Bob Katter Archives - thegoodwills.com

Tokyo Olympics 1964 and 2020/21

There was not much else to do in sports-mad New Zealand in October 1964 other than join the legions cheering on our most famous athlete, Peter Snell, at the Tokyo Olympics.

He remains the only athlete since 1920 to win the 800m and 1500m event at the one Olympic Games. The Tokyo medals came four years after Snell, then an unknown, sneaked away with the 800m gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960.

The 1960s was one of New Zealand’s golden eras of sport, with the All Blacks kings of the rugby world and runners like Snell, Murray Halberg, Bill Baillie, John Davies and Barry Magee winning medals and breaking records.

It might be 57 years ago, but I recall jostling for position outside the appliance store in our small town which was broadcasting the Olympics on a black and white set, centre stage in the shop window. I was only 4ft 10 then, so had a mate give me a leg up to watch Snell take the lead on the turn and draw away with a 15 metre margin. Team-mate John Davies finished third, so all in all, a good day at the arena in Tokyo. It was also one time when watching sport on a black and white TV was not a disadvantage. (For those not familiar with New Zealand, their sports uniform colours are black and white)

The crowd outside the shop with the TV in the window thinned out and we settled in for some more free entertainment. If this seems backward, New Zealand did not get television until 1960 and it took another four years for a relay station to be built in our region. Colour TV did not arrive until 1973.

Snell’s win, immortalised here in this YouTube video, shows why this record of winning the 800 and 1500 meters has not since been broken.

World Athletics recalls how Snell, coached by Arthur Lydiard, ran his last 300m in 38.6 and his last lap in 53.2, despite unleashing his full sprint only in the last 220 metres. The only faster time was Herb Elliott’s world record of 3:35.6 set in Rome four years earlier.

Snell’s 1:45.1 in the 800m in Tokyo was an Olympic record and the second-fastest performance of all time, behind only his own world record of 1:44.3.

Sebastian Coe, who later won Olympic medals at the same distances, credited Snell with changing the way athletes prepared for middle-distance running – both physically and mentally.

“He would think nothing of a 20-mile training run,” said Coe. “He was unbelievably fit, with the physique of a rugby player. For four years he never lost in global competition, and he would still be a medal contender in Tokyo 2020 with the sort of times and runs he was producing in 1964.”

I was mad keen on (playing and watching) sports as a lad – just bloody useless at team sports. So I took up tennis and running. Pretty shit at that too, but at least there were no team mates to let down.

As a teenager growing up in small town New Zealand, I would spend Wednesday nights competing in track and field events (under lights). Third in a field of four was my PB!

Imagine our excitement when it was revealed that Peter Snell would appear at an exhibition run at our sports oval (and sign autographs afterwards). He apparently did this quite a bit in the early 1960s – inspiring future generations of would-be athletes.

Snell gave the local runners a head start. As one competitor recalls: “In the 880, I had 220 yards head start. I kept that until the last 220 when he flashed past me! It was a great night.”

These stories of adolescence came rushing back when I was stuck at home this week, nursing a not-Covid virus and binge-watching the Olympics. I’ve been amazed at the skill shown by athletes competing in the ‘new’ BMX freestyle and skateboarding events. I sometimes watch the kids doing tricks on skateboards and BMX bikes down at our local skate bowl. I worry about the ones who don’t wear helmets and hope they don’t try to copy some of Logan Martin’s tricks.

Gold-Coast-based Martin became the first winner of the men’s BMX freestyle competition, clearing out from his nearest rivals. The Guardian reported that Martin, who calls the sport ‘gymnastics on a bike’, took a $70,000 gamble on winning gold when he built a replica of the Ariake Skate Park in his back yard. He did so as he was unable to travel to Tokyo to practice. Covid had also closed his local training ground, the indoor BMX park at Coomera.

Martin, 27, took to BMX after his family moved near a skate park in Logan City when he was 12. As The Guardian’s Kieran Pender put it, “Logan from Logan has been on an upward trajectory ever since, taking to the sky with his death-defying flips.”

Overall, Australia’s doing very well (so far). Last time I looked (2pm), we had 42 medals, including 17 gold.

But I’m sure no one will begrudge New Zealand its 19 medals, (seven gold) for sports including rowing, canoeing and rugby. Why the focus on NZ, you might ask? Well, Tokyo 2020 is that country’s best OIympic gold result since Los Angeles in 1984, and it’s not over yet. That year, New Zealand athletes won 8 gold medals in equestrian, boxing, rowing, canoeing and sailing events to make the top 10.

Furthermore, just to show there is a database for everything, on a per capita basis, New Zealand is in third position on the medal table. The aim of this table is to show which countries punch above their weight. In this case, Australia is struggling to make the top 10.

Ah well, it will soon be over, as will (hopefully), this unspecified virus we have caught. Japan will be left thinking about how to best utilise the venues created for two weeks of international sport.

It will be Brisbane’s turn in 2032, after Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028).

Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea. Maverick north Queensland politician Bob Katter criticised Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Katter, the Member for Kennedy in far north Queensland, said the Premier would be sending Queensland into economic ruin after it was announced Brisbane would host the 2032 Olympic Games.

Known for staging publicity stunts, Katter blew up a makeshift ‘state economy’ to represent his distaste of the State hosting the Games. The State, for its part, has said the Olympic budget is $3.5 billion.

The VIP delegation which travelled to Tokyo to sell Brisbane as the 2032 host city told reporters that 84% of the OIympic venues and arenas would be existing, refurbished or temporary structures. The famous Gabba cricket ground in Woolloongabba, already earmarked for the opening ceremony, has been promised a $1 billion makeover. There’s talk of a new stadium at Albion and of course there’s existing infrastructure originally built for the 1982 Commonwealth Games. They include the QEII (ANZ) Stadium at McGregor and the Sleeman Centre at Chandler.

As it’s still about 4,075 sleeps away yet, there’s a bit of water to flow under that particular bridge. What new sports will the Olympic Committee allow in 2032 and can Australia be competitive? It’s not that many years ago (1912-1948), that painters, sculptors, writers and musicians competed for Olympic medals. Now wouldn’t that be a thoroughly justifiable bonus for artists who suffered through the Covid restrictions?

Oh right, you can’t eat a gold medal.

Going bananas over budgets

bananas-budgets-cyclones — North Queensland banana plantation. Photo Bob Wilson

After seeing a photo on a tourism brochure of a fruit cocktail with a banana posed like a dolphin with its mouth open, eating one will never be the same. I decided to write about bananas after spending two weeks in north Queensland, where 94% of the fruit is grown. I had also recently learned of the re-emergence of Panama disease, coined ‘Bananageddon’ by some droll headline writer.

The threat of disease not withstanding, Australian banana growers have to live through the annual cyclone season and its potential for destruction. In March, the north’s most visible politician, Bob Katter, was clamouring for Federal intervention to help bale out growers devastated by Cyclone Niran.

While North Queensland provided the best growing conditions for bananas, the tropical fruit is always under threat when cyclonic winds blow. The North Queensland Register’s Ben Harden reported up to 100% losses in the Boogan and Wangan districts near Innisfail. There were 20% to 100% losses along the Cassowary Coast, where most of Australia’s bananas are grown. Katter, the member for Kennedy, as usual got himself front and centre in a press photo taken on a farm wiped out by Niran’s wind gusts (between 205kmh and 265kmh).

Katter has pledged his support behind North Queensland farmers with crops worth $200m knocked out by Cyclone Niran. He said the government should look at crop and livestock insurance funded by a 1% levy on farmers.

“It would make the recovery from these events a lot easier, and we could rebound quicker.“

Some banana-growing areas were left untouched, as we discovered when visiting Lakeland south-west of Cooktown.

Lakeland’s rich volcanic soil and mild climate is ideal for growing bananas, plantations of which can be seen along both sides of the Kennedy Development Road between Lakeland and Laura.

We picked up a bird-watching map from Cooktown which identified Lakeland Honey Dam as a location to see water birds. We set off at sunset, only to find a gate with a banana farm sign forbidding entry due to biological risks. So we did not venture further; but if we had, we might have spotted corellas, egrets, herons, brolgas, sarus cranes, square-tailed kites and more.

Turns out the dam is on private property and banana farmers tend to be risk-averse about biological diseases and for good reason. Growers are twitchy about people bringing in banana plants or suckers from New South Wales in particular. In short, they do not want to add bunchy top to the list of issues that face banana growers. Trumping bunchy top though, is the re-emergence of Panama disease, which all but rendered the global banana industry extinct in the 1950s.

Stuart Thompson, Senior Lecturer in Plant Biochemistry, University of Westminster, wrote a lengthy article for The Conversation on this topic.He described the attempts to save the banana and the industry that produces the fruit. Scientists are now in a race to create a new plant resistant to Panama disease.

In the 1950s, a condition known as Fusarium wilt or Panama disease was wiping out whole plantations in the world’s major banana-producing countries of Latin America.

“It threatened an industry so important to this part of the world that some States had became known as Banana Republics because they were virtually governed by the corporations that produced the crop.”

Luckily, banana companies realised that another variety of banana, the Cavendish, was almost completely resistant to Panama disease. It rapidly replaced the Gros Michel (Big Mike) type which had prevailed until that time. The Cavendish rescued the industry and by the 21^st century, 99% of exported bananas and almost half of world production is of the Cavendish variety.

“But this strength has now become the banana industry’s greatest vulnerability. Panama disease has returned, and this time the Cavendish is not resistant,” Thompson wrote.

While the Federal Budget managed to find $371 million for ‘biosecurity measures’, they were more focused on prevention of African swine fever and foot and mouth disease. So it falls to State governments to address their own biosecurity challenges. The Queensland Government stumped up $10 million in 2015-2016 to investigate the re-emerging Panama disease tropical race 4 (TR4). Biosecurity Queensland launched a surveillance programme to detect the presence of the soil-borne fungal disease after it was detected at north Queensland farms.

While that battle is being fought (and once again raising questions about the risks of monoculture), just how important is the banana to Australian consumers and the economy?

The Australian Banana Growers Council (ABGC) is a font of knowledge about all things banana, including the incredible statistic that we consume 16 kg per head per year.

I extrapolated that figure, assuming that the average (four person) household consumes over 1kg (seven bananas) per week.

If you prefer Lady Fingers, you are in a minority, as 97% of bananas grown in Australia are off the Cavendish variety. Growers sold 388,000 tonnes of bananas in 2017-2018 (valued at $587m). The ABGC estimates the industry contributes $1.3 billion to the economy.

For all that, there’s not much protection for growers whose crops are wiped out by cyclones or other weather events, not to mention the incursion of a disease like TR4, which cannot be eradicated.

Nonetheless, banana growers keep up the supply of this popular fruit, with harvesting activity occurring as we drove by. Despite Queensland’s dominant market position, the ABGC’s statistics note a growing contribution to the annual banana production from Western Australia (6,800 tonnes), most of the crops grown around Carnarvon and in the irrigated fields around Kununurra.

Some 15,000 tonnes were grown in New South Wales, around Coffs Harbour and northern NSW where rainfall is plentiful.

We used to grow bananas on our half acre at Maleny. They were tall trees which were quite often raided by Brush Turkeys. They’d clumsily fly to the tops of the trees and partially eat out the green bunches. Our yield was better once we planted dwarf bananas closer to the house. They key is to bag the bunches before they ripen. One you cut a bunch, hang it from a rafter with a bag around it to keep vermin out. Growing bananas in much of Queensland is not hard. There’s a bit of work involved, chipping weeds and thinning out the plantation until you have the desired groups of three at various stages of growth.

We travel a bit and unfortunately, bananas are not good travellers. We bought a half-green bunch on Monday and by Tuesday they were ripe enough to eat.

She Who Makes Banana Cake is in charge of Plan B!

A backwards step for world peace

backwards-bob-conondale — A backwards step to make a point about world peace

In 2009, Greens candidate Peter Bell walked several kilometres backwards from a Mackay fast food franchise to the office of the National member for Dawson, De-Anne Kelly.

He told ABC radio at the time he did this to highlight the backwards nature of the Howard Coalition’s policies on industrial relations and climate. Despite making headlines with this stunt, Bell polled only 3,489 votes (4.4% of the Dawson ballot). But he made his point, in public.

There was a time when if someone said you’d taken a step backwards, they meant a return to older and less effective ways of doing things. The Cambridge Dictionary’s example: “The breakdown in negotiations will be seen as a step backwards.”

You could argue the ‘step backwards’ is in vogue here and around the world; for example the public re-emergence of white supremacists in the USA. President Trump set the mood for this, with florid statements about expelling Muslims and building a wall to keep Mexicans out.

Now Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un are trading threats about the latter’s reported development of missiles capable of delivering nuclear war heads. One of Trump’s responses, tweeted in the early hours, was to bring down ‘fire and fury’ on North Korea. Does that not seem like a backward step for world peace?

Australia’s non-compulsory, non-binding postal vote about a simple social justice issue is also a step backwards. The Australian government’s stubborn commitment to this $122 million folly could have been avoided if PM Malcolm Turnbull had called a free vote for all federal politicians.

There’s a backwards look too about the kerfuffle over whether you can be a politician in Australia while also a citizen of another country − even when you didn’t know you were a dual citizen. I seem to recall the media making much of Julia Gillard’s Welsh background and Tony Abbot’s British roots. So what? We all came from somewhere else, didn’t we?

“Whatever”, as the Gen Xers used to say, one should never say rash things in print like “if anyone can hum a few bars of Song of Australia I’ll walk backwards to Conondale.” Several readers challenged me about their memories of Song of Australia, the fourth choice when Australia last held a plebiscite in 1977. Regular FOMM reader Elaine Beller wrote to say that in the years leading up to the plebiscite, she was a teenager living in Townsville, and a member of the local youth choral society.

“Just wanted you to know that I really enjoy reading FOMM each week,’ she wrote. “However, I also wanted to let you know that walking backwards to Conondale is on!”

“We had to learn all the patriotic songs for a public performance on The Strand, so the citizens of Townsville could make an educated choice,” she said. “So, I can sing/hum more than a few bars of Song for Australia! The lyrics had us kids in fits of laughter (‘gushing out with purple wine’ being a particular favourite).”

Caroline Carleton wrote the poem (later set to music by Carl Linger) in 1859, her winning entry for a competition held by the Gawler Institute.

I still can’t believe I walked backwards to Conondale on the strength of such purple prose as:

There is a land where honey flows
Where laughing corn luxuriant grows;
Land of the myrtle and the rose.
On hill and plain the clustering vine
Is gushing out with purple wine,
And cups are quaffed to thee and thine – Australia.

So, while I was steeling myself for the backwards trek to Conondale (note how I carefully did not specify from where), I did a little research on the art of backwards perambulation.

Shannon Molloy writing in The Courier-Mail about colourful Qld political characters, found an endearing photo of former Industrial Relations minister Vince Lester walking backwards.

“The intriguing figure of 1980s politics was famed for his hobby of walking backwards, often for hours at a time. He would complete trips in the name of charity, once rear wandering for several hours between two regional towns.”

Colourful Queensland MP Bob Katter once promised to “walk to (or from, according to some reports) Bourke backwards if the gay population of North Queensland is any more than 0.001%”. Despite his half-brother since coming out as gay and Katter being (often) reminded about this loose remark (there was a rainbow protest outside his Mt Isa offices in 2011), he maintains that gay marriage isn’t an issue in his electorate. It appears he never did take up the threat to walk frontwards or backwards to or from Bourke in Western NSW (about 1,600 kilometres to his Mt Isa electoral office).

Sometimes known as ‘retro walking,’ the seemingly unusual habit of walking (or running) backwards is widely recommended for fitness.

You will find many health and fitness links on the Internet which suggest walking backwards strengthens little-used muscles, improves balance and is good for people with knee, hip and back problems.

Some people even do it for a living.

Seaman Nathan Winn is a tour guide for the Pentagon, and routinely walks up to eight kilometres backward per day (including escalators)

Whatever you do, don’t try walking down stairs, steps or steep bush tracks backwards (or backward as they say in the US). As Seaman Mann found, when he tried going down the up-escalator, it’s embarrassing and definitely not funny.

I walk every day but if you want to have some idea how far you’re walking and set some goals to increase the tempo and distance, a pedometer is useful.

It is said that for maximum fitness from walking you need to chalk up 10,000 steps a day. That’s about eight kilometres, the same as that logged by Seaman Winn, but in a forwards direction.

If you fell asleep in your recliner while reading this on your IPad, you may want to do something about your general level of inertia.

Here’s a suggestion: Sign up for Steptember (a fund-raiser for Cerebral Palsy), where you pledge to walk 10,000 steps on each of 28 days during September.

Or you could just donate money and loaf in the recliner and watch old movies on SBS on Demand, Stan or Netflix. I’ve been looking but have not yet found the critically panned 2008 remake of The 39 Steps, a spy thriller starring Rupert Penry-Jones (Silk and Spooks). I’m curious, having seen the 1959 remake starring Kenneth More (which was spiffing). Never did see the original (Hitchcock, 1935).

UK author John Buchan wrote the book at a clifftop nursing home in Broadstairs while recovering from illness. A set of wooden steps which led from the garden to the beach are thought to have inspired the title. In the book these steps become the escape route (frontwards) down to a quay where the villains’ vessel, Ariadne, is waiting to speed them away.