertical cabinet with two or three drawers or two drawers and a cupboard. Once you’re in bed, only the top drawer is easily reachable and of course every time you lean over to look for something, there’s a risk you will knock something off the top (where many of us keep things like books, reading glasses, contact lenses, hearing aids, a glass of water, e-reader, wallet, and so on – not unlike the illustration above.

The smart bedside table would have a tissue dispenser built in to the side (also touch of a button) to free up space on the top of the cabinet. Bedside tables (the typical bedroom suite comes with two), are not designed with age groups in mind.

The 18-35 groups could get by with a wooden chair, on which to place current reading (e.g. Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer, On the Road by Jack Kerouac), and the essential accoutrements of the young and impulsive.

The 36-49 groups used to favour clock radios so they could get up with the lark listening to classic FM. These days it is likely to be a smart phone alarm and an MP3 player programmed to play your early morning playlist. Books may include: The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen Povey or conversely, Summer on a Fat Pig Farm by Matthew Evans.

We elders need a lot of space on the table top. There’s the aforementioned hearing aids, a glass of water (to drink), a glass of water (for our teeth), one or even two of those Monday to Sunday prescription boxes so you don’t forget to take what the doctor ordered. There’s often a torch so those of us with cataracts don’t walk into walls or doors.

The over-65 top drawer is likely to contain a plastic folder with five or six prescriptions repeats, boxes of medications, tubes of ointment for various aches and pains and itches, several old watches, cufflinks (who wears cufflinks?), pebbles, feathers and shells collected from the last beach walk, a Swiss army knife, a pedometer with a flat battery, hearing aid batteries, a scattering of coins, a few buttons that ought to be in the button tin, the thumb splint from last time you had a bout of tendonitis, a well out of date asthma puffer, a well-thumbed copy of Meditations for Men Who Do Too Much, five bookmarks and a card with all your pins and passwords disguised as telephone numbers.

How are we doing so far?

The second drawer of your typical bedside table might be the place you keep bulkier objects like a wheat bag (put in microwave for 40 seconds and apply to aching body part), the leather writing compendium a well-meaning friend gave you for your 21st birthday and which you cannot bear to throw away, even though it is a mid-20thst century curio containing five old address books and a Valentine from 1974.

The bottom drawer is where you should keep a pouch containing important personal papers so you can grab it and run if there is a fire.

If your bedside table has a bottom drawer or a cupboard, you could try a psychological experiment:  Every Sunday night, list everything that has happened in the news this week that you don’t want to think about and lock it away.

A year later you can read these 52 pages: Cardinal Pell. Who was he again? Oh, the asylum seeker babies. The Hague ruled on that, didn’t they? Anyway, they all went live in New Zealand.

A cluttered bedside table can be a trigger for allergens. At least once a month you should throw everything on the bed and give the cabinet a jolly good clean. Then put back less stuff. Go on, you can do it – who needs two watches that don’t work, an empty floss container or a tube of Dencorub with a 2009 use by date?

Some of you might wonder why I didn’t write about asylum seeker babies or Tim Minchin’s song about the cardinal, or that proposal by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry – (journalist Paul Syvret called it a ‘brain fart’) – to turn age pension payments into a loan, repayable on the sale of the pensioners’ home.

As you can clearly see, especially if you zoom to 200% and examine the photo above, I had other things on my mind.

 

Disappearing acts


 

By Guest writer Lyn Nuttall

Introduction by Bob

I did say last week I’d be serving up items from the FOMM archives while I’m away, but could not resist this post by Lyn Nuttall, curator of the website Pop Archives (Where did they get that song?).

The other day some bloke tweeted, “Anyone remember Dionne Warwick?”

Dionne Warwick answered, “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

When I wrote about a Top 20 hit by Sydney singer Jennifer Ryall I said that she was “lost to history”. I hadn’t been able to find out much about her, and there was nothing after the mid-1970s.

Jennifer Ryall finally emailed to tell me she wasn’t lost, and her own history turned out to be rich and varied. In the following days she gave me a lot of information, full of interest, which I used to write up a decent account of her career.

I now avoid suggesting that people are lost, or that they disappeared or vanished, just because they haven’t released any music for a while.

It’s a trap that fans can easily fall into. When a performer we know only through their media persona stops performing, there is a sense that they have literally disappeared.

We might even sympathise with them for their downfall, even if we have no idea what they are doing these days. However fulfilling their life away from the music (or film or TV) business might be, their absence suggests that they no longer do anything. They exist for us on the public stage and when they’ve gone it’s as if they don’t exist.

The jazz trumpeter, composer and bandleader Red Perksey migrated to Sydney via France in 1951. He soon established himself on radio and records, and in live gigs, and he became Musical Director for a Sydney record company.

Red and his orchestra had a hit with (A Little Boy Called) Smiley from the film Smiley Gets A Gun (1958), and they backed Vic Sabrino on his version of Rock Around The Clock (1955), a record some call as the first Australian rock’n’roll record. He was clearly a bright and likeable personality who pops up here and there in the newspaper archives.

Red Perksey 1950s (photo)

In 1958 Red was photographed joshing around poolside at a deejays’ convention, and he was giving lunchtime concerts at a Sydney music store. Then there is nothing. No more listings in the radio guides, no more gigs advertised, no more affectionate write-ups. He disappeared?

I had written what I believe is the definitive biographical sketch of Red Perksey. He was born Siegbert Perlstein in Berlin in 1921, of Jewish German-Polish background. I traced his progress from Berlin in the 30s, to Palestine in the mid-40s and Paris in the late 40s. He and his wife Zizi came to Australia by refugee ship in the early 50s, and were later naturalised here. The only later date I had was his death, in 1995, but from 1958 until then, nothing.

Eventually, someone emails. A niece, probably his only surviving relative, emailed from Paris with some answers.

To Australian audiences, to the Sydney newspapers, and (retrospectively) to this archival forager, Red Perksey had disappeared.

Meanwhile, a couple known as Bert and Anne were living in a remote French village where Bert painted, sculpted and made furniture. Bert was also a musician, and sometimes he joined in with local groups.

To us, they had disappeared; in France, Red Perksey and his wife were in plain view to their fellow villagers.

I guess my point is, there are more places in this world than the public stage.

ends

(Lyn later emailed me to explain how he tracked Red down).

“At the French National Library (BnF) I found song copyrights from 1950, which helped place Red in France and active at that time.

“I got a lead from a French book of pseudonyms at the Internet Archive that gave me his real name. Then he was easy to find at the Israeli national archives. They had had facsimiles of loads of documents to do with him and his wife when they applied for Palestinian citizenship in the 40s, including passport photos, dates of birth etc. A Jewish refugee agency had passenger lists from refugee ships going out to Australia.

And there they both were!”

Postscript by Bob

While I greatly admire Lyn’s dogged pursuit of facts supposedly lost in the dross of pop culture, I probably spoiled it for him with my obscure comment on his blog.

I asked did he know that the Ron Sexsmith wrote a song called ‘Disappearing Act?” This of course had nothing to do with Lyn’s blog other than his headline. Then again, Ron is a brilliant and prolific artist who rarely makes headlines and for a time there (between 2008 and 2011) he too seemed to disappear.

I was never so happy to learn in 2011 that his career was being revived by Canadian heavy metal producer Bob Rock, resulting in Long Player Late Bloomer, Ron’s first album since 2008. A strange coupling but it worked!

I recall Ron Sexsmith appearing at The Zoo, a daggy Fortitude Valley music club, in 2008. Tickets were $45 and the show was just Ron, his baby face and an acoustic guitar. Not a minder or a roadie to be seen.

Happy to report the award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter is this month releasing his 18th album – The Vivien Line. I have no idea what it will be like, but given songs from his back catalogue like Disappearing Act, Gold in Them Hills, Cheap Hotel, Fallen, Whatever it Takes and Secret Heart, I’ll be ordering one. Still not ringing a bell? Ron’s songs have been covered by famous singers including Rod Stewart, k.d Laing, Nick Lowe, Michael Buble and Emmylou Harris. Coldplay’s Chris Martin recorded a duet with Ron of Gold in Them Hills as a bonus track for the 2002 album Cobblestone Runway. That’s the same album featuring Disappearing Act and one of Ron’s best.

 

Why our media mostly ignores New Zealand

New-Zealand-News
Photo of Auckland with rain looming by Bernard Spragg https://flic.kr/p/2kXpL9W

The young New Zealand journalist broadcasting from down town Auckland described the rain storms which drenched Auckland last weekend as ‘completely apocalyptic’.

This may not be overstating the case. as Auckland received 284mm (nearly a foot in the old measurement) in the 24 hours from Friday to Saturday –  and it kept on raining.

As The Guardian reported on Monday, intense rain on January 27 brought more than 200mm in 18 hours, as recorded by most of Auckland’s weather stations. Some parts of the city were hit with more than 150mm in three hours, prompting flash flooding and landslides. These totals are almost 300% of a normal January rainfall and beat the previous record set in January 1986. You have to go back to 1969 to find more rain that that – 420mm in February 1869.

New Zealand is not unaccustomed to rain – you can tell how much the country gets by how green are its valleys. But Auckland is not at all used to cloudbursts on a scale more often associated with northern Queensland or the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast hinterland. ABC Breakfast crossed to a Kiwi correspondent on Monday morning, who used the A word but also added ‘it’s still raining’.

By Tuesday, it had eased to ‘light rain showers’ with precipitation at 19%  and humidity at 89%. As we all know, any amount of rain closely following a 300mm deluge will wreak havoc with saturated catchments.

Generally speaking, you won’t see, hear or read much about New Zealand on Australian media. If it’s not an earthquake, a volcanic eruption or a mass shooting, they usually don’t bother. One of the reasons for this is that Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd does not own any newspaper or electronic media in our Pacific neighbour country.

But journalists and others who support Kevin Rudd’s campaign against News Corp’s monopolistic approach might be disturbed to read this.

News Corp did report on the deluge after it initially discovered that two people had died, and there was scary looking footage on a couple of TV networks. Auckland is built on a chain of extinct volcanoes, so many residents live in houses perched on hillsides. Excessive rain causes landslides or slips, as they are called over there. One news channel had footage of a house in Remuera (think Ascot or Toorak) which in Kiwi parlance was ‘munted.’

I’m due to arrive in Auckland next Thursday. For purely selfish reasons, we hope the rain has gone by the time we get there. Among the news stories to emerge from the wet weekend was the cancellation of Elton John’s two concerts at Mt Smart Stadium, better known as the home of the Warriors rugby league team.

Our contact said Elton was also trapped in Auckland as all flights were grounded during the worst of it. One dejected Elton fan could be heard, wading through the drowned streets, clutching a bottle in a soggy paper bag, lustily singing: “I guess that’s why they call it the blues”.

The Australian chimed in later this week with a report, not so much about the death toll of four, but criticism of Auckland’s Mayor for not doing enough. When do Mayors ever do enough eh?

One of my old friends from newspaper days was a Kiwi who was recruited during a little-known period in Australian newspaper history when there was a dire shortage of sub-editors.

Publishers advertised abroad and subsequently hired experienced people from New Zealand, the UK, Canada, South Africa, Northern Ireland and the Pacific Islands. My friend, now retired, hails from Otago. As I recall, he would arrive 10 minutes early for his shift and sift through the AAP news agency feed looking for stories about New Zealand. These would be copied to an internal directory so that those of us in the building whose accents were often chucked off at could keep up with what’s going on at home.

I’ve not done in depth research, nor could I find any, that makes findings on the Australian media’s scant regard for what happens across the ditch. Jacinda Ardern of course got more column inches than any Kiwi politician since Rob Muldoon. Earthquakes, eruptions and mass shootings also attracted the mainland media pack but not much else. It has to be quirky news, like this week’s announcement of the first All Black rugby union player to come out as openly gay.

The online new website Stuff said the former All Black decided to “open up that door and magically make that closet disappear”. Known as All Black No 1056, Campbell Johnstone, who played three tests for the All Blacks in 2005, did confide in some teammates and his family during his playing days. He made his debut against Fiji and played his last game against the British and Irish Lions.

Statistically speaking, of the 1207 Kiwi men who have played rugby union in the famous black jersey with silver fern, 53 of them would be gay.

That this rates as a ‘news story’ from the Australian perspective is a solid example of editors’ approach to selecting New Zealand news. As Jerry Seinfeld would say ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

We have read stories here about the incoming Prime Minister, replacing Jacinda Ardern. Fair to say he had no media profile in this country, unlike Jacinda, whose shock resignation made headlines in New York, London, France, Canada and Australia.

She may be criticised for not doing enough policy-wise, but she dealt with an unprecedented series of catastrophes in her country that marked her as an international leader of substance. She may be taking time out  to be a wife and mother, but I’m sure we have not heard the last of her in politics or academic life.

One example of big news stories from New Zealand which probably did not rate here are those about three Nobel Prize winning scientists.

The most recent was the late Alan MacDiarmid (2000), while Maurice Wilkins (1962) and Ernest Rutherford (1908) also took out the honour.

Meantime, I’m trying to finish the notes for a Basic Computer Skills course that starts three days after I get back from a family visit to New Zealand. As always, I’m trying to balance spending time between family and friends and also having what young Kiwis used to call a ‘OE’ (overseas experience).

As part of that, we will be attending the first major rugby league game of the season, the Indigenous All Stars vs NZ Maoris at Rotorua. She Who Got Up at 10am New Zealand Time claimed early bird seats and also found (with some difficulty) a place to stay.

Next day we are heading off to Gisborne to spend a few days with my sister before travelling further south to catch up with the rest of the whanau. We will take the inland road through Waioeka Gorge because, something that probably didn’t make the news here, a cyclone has destroyed some parts of the East Cape road.

We were going to take the slow drive (5.5 hours) around the Cape to Gisborne for sentimental reasons. It is a beautiful, unspoiled, under-populated part of the country.

I’m taking a rare holiday from FOMM so the following three weeks will feature (a guest blog) then episodes from my Back Pages (curated from almost nine years of archives). Kia Ora and Aroha.

Physiotherapists in demand

phsyiotherapists-in-demand
Image by Matias Maiztegu, www.pixabay.com

Every day I walk anywhere, I silently thank the physiotherapists who got me back on my feet after a serious motorcycle accident in 1969. Too long ago and yet still traumatic to relate, so I’ll skip the detail of the accident and fast forward to the rehab centre.

Once out of plaster, able to use crutches and manage a flight of stairs, those with serious injuries were packed off to a rehabilitation centre. Those physios, I remember well, were relentless in the quest to restore flexibility and muscle strength to wasted limbs.

I’d fractured both kneecaps and had them removed, so on release from hospital had limited movement. My quads were so far gone I could hook an umbrella around my thigh.

Enter the first physio who introduced me to the pedal-driven lathe, on which we made wooden collection plates, cheese boards, wine goblets and other items that required hours of repetitious pushing up and down, first one foot then the other.

Then it was into the (heated) pool to developed further flexion through weight-bearing exercise. There were sessions with muscle-stimulating machines, weights and frequent massages to break up the scar tissue.

We were given three good meals a day and then sent off to bed at 8.30. One night we all sneaked out and found a pub down the road; discovering it was by no means an original idea.

My knees got better with time, although I still can’t squat down and kneeling is something I’ve learned to do as seldom as possible. If I get a flat tyre I call the RACQ.

I was musing about this on day three of the great rose garden refurbishment project, spending more time on my knees than I’m used to. Once the day warmed up, I’d shower and retire to the lounge to watch the Australian Open. I’m a fair-weather tennis fan and only get engrossed when we’re into the quarter finals.

He Who Was Deported for not Being Vaccinated is back again, and, despite a troublesome hamstring, seems destined to take home the AO trophy. As all the leading tennis pros do, he brought his own physio. He may even have brought two if you peruse this story.

No doubt you have all had dealings with a physio at one time or another. It doesn’t take much. Common complaints referred to physios include lower back problems, broken wrists, ankle sprains, knee injuries, shoulder conditions, achilles tendon and pectoral strains, tendinopathy, arthritis and the dreaded hamstring strain. Novak Djokovic has had a dodgy hamstring since he set foot in Australia but his physios are obviously skilled at keeping him on the court. He is in superb physical condition too, which helps.

Given the dominant form he displayed against Alex de Minaur (6-2 6-1 6-2), his hammies are just fine.

As Novak said early on: “It’s up to God, and my physio to help me. Let’s take it day by day, I hope I’ll be able to recover.”

The hamstrings are the muscles at the back of the thigh, attaching above the hip joint and below the knee joint. Adequate resilience of the hamstring muscles and their tendons, which attach the muscle to bone and are essential for movement, is essential and fostered by sport-specific exercise.

Retired ballet dancer Martin Collyer has just finished undergraduate studies at UQ for a degree in physiotherapy. One of his placements was at a former workplace, Queensland Ballet headquarters in West End. Like all elite athletes with a retirement age around 35, he made plans, initially working as a yoga teacher.

He said he chose to study physiotherapy despite some disappointing experiences with physios on the few occasions when he suffered injuries as a professional dancer.  He related an anecdote from a group he was teaching about a long-term yoga teacher who was studying for a bachelor of physiotherapy. She chose to stop, after four years and much effort.

The reason cited was that physiotherapy was, “too focused on individual joints and muscles; too narrow,” leaving the individual feeling that yoga was a more ‘holistic’ approach. Martin was asked for an opinion.

“I said that while there are tremendous physios, the individual may matter more than the modality. There are great chiropractors working from the evidence base and using exercise as treatment, just as there are physios who may disregard the evidence base.

“Physio’s origins are in massage, but the profession has evolved a great deal over the years. Increasingly, the evidence supports exercise as best-practice management for a majority of musculo-skeletal conditions. This means that the training physios receive, with an emphasis on manual therapy and other passive techniques (e.g. ultrasound), may not adequately support them. While exercise was covered in my physio undergraduate degree, it was arguably insufficient.

“Because of my prior experience in movement and movement coaching, I feel confident with this aspect of practice, but what about the individual who had little experience with sports and exercise prior to studying physiotherapy?”

Through four years of study, Martin said it dawned on him that the issues physios treat are public health problems.

“If more people were more physically active, far fewer people would suffer from musculo-skeletal complaints. The best sort of exercise is the sort you’ll keep showing up to.”

The popularity of physiotherapy as a study course appeals both to those who want to be practitioners and those who use it as an entrée to medical school.

The Australian Physiotherapist Association (APA) tabled recent data that showed there were 35,290 registered physiotherapists in Australia. Physiotherapy continues to be a female-dominated workforce (66%) and a Gen-Z profession with the majority of registrants aged 25–40.

The stumbling block for most people who are referred to a physiotherapist is the cost. Typical fees for a 30-minute or 60-minute session are between $80 and $120 per session. Your GP can issue a chronic condition treatment plan (subsidised) but this has limitations.

The Grattan Institute recently released a paper advocating a review of Medicare arrangements for allied health services.

Grattan Institute author Anika Stobart advocated scrapping the existing Medicare items for allied health and re-directing funding through local Primary Health Networks. These networks would contract providers to perform services with no (or very low) out-of-pocket fees for referred patients.

Stobart says that even though services are subsidised, they can still be very expensive.

“Last year, only 56 percent of allied health services were bulk billed, and patients paid on average $55 out-of-pocket per appointment.

Just this week there were news reports of a pending review of Medicare and its funding model. The Albanese government’s Strengthening Medicare Taskforce recommends moving from subsidising GP consultations alone to wrapping in care provided by nurses and paramedics.

Health minister Mark Butler said the current system is “no longer fit for purpose” and flagged changes in the May budget. Given that one in six GP presentations are for musculo-skeletal conditions, there’s a good case to review the Medicare treatment plan system.

I ran into the treatment plan limitations when seeing a physio for a rotator cuff (shoulder) injury some years ago. I quickly used up my “free” sessions but opted to keep going at around $70 a session. My physio claimed credit for the reduced inflammation and increased mobility over time. I said the symptoms eased once I started taking magnesium tablets. She politely but firmly disagreed.

Seniors becoming savvy about digital technology

Early PC, complete with floppy disk drives source Wikipedia

During a frustrating hour or two updating our websites, I realised I am more savvy than the average 74-year-old when it comes to digital technology. Or so I thought. Later, you will read about how Covid-19 prompted many older Australians to start interacting with Skype, Zoom, WhatsApp and other communications systems.

In what has been a busy month (editing the U3A newsletter, updating three websites, updating our self managed super fund and writing a new song), I am finding time to create a short course in basic computer skills for U3A members. Most of our members are in the over-70s age group and a few do not have access to the Internet. I am hoping some will find a use for U3A’s laptops, which have been in hibernation since Covid broke out in early 2020. In preparation to run the computer course, I took these laptops home and updated them.

It wasn’t too difficult, but these laptops were a reminder of how quickly digital technology becomes obsolete. I was reminded of that last Friday when the WordPress website which hosts this weekly essay “broke”. That’s WordPress community geek-speak for not doing what it’s programmed to do. Therefore, WordPress followers who had subscribed to the blog did not get last week’s email with a link to the website. The blog was still posted to the website, but the electronic sharing didn’t happen. It turned out I’d been ignoring reminders to ‘update your PHP’, which is the software within WordPress that interacts with plugins (or apps) that make the website work efficiently.

(That sound you hear is me snoring, having fallen asleep. Ed)

I am convinced that everyone who uses a computer has a ‘blind spot’, that is, a technological advance with which they cannot cope.

My blind spot would be anything to do with coding, editing the registry, updating drivers or any one of a dozen under-the-bonnet programming tasks. In this case, I asked Craig P from Inmotion Hosting to do the hard work updating PHP (the older versions are ‘deprecated’), and I’d take care of the detail.

Computer hardware and software companies are continually updating their products, to fix glitches in the system and to improve security. They also do it to sustain cashflow. There was a time when you could buy the complete Microsoft Office programme at a retail store and use it seemingly forever at no extra cost. Now they want an annual subscription (which includes updates and support).

I’ve been using a computer at home since the mid-1990s and came into daily newspapers at a time when they were leaving the old technology behind. I learned a lot, but don’t ask me about programming.

She Who Sometimes Shouts at her Computer told me the other day she studied Base 2 in grade seven. Base 2 is a field of mathematics that is particularly germane to computers.

As Wikipedia explains, the base-2 numeral system is that in which each digit is referred to as a bit, or binary digit. Because of its straightforward implementation in digital electronic circuitry, the binary system is used by almost all modern computers and computer-based devices.

Got that? You can log back into Facebook now and carry on regardless.

While kids are learning computer science and coding at school, we of the older cohort rely on the ever-changing versions of Microsoft Windows to make it easy. There have been 11 versions of Windows since 1985. Some, like Windows ME, 2000, Vista and Windows 8, were not perfect, so Windows moved on to 7, 10 and now 11.

One of my contacts in information technology tells me that Windows 11 is the best operating system yet because Microsoft has looked at security first and everything else second.

I haven’t upgraded from 10 yet. I limped along with Windows 7 until it got the point where Microsoft wouldn’t support it at all. As of this month, people with Windows 7 won’t even get security updates.

I set off with this idea of teaching older people how to take control of their computer because the conventional wisdom is that older people struggle with new technology. Our reflexes have slowed and we have leathery fingers – ask anyone.

But maybe not so much in Australia. A recent study by The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) set the record straight.

While older people have trouble navigating touch screen gadgets like smart phones and tablets, in the four years from 2017 to 2020, many were on an IT learning curve and probably still are. ACMA’s report, produced in May 2021, noted changes in the way older people engage with the online world.

While most use the internet at home, they also used a mobile phone to go online when out and about. Their adoption of other digital devices like smart phones, tablets and fitbits is also on the rise.

In mid-2020, ACMA found that 93% of older people had internet access in their home, up from 68% in 2017.

In 2017, only 6% of older people used apps and digital devices to go online. In June 2020, 26% of older people used five or more types of devices to go online.

ACMA says that parallel with their uptake of digital devices, more older people are using the internet for a wider variety of activities and tasks.

“Almost all older people now use email, while banking, viewing video content, and buying goods and services online have increased substantially over the previous 4 years, to become relatively common behaviours for this age-group.”

There was also a quantum leap in the numbers of older people who use apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to make voice calls, video calls and send texts. In 2019 the figure was 33% – a year later it was 55%.

The Pew Research Centre, which keeps tabs on this topic in the US, also noticed growth during the pandemic but observed that 7% of Americans aged over 65 are not online at all.

The Pew Centre said there were notable differences between age groups when measuring the frequency of internet use. Some 48% of those ages 18 to 29 said they were online “almost constantly”.,compared with 22% of those 50 to 64 and 8% of those 65 and older.

Joelle Renstrom, writing in ‘Slate’, an online magazine, said computer and digital technology companies are not designing devices that older people want. Renstrom cited research by Bran Knowles who studies how older people use technology.

Knowles says tech companies don’t see older people as valid stakeholders.

“That’s evident in how they fail to consider seniors’ needs, even when manufacturing products like the Jitterbug, a phone with extra-big buttons.

“Button size doesn’t dictate seniors’ decisions about tech use, and such presumptions highlight Silicon Valley’s bias toward youth.”

The people who drive tech development “can’t imagine what it’s like to be 80”, said Knowles.

Meanwhile, big organisations and governments continue to drive their customers/clients (young and old) to online accounts and digital apps.

RACQ’s Road Ahead magazine reports in its latest edition that drivers will have access to a ‘digital licence app’ in 2023. Queensland’s Department of Transport has been conducting trials since legislation was passed in 2020 to allow development of a digital licence (which will have equal weight to a physical licence). Drivers can store their digital licence on their mobile phone and use it for ID purposes as they travel. The Road Ahead article notes that the new digital licence will be ‘opt-in’ and not compulsory. Phew, we all said.

So, WordPress readers – did you get it?

A message for WordPress followers of Bobwords

January 15, 2023

Sunday on My Mind – a message for WordPress subscribers

I have been updating the back end of my website bobwords.com.au after encountering some issues. It seems none of you received an email with a link to my Friday blog. Nor was it posted to social media. I have been doing some serious upgrading today on this site and thegoodwills.com. Please bear with us as we may have ongoing issues for a while on both websites. For those of you conversant with website management, the problem was software which is ‘deprecated’ – that is, no longer supported.

You can read Friday’s blog here https://bobwords.com.au/record-stores-future/ but I apologise for the no-show to subscribers. It would be handy if a couple of my email subscribers or WP followers let me know they received this by email.

Let me know by email waikareiti<at>gmail.com if you have any issues in the future.

Bob Wilson

The future for record stores

future-record-stores
Image: A selection from the B’s. How many of these do you have?

While my friends in New Zealand were still at school, I was making apprentice wages, spending almost all of it on records. Our small town didn’t have a record store as such, but the local department store stocked the latest pop records. At the time, LPs were pressed at a factory in Wellington owned by His Master’s Voice (HMV). My copy of ‘Please Please Me’ (The Beatles), for example, was issued by Parlophone in Mono. It still plays OK but it sounds thin compared to the sophisticated sounds of Pink Floyd or the Moody Blues.

New Zealand’s music fans had the jump on most other countries when the latest Beatles album became a ‘must have now’ item. The masters were shipped to Wellington and the presses were set to work. Other countries usually had to wait for a shipment of imported records.

‘Please Please Me’ was rushed out by Parlophone in March 1963 (I was 14), so maybe I bought it with money from my paper run. Parlophone was eager to cash in on the title track, the group’s first No 1 hit in the UK.

Roll forward to 2023 and my LP collection is stacked neatly in two cupboards, very rarely played. I have a good quality record player hooked up to my stereo with a pre-amp, so I’m not sure why they don’t get more of a playing. Ah yes, it’s the getting up and flipping the record over to the six or seven tracks on side two.

The big change between my teenage consumption of music and now is that, for the most part, we listened to music in one room. We would typically lie on the floor (parents were out, obviously), and crank up the volume. There may have been alcohol.

By comparison, today’s music listener can stream an endless Spotify playlist from their phone to a Bluetooth speaker at home or in the car (or through earbuds). It might be inferior quality, but it’s easy.

What set me off on this tangent was reading about the imminent closure of the Sanity record chain. Our town has one of their outlets. I didn’t shop there often but bought a few CDs – Kasey Chambers, Troy Casser-Daley. Now, as stocks starts to dwindle, I’m having a look for bargains. They sell DVDs too.

Sanity is closing all 50 stores as leases expire and moving to an online business model. Sanity is not the first retail chain to retire from shopping centres, where so many retailers have found that the foot traffic doesn’t always translate to turnover to offset higher rents.

This is not an isolated development, with a couple of Brisbane record stores closing their doors and Melbourne’s iconic Basement Discs set to do the same. Co-owner Suzanne Bennett told The Age that the impact of Covid and a drop in foot traffic reduced revenue. The CBD store was established for 28 years and famous for its in-store performances by musicians including The Teskey Brothers, Paul Kelly, Billy Bragg and Justin Townes Earle. This is not to say Basement Discs is going out of business. Suzanne and partner Rod Jacobs will continue to operate online and have a dream of opening another shop in the suburbs.

As I discovered, after chatting online with former colleague Noel Mengel, there are still some funky record stores around in Brisbane. But the independents have mostly moved to the suburbs to find cheaper rents.

Noel, who was chief music writer at The Courier-Mail for 15 years, said that most shopping centres had an independent record store. In recent years most have closed or moved to the suburbs.

“Every shopping centre had one, usually as well as Sanity or HMV, for example Sounds at Chermside, Brookside Music Centre and Toombul Music. Rockaway Records is a groovy store still going at Carindale Shopping Centre. It used to be near the Paddington shops before that.

“There are lots of Indie record stores now in Brisbane, but rents are too high in shopping centres. The independents include Sonic Sherpa at Stones Corner, Stash Records at Camp Hill, Dutch Vinyl in Paddington and Jet Black Cat in West End. So that niche market, import vinyl thing is going OK.

“But those shops really used to add something to the shopping centres.”

Rockaway, established in 1992, is one of the last indie stores in Brisbane shopping centres. Long-established Rocking Horse Records and Record Exchange continue to trade in the CBD.

As music production formats and distribution began to change, famous record stores like Harlequin and Skinny’s disappeared. Even with Sanity moving out, there are still big retail chains in shopping centres like JB Hi Fi that sell CDs and vinyl albums.

We old school music listeners grew up browsing record stores, from the days of vinyl in the 1960s, through the transition to cassettes (1970s) and CDs (the 1990s) and into the brave new world of downloading and streaming music. This arguably began with Apple Itunes in 2001, although the original Napster found a way in 1999 for users to share music through peer-to-peer file sharing.

Although it was shut down in 2002 after a plethora of legal actions, you may be aware that Napster re-emerged later under new owners and is now a legitimate alternative to Spotify.

The best and most popular physical record stores are those that specialise in rare and second-hand vinyl. They are not always easy to find, as they need to find a shop in the suburbs where rents are viable.

Long-time reader Franky’s Dad (aka Lyn Nuttall) is someone who has a history of browsing in such shops. These days though he confesses to preferring streaming services like Spotify.

“Platforms like this are made for me. They seem to have every track in the universe. They don’t of course, but lately my bowerbird approach is served by YouTube, where numerous collectors seem to have posted their entire collections.
“These days I can find even the most obscure or lost tracks from the 50s and 60s”.

Lyn, who hosts the website poparchives began collecting vinyl 45s via mail order in the 1980s & 1990s, mostly through record auctioneers – “I think I paid the rent of one bloke in Sydney.”
“I do miss combing through the racks for the physical object. Even at the time I used to say that half the pleasure was the hunt and the item in your hand after you’d paid for it.”

Noel Mengel, now a freelance journalist who also plays in his own band, The Trams, says Brisbane is well served by independent, suburban record stores.

As the figures below show, there has been rapid growth in demand for vinyl records. Noel welcomed the recent addition of a vinyl pressing factory in Brisbane as there were previously huge delays for those pressing vinyl.

“The community radio station 4ZZZ does a great job playing Queensland music and the independent stores sell their records.”

Figures from ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) show that vinyl album sales ($28.51 million) outsold CD albums ($23.90 million) for calendar year 2021. Vinyl sales have increased steadily since 2012 (then just $1.85 million) compared to CD sales in that year ($193.49 million).

All of which reminds me I promised my niece I would bring some of my old jazz records when we visit NZ next month. She and her husband only listen to vinyl. I reckon they are on to something.

Last week: It was Wirth’s Circus.

New Year rolling relentlessly along

My friend Joy sent one of Jacquie Lawson’s life-affirming animated cards for New Year, a positive message delivered as a calendar, pages flipping to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. It was a northern hemisphere theme, but the message was universal – the wonders of nature.

As for last week’s flippant item about fluffy news, the opening days of 2023 delivered anything but. At New Year drinks, assembled guests inevitably began talking about the bad news of preceding days and weeks. The Tara shooting is still (and probably always will be), bewilderingly pointless. There are Court cases to come involving a traffic accident in which three people died. There’s the home invasion which left a young mother dead and her husband injured. There were drownings, fatal car accidents and a helicopter crash that killed four people.

Where’s a cat up a tree story when you need one?

For my part, I’ve been quite busy as one of my pro bono jobs is editing the U3A Warwick newsletter, an 18-page publication (due today). I was chasing up sponsors who booked advertising space. I made up an ad in Publisher and sent it for approval, quietly invigorated by finding that I can be multi-skilled at my age.

Mind you, race walker Heather Lee (96), could teach me a thing or two. ABC Breakfast interviewed Heather (a lone, good news contribution). She was lamenting that she can no longer compete in her age group – because she’s the only one.

Watching Heather briskly walking, arms swinging, made me prise myself out of the recliner, stretch my hammies and vow to return to the gym. If you make New Year resolutions, that should be Number 1, really. If we’re not fit and active, chances are we’ll soon be on a wheelie walker or in a wheelchair.

Neither of these options appeal to me, but at 70+ with diagnosed brittle bones, I have made getting fitter than I am a priority.

It’s all about exercise, stretching, lunging, eating good food and drinking lots of water; it’s also about brisk walking, not quite the Heather Lee standard but not dog-walking pace either.

The realisation that I was not as fit as I have been came while trudging around the Woodford Folk Festival site, up hill and down, on roads which had been knocked about by rain. I had not been to Woodford for some years. It was always tiring, no matter how fit you were. One year at Woodford, realising that the tiredness comes from the endless walking from one venue to another, I took up residence at one venue and stayed there for the duration. It sure was better than catching the last song of John Butler’s set or not being able to get into the tent when you wanted to be in the front row.

Woodford, with its teeming thousands milling about, is a place where you might meet someone you know and then again, not. In previous years, it seemed as if our age group (the over-60s) was well represented. This year, it was like being at Splendour in the Grass. Most attendees seemed to be in the 18-29 age group and of course there were kids and babies everywhere.

I was one of the few men I spotted wearing jeans. Most were clad in shorts, long hippy pants or on occasions, sarongs. Hardly anyone wore a hat (Albo did), and I guess they will pay for it later.

We were there for the 9am tribute to the extraordinary folk singer, comedian and writer John Thompson, who died in February 2021, aged 56. His widow Nicole Murray put the show together with the help of friends Fred Smith and Ian Dearden. They covered a lot of territory in just 50 minutes; there were performances from singers who’d been in bands with John, a special Morris Dance to the tune of his song ‘Brisbane River’ and a spooky rendition of The Parting Glass by the Spooky Men’s Chorale. As director Stephen Taberner told the full-house crowd, John had at one point joined the Spookies for a tour of the UK. If you did not know of John, you might have seen him as the Songman in the stage production Warhorse, which toured Australia and New Zealand.

A cheerful highlight of the tribute was a rendition of John’s song ‘Bill and the Bear’, about a Maleny man who wrestled a bear at Wirth’s Circus, back in the day. A scratch orchestra led by brass player Mal Webb marched in from the back of the venue to play the extended instrumental.

It was an appropriately sombre, hilarious, cheerful and tearful event. John would have been incredulous that he could draw a full house at a 9am festival gig.

From there, I wandered off to catch Jem Casser-Daley at one of her first Woodford gigs. Jem played piano and was backed by a drummer and bass player. She’s young and her songs are mostly about feeling young and vulnerable, broken relationships or being stood up for a date. She’s confident, natural, has a beautiful voice and showed her musical pedigree by including two covers. First came Neil Young’s ‘Harvest Moon’, maybe inspired by A.J. Lee and maybe not, and then delving into her Dad’s record collection to come up with Carole King’s ‘It’s Too Late’, Baby. Jem Casser-Daley, star of the future.

I found my way back to the 9am venue in time for Eric Bogle’s sound check in which the pithy Scotsman sang ‘For nearly 60 years I’ve been a jockey’. Later, he sang the real song with great heart, as he always does. As a songwriter who is always asked to sing the same one or two songs at gigs, I felt for Eric once again working through ‘No Man’s Land’ (also known as ‘The Green Fields of France’), which was a huge hit for the Fureys and set Eric off on the life of a touring musician. At 77, he’s still in good voice, quipping away between songs and bantering with fellow musicians, Emma Luker (fiddle) and Pete Titchener (guitar and vocals). I feel tired just writing this, but Eric went from a tour of New Zealand in October to a 13-concert tour here in November and a few gigs in December before the tour bus rolled into Woodford. As the quote goes on his tour posters: ‘A mixture of loquacious Scottish humour and exceptionally heartfelt folk songs’. (The Irish Times).

Songwriters tend to become identified with a certain type of song – in Bogle’s case songs about World War I. He told his Woodford audience that he had published 230 songs, of which only 12 are about WWI. He also revealed he had registered ‘No Man’s Land’ under both titles!

Eric is one of three songwriters who wrote a tribute for John Thompson, ‘Catching the Wave’, which is on his latest album, Source of Light.

Fred Smith, better known for songs about the conflict in Afghanistan, penned the as-yet unreleased ‘Sweet Ever After’, watching John’s funeral on Zoom from his room in Kabul. Brisbane folk singer Ian Dearden, a long-time friend and associate, wrote ‘Song for John’ which can be found on Bandcamp.

I like to remember John Thompson as he was – a warm fellow with a brilliant mind, feverish sense of humour, a grand voice, clever writer, sometimes impatient but always with good intentions.

It’s so hard to refer to him in the past tense.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cat up a tree time of year

cat-up-a-tree-journalism
Photo from www.pixabay.com No, it’s not a Jarrah, but there’s a cat in there!

Here’s a heart-warming story, filed this morning by our intrepid reporter, Abigail Featherweight, on location at Jumpinup Downs, WA.

(Video shows a fire truck pulled up next to a very tall tree where a shirtless fireman in the basket of a cherry picker is rescuing a cat, which, having not only got stuck at the top of the tree, gave birth there to seven kittens).

Morning show host Gavin Brighteeth: Hi Abbey – tell us what’s going on.

Abigail, breathlessly brushing back tendrils of thin blonde hair from an angular face, nodding, as they teach television reporters to do.

“Hi Gavin, good of you to give this story a spin. As you may have heard in the voice-over, a missing neighbourhood cat, Charlize, was found this morning perched in the branches of this 25m Jarrah tree. (Telephoto closeup of Charlize nestled in a pocket of branches where she’s nurturing the seven kittens she gave birth to this morning).

Abigail: It was fireman Vince Colloseum to the rescue, after first taking off his shirt, as it is a steamy 42 degrees this morning at Jumpinup Downs, where this magnificent old tree stands alone at an intersection. Environmental activists who campaigned to save the tree amid urban development dubbed it “Last Jarrah Standing”.

“I see Vince is coming down with yet another two kittens, his muscular torso glistening with sweat.

“Vince is not only a fireman, he is a dedicated body builder and was Mr September in last year’s Firies Calendar. (close up of Vince’s glistening torso).

Abigail, thrusting her mike in Vince’s face: Vince, this is awesome – how many kittens have you rescued now?

Vince: Six, Abbey, so there is one more and Mum, which will be the last load.

Abigail: I see you have been scratched numerous times, Vince?

Vince: “Just a flesh wound or two, hahaha. You have to expect that with cat up a tree rescues. I’ve saved dozens over the years but this is the first one that gave birth way up there.”

Producer in Abigail’s earbud: “Can you find the cat’s owner and interview her now before we go to the next story?”

Vince climbs back into the cherry picker basket and is lofted high into the canopy. The small crowd of locals cheer.

Gavin: Leaving Abigail Featherweight at Jumpinup Downs and crossing to a breaking story where six rusting drums thought to contain pesticide have washed up on Buggerup Beach.

If you haven’t encountered a fluffy news story like that over Christmas, trust me, you will. There are 23 more days of this sort of bumf before school goes back and industry and commerce resumes.

Most news organisations assign reporters to assemble what is known in news parlance as the Yearender. Typically, it will remind us of all the awful things that happened since January 1, 2022, things most of us would rather forget.

If you want to quick snapshot of what the media concentrated on, online media and marketing specialist Mumbrella ran a feature from media-monitoring group Streem.

As Streem’s communications director Jack McClintock said, despite hopes that we had put the pandemic behind us, “Wall-to-wall COVID coverage in the opening months of 2022 ensured it would be the top story of the year.”

“As the year unfolded, numerous other major news events took place, including the War in Ukraine, the 2022 Federal Election and the death of The Queen. Add to these significant events strong undercurrents of cost of living pressures, including inflation and energy prices, and 2022 was as big a news year as they come.”

Covid dominated media discussions for seven months this year, interrupted only by big stories including Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine, the March Federal election, the death of Queen Elizabeth and massive flooding in parts of eastern Australia.

Queen Elizabeth II’s death on September 9 was the most prominent story on one single day, Streem observed. Other big single-story days included the COVID wave in early January, Ukraine’s initial invasion and Shane Warne’s death on March 4.

As for the media ‘Person’ of the year, honours were shared (in Australia) between Vladimir Putin, Scott Morrison, and Anthony Albanese. All had very high peaks in prominence, and a strong level of sustained media attention. The exception was in January, when tennis player and prominent anti-vaxxer Novak Djokovic claimed headlines by his arrival (and subsequent expulsion) for the 2022 Australian Open.

https://mumbrella.com.au/streem-insights-reveal-the-biggest-news-stories-of-2022-769537

All is forgiven, apparently, as Novak is scheduled to play in Adelaide and Melbourne next month. Also in the forgiven category was Premier Daniel Andrews, an emphatic winner of the Victorian election in November.

As we know the mainstream media (MSM) allots the biggest headlines and pictures and the longest radio or TV coverage to the ‘if it bleeds it leads’ category of news story. These days television is aided and abetted by amateur reporters who file breaking news videos for broadcast to live television. The most recent example was the fuel tanker explosion near the South African town of Boksburg which killed at least 15 people. The actual explosion was caught on a smart phone and broadcast by international media. Reports like this have led to many news broadcast warnings that ‘some people may find this footage distressing’. You reckon?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-64086051

Most television channels now have a section devoted to ‘good news stories’, although I don’t always agree with their definition.

For example, in November there was a frantic search going on to find a man who bought a winning Powerball (lottery) ticket in Forster (NSW). This angle was spun until the man was contacted and notified days later he had won $50 million. And much was made of the Australian soccer team making its way to the World Cup quarter finals. No! We lost!

My definition of a good news story was when Shayla Phillips (4) and her dog went missing in dense Tasmanian bushland. We were in Tassie at the time (March) and could appreciate the concern as night temperatures plummeted. Shayla was found safe, dehydrated but well after two nights alone in the bush.

Earlier this month, grave fears we held for four teenagers on paddleboards who drifted into rough seas off the Mornington Peninsula. They were found safe the following day, but stranded on a remote island .

Good news from FOMM’s perspective included the Federal Government’s commitment to a 43% reduction in CO2 emissions and the first group of refugees leaving Nauru, bound for New Zealand.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese kept an election promise to quickly resolve the long-running saga of the Tamil refugees. The Nadesalingam family were released from years of detention, granted permanent visas and allowed to return to Biloela, where they had formed a community bond.

I’ll get off my soap box now and let you start the countdown to January 1, 2023. I imagine almost all of you (at a party) will form a circle and sing Robert Burns’ ‘Auld Lang Syne’, whether you know the words or not.

Maybe this can be a year when we who are most fortunate reflect on those who are not. As Burns said:

“Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it, But we hae meat and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thankit.”