thegoodwills.com

Halloween and other imports

V mask — Thumbs up from the Guy photo by Internet’s_dairy https://flic.kr/p/4Wb2AU

The prediction in 1940-something that Mother’s new bairn would be born in late October may have caused some angst. In Scotland, those of a superstitious nature would have been in a ‘swither’ (a state of nervous agitation). But “no worries” as we say in Australia. I was born the day before Halloween, with 22 hours to spare.
My friend Ingrid says that apart from it being her birthday, October 31 is a ‘non-event’. But her American friends are horrified, in a swither, even, because of the tradition that deems the 31st to be the date departed spirits return to earth.

The chances of giving birth on Halloween (October 31) are considerably lower than those who drop a sprog on Valentine’s Day (February 14), according to the journal Social Science and Medicine. Researchers studying birth data a week either side of those dates said the chance of giving birth on Halloween dropped by 11.3%, with 16.9% fewer C-sections, 18.7% fewer induced births and 5.3% fewer spontaneous births. On Valentine’s Day, statistics say the likelihood of giving birth rises by 5% and Caesarean births are 12.1% more likely, prompting speculation that women deliberately schedule C-sections to have Valentine’s Day babies.
I have vague early childhood memories of Halloween in Scotland where bairns wear ghost costumes and go door knocking. You don’t get something for nothing in Scotland. You had to sing, dance or recite poetry to be rewarded with a sweetie.

Cultural invasion

Meanwhile, the traditions of Halloween, or to be more precise, the retail world’s version, have been imported to Australia. It’s a relatively new thing, but gathering pace, year by year.
Former colleague Jeff Sommerfeld, also an October 31 baby, says he was spared trick and treaters for years by virtue of living in an inner city apartment, where door knockers rarely strayed. But since he moved to the country, it’s a different matter.
“Last year I was quietly watching television on October 31 when I heard the doorbell ring and to my surprise there were children, escorted by a parent who cried out “trick or treat”. I did not chase these people away, but rummaged through my cupboard and found some lollies that I have for sweet tooth indulgences.
I presented these treats to the people at the door and they left. That is my first and only encounter with Halloween.”
Jeff and I share a dislike of the incursion of American culture into our way of life.
“What is interesting is the hit and miss uptake of American culture,” he says. “We like The Simpsons and 7-Eleven, but have not warmed to Starbucks.”

Retail therapy for some

The brutal truth of the matter is the retail sector needs to cram its calendar with special days that will boost turnover and present opportunities to sell unique stock. It starts with Australia Day and the related merchandise, which includes flags to fly from your car, real flags, Australian flag flip-flops, stubby holders and cigarette lighters, packs of cards, beach towels and sun hats. The fiscal joy for retailers of this strictly Australian event is that unsold stock can be stored away until next year.
Then comes Valentine’s Day – a big thing in Australia with almost 90% of people aged 18-24 said to mark the day of lovers in some significant way. Ibisworld Research estimated that Australians spent almost $800 million on Valentine’s Day in 2014, $42 million of which went on restaurant meals.
There are other imported anniversaries which cynics dub “Hallmark Holidays”, including Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day.

Penny for the Guy

Some of you Brits will notice how I skipped over Guy Fawkes (November 5), a macabre celebration which now barely registers in Australia. It was quite a thing when we were children and the custom is still big in New Zealand, albeit tightly regulated.
The sale of fireworks was banned in Australian states in the 1980s, partly because of injuries and burns, but also because of the risk of bush fires in November.
The custom is still popular in the UK, where people start building bonfires in October while children make “guys” which are traditionally burned on Guy Fawkes’ night. For the benefit of readers under 40, a summary: The Brits foiled a plot to blow up the House of Lords on November 5, 1605. Spanish anarchist Guy Fawkes, who was found guarding a stock of explosives associated with the “Gunpowder Plot”, was arrested, tortured, and executed. Every year thereafter on November 5, effigies are ceremonially burned, with or without Guy Fawkes masks, while fireworks are let off.You may have seen the stylised face mask (pictured above), designed by British artist David Lloyd as part of the 1988 book series V for Vendetta. The mask has become well-known through the movie of the same name. It has also been appropriated by the Hacktivist group Anonymous, worn at protests and rallies, including Occupy Wall Street.
Lloyd created the original mask image for a comic strip written by Alan Moore. He told Rosie Waites of BBC News Magazine the mask had become a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny.
“I’m happy with people using it, it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way,” he said.

The Pagans and the Christians
Before we drive a stake into Halloween for another year, let me tell you about the bizarre ritual that the US blog zine Jezebel dubbed “Slutoween.”
Sydney Morning Herald fashion editor Paula Joye was invited to a Halloween soiree in 2011. After donning a traditionally appropriate outfit, she arrived to find something resembling a Hugh Hefner garden party.
“There was a Cinderella wearing a dress so tiny that it didn’t cover her bottom, but that was lucky because it gave everyone a better view of her white garter belt and fishnets. A latex clad nurse was standing next to the slippery dip talking to a policewoman in hot pants and a ed lace bra. My PG afternoon had suddenly turned Pay Per View.”

The skanky witch takeover is but one diversion from ancient traditions. No wonder there is a Catholic-led campaign to “reclaim Halloween”.
Francine Pirola of www.cathfamily.org says parents are wise to approach the festival with caution. Trick-or-treating can lead children into a “mind-set of greed and an expectation of free handouts”, she wrote in 2012. “Further, the association of Halloween with pagan ritual can feed an unhealthy fascination with the occult.”
Some Christian families want to redeem Halloween from these unsavoury associations because of its links to ancient traditions. Halloween is, after all, the evening before All Saints Day which the Church celebrates on November 1st. All Souls Day follows on November 2nd, when Catholics pray for all the dead.

An apple a day

Meanwhile, Mr Sommerfeld has stocked his country larder for this year’s trick and treaters.
“I intend to answer the door this year and present any children with a fresh apple. I think the spirit of giving is important, so if we are going to be dragged into another American cultural tradition, let us shape it and give children something that is good for them, rather than things that add to obesity and dental issues.”

Tick talk

ixodes_holomale — Paralysis tick – image by Stephen Doggett

The following should not be construed as medical advice. If itching persists, see your doctor.

One Sunday morning in October 2013 I woke early with a weird sensation behind my ear. Half asleep I picked the tick off that was embedded in my scalp. Less than a minute later my body erupted in a full-scale hives-like rash, my lips began tingling and I began wheezing. I jumped in the shower to see if that would ease the dreadful itching (I had angry red welts all over my body). I began to feel quite ill; hyperventilating and feeling light-headed. She Who Took Me To Hospital looked about as worried as I’d ever seen her. Not that I was caring much. By then I was feeling fit to pass out.
At Maleny Soldiers Memorial Hospital, known for its focused care and attention to patients (and a missing apostrophe), staff swung into action. The nurse on duty administered antihistamines and summonsed the doctor. The doctor ordered up Ventolin as he was not happy with the way my lungs were sounding. While that was happening, various nurses and doctors wandered back and forth to see how I was doing, all the while monitoring my blood pressure. The doctor returned and gave me an injection of adrenalin. Instantaneously the rash disappeared, my blood pressure started to normalise and I began to feel well enough to start contemplating my new-found status as being allergic to Ixodes holocyclus, or the paralysis tick.
As a precaution, I was admitted to hospital, remaining for the next 36 hours, during which time I was carefully monitored. The house concert we’d planned for that afternoon passed me by. Our guest musicians, Sarah Calderwood and Paul Brandon played on, and after the gig called in to visit me, along with a couple of friends who’d come for the house concert and found me missing in action.
Hospitals around South-East Queensland reported a higher than normal incidence of tick anaphylaxis that summer. A tick attack in an allergic individual is serious business. An allergic reaction causes the blood pressure to drop rapidly. The issue is that you could lose consciousness before being able to get help. If your airways swell up and become blocked, well, it’s game over.
It’s a bit hard avoiding ticks when you live on the eastern seaboard, as they are commonly found from Cape York to Tasmania and up to 30 kms inland.
The tick is also found in the Australian Capital Territory and a similar tick is found around Launceston in Tasmania. The common hosts are bandicoots, possums, brush turkeys, kangaroos and koalas.

A new way of life

I was sent me on my way with two Epipens and careful instructions on how to use them (as was She Who Hopes She Never Has to Stick a Needle in the Scribe) and a prescription for oral cortisone. It was also suggested I keep antihistamines handy as well as Lyclear, which is an ointment used to treat scabies. The drill is to carefully inspect your body for ticks after gardening or bushwalking (I do lots of both), and if you find one, dab some Lyclear on it and later remove it with tweezers or patented tick removers.

Sorry, I had to stop writing just then and go into the bathroom to inspect my nether regions. You?

Ticks can roam around on your body for up to two hours before latching on in body crevices, armpits, groin, behind the knees, on the head, behind the ears and on the back of the neck under the hairline.

The tick goes through four life stages over the course of a year. The following is a precis from an excellent website maintained by Tiara (Tick Induced Allergies Research and Awareness).

Ticks are commonly found in wet sclerophyll forests and temperate rainforests. The mature female will lay 2,500 to 3,000 eggs in moist leaf litter before she dies. Only a few of these eggs survive to adulthood. The eggs hatch as six legged larvae which must obtain a blood meal before they can moult to the next stage. These are the tiny ticks that show up on your body as itchy red welts. The larva climbs to the top of the nearest vegetation and waits for a passing host. The larva feeds on the host’s blood for four to six days, then drops off the host and moults to the eight-legged nymph stage. Nymphs seek a further blood meal for four to eight days before moulting to the adult tick. Adult female ticks feed for 10 days, drop off the host and then lay eggs over several weeks.

(Sorry I just had to duck upstairs for a quick shower. You?)

Before my body decided it had enough of ticks and tried to reject their toxins, I had numerous incidents where large ticks had embedded themselves in various parts of my body. I was savvy enough to know the tick should be killed before removal. If you try to forcibly remove the tick while it is still alive (guilty as charged), there is a risk the tick will release a toxic dose of saliva into your body. Even if you’ve had a mild to moderate reaction, the next time could be more serious.
By far the strangest allergic reaction to a tick is an allergy to mammalian flesh as a result of a prior tick bite. This used to be an extremely rare condition, but sadly it is now more common than either doctors or their patients would like. Imagine having to become a vegetarian or restrict your diet to fish and chicken because eating red meat makes you desperately ill?
I hear a few of you scoffing – check out this Catalyst programme from February.
The key to avoiding a tick bite is precautions. Some people react by moving somewhere else. But if you think about the distribution, moving is probably futile, unless you plan to move to the desert.
This is not an exhaustive list of precautions but contains the handiest hints I know.
• Wear light-coloured, long sleeved shirts and tuck your trousers into your socks or wear gumboots when gardening or bushwalking;
• wear a wide-brimmed hat;
• Sensitive individuals should apply personal insecticide to exposed flesh and on their gardening/walking clothes;
• Remove gardening/bushwalking clothes outside the house and immediately have a shower, carefully inspecting your body;
• Some people put gardening clothes in the dryer on hot for 10 minutes, supposedly to kill any ticks loitering there;
• Mow lawns frequently and be aware that ticks can crawl up your pant legs;
• If you are allergic, buy an insulated baby bottle pouch and carry your Epipen at all times. Replace every 12 months;
• Guinea fowl and chooks eat ticks. But chooks destroy gardens and guinea fowl have a braying call that might annoy you or your neighbours.
There are electronic gadgets that emit ultrasonic sound that is said to repel ticks up to 3 metres. I bought one last year from the chemist and can report that I’ve not had a tick latch on to me when I’ve been wearing it.
You probably guessed by now I’ve been lured out to the garden to take control of the spring weed growth. So far the ticks don’t seem to be as bad as the bindi-eyes – but it’s early days.

Each cliche a cliffhanger

SONY DSC — Image by Tom Newby https://www.flickr.com/photos/noodle93)

She Who Reads Newspapers: “Dear, it seems a raft of measures has been swept out to sea by a storm of protest.”
“Zounds,” I say (exhuming an archaic oath meaning indignation). “That will teach them not to put all their eggs in one basket.”
There was a time when a journalist wouldn’t touch a cliché with a barge pole, as Nigel Rees says in the introduction to his book, The Joy of Cliches. We all ought to have learned this at our mothers’ knees. Or as per a poster in a venerable Fleet Street news room: “Cliches should be avoided like the plague”. That said, the word itself as a double-word score is worth 26 points.

A cliché is an expression which has lost its original meaning through over-use and thus become trite or irritating. More persistent is the over-use of axioms (a phrase as self-evident as to be taken as a truth) and idioms (wise but clichéd sayings which often make no literal sense).
Today’s generation of journalists seem wedded, indeed married to the notion of over-using axioms, idioms and clichés. Battening down the hatches, they defy the fickle finger of fate, avoid being hoist with their own petards and keep everyone on tenterhooks.
According to worldwidewords.org, it is a long time since anyone saw a tenter, never mind the hooks. It refers to a process of making woollen cloth involved drying and stretching lengths of wet cloth on wooden frames (tenters), allowing them to dry and straightening their weave. Metal hooks were used to fix the cloth to the frame.
To be on tenterhooks, translating to someone being in a state of anxious suspense, goes back a bit. While fabric makers were using both tenters and hooks from the 11th century, the exact phrase on tenterhooks was first used by Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random in 1748.

Cliches to avoid like the paralysis tick

Steve Lautenschlager compiled 1658 splendid examples of the clichés to which so many of us turn when written or verbal expression finds us wanting. Among these gems are those that mention bridges, under which much water has flowed.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, that is, unless we’ve already burnt it.”

You could spend a bit of time, as I did, hunting down the supposed derivation of such clichéd phrases as ‘dressed to the nines’ (attributed to tailors using nine yards of cloth to make a suit). ‘Too many chiefs and not enough Indians’ is the original and now politically incorrect way of denigrating office politics, committees, boards and editorial meetings. One can vary this to ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ or ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ – in all, they mean too many people attempting to achieve something and in the end achieving nothing.

Babies and bathwater

Now contemplate the vividly awful image of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I suppose it depends what floor you’re on. It also brings a new twist to the 19th century French warning “Garde à l’eau” which residents bellowed before throwing their bedpan contents out of the upstairs bedroom window.

The baby and the bathwater idiom means to discard something valuable along with something not wanted, from the German proverb, Das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten, first recorded in English in 1853 by Thomas Carlyle.

Australian journalist Chris Pash has become the unofficial curator of cliché use in journalism.
Pash went through the Dow Jones Factiva database to short-list seven howlers he claims are the worst – in fact he challenges readers to put them all in one sentence. So here goes:

“At the end of the day, there was a split second outpouring of support for the unsung heroes who, after a last ditch effort, saved concerned residents from an embarrassing about face.”

I would have thought ‘sort after’ might get a mention.

Making a sow’s ear and all that

We all should know why journalists, particularly those who have to turn around fresh radio news every half hour, resort to snatching things out of thin air, saving a stitch in time, keeping their shoulder to the wheel, going the extra mile and cutting off their editor’s nose to spite his face.
A fresher way to express the latter would be to say that Alice, who in doing something bad to her editor out of a need for revenge, caused herself more harm because she is now perceived as a hateful harpy who can’t spell “sought after”.
It is truly disturbing in 2015 to peruse Nigel Rees’s book and the chapter about clichés in journalism (he wrote the book in 1984), to find that many are not, as one might expect, dead as a doornail. When all’s said and done, the smell of midnight oil or martyrs burning ought to set alarm bells ringing.

Rees says one of the more useful clichés for a journalist is ‘amid mounting’ – which as he coyly observes has nothing to do with horses or sex. Only journalists can use ‘amid mounting’ as it can be appended to any number of news stories linked to words like ‘opposition’ ‘derision’ ‘calls for his or her resignation’ (or in Oz) ‘calls for another leadership spill’.

Don’t drop the petard

The Phrase Finder’s Gary Martin observes just how many of the tired old maxims and tropes we use derive from the Bard himself, William Shakespeare. Consider “Hoist with your own petard.” (Hamlet 1602). A petard is, or rather was, a small bell-shaped device full of gunpowder used to blow breaches in gates or walls. Once you know what it means, being ‘hoist with your own petard’ is easy to fathom. It’s like pulling the pin out of a grenade in a trench then dropping the damn thing so it rolls downhill and under a plank and by the time you lift the plank…
Basically it means hurting yourself while in the act of trying to hurt others. The analogy would not be lost on Tony Abbott, nor, to be fair, on Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd, or, in the fullness of time, Malcolm Turnbull.

Throwing glasses at castle walls

We could have some more fun with this but the real reason writers use common clichés and weary phrases is it soaks up the word count in less than no time, or no time at all if you prefer. But it’s a risky business pointing out other writers’ flaws.

As a waggish writer (possibly moi), once quoth: “People who live in stone houses shouldn’t throw glasses.”

So I’ll admit to playing with fire, stirring up an ant’s nest or even opening a can of worms, though why anyone would keep a can of worms in the pantry is anyone’s guess.

I just go with the flow, you know, Steve’s handy cliché list at hand. I’m running with wolves, burning the candle at both ends, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Speaking of which, it’s time to rest on my laurels, so to speak, and hand this over to She Who has Eyes in the Back of her Head, the most sort (sic –Ed!) after editor this side of the Black Stump.

Talking to the empty chair

Chair on beach Jasleen Kaur — https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasleen_kaur/)

A good few decades ago, I’m having time off work; my more attuned friends describe it as ‘having a rest from his mind’.
Friends have come to visit. Some kind of coincidence, the four of them – all psychologists – sitting around the table on the back veranda. I’m wearing the top half of a pair of pyjamas, a Sulu (Fijian garment) and slippers. I’m doped to the eyeballs – diaze-something, a blobby sponge soaking up everything and feeling nothing.
The overwhelming memory is of these four psychologists, having a quiet glass of wine in the late afternoon, looking at me with this kindly detachment, a bit like a vet examining an old dog whose time has come.

Time to talk to the empty chair

Apparently it’s Mental Health Month in New South Wales – a bit of an improvement on raising the issue for a week, like elsewhere, then forgetting about it for the rest of the year. NSW Mental Health Commissioner John Feneley was making a case in a Sydney Morning Herald column on Monday asking people to think about people with serious mental health disorders – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and unrelenting forms of depression – and try to get over the instinct to avert our eyes.
One in five Australians suffer from some form of mental health disease – be it one of the basket of ailments usually described as neurosis (depression, anxiety, OCD, phobias) or long-term psychotic disorders like schizophrenia.

So let’s talk about neurosis and remember we’re talking about a sliding scale here. When it comes to dealing with what my mother’s generation called ‘an attack of the nerves’, most of us take the medication the GP gave us and lie down until the feeling passes. Not going to work really helps.
Once you understand the nature of a panic attack and no longer feel you are going to die on the spot, a brown paper bag is a handy accessory.
Some decide they need to talk to someone about the root cause, so flick through the yellow pages looking for a registered psychologist. It shouldn’t be hard – there are 32,766 registered psychologists in Australia. There are many more whose expertise is not endorsed by the Psychology Board of Australia so they hang out the ‘counsellor’ sign.
I have had a few fruitful adventures with counsellors of one kind or another – talking to the empty chair, picking up the heavy rock (and putting it down again).

Blessed are the toast-makers

Psychologists know which buttons to press. Whenever I get up late at night for a snack, I still remember what one counsellor said about this nervous habit.
“What would happen if you didn’t eat toast?”
Before eventually ‘seeing someone’, I took refuge in daily journals in which I had been scribbling since the early 1970s. (Executors have been instructed to build a Charles Dicken-style bonfire with these diaries). Interesting now to find references to a ‘periodic head-check’ which was my way of dealing with psychological problems – to have an imagined conversation between your addled self and an older, wiser, sober self. The following is for entertainment purposes only; it may be a figment of the writer’s fertile imagination and should not be construed as advice, medical or otherwise.

Searching for Dr Zeitgeist

Dr Zeitgeist: It’s been a while.
BW: “Looks like rain – probably will.”*
Dr Z (consults file): Hah! You quoted Eeyore last time you were here. Is he a permanent fixture in your life then?
BW: (turns to examine his bottom) “It’s not much of a tail, but I’m sort of attached to it.”*
Dr Z: (aside) Did you know Disney has trademarked the names Pooh and Eeyore?
BW: But, but, – they belong to our childhood!
Dr Z: Anyway, I digress. What brings you here today, apart from the turned down mouth and slack-shouldered look of the long-term depressive?
BW: I take pills for that – this is more of an existential angst.
Dr Z: (steeples hands under chin) How so?
BW: Well I hear the ADF has carried out 9 ‘strike missions’ in Syria, adding to the general mayhem over there and at the same time we’re agreeing to accept only 12,000 of the 9 million Syrian refugees. I feel bad about that.
Dr Z: This is sublimation on your part – you are finding other reasons for your feelings of despair instead of confronting the root cause.
BW: Do you seriously think I’m going to get into this with several thousand readers looking on?
Dr Z: If you don’t use it, you lose it – very important at our age to remember that. Now, what’s really troubling you?
BW: I lie awake in the early hours of the morning, turning things over and over, like flipping pancakes.
Dr Z: So you ruminate?
BW: All writers ruminate. It’s how we write. And I don’t want to burn the pancakes.
Dr Z: But you’re not happy about it?
BW: I’d rather be asleep.
Dr Z: When you do sleep, do you dream?
BW: Do I dream! Technicolour, with music, dancing girls…
Dr Z: Tell me about one of these dreams.
BW: I have this recurring dream where I’m back at work and nothing is working out and I’m sort of aware, even though I’m asleep, that this is absurd because (a) it’s the last place in the world I want to be and (b) I was actually very good at the work.
Dr Z: (claps hands lightly and exclaims Mein Gott!): Classic! So this was the last time in your life you had great responsibility and success?
BW: I guess so.
Dr Z: You need to look at your life now and you may find an area of great responsibility where you are not having much success.
BW: I have this other dream where I’m driving too fast and my feet won’t reach the pedals or the brakes don’t work.
Dr Z: Do you go off a cliff into the ocean – dashed to pieces on the rocks?
BW: I thought maybe I’m trying to do too much for no good reason and need to scale down and take control of my life again.
Dr Z: Ah, like that line in your song where the swaggie staggering around in the desert has only one book, ‘The Theory of Control’.
BW: Sent you a copy, did I?
Dr Z: How’s the album going anyway?
BW: I think it’s what they’d call ‘a critical and artistic success’.
Dr Z: Have you seen the documentary, Searching for Sugar Man, about the singer-songwriter Rodriguez?
BW: He flopped in the US but was bigger than Elvis in South Africa, though everyone there thought he was dead. Meanwhile, he’s living in the USA and he didn’t know about any of it.
Dr Z: And then he was found and made famous again in South Africa, after giving up his dreams of a musical career and spending his life as a construction worker in Detroit.
BW: And we’re talking about this why?
Dr Z: I thought the analogy wouldn’t be lost on you, or your readers.
BW: Well, good to catch up, Dr Z. It still looks like rain.
“However, (brightening up a little), we haven’t had an earthquake lately.”*
*quotes from The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne

Watching footy

(Tigers game at Leichhardt Oval – photo by Scott Brown https://www.flickr.com/photos/kodamapixel/

Did you know Australians will bet on which of two flies crawling up a wall will get swatted first? Yes, and they bet on cockroach and toad races too, and horses, dogs, the toss of a coin and football games. Fond as I am of a punt at major racing carnivals, I have never had a bet on the outcome of a footy match, even though we follow rugby league fairly closely. It just never occurred to me to try to win money predicting which team will win or who will score first.

Apparently you can still get odds of $2.50 about the North Queensland Cowboys beating the Brisbane Broncos (favourites) in the NRL grand final on Sunday.

One of life’s simple pleasures − watching footy on a Sunday afternoon− has been overrun by a bewildering range of options, few of which will ever recapture the bonhomie of afternoons spent sitting on the hill drinking tinnies and booing the referee. I tried to recapture that lost innocence in a song, Watching Footy, where I ponder, “Does anyone remember when we had no unemployment and inflation was what happened to a hot-air balloon?”. In the New Zealand of my youth we’d set our alarm clocks and get up at 3am to listen on an unreliable shortwave radio to the All Blacks playing Wales at Cardiff Arms Park. People would be late for work or school and be forgiven, as can only happen in a sports-mad nation.

Uber-marketing in sports

Those of us who love watching rugby league today must endure delayed telecasts stacked with advertising, cross-marketing and peripatetic commentary, or go to a live game. Games are usually held at night, under lights. Going to a game typically costs $150 for two people, by the time you take in the cost of tickets, transport, a couple of beers and a pie or two. Little wonder southern NRL teams are playing to half empty stadiums as fans save their pennies for the State of Origin or the rare “double-header”.
It’s a different story when you get to the pointy end of the season and teams are playing off for the grand final; 50,388 footie fans (about 2.5% of Brisbane’s population), packed in to Suncorp Stadium on September 12 for the semi-final between the Cowboys and the Broncos.
The vast majority of footie fans watch the game at home on their big screen TVs. You get the best view of the game without the noise and distractions like people pushing along the aisle, spilling beer on your shoes.

Watch out, here come the advertisers

The advent of “broadcast rights” has dragged footie fans into the vortex of cross promotion, where Channel Nine’s Friday night football commentary frequently promotes the network’s next series.
The commentators try hard to dress this up as conversational asides: “I can’t wait for The Block to start, can you?” At the ground, punters are regaled with sponsor’s advertising and all of the razzmatazz that has basically been ripped off from American gridiron – mascots, cheer leaders, pennants, signet rings, half-time interviews with panting, sweating players, referee-cam, spider-cam and so on.
When you dig down underneath all of the bullshit, the game is better than ever – fast and furious, the players bigger, faster and fitter than ever before. While the television commentary can be infuriating (‘Do you think players should have their socks up or down, Rabbits?’), the camera work just keeps getting better, as does the technology that allows veteran experts like Darren Lockyer or Andrew Johns to walk us through set moves that led to tries.

Paying the bills

Not that we should go back to the days when amateur footie players broke arms or legs and spent months off work with no compensation. My late brother-in-law, a more than handy rugby union player in his day, asked my sister for fifty cents before he set off for the afternoon game one day. Apparently this was to pay for insurance, to cover the reasonable likelihood that he might literally become a one-armed cabinetmaker, in which case insurance would prevent the family from starving as he was recuperating from injury. Most of the bills today are paid by television rights, the betting percentages trickling back to sporting organisations, and by sponsors. Sponsorship in rugby league is a relatively new phenomenon – in 1976 Easts was the first rugby league team to have a sponsor’s name on their jerseys (City Ford). The first commercial sponsorship of competitions in Australia was not introduced until the 1980s, with the Winfield Cup. In the UK, the brewer Joshua Tetley and the cigarette company Players were the first sponsors in 1971-1972. The game has been televised since 1961, so you’d have to say they were all a bit slow off the mark seeing the potential audience for fast food, beer, fast cars and other products aimed at a primarily young male audience.

Sports betting takes hold
Footytab, largely an industry attempt to shut down illegal betting, which had been an open secret since the game began in 1908, started in 1983. The official totalisator version of services offered through the TAB offers three different bets: “Pick The Winners,” “Pick The Margins,” and “Pick The Score”.
Online betting has taken hold in Australia, with smaller bookmakers swallowed up by the big UK operators, Ladbrokes and William Hill. A visit to the latter’s website is a revelation – you can bet on 25 different categories of sport, state and federal elections and some financial markets.
In 2013, bookmakers were being threatened with federal intervention as a result of a public outcry over the barrage of betting updates on TV during live rugby league matches. As Charles Livingstone of Monash University wrote in The Conversation last month, bookmakers agreed to self regulate, promising not to promote odds during games. But since then, the number of betting ads has increased massively.
While poker-machine gambling is still the biggest game in town, Livingstone says sports betting is growing in popularity. Poker machines soak up $11 billion of the $20 billion Australians lose every year on lawful gambling activities. He estimates that sports punters will lose around $750 million in 2015-16, based on a seven-year pattern of trends. And while AFL (grand final on Saturday), is still referred to by league fans as ‘aerial pingpong’ it consumes the biggest share of sports betting.

Reverend Tim Costello summarised the more serious problem with sports betting in a 2011 article in The Monthly.
“There’s no question that if the bets get big enough, people will start throwing games,” Costello said.
“While gambling is a part of life, there’s a vice dimension that drops, compromises and changes what should be family and children’s passions.’’

Someone’s spending my share

The Productivity Commission’s 2010 report showed that while 70% of Australians indulge in some form of punting, for most this is an occasional or weekly Lotto or scratch casket ticket, representing a small proportion of betting turnover.
When gambling is extended into clubs and casinos, with poker machines, gaming tables and electronic gaming, participation is higher and so is turnover.
The Productivity Commission found that 600,000 Australians play the pokies at least once a week and 95,000 are problem gamblers. (They contribute 40% of the cash put through poker machines. About 115,000 Australians are classified as ‘problem gamblers’ with a further 280,000 people at ‘moderate risk’).
Naturally enough, those engaged in spruiking the business of sports betting offer a time-honoured disclaimer.
As one footy commentator used to say (before someone corrected him):
“Most importantly, bet responsible.”

Marriage vows and more

A good few years ago we were out for a meal at a Noosa restaurant with a work colleague of She Who Is Pictured on the Left. As it happened, this chap’s signature is on our marriage certificate, circa 1981. He did it a second time three years later when we had a Reaffirmation of Vows ceremony.
(photo by Sarah Calderwood))
He may well have taken on a second job as a civil celebrant to help feed his large family, but his personality was well suited to the role. As we studied the menu at the Hastings Street bistro, a 30-something couple with children in tow greeted him like a long-lost uncle. They chatted for ages and, before he was able to sit down again, another couple came up to say “Hi”.
“I’ve married thousands of people,” he explained later. “I might forget, but they never do.”

Party animals, not

I was prompted to recall this anecdote after spending Saturday night at the 20th wedding anniversary party of musician friends. It was a 70s theme costume party so I really lashed out, spending $6.50 at a Lifeline shop in Nambour where I picked up a splendidly appropriate surfie shirt to go with the purple hippie pants someone gave me for my 60th birthday. She Who Buys Quality Clothing and Keeps it for Years wore an original from the era. The party was in a retro Fortitude Valley nightclub. The music was suitably cheesy and we knew many of the people attending, so as parties go (and I’m not normally a party-goer), it was lovely. Many selfies were taken, there was much hugging and everyone happily forgot who bought the last bottle of champagne.
I ended up chatting to a musician writer friend who looked like he needed a reason to keep sitting in the corner. We quickly agreed that a certain level of introversion, usually demonstrated by a reluctance to go anywhere on a Saturday night, was healthy (for us). We’d come along (a) because we like the bride and groom and (b) our gregarious partners insisted.
We sat there watching our women working the room – playing Tigger to our Eeyore and there’s something to be said for that.
I am a big believer in the opposites attract kind of relationship. Even Tiggers have days when they can’t bounce. They can privately retreat into the arms of their respective Eeyores whimpering “looks like rain” to which their Eeyores will agree “probably will”.

Hanging in there

Later there were speeches and cake. The bride started talking then the tears came. The groom took over and said exactly the right things. The bride recovered and told assembled guests about her deep love for “this man”.
“I don’t know where I’d be without him,” she added.
“You’d be rich,” murmured the groom.
This event had been on our social calendar for months. It wasn’t just that we like the people who felt moved to reaffirm their love for each other in this way. It seemed that we, the veteran musician couple, helped set a certain tone. Several people wanted to know how long we’d been married. We typically flounder when asked this question. I/we usually say self-deprecating things like “It depends which wedding you’re talking about,” or, “It wasn’t continuous service, you know.”
Married men will know there is a right and a wrong time to be glibly sarcastic – for instance, if someone asks you about the secret to your long relationship, “inertia” might get a laugh, but it could lead to you making a bed up in the shed.
A Relationships Australia survey asked respondents to rate reasons for their getting married – 91% of people said love was the major reason. Second in the running was companionship (88%). Legal/financial security was not rated highly (66%) nor was religious beliefs (62%) or pressure from parents (50%).

Hanging in for a really long haul

There was a bit of chatter at this party about long-lasting relationships – we were not the only 60-something couple in attendance. Someone said her grandparents had been married 64 years and were still daftly in love.
The world record holders, Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher, were married 86 years, 9 months, and 16 days until Herbert (106) passed away in 2011.
Another entry in the Guinness Book of Records tells of Ann Shawah (17), who eloped in 1932 with John Betar (21) instead of marrying the older man her parents had chosen for her. John told The Telegraph that learning to compromise and letting his wife be the ultimate boss was the key to their enduring union.
Someone should make a meme out of that.

Memo: watch Burton and Taylor

There are plenty of record-holders for being married (and divorced) many times. Film star Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times, even if one of those was a second marriage to Richard Burton (check out Burton and Taylor, ABC 8.30 Saturday).
Liz had nothing on Linda Wolfe, though, the world’s most married woman. The Guinness Book of Records says she married 23 times, the first at 16 for love and most recently in 1996 to Baptist preacher Glynn ‘Scotty’ Wolfe “for publicity”.
The Tennessean reported that locals Lauren and David Blair exchanged vows for the 109th time last year. These hopeless romantics from Hendersonville, who married in 1984, have reaffirmed their vows with ministers and civil celebrants in many exotic locations including London, New York, Gretna Green (Scotland), Las Vegas, Tupelo (Elvis’ birthplace) and the Hard Rock Café in Honolulu.

Australians celebrate

Celebrants are now the preferred option for Australians who swung away from formal church weddings in the 1970s.
In 1973 Attorney-General in the Whitlam Government Lionel Murphy introduced civil celebrants as a viable alternative to church weddings. Before then, people who did not want to be married in a church made do with a soul-less encounter in a Magistrates Court registry. Someone who had suffered that indignity said it was “like going to see your probation officer”.
Twenty years ago, more than 60% of Australian marriage ceremonies were performed by clergy. Now, 64% of marriages are performed by civil celebrants.
Author Amanda Lohrey wrote in The Monthly that under Murphy’s system, celebrants were appointed for life after being subjected to a ‘fit and proper person’ test which required a record of community service and solid references. In the late 1990s, the system was reviewed and civil celebrant numbers have increased fourfold since 2003 to more than 12,000, amid mutterings about inadequate training and falling standards. In 2004, The Howard government’s Attorney-General Philip Ruddock introduced changes to the Marriage Act to specify that marriage “means the union of a man and woman”. Lohrey wrote that Ruddock’s changes were widely interpreted as a response to pressure from the Christian lobby and its anti-gay-marriage wing.

She Who is Taller Than Me has a cousin in Calgary who has been a marriage celebrant for many years. ‘Cuz’ and her siblings came to Australia in 2010 for a family wedding where she did the honours on a Gold Coast beach. Every guest was given a custom-made pair of thongs (footwear).
We were late, so had to make do with bare feet. As is our marital custom, no blame was apportioned for the lateness.

Leadership and loyalty

Only the NT News would dare describe this week’s dramatic political story with the headline: “Rich dude becomes PM”. Such is the Darwin-based tabloid’s sense of independence, the leadership spill story was pushed ‘below the fold’ by a court story. Given the over-the-top live coverage assigned to the breaking story, the NT News evidently decided to play the story for laughs.
There was much room for satire and cruel amusement as social media lit up with one hastily-made meme after another (a meme being a picture with irreverent words). While the narcissistic nature of Australian power politics is no joking matter, it was predictable that some of the media coverage would focus on a list of Tony Abbott’s gaffes. The most recent was when Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton were caught on an overhead mike making thoughtless jokes about Pacific nations and climate change. Alas poor Tone, he was always putting his foot in it: he was caught luridly winking at a radio interviewer while talking to a sex worker; few veterans are likely to forgive him saying “shit happens” about the death of a soldier; not to mention his misuse of the word “suppository’ and the farcical dubbing of the Queen’s hapless husband, Sir Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, when inexplicably re-introducing knighthoods.
Even Rupert Murdoch thought that was naff.

Five PMs in five years

While Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s fifth prime minister in five years (KR is counted twice), is enjoying his brief honeymoon, perhaps we need to be reminded of the duplicitous nature of power politics.
There have been 17 inter-party leadership spills since 1981, many of them brought about by the incumbent’s poor opinion polling. Let’s not forget naked ambition and treachery.
Australia stands in an unusual position with our incumbent Prime Minister ousted by party room spills on four occasions since 2010. This has caught the attention of international media, as one might expect.
As Andrew Coyne wrote in The National Post, the leader of the party in Canada’s Parliament is chosen by an entirely different group of people (a broad cross-section of Party members).
“(It is) a body that is brought together for the sole purpose of voting, and having voted, disappears. Under the Westminster model, the leader is accountable to caucus; under our system (ie the Canadian system- Ed.) the leader is effectively accountable to no one.”
Coyne asked his Canadian readers if they really wanted the kind of ‘manic leader-shopping’ Australians had just gone through? From his desk somewhere near Toronto, he sent this warning to Malcolm Turnbull:
“A big part of Australian Labor’s defeat at the last election was attributed to voter weariness with the party’s leadership shenanigans.”

Onion-eating eccentric

Amelia Lester in the New Yorker saw Abbott as someone who “exhibited a feckless machismo, which often verged on eccentricity”.
Lester mercilessly ran through all of these macho eccentricities and more, including his bizarre little lunch, chomping on a raw onion when visiting a Tasmanian farm.
Soon after the result of the dramatic leadership challenge was announced, #putoutyouronions was trending on Twitter. Few Australian Prime Ministers have attracted such universal scorn.
But Abbott wasn’t just the butt of other people’s jokes.
Whether you agree or not, he didn’t muck about when implementing core pre-election promises. Abbott was opposed to the Labor Party’s implementation of a price on carbon, repealing it on his first day in office, telling the world that climate change was “faddish”.
It was his stand on boat people, however, which upset the international community and deeply divided communities at home. Earlier this month The New York Times castigated Abbott for overseeing “a ruthlessly effective effort to stop boats packed with migrants, many of them refugees, from reaching Australia’s shores”.
“His policies have been inhumane, of dubious legality and strikingly at odds with the country’s tradition of welcoming people fleeing persecution and war,” The NY Times editorial said.

Two lost fish swimming in a fish bowl

William_McMahon_bust — William McMahon bust by Victor Greenhalgh (Wikipedia)

In all then, Monday’s leadership challenge, the second for Abbott in seven months, should have come as no surprise.
The past 15 years have been notorious for unrest at the top, as opinion polling, the 24-hour news cycle and the relentless clamour of uncensored social media turned Australian political life into a giant fish bowl.
Don’t fart – someone will see the bubbles.
The list of Tony Abbott’s gaffes, coupled with inexplicable “captain’s calls” and tardiness in resolving the Bronwyn Bishop saga amounted to a lot of bubbles.
Political analysts with long memories are making comparisons between Abbott and Billy McMahon, another veteran politician who did not deal well with life at the helm.
McMahon became PM in March 1971 after a leadership spill between him and incumbent John Gorton resulted in a tie. Gorton saw the tie as a vote of no confidence so resigned, leaving McMahon to lead the Libs into a general election in 1972. It was McMahon’s bad luck to be taking on a consummate young politician by the name of Gough Whitlam who had helped Labor to a clear lead in the polls.
Meanwhile, McMahon’s approval ratings had dwindled to 28% and his press profile was abysmal. British psephologist (election expert) David Butler said he could not recall a Prime Minister in any country being “so comprehensively panned”. This was despite McMahon’s record of (a) setting up the first Department of Aboriginal Affairs and (b) extracting Australia from the Vietnam War.
It was said at the time that McMahon simply “did not look or sound like a Prime Minister”. Forty-odd years later and it seems Tony Abbott got the flick for much the same reasons.

Spills aplenty

A Wikipedia summary of leadership spills shows how the trend accelerated in the 21st century, with consecutive challenges in 2003 to oust Simon Crean as Labor leader. It worked and Mark Latham became leader until the next election. Then Kevin Rudd in December 2006 challenged and beat Kim Beazley as Labor leader.
In the intervening years there were changes at the top of the Liberal Party too, first with Brendan Nelson, toppled by Malcolm Turnbull in 2008 (ah, you’d forgotten that, eh?). A year Later Turnbull was challenged as Opposition Leader by this Abbott chap, who at that time won 42-41.
Then we fell into the three-ring circus of the Rudd/Gillard era, but all had been relatively silent until February 9 this year when a motion to bring about a leadership spill in the Liberal Party was defeated 61–39. Seven months later, Malcolm Turnbull challenged Tony Abbott and won the vote 54-44.
A close vote ensures Turnbull will have a difficult time turning the ship of state around, even assuming he is unlikely to stray far from party policy. After all, he’s been there all the time Abbott was ostensibly calling the shots.
We wait, Facebook memes at the ready, for his first gaffe, or more hopefully, his first statesman-like act:
• A free vote on gay marriage;
• The re-introduction of solar and wind farm subsidies;
• The protection of remote Aboriginal communities;
• Higher intakes from refugee camps;
• Increased foreign aid to war-torn countries;
• The scrapping of Knighthoods;
• Re-instatement of the onion as a common garden vegetable.

Shoo flu don’t bother me

I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.

So went a children’s skip rope ditty of 1918-1919, when Spanish Flu swept around the world and knocked off more people than the so-called Great War. Isn’t that so like children; to make light of something so awful they can’t comprehend it.

My free range imagination set off on this journey when confined to bed with something approaching flu, but probably not. After all, I had the vaccination in April. It started with a headache, a dry, irrepressible cough which brought on asthma, hot and cold spells and low-grade aches and pains.
The asthmatics among us would agree that we soon know if a virus inhabits our respiratory system. It’s never much fun. I’m also a bit of a hypochondriac, but you knew that. But if you see me out and about this weekend and I’m wearing a gauze face mask, stay well away (more about masks later).

The media is fond of a good plague story – they daren’t call it a plague, as that would be inaccurate and irresponsible, but the word epidemic often gets an airing. At the end of August 2015, Queensland Health had reported 18,500 cases of influenza including 10,000 cases of Brisbane B, which last emerged in 2008.

News.com.au reported that Queensland was “in the grip of its worst flu season on record”. They obviously forgot about the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 that killed between 20 and 40 million people worldwide. The Spanish Flu or “La Grippa” came on really fast, invading the lungs, leading in many cases to pneumonia and death.
According to the Australian Disaster Management website, Australia fared relatively well, by enforcing strict quarantine regulations. Nonetheless, the Spanish flu killed 12,500 Australians, mostly younger people (ages 15 to 35) at a time when Australia’s population was just five million. (The picture above of nurses in Brisbane circa 1919 comes from the John Oxley Library).

World Health Organisation warnings about Influenza B last September came too late to include it in the free vaccination program. There have been 15,403 cases of influenza in Queensland this year, about 5,000 more than last year. Of those, more than 10,000 have been Influenza B, compared with just 1161 last year.

Another 3,000 cases in the last week of August took the number of people diagnosed with influenza to 18,500, making it the worst year since the swine flu in 2009. Still, that is only 0.39% of the State’s population of 4.7 million, so let’s not panic yet.

A musician friend had just left on a cruise ship for a holiday when she became ill. Soon after, she was diagnosed with Brisbane B and confined to her cabin for the duration. That’s just plain unlucky, but when you catch a genuine case of flu, you won’t resent too much being confined to quarters. Bed rest is really the only cure.

In between the genuine cases of influenza, which can be isolated as this or that strain, come a range of head colds and what we Aussies call lurgies, wogs or dog’s disease. Last time I came down with a rapid onset lurgie, a young Asian doctor who used to practice around here checked me out and pronounced: “It’s just a wirus – antibiotics are no use. Go home go to bed, take aspirin and drink lots of fluids.”
Good advice. It crossed my mind that I probably infected some of the people who were in the waiting room at the time, unless of course they already had a ‘wirus’.

There’s a fair gap between a bad head cold, a non-specific virus and influenza. Each can make you feel like putting a pillow over your face and pressing down hard.
I usually keep good health in this regard, but our passion for rugby league led us to Lang Park Stadium last Thursday night, along with 44,000 other people. Then we were stuck on a packed train back to Caboolture, breathing in all those dubious germs. I didn’t think of it at the time, but I’m thinking about it now.

Not that I want to blight your weekend, but here’s a sense of what it was like in 1918, living with ‘La Grippa’. Molly Billings of Stanford University Department of Human Virology writes:

“The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years. The influenza virus had a profound virulence, with a mortality rate at 2.5%, compared to the previous influenza epidemics, which were less than 0.1%. The death rate for 15 to 34-year-olds of influenza and pneumonia were 20 times higher in 1918 than in previous years (Taubenberger). People were struck with illness on the street and died rapid deaths.”

The curious thing about influenza is that it fades away – the strain mutates into something less crippling, less contagious and people get better. That certainly happened towards the end of 1919.

When Florence Nightingale (not) and I were in Hong Kong for a few days, it seemed every second person was wearing a gauze face mask. At first, I assumed this was to protect them from the appalling air quality, as pollution from coal fired power stations and motor cars drifts in from mainland China.
A friend who lives in HK says it is also to stop the spread of colds or flu generally, or in the case of the only well person in a household, it’s worn for personal protection.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) says it is neutral on general mask-wearing “because there is hardly any evidence either way”.

Little research has been done to see if wearing masks helps protect people. The ECDC says that in some societies, e.g. in the Far East, masks are worn a lot in the influenza season, “but they still get plenty of influenza”.

As any general nurse can tell you, thorough hand washing is the best protection against spreading influenza or being infected. ECDC recommends using hand-washing to reduce influenza transmission and alcohol gels work against the influenza as well. So good general hygiene, hand-washing, and using and disposing of tissues is important.

Many people around here swear by ‘hippy cures’ – echinacea, olive leaf extract, ginseng, nasal rinsing or throwing a towel over your head and inhaling pine/menthol vapour. No better or worse than over the counter medications. A rum toddy with lemon and honey and two aspirin on the side is another option. Make it a double.

Meanwhile, I’m choosing to stay in bed and drink lots of fluids, as advised. For distraction I’m reading the New Internationalist’s coverage of Syria and its myriad woes. The irony does not escape me that I will soon get better and return to my cushy life.

Songs sung true

MMF session Steve Swayne — Maleny Music Festival folk session Photo by Steve Swayne

There’s a tradition in the folk music scene at folk festivals and in selected pubs where singers and musicians gather and play, surrounded by those who sit on the fringes, tapping their toes in time to the music.
The folk session (photo by Steve Swayne) is wedded to repetitive tunes, played by whoever turns up with whatever instrument they have, and interspersed with songs which tell of the plight of the urban proletariat. The former are usually Irish or Scottish tunes which commonly have an A part (played twice) and a B part (played twice). The tune is repeated until whoever is leading the session switches to another tune and another key.
The stridently political song, tending as far to the left as one can possibly go, is another matter. Someone will break into the cycle of diddly diddly tunes when the players are sitting back, supping their pots of Guinness and thinking of what to play next.

Rebel songs

The classic World Turned Upside Down (sometimes called The Diggers) by English songwriter Leon Rosselson often turns up at sessions. It sounds like it was written in the era in which it is set.
“In sixteen forty-nine to Saint George’s Hill
A ragged band they called the Diggers came to show the people’s will
They defied the landlords, they defied the law
They were the dispossessed, reclaiming what was theirs.”
So it goes – they came in peace to dig and sow, to work the land in common and make a “common treasury for all”.
Now that you understand the socialist rhetoric, you will either spend all weekend in the session tent or not go there at all.
The closest I came to this genre was The Almost Armageddon Waltz, written in 1980 when the Russians invaded Afghanistan and the world once again was thrust into anxiety about the possibilities of nuclear war.
I penned a corny but catchy chorus: “Armageddon, Armageddon, Armageddon out of here” which led to a song writing award, a run of T-shirts and requests (still, after all this time). The references to Malcolm Fraser, the Holden Kingswood and hi-fi gear quickly dated. Unhappily, Afghanistan is still a basket case.

Why censoring does not work

Happily, authoritarian attempts to censor politically or morally ‘incorrect’ songs usually backfire and lead to the rebellious authors developing a cult following. The Guardian reported this week that an environmental scientist working for a Canadian government agency has been suspended and will be investigated for recording a protest song about the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper.
Harperman was written by Tony Turner, who worked at Environment Canada and is, in his spare time, “a mainstay on the Ottawa folk music scene”.
The song contains lyrics like “no respect for environment / Harperman, it’s time for you to go”, and “no more cons, cons, cons / we want you gone, gone gone”.
Crikey, as we say down here, if he (Turner) didn’t write the song in work hours, where’s the problem?

Chewin’ the fat again

Governments over many eras have elected themselves the guardians of people’s morals, if not their freedom to speak out when not entirely pleased with the way things are going. Nazi Germany is an example of how this can be taken to extremes.
In 1960, officials in Adelaide blocked American satirist Tom Lehrer from performing until he agreed to omit “morally corrupting” songs from his repertoire.
Lehrer’s funny and sacrilegious anthem “The Vatican Rag” attracted a lot of complaints when first aired in 1967. An academic paper by Jeremy Mazner says Lehrer was relatively unaffected by the complaints about lines like this:

“There the guy who’s got religion’ll/Tell you if your sin’s original/If it is try playin’ it safer/Drink the wine and chew the wafer/Two four six eight/Time to transubstantiate”)

“It was kind of fun to see them squirm,” Lehrer remembered.

A teacher in Putnam Valley, New York, was fired after playing The Vatican Rag to his seventh grade class as an example of satire. The teacher was eventually reinstated.
Lehrer the piano-playing Harvard math professor who gave up songwriting and performing in 1965, told Tony Davis of the Sydney Morning Herald in a 2003 interview that there was no place now for his kind of humour.

“I’m not tempted to write a song about George W.Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem: I don’t want to satirise George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporise them.”

Lehrer’s granted the SMH a rare interview because he wanted to reflect on his 1960 Australian tour, the “highlight of his life” when he was banned, censored, mentioned in Parliament and threatened with jail.
Brisbane was the problem town.
“The chief of police said I couldn’t sing the Boy Scout song, particularly.”
Be Prepared! includes revised Scout pledges: “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice/ Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

I’m not awful, I’m a satirist

Satire often goes over people’s heads, especially those who have a literal sense of humour and don’t grasp irony; the ones who thought Randy Newman was being racist and offensive writing songs like Red Necks and Short People. Eric Bogle copped the same kind of misdirected abuse over “I Hate Wogs” where he adopted the persona of a bigoted Ocker.
It also works in reverse. Lancashire punk band The NotSensibles wrote a satirical song “I’m In love With Margaret Thatcher”, which was inadvertently adopted by some of Thatcher’s supporters.
The Guardian assembled a lengthy list of songs of politics and protest in 2009 including three Beatles tunes, many Dylan songs and things you would expect to find in a list of this nature, like Bob Marley’s Redemption Song and Billy Braggs’ Between the Wars. Eric Bogle is the only Australian on the list for And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.
Maybe what Lehrer said was true – there’s little room now in mainstream music for songs of protest. I found only 17 songs on the list from the last 15 years.
It can be a career-defining/defying moment when a mainstream band decides to take a stand (to wit the Dixie Chicks’ Not Ready to Make Nice), which sharply divided their audiences and led to the musical equivalent of book burning).

There are Aussie rebels too

The Guardian recognised the subjective nature of the list, encouraging people to post their own favourite rebel songs. There is an enduring history of Australian songs of this ilk. Start with Tex Morton’s 1930s story of Sergeant Small harassing swaggies riding the rails, divert through the folk catalogue (e.g. Judy Small, John Dengate) then progress to popular music (Redgum, Midnight Oil, Paul Kelly, Warumpi Band and Kev Carmody), through to rebels of today like Xavier Rudd and John Butler.

It would be comforting to think that a public servant working for a government could write and perform a song like The Lurkers’ Mining Man without fear of reprisal.
But in this political climate, I doubt it.

Postscript: She Who Also Sometimes Writes (SWASW) has penned her own piece about the loveable, eccentric folk scene, which you can find here:

In praise of old folkies

Morris dancers at MMF — **Morris dancers performing at the Maleny Music Festival: photo by Steve Swayne**

By Laurel Wilson

Vale Tommy the Narc. We lost one of the good old folkies the other week and his wake was on last Saturday, attended by several dozen folkies who remembered him fondly from the 1970’s. The wake encompassed many of the elements dear to the hearts of folkies – fond tales involving the departed, an ample supply of cider, beer etc., laughter, music, camping overnight.
I recall meeting him in days gone past at The Red Brick hotel – named for obvious reasons, but no longer in existence. I was intrigued at the time as to how he was awarded that seemingly insulting moniker and was assured that it was all in good fun and he accepted it graciously, distinguishing him as it did from any of the other ‘Tommies’ who were around at the time. For those curious to know, he was christened thus after having innocently seated himself next to a notorious police informant at the pub folk night. At least, that’s one version. As is common with the oral tradition, there may well be other explanations floating around.
Tommy was but one of the numerous folkies, past and present, that I have enjoyed meeting over the past 40 or so years.

So who are these ‘folkies’ I have been hanging around with? The first definition that comes up when you Google ‘folkie’ is “a singer, player or fan of folk music”, which only sends you down the rabbit hole of trying to define ‘folk music’. One rather narrow definition is that “folk music is music which originates in and is handed down by oral tradition amongst common people”. That repository of all knowledge known as Wikipedia is more inclusive, saying, “Folk music includes both traditional music and the genre that evolved from it during the 20th century folk revival. The term originated in the 19th century but is often applied to music that is older than that. Some types of folk music are also called world music.” I’d add dance to that mix, as there are groups interested in Australian bush dances, English Morris dancing, Scottish and Irish dancing, to name a few.
As an indication of the wide range of music which can be covered under the umbrella of ‘folk music’, consider the programme for last weekend’s Maleny Music Weekend – eg Zumpa (trio of accordion, double bass and saxophone mainly playing popular Italian tunes); Shanasheel Arabic Music Ensemble; Sweet Chilli (local all women choir) The Barleyshakes (fast-paced Irish trad); Hayden Hack Infusion (self-described funk, Afro psychelic aesthetic); bluegrass trio The Company, even The Goodwills…
Our friends from the trio cloudstreet describe their music as “new Australian folk music”, demonstrating their enjoyment of what is traditional about the kind of music they play, along with their emphasis on presenting it with a unique Aussie flavour.
Folk music is “a broad Church”, which also happens to be Malcolm Turnbull’s description of the Liberal party, but in my opinion at least, you won’t find too many who belong to that “church” at a folkie session. (Oh, there was one once, but he now acknowledges the error of his ways and has converted to the ‘leftie’ side of things political).

It might seem a stretch to suggest that performers and lovers of such a wide range of music and dance have much in common, but to my mind, there is definitely a common theme, and that is musicians and singers performing mainly for the love of it to audiences who come along specifically to hear music (rather than to have it as background as they chat, eat and drink). Sure, performers were paid by the Festival, but it seems most accept that festivals of this type try to keep gate prices at reasonable levels and in turn, don’t expect commercial payment rates. For many, the opportunity to play to appreciative, listening audiences, rather than noisy pub crowds, is a treat which makes up for the lower financial rewards.
So the ‘folkie’ performers play more for the love of it than with the aim of making the sort of money that can be made by ‘pop stars’. As well as performing themselves, when not playing they often form part of that appreciative audience and/or ‘jump up’ with other performers to help them with their presentations. And they are often involved in helping to organise music events like last weekend’s Maleny music festival. So here’s a big thank-you to all the organisers/performers/volunteers from last weekend, and of course to those who came along to enjoy the music.
As for coming to festivals, folk club nights, house concerts and the like, there may be a preponderance of grey heads and bearded older men, but the younger generation is also represented. Like The Mae Trio – daughters of well-known folkies from my generation. And then there was the young chap who celebrated his 21st birthday recently by playing at a fund-raising concert for the on-line magazine that keeps everyone up to date with local events.

If all this sounds intriguing, try coming along to the next main event on the local folkie calendar – The Neurum Creek Music Festival being held at Neurum Creek bush retreat. I’m told the camping spots are sold out, but there’s still room to come along for the day. (Saturday 12th or Sunday 13th).