rugby league - thegoodwills.com

Concussion and the slow demise of contact sport

contact-sport-concussion — Image: John Hain, www.pixabay.com

As you might know, one of my unlikely ‘hobbies’ is watching rugby league games on television. It’s as exciting as things get around here, especially if your team is winning. Once or twice a year we go to a live game (at least $100 admission for two).

The technology used to televise contact sport has led to a level of live scrutiny the game has never known before. Back in the day you could tackle someone and give him a ‘facial” (mashing your forearm into his face), and if the referee didn’t see it, you got away with an unsporting, illegal ‘dog act’.

The advent of The Bunker (a small team of referees armed with the technology to forensically replay on-field incidents), has changed the game forever. There is only one referee, and he/she can’t be in all places at once. That is why the Bunker alerted the referee to an incident last week where Parramatta Eels forward Reagan Campbell-Gillard slid his knees into the back of Titans hooker Chris Randall (who was already on the ground). It didn’t look good and the player on the ground was in apparent agony.

Campbell-Gillard was sent to the ‘Sin Bin’ and later suspended for four weeks over a grade three dangerous contact charge.

Repeated replays of such incidents prompt mothers (and fathers) around Australia to say, ‘no son of mine is playing that brutal sport.’ Then they sign them up for under-12s soccer, even though 22% of injuries in the round ball game are concussions.

Australia can’t be too far away from a class action brought by former contact sport players for whom repeated head injuries have left a legacy. There have been a few individual cases brought in Australia. Former Newcastle Knights winger James McManus eventually settled out of court after suing the National Rugby League (NRL).

One does wonder how much longer contact sports like rugby league and rugby union can be justified when there is so much evidence to show what repeated head trauma can do to an individual.

Research published in the British Medical Journal canvassed the extent of head injuries/concussions and the risk of under-reporting. The research found that 17.2% of Australian rugby league players suffered a concussion in the previous two years and did not report it to the coaching team or medical staff. About 22% of NRL first grade players admitted to not reporting at least one concussion during the 2018 and 2019 seasons. The most common reason was the player ‘not wanting to be ruled out of the game or training session’ (57.7%) and ‘not wanting to let down the coaches or teammates’ (23.1%).

Rugby league has changed immeasurably since I first started watching the game in the 1980s. Many rule changes occurred, technology worked its way into the game and now, it seems, an entire game is played with player welfare a priority. Back in the day, players commonly used their shoulders to tackle an opponent, usually resulting in the foresaid opponent being concussed and having to leave the field. Players who led with their shoulders inevitably spent time off the field having shoulder reconstructions. Even now, when shoulders are much less utilised than they were, it is not unusual to find a player in his mid-20s who has had two or even three reconstructions.

The shoulder charge is not the only banned ‘tackle’. There is the crusher tackle, the hip drop, third man in and any tackle involving contact with the head. The latter usually ends with a player being sent to the ‘sin bin’. This means the team is a man down for 10 minutes. This commonly leads to the good teams putting on 10 or even 20 points in the period where they have a numerical advantage.

You’d have to ask why rugby league players persist with high contact tackles which sports administrators have agreed are dangerous. At times it seems malicious. True, you might get sent off for 10 minutes, but the bloke you tackled into oblivion is going off for an HIA (head injury assessment) and will not return to the field. The player in the sin bin, perversely, is allowed to return to the field.

Since the tightening of concussion rules in 2016 a few players have retired prematurely because of repeated concussions or ‘head knocks’ as they were once known.

Many instances of high contact are accidental, such as head clashes (at times with your own teammate’s head). Others come from fatigue – the opponent has already beaten you, but you instinctively throw your tired arms up and hit him around the throat, chin, and head.

The NRL, the professional body which administers the game, has in recent years initiated a range of measures designed to protect players from repeated head injuries.

Any contact with the head, be it an accidental head clash, a careless or deliberate high tackle or the unconscious player’s head hitting the ground is reviewed. The Bunker can intervene and order a player off the field to be assessed by an independent doctor.

Typically, the injured player goes off for a mandatory 15-minute HIA. The player may pass the test and return to the match, but more often if it is graded category two or three the game is over for that player. If the contact is deemed serious he may be banned from playing for several weeks.

Some players seem prone to head injuries and in recent years there have been plenty of premature retirements. In the UK, law firms are leading two court challenges, one against World Rugby and another against the promoters of rugby league in England. In all there are some 350 former players involved, all alleging that the sports’ governing bodies failed to protect them from concussion and non-concussion injuries. They allege that these injuries caused various disorders including early onset dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, epilepsy, and Parkinson’s disease.

Despite an older study reporting that 23.2% of parents discouraged their children from playing rugby league, about 480,000 Australian adults, juniors and school children are engaged in the sport.

Speaking of school children (about 30,000 are involved in school programs every year), many will have reached adulthood thinking that sports betting is all part of the game. Sports betting has been legal in Australia since 1983. Lately there is much talk about placing constraints on the industry’s saturation advertising. So far the controversy has led to preposterous warnings after sports betting ads about the dangers of gambling addiction.

Gambling ads are a genuine issue given that NRL games were watched by 119 million viewers cumulatively over the 2022 season, an average of 620,000 viewers per game. The 53% increase in viewers on Channel Nine is reflected in a similar rise on Foxtel, with most games attracting 50,000 to 60,000 viewers.

The choice of betting types is large and varied. Punters can bet on the outcome of league games with novelty bets thrown in: first (and last) try scorer and in big games, man of the match, exact score, and exact winning margin. You cannot yet bet on which player will go off for an HIA, or which player will be sin binned, but never say never.

Australians have bet on stranger things.

More reading https://www.aans.org/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-Treatments/Sports-related-Head-Injury

Covid- it’s everywhere

covid-masks-pandemic — Washing line 2022 Willfried Wende – www.pixabay

On a quick shopping trip this week, it seemed that every second person was wearing a Covid mask, even though there is no legal obligation to do so. Friends, relatives, neighbours and friends of friends are either in isolation because of a positive RAT test or actually have Covid-19. There’s been a nasty flu getting around South-East Queensland at the same time. The only way to tell one from the other is to take a Rapid Antigen Test.

The statistics are a bit scary. The only saving grace is that the Omicron variants are said to be ‘milder’ than the Delta strain which was rampant in 2020.

As of this morning, Queensland reported 45, 824 active cases, including 6,366 new cases in the previous 24 hours. There were 907 hospitalisations and 14 patients in Intensive Care Units. There have been 73 deaths (people who died with Covid) this week alone.

There are many unanswered questions about this third wave of the Omicron variant. Like, how come we haven’t had it? Knock on wood. Or why do some people get “long Covid’’ where symptoms persist for months?

If you look at the historical charts, you have to wonder why governments decided to take their collective feet off the pedals of the crowd control machine.

On December 16, 2021, Queensland had 17 cases (a weekly average of 9). Then we opened the borders, relaxed the mask mandate and other rules like contact tracing which had thus far kept the virus out of Queensland.

By January 17, 2022, new cases had spiked to 31,056. While numbers have since fallen away, the State reported 32, 355 new cases (between July 11 and 15), with hospitalisation rates between 800 and 900.

Cumulatively, Queensland has now recorded 1.63 million cases (equates to 32% of the population) and 1,388 deaths. So much for Omicron being more infectious but less serious than Delta.

Queensland’s chief health officer John Gerrard has been quoted that catching Covid is “inevitable”. Ironically former chief health officer Jeanette Young, now Governor of Queensland, was also taken down by the virus.

Did you know that the entire Queensland Maroons rugby league team held a fan day in Warwick last week? The visit started with a sold-out dinner on Tuesday night with guest speakers including Maroons coach Billy Slater. Next day there was a street parade, breakfast in the park, coaching clinics for children and then the Maroons had a training session at the local footie oval. A few days later, two members of the team, Cameron Munster and Murray Taulagi tested positive for Covid and were unable to play in the decider on Wednesday.

I did notice that team members wore masks as they mingled with the thousands of fans who turned out to meet and greet.

Which brings me back to people wearing masks – in the street, in cafes, shopping centres and pharmacies. The latter used to insist on customers wearing a mask, but without the muscle of a state-mandated instruction, they can only make polite suggestions.

Remember the days of close contacts and contact tracing? The border closures, closed-down cafes and bars? Apart from hospitals, organisations with a Covid policy and employers, it seems you don’t have to prove you are double vaccinated. Hardly anyone checks to see the green tick on your phone. I was only asked to do so twice on a three-week trip to Tasmania in April. We did find you had to wear masks on public transport in Victoria and Tasmania (as you do in Queensland, although many do not wear masks).

An approved style of mask is your first line of defence to avoid being infected by Covid-laced aerial droplets. Second line is to stay home as much as possible.

The people I feel for are those who cannot avoid being in close quarters with other people (aged care homes, prisons, detention centres etc). It is now well known that residents in aged care are vulnerable; not only because of their living circumstances, but also because most are 75 and over and in the high-risk category.

Nationally there have been 2,881 deaths in aged care homes since the pandemic began in early 2020 and 2,580 residential aged care facilities have had an outbreak during that time. It’s probably misleading to include those two facts in the same sentence because the mind goes: ‘Hey, that’s an average of one death for each facility.’
The Guardian reported yesterday that 100 aged care residents are dying with Covid each week, with more than 700 current outbreaks. The industry fears that two-thirds of aged care homes across Australia may be grappling with outbreaks over the next six weeks.

Amid reports of a Covid outbreak on a cruise ship anchored in the Brisbane River, I went looking for places in the world where the virus had been contained. Unhappily, the virus has caught up with some of the 10 or so island countries which, until the end of 2021, had managed to stay safe. They included Nauru, which went from zero cases in late 2021 to 40% of the population being infected. Nauru, as you may or may not know, is ‘home’ to 129 asylum seekers, most of whom have been on the island since 2012.

The World Health Organisation confirms that there are currently 121 new cases in Nauru and a cumulative 6,237 cases (and one death) since January 2022.

Citing global numbers, the WHO says that as of July 11 there have been 552.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 6.34 million deaths. As of 2 July 2022, a total of 12.03 billion vaccine doses had been administered. As for the United States, 87 million cases have been recorded since early 2020 and 1.02 million deaths. Donald Trump, we’re looking at you.

Compare that with Australia – 10,515 deaths since the first cases were seen in February 2020.

This takes me back to an early report from Seattle, the US city that gave the world the TV soap opera ‘Grey’s Anatomy’. A community choir had met for a rehearsal in the early days of Covid when nobody knew what we were dealing with.

As Live Science recalls, 52 people were unknowingly infected with Corona virus at a choir practice in Mount Vernon, Washington. The event led to the deaths of two people.

The practice happened on March 10, roughly two weeks before Washington Governor Jay Inslee issued a ‘stay home stay healthy’ executive order, barring social gatherings and non-essential travel.

That story shocked Australian choral singers. Most community choir directors I knew decided to cancel rehearsals for the foreseeable future. We mucked around on Zoom for a while and had a few tentative practices outside, but it just wasn’t the same. Eventually in 2021, as case numbers began to fall, choirs and orchestras started rehearsing again under controlled circumstances.

Experts told us that singing in a closed room was a sure-fire way to catch the virus – 20 or 30 people spraying droplets everywhere. Nobody said anything about 52,000 people in a footie stadium shouting and screaming for 80 minutes. Yes, it was an open-air event, but even so, those patrons walked in and out of the venue, used the public toilets and struggled back and forth along packed aisles, spilling beer and spreading potentially lethal aerial droplets around. Because Queensland won the State of Origin series, there was lots of hugging, kissing and selfie-posing. Then they all got on trains and buses, noisily singing the team song on the way home.

Don’t get me started. (Yes, but ‘we’ won – wasn’t it sweet? Ed)

FOMM Back Pages

Sport as opium of the masses

YouTube video – Ash comes back from 5-1 down

On Sunday night, as Rafael Nadal and Daniil Medvedev drew level at two games each in the first set, we decided that tennis as a spectator sport was intrinsically boring to watch.

We adjourned to the dining room table to resume the great summer scrabble tournament. Earlier that day while vacuuming, I had found an F lurking beside a leg of the dining room chair. Now it was back inside the green cloth bag, I felt my luck was about to turn.

As the game progressed, faced with a dismal collection of letters and a cramped board, I tentatively offered RAFA. She Who Usually Wins at Scrabble snorted: “Good try, Bob”. I ended up winning that game (which took 1 hour and 11 minutes with no tie-break). ZOO and OM on a triple word score did the trick. In between moves one of us would slip into the lounge to see how the men’s final match was progressing – whack (grunt), whack, whack, whack (grunt) whack.

Scrabble over, we went back into the lounge and switched to Muster Dog, an ABC reality series fast overtaking all but the tennis in the ratings. Yes, we could have watched it later and persisted with the tennis. But really, how many hours can you spend watching two blokes, neither of them Australian, whack a ball back and forth across a net?

I realise this is cognitive dissonance and counter to the prevailing Australian obsession with sports of all persuasion. But as February looms – the brief hiatus between summer and winter sports begins.

The end of the Australian Open is a sign we are all about to be dragged back to an albeit-postponed new school year and all that entails. The ever-spiralling Omicron case numbers might finally penetrate our sports-soaked brains. The total number of cases in Australia since February 2020 is 2.29 million. As of February 2 there were 345,027 active cases. In those two years 3,987 people died, most recently musician and promoter Glenn Wheatley.

But gee, Rafa’s got a great forehand slice, eh!

Across the decades, various academics and writers have twisted the famous Marxism that sport is the ‘opium of the people’. Marx actually said that of religion, back in 1843. Marx, being opposed to all things important to the ‘system’, said religion was like a drug, causing people to experience an illusory form of happiness.

Politicaldictionary.com says the original intent of Marx’s thinking has been paraphrased and twisted over the years. The term ‘opiate of the masses’ has been hijacked by people trying to make a case about professional sport (in cahoots with television), replacing religion in an increasingly secular society.

What Marx actually said 179 years ago was this:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx’s opinion was that religion dulled people’s minds and preventing them from improving their lives. Many pundits have since argued that spectator sports, politics or even television itself also distract us from confronting the real issues in life.

For example, Western Kentucky University political scientist Eric Bain-Selbo argued that sport (in this instance college football), was the opium of the people.

“Sport functions to preserve the status quo, to maintain the position of the “haves” vis-à-vis the “have nots”. To do this, sport must act as a kind of “opiate” for the “have nots”, so that they will accept the inequities and injustices of the social system.”

I did the basic research for this while half watching Nadal sweat his way through the fourth and fifth game of the third set. As the game seemed about to go to five sets, I cleaned up the kitchen, turned on the dish washer and went to bed to read three more chapters in a devilishly well-written book by William Boyd. Armadillo is about an idiosyncratic chap who has found his niche in life practising the dark arts of a loss adjuster. Then I checked my emails, scrolled through Facebook to find that few of my friends were watching the final (as opposed to Saturday night when 4.25 million people saw Ash Barty win the Australian Women’s championship). Ah, but that was different, eh? She’s one of ours.

The above demonstrates how much one can get done in five hours and 24 minutes, which is how long it took Rafa to wear down the Russian and win his 21^st grand slam.

You have to give it to the old pro, who, like Ash Barty, came from well behind to take an impressive victory. The match was watched by 1.58 million television viewers, although there are no statistics available on how many of them gave up and went to bed.

On Saturday night, a record 4.25 million people tuned in to Channel Nine to watch Ash Barty defeat Danielle Collins in two sets.

Later, after the official presentation and a victory lap, Barty made her way to the Channel Nine studios where an excited James Bracey waited. In the interim, Bracey waxed enthusiastic about the win, sharing the euphoria with co-commentators and former tennis stars, Casey Dellacqua and Alicia Molik.

“You dream of this as a broadcaster. Our whole Wide World of Sports team has been willing this on,” Bracey said, having earlier acknowledged how badly the country needed a (psychological) lift.

Near the end of the interview (YouTube video above), a crew member pushed a mixed basket of boutique beers on to the presenters’ table. This shameless product placement left Ash with nowhere to go but choose one (by name). It is commercial TV after all.

I note there is now an edited version of this video reducing it to a beer ad, which has produced a stream of comments castigating Nine for taking advantage.

If you saw the original interview, you could not fail to be impressed with Ash’s genuine, modest nature. When Bracey asked her about her trove of tennis trophies, she revealed she does not keep them at home but instead shares them around to family members. Nice.

I happened to text my sister in New Zealand at some point in the Barty/Collins match to ask if she was watching. I’d forgotten about the three-hour time difference. Next morning it transpired she’d been otherwise occupied, celebrating the first birthday of her tamahine mootua (great-grand daughter). My sister and her family are mad about cricket though, so I sent her an abridged version of Ash Barty’s achievements in cricket, golf and tennis. Meanwhile, we now have to sweat our way through February, 28 days of humidity, storms, possible cyclones, probable heat waves (Feb 1 was a stinker), floods (see SA), and continuing supply chain issues. As for sport, there’s always the six nations rugby tournament or the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Shame about the Matildas (women’s soccer team). Then there’s the first rugby league game of the year, to be played (Covid-willing), on Saturday February 12. The Indigenous All Stars meet the New Zealand Maoris in a televised event which promises to be a spectacle, if only for the pre-match entertainment. The Maori team will demonstrate a haka, while the Indigenous team will hopefully reprise the ‘war cry’ that Bangarra Dance Company founder Stephen Page and indigenous leaders produced for last year’s contest.

No scrabble game that night.

FOMM back pages

Music festivals and footie finals

music-festivals-grand-finals — Night shot of the Neurum Creek Festival marquee

Some of our musician friends in Melbourne and Sydney have ‘festival envy’, akin to the mixed emotions felt by southern footie fans who will miss out on this year’s grand finals.

As you might know, the National Rugby League (NRL) moved all teams across the border into Queensland. As a result of ongoing Covid lockdowns in Victoria and New South Wales, this year’s Grand Final will be held in Brisbane for the first time ever. Likewise, the Aussie Rules Grand Final has been moved from Melbourne to Western Australia.

As for those southern musicians, most if not all of their live music events have been cancelled or postponed. For people who combine day jobs (also affected by lockdowns), with weekend gigs, these are very hard times. It’s been harder still for those who do earn a living from music and persevere with touring plans and CD launches, only to see them curtailed by lockdowns.

So we can consider ourselves blessed to have performed at one of the few music festivals to go ahead in Australia last weekend at Neurum Creek bush retreat near Woodford (see image above).

The Neurum Creek Music Festival is in its 15^th year, not counting a cancellation in 2020. It’s a medium-sized festival held outdoors (a camping weekend). The organisers hire one very large marquee with associated infrastructure for a bar and a ‘green room’ for performers. It is a minimalist event – numbers are capped at 1,000 and most of the work is done by volunteers. There were three food stalls this year and a hugely popular coffee van. The festival is billed as an ‘acoustic music’ festival,(ie no heavy drum kits or electronica, thankfully. Ed) with 23 acts performing from Friday evening through to Sunday afternoon.

Organisers Angela Kitzelman and Don Jarmey kept a daily watch on Covid developments in Queensland while planning the 2021 event.

“We sat down and assessed the risk.” Angela said. “It’s a very relaxed festival that we run and the money that we spend on it goes mainly to performers, for the marquee costs and the sound guys.

“It was looking at how much we spend and also looking at the situation in Queensland and what the health directions were.

“At the time we decided to go ahead with it, there had been a lockdown. We came out and talked to the camp site managers. They told us that in the event of a Covid lockdown cancellation, people who had booked tickets could get a full credit to do it at another time.

“We realised we could afford to do this at half capacity, as it was at the time, and be very clear that we would pick (the festival) up and put it on another date if something happened.”

After looking carefully at their finances, the organisers decided to press the ‘go’ button, without the usual lead time to host music festivals.

“We invite people to play and say this is how much we can afford to pay.

“We didn’t have enough time to invite expressions of interest so we just asked people who had played here before, abiding by our rule that performers don’t get to play two years in a row.”

“Our advantage is that people come for the festival itself. We don’t have headline performers. We often sell out before I’ve finished finalising the programme. People come here for the experience.”

While Queensland has been able to avoid ongoing lockdowns, some music festivals have been cancelled or postponed regardless. Last month, Woodfordia announced the cancellation of its six-day Woodford Folk Festival, held at New Year. Instead, the organisation will schedule smaller events called Bushtime.

The Byron Bay Blues Festival, which was cancelled just one day out from the Easter 2021 programme, has been postponed again to April 2022. The National Folk Festival, held in Canberra at Easter, has called for expressions of interest for 2022, a move which surprised many, as it was cancelled in 2020 and 2021.

Illawarra Folk Festival artistic director David De Santi took to Facebook this week to announce the cancellation of the music festival set down for 13-16 January, 2022.

“It is just too hard in the current climate for a non-profit association to take the risk on a festival of the scale of the Illawarra Folk Festival,” he said.

Mr De Santi said there was a chance the festival may be able to apply for a grant from the Federal Government’s RISE Fund and reschedule later in 2022.

Despite these and many other cancellations, two smaller music festivals are going ahead in north Queensland next month. Smaller social gatherings where musicians gather to jam have been held or are set down for later in the year. Woodfordia is also staging its Small Halls tour around Queensland country areas.

Professional arts groups including theatre, ballet, opera and orchestral companies have also suffered from lockdowns and Covid restrictions. Some Queensland arts events have since gone ahead, including ballet, theatre, musicals and the Brisbane Festival. Even so, this press release from Queensland Ballet is just one example of how arts companies have struggled to stage shows since Covid started in March 2020.

Queensland Ballet artistic director Li Cunxin took the decision in May 2020 to postpone the season to 2021. Despite forecasting a 43% drop in revenue for 2020 and a drop in patronage for 2021, Queensland Ballet resumed performances in 2021. As subscribers, we were lucky to have seats for sold out performances of the 60^th Anniversary Gala in March and Sleeping Beauty in June. The company also toured the regions (Tutus on Tour). and has five more ballets scheduled between now and the end of the year.

Government funding is available to support the arts, but it is relatively lean compared to the money invested in professional sport. The Federal Government’s $50 million Arts Sustainability Fund might sound generous, but it is spread over two financial years (about $2m a month). Then there is the hard-to-fathom RISE grant program. This post in The Conversation last September tosses it into the too-little-too-late basket.

For the professional sports sector, it has been mostly ‘business as usual’, although at a considerable financial cost. The NRL decided in early July to move NSW and ACT-based rugby league teams and staff into Queensland at a reported cost of $12m to $15m per month. The NRL funded the move, but it needed formal State Government permission to make it work.

As usual, money talks. It comes down to billion of dollars in sponsorship deals, international broadcast rights, betting agencies and other contractual obligations (not the least of which involves players’ salaries).

The NRL decided to relocate when there were eights weeks of the competition left to run (not including the finals). Now, primarily because of the Covid situation in NSW, the finals are being held in Queensland as well. So by the time the NRL wraps up the season in early October, the cost of what was meant to be a month-long trial may have blown out to $45 million or more.

The good news for Queensland is that local hospitality businesses have benefited from this, with more than 500 people living in hotels and serviced apartments for three months.

The hospitality flows most on ‘Mad Monday’, when players who did not make the finals let their mullets down. Let’s hope that the relatively strong Covid bubble around these 13 visiting teams remains unbreached during coming weeks.

We only need to remember the infamous Illawarra Dragons barbecue debacle to realise what could happen amid the inevitable celebrations and drowning of sorrows that follow a grand final.

Go you Rabbitohs!

Arts Take Virtual Performance To Another Level

One evening in April, a Kiwi songwriter friend living in London posted a YouTube video by the London Humanist Choir, performing a love song in Māori. The video of New Zealand’s unofficial anthem, Pokarekare Ana, was, as we are now accustomed, a multi-screen video with choir members recording their parts remotely. I shared this with a few Kiwi friends who live elsewhere, knowing it would tug at the tendrils of homesickness, which are almost always waving in the breeze.

This video has had some 37,000 views – not bad for an arts group with 322 subscribers. The group’s social media curator coined the cute phrase, ‘Choir-antine’.

The group’s leader, Alex Jaye, started by giving the choir singers notes on how to record, mostly to minimise unwanted noise, distortion and filtering. Once he received the 20+ videos, he used EQ and compression to correct problems detected in the audio (often due to mobile phone microphones).

“Very little corrective editing (on individual videos) was used as it kills the sense of there being a choir – which does invite blemishes naturally as part of the sound.

Mr Jaye used iMovie to edit the video, utilising picture-in-picture, a technique often used in sports broadcasts.

“Overall it was around a day’s worth of work, however mostly due to video editing not being my forte, so I would say all told five to six hours’ worth of editing.”

In the same vein, a virtual video by Camden Voices does Cindi Lauper’s True Colours a lot of justice.

Like Alex Jaye, the UK choir’s director Ed Blunt started by giving singers instructions for filming the videos to a click track (metronome).

“It was a steep technological learning curve for me as I only had limited experience with video editing.”

He also converted the individual video formats into a uniform file type. The video was synchronised separately from the audio and the different grids were arranged and then exported (one at a time) to an editing programme (Premiere Pro). The audio tracks were synced and mixed in Logic.

My point, before we get too much further into this topic, is the value of such contributions to the community in general. True Colours (this version) has had 1.64 million views. If even 10% of the people who watched this sent Camden Voices $1, they would be able to top up their larder, probably bare these past months from a lack of paid performances.

True Colours:

Sunshine Coast choir director Kim Kirkman concurs with the complexities involved in editing a virtual video. He produced a Zoom video for female barbershop group Hot Ginger Chorus, performing Cindi Lauper’s Time after Time.

“The audio part is the challenging part for me. I have to put 25 voices in line with each other and check that they are all correct. That takes quite a lot of time. The visual is very easy. I just do two runs through Zoom and then stitch that together over the top of the audio that I’ve done previously.”

Time after Time:

Musicians, performing artists, actors and dancers were quick to adapt the technology to the life of isolation. Anyone with a smart phone and the ability to film themselves could play. The production values on numerous videos by orchestras, jazz bands, country musicians and choirs have, for the most part, been outstanding.

The ‘Quarantunes’ series by the Nelson family (Willie and sons Lukas and Micah) is worth a look. Lukas, who wrote a lot of the music for the hit movie A Star is Born, is the one singing, in case you were wondering!

Turn off the TV and build a Garden:

Queensland Ballet is a local example of an arts company creating ‘mini-ballets’ to keep subscribers’ appetites whetted for next year’s season. On May 21, QB made the difficult announcement that it was postponing its 2020 season to 2021.

Queensland Ballet Artistic Director Li Cunxin AO said the company was planning a reintroduction of activity “in a cautious and methodical manner to optimize dancer and community safety”.

Mr Li said in a statement that the decision was also based on feedback from patrons that they may wish to wait until 2021 to enjoy ballet again.

“We have also undertaken economic modelling which has considered potential social distancing restrictions that would render any return to the stage as extremely costly and potentially detrimental financially to the company.”

If you are a ballet fan (and FOMM’s research suggests that readers are more likely to follow the arts than the NRL), you can donate money this month and a benefactor will quadruple your gift. So your humble $25 turns into $100 and so on. To keep the faith, QB is posting 60 short dance videos through the month of June.

Britain’s National Theatre has been filming live performances and streaming them every Thursday. The most recent play is Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, starring Tom Hiddleston. There was also a performance of Frankenstein starred Benedict Cumberbatch as the monster. Imagine!

This is high art delivered with a generosity of spirit while the theatre is closed to patrons until at least August 31. If you think about what tickets to live theatre cost in Australia, you could log on to PayPal and send them a few quid!

I rather liked comedian Sammy J’s Antique Roadshow piss-take recently where he evaluated the worth of a pair of tickets to a live event. As the faux antique owner says, “you mean people used to leave their houses?”

We might bear this satire in mind, given that this week the first patrons will be allowed into live rugby league games. The National Rugby League apparently pointed out that pubs and clubs were allowed to have up to 50 patrons on their premises (subject to social distancing rules). So, the NRL said, it was only fair that rugby league fans to be allowed in limited numbers, confined to the catering sections of stadiums.

It will be interesting to see if Fox Sports abandons its naff ‘virtual crowd’ audio, the sports equivalent of canned laughter in a comedy show where there is no audience.

Andrew Moore of the ABC’s sports show Grandstand left no room for ambiguity when he commented on this during a lull in play.

“When two players are down injured like this (a head clash known as ‘friendly fire’), the crowd would normally go quiet. Let’s have a listen (pushes window open). Nah, nothing! No fake crowd noise on the ABC, folks.”

Which is as good a point as any to observe that while arts communities were getting creative through the March/April covid-19 restrictions, the best Channel Nine (the home of rugby league) could come up with was re-runs of State of Origin matches from bygone eras. the transition over the next 12 months.

The best advice to choirs and singers in general is dire – there is no safe way to practice public singing while the coronavirus is active.

Dr Lucinda Halstead, one of the experts quoted in this paper, says physical distancing on a stage for a choir would not be possible:

“You would need a football stadium to space apart the Westminster choir”.

The reality is that normal transmission will not be resumed until social distancing ends (as is now the case in New Zealand).

Kia kaha (be strong).

Morris Dancing And Other Cancelled Events

morris-dancing-cancelled events — Image of Morris dancers at Mt Coot-tha (2019) by Mary Brettell

Most of us have one social activity we love to share with like-minded people, be it Morris dancing, concerts, plays, ballet, rodeos, stock car racing, cricket, playing or watching football (all codes) or participating in surfing carnivals or golf tournaments.

Perhaps camp drafting is your thing (nothing happening here); there are no country shows or rodeos and the list of cancelled music events and festivals goes on for pages.

Even if your interest is excentrique (a dozen friends gathering for dinner and Chateau de Chazelles while trying to speak French for two hours), COVID-19 restrictions have put paid to it.

I might just add, before developing the theme, I’m puzzled why the horse racing industry has not come under much scrutiny for its lack of attention to social distancing. Horse racing, trots and even greyhound racing have continued without disruption throughout COVID-19. Sure, there are no crowds in attendance, but just envisage a typical blanket finish in a horse race: a nose, a neck and half a head. Pity the poor jockeys at the back; copping all that flying sweat, saliva and horse drool. That’s not social distancing, folks. As animal rights group PETA rightly observes, “staff members at a typical race meeting include trainers, jockeys, vets, strappers, farriers, stewards, handlers, and stable and kennel staff. “They’re required to be in close proximity, and many travel considerable distances to attend.” (Nothing to do with gambling revenue, of course. Ed)

But as we were saying about cancelled events, Queensland’s Morris dancers called off today’s traditional May Day event.

Every year on May 1, dancers gather on hilltops at dawn to welcome the sun. Morris dancing is a 14^th century English tradition which lives on, not only in the UK, but in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.

This was the topic of my first FOMM, six years ago. It was an eye-witness account of pre-dawn shenanigans atop Brisbane’s best-known spot to view the city. It was cold, dark and showery, but nothing could extinguish the enthusiasm of musicians and dancers and their loyal followers.

Morris dancers clash sticks and bump bellies, symbolising the battle between the seasons. Morris men often wear hats with flowers, and “tatter coats” and many paint their faces. Dancers use either garlands of flowers or hankies for the gentle dances. But there are as many variations in dress and dance style as there are Morris ‘sides’ or teams.

Brisbane Morris musician and dancer Nicole Murray told FOMM that local dancers would not be congregating at Mt Coot-tha this year, the first no-show for at least 40 years.

“But we are marking the occasion,” she said. “Emma (Nixon) and I recorded a version of Princess Royal (a traditional dancer tune). Everyone is dancing a jig at dawn and filming it. The aim is to do a stitched-together video. I hope that will be the outcome, anyway.”

Amongst other things, COVID-19 has postponed attempts by those who aspire to topple world records for mass participations. World records of this nature are many and varied – mass gatherings of Peruvian folk dancers, people wearing Akubra-style hats, Elvis impersonators, people dressed as Harry Potter, the longest River Dance line – the list goes on.

In 2018, the Potty Morris and Folk Festival set the record for the largest Morris dance in Sheringham (UK) with 369 dancers (33 Morris sides).

(Ed: Bob reels about clutching his head screaming ‘the bells, the bells”)

Nicole Murray’s partner John Thompson penned a song a few years ago which starts: “Dance up the sun on a fine May morning, dance up to sun to call in the Spring…” and traces the English tradition that spawned this annual event. The ritual insists that if Morris dancers don’t dance up the sun, it will never rise again.

May Day also commemorates those who struggled to win the right to fair pay and an eight-hour day. Perhaps that is one reason British Morris dancers arced up last year when the UK government arbitrarily decided to shift the date of the May long weekend (in 2020).

Meanwhile back home, a survey showed that Australians are anxious, bored and lonely as a result of the COVID-19 restrictions.

This may not apply so much to the over-65 cohort, many of whom will tell you they routinely experience anxiety, boredom and loneliness. For example, the highlight of my week was queuing up at 7.15am for my annual flu shot, along with 150 others over-65s. (We stayed at least three walkers apart).

Freedom of movement restrictions are sending some people a bit bonkers. Look how much trouble these rugby league players are in, not only breaking curfew but sharing their co-mingling activities on social media.

Young people are finding self-isolation and social restrictions tough. I offer as evidence the chart that shows more women aged 20-29 have been infected with COVID-19 than any other age group.

We have noticed, on our evening strolls along the river with the dog, increasing numbers of runners, seemingly out for more than routine exercise. Most people whizz by at one or two metres with a cheery “G’day”. Some give us a wide berth, occasionally muttering “1.5 metres mate.” A solitary young man can be seen repeatedly whacking a hockey ball into the net, not missing very often. One can only guess, in these uncertain times, at the level of frustration felt by people who enjoy team sports of any kind.

Even though I have been a rugby league fan for some 40 years, I disagree with the National Rugby League’s decision to restart the professional season in late May. It is irresponsible, fraught with risk and seems to be done for the sake of TV rights, betting agencies, and advertising contracts (not forgetting contractual obligations with players and coaches).

As is often demonstrated, the NRL cannot control what goes on in the lives of young athletes with high disposable incomes. What’s worse is the sense of entitlement the season re-launch implies. It may not be so well known that all amateur and semi-professional footballers (and netball players), were stood down in March. There are no signs at all of those competitions resuming any time soon.

We all may deeply resent the forced curtailment of our chosen sport/hobby/social activity. But it is being done for noble reasons, demonstrated every day with a notable drop-off in new COVID-19 cases. This weekend will be the first big test (in Queensland), as some restrictions are eased. For our part, we may visit Queen Mary Falls, located in a national park some 40 kms from home, just inside the 50km maximum travel allowance. As it’s in a national park, the dog will have to say home. He won’t like it, but rules are rules, eh?

As for the Morris no-show, several people who follow the tradition suggested Morris folk dance in their own driveways, just like on Anzac Day. Accordion and bells at 5am, LOL!

Here’s Nicole’s Murray’s song, Let Winter Begin, about that very magical moment from a southern hemisphere perspective.Let Winter Begin

Don’t fence me in – a COVID-19 adventure

covid-19-travel-adventure — The author looking for an elusive bird at Sawn Rocks, 25kms from Narrabri. Photo by Laurel Wilson.

In downtown Dubbo, NSW, the checkout operator at one of the major supermarkets described the day as ‘crazy’. Shopping late (6pm) we managed to buy enough food to tide us over, mindful of Scotty from Marketing’s exhortation to stop hoarding, because ‘it’s UnAustralian’. But the PM was at least three weeks late with that edict, which fell on deaf shoulders (in Dubbo at least). There were plenty of empty shelves and shortages. No rice, mince, long life milk, potatoes, pumpkins or toilet rolls. I cracked a lame joke with a customer about SFM’s demand that we stop hoarding.

“Didn’t work here,” was the terse response. (Possibly because people resent being spoken to like naughty schoolkids.Ed.) The only things on our list that we could not buy were spuds and long life milk – the mainstay of campers everywhere. What is that about? In normal times supermarkets can’t give it away!

But these are not normal times, not at all.

As of 8pm on Thursday, there were 565 diagnosed cases of coronavirus in Australia. Yes, it is spreading fast. But lazy reporting, combined with deliberate sensationalism in the news media does not help with perspective.

Example: “The number of COVID-19 cases in NSW (265), has escalated dramatically,” the comment not balanced with the observation, ‘Australia’s most populous state’ (7.54 million).

Scotty and his War Cabinet came up with the idea of advising the cancellation of all non-essential events attracting crowds of more than 500 people. Just why they decided on that arbitrary number is one mystery. The other imponderable is why the COVID Crisis Team decided to foreshadow the plan on March 11 but postpone it until after the weekend of March 13-15, which just happened to be the start of the rugby league season.

As we all now know, future rounds of NRL matches will be held in empty stadiums, to attempt to limit the spread of the virus; to flatten the curve, as they say.

Regardless of what happens to the infection rate now, 80,000 people attended eight rugby league games last weekend, not to mention the thousands who attended the Hillsong Conference in Sydney. As of last Monday, you can’t go and watch a live footie game anywhere. I have no argument with that, but must roll out the old cliché about closing the stable door. Too late, Scotty, that horse has bolted. The War Cabinet may yet regret the decision to let 80,000 people co-mingle, three days ahead of a ban on mass gatherings, which they now tell us could last for six months.

As I said last week, we are on the road and anything could happen. The three music festivals and a garden show we had planned to attend have been cancelled. Nevertheless, we motored on down the New England and Newell highways, giving our new-ish caravan its first serious road-test.

People we know who are taking the coronavirus more seriously than we are (so far) seemed alarmed that we were not self-immolating or whatever they call it. We are not alone. I counted 185 vehicles between Moree and Narrabri (some 100kms). A third of them were trucks – essential services, no doubt. In a way, we travellers are all self-isolating, sealed in our air conditioned cabs except for times when we have to refuel (paying by EFTPOS, using the same keypad upon which hundreds of customers have already left their microbe-laden fingerprints).

We’ve been staying in local showgrounds, a process which usually involved leaving cash in an honesty box. Vans are parked a long way from each other so there’s not much interaction unless you go looking for it. As I have remarked to people who know me well – I have no trouble with social distancing.

It’s a bit hard to find a news story which is not touching on the coronavirus pandemic, even in a small way, so we switched off and went birdwatching. Lake Narrabri is a good spot to see water birds of all varieties, which we did, thanks to the unprecedented discipline of getting out of bed at 7am!

If we were not ambling around country New South Wales (centre of the coronavirus universe, remember), we’d not have seen the amazing Sawn Rocks (photo above). The basalt formation lies at the bottom of a small gorge in remnant rainforest. The spectacular geology is known in the trade as ‘organ piping’.

Later we drove to Gulargambone, (kudos for those who can pronounce it correctly) stopping off for a good soak in the Pilliga Bore Baths. There were three other people in the pool and we all negotiated our corners without anyone having to say anything. I noticed that they close the baths for cleaning on Friday mornings.

Matters of personal hygiene loom large when assailed by a fast-spreading virus for which there is no vaccine. Dubbo’s biggest supermarket was right out of all items related to hand sanitation. My plan is to buy a small spray bottle from a $2 shop and mix up a mild solution of antiseptic and water. I was bemused to see sideline officials at the Tigers vs Dragons game, disinfecting footballs every time one of them went off-field. Dip, rinse and dry. Then gloved-up ball kids ran the ball back to where it was needed. Did that really happen?

The cancellation of the three music festivals at Katoomba, Yackandandah and Horsham was not a financial loss for us, apart from deciding not to upgrade our non-refundable cheap air fares to Sydney and back.

We were just going to these festivals as punters, maybe picking up a walk-up gig along the way. But I feel for my musician friends trying to earn a living in a notoriously fickle business.

As one muso friend said: “We’re watching our careers evaporate and transition to an online model that can’t possibly be sustained.”

Sick of all the negativity and doom-saying across all media, I went on a hunt for the places which had the smallest exposure to COVID-19. Gibraltar, a British protectorate located between Spain and Morocco, has only three reported cases after banning all cruise ships quite some time ago. The Vatican (meaning the Holy See), had one reported case, and the ACT has three, including high-profile politician Peter Dutton. Or you could head for the Northern Territory where no cases of COVID-19 have been reported. But you’d have to be sure you were not carrying the virus, and apparently that is the one thing none of us know.

I’m not at all sure how the Vatican City, a walled enclave within greater Rome, has managed to keep coronavirus out. Italy now has 25,000 cases and the death toll has reached 1,809. Normally a haven for tourists in the lead-up to Holy Week, this report says tourists have vanished across Italy. That must be a weird feeling for the citizens of Venice, who each year host 20 million tourists.

Closer to home, the Byron Bay Blues Festival and Canberra’s National Folk Festival at Easter have both been cancelled, with a host of smaller events following suit. Sydney’s Royal Easter Show and Melbourne’s annual flower show have also been axed. This is likely to be a financial disaster for the catering businesses who earn a living from such events.

Meanwhile we will continue on our uncharted road adventure, spending a bit of money in local towns, as my editor person says “until someone in authority orders us to stop.”

Friday on My Mind – Technology And Our Private Lives

technology-privacy — “Hacker’ image by www.pixabay.com

“Och*, technology – it’s the Deil’s work,” my Scottish Dad said in 1964, when I bought one of the early transistor radios.

Dad died in 1991, so he missed the Internet (and Windows 98, the best version). He also missed WIFI, smart phones, internet banking, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Bluetooth, video and music streaming and that nemesis of 21^st century parents − Facetime. I’m not sure what he’d make of hackers, spammers, viruses, malware, or dealing with glitch-prone software and untimely computer crashes.

As we all should know privacy risks for internet and mobile phone users include data harvesting, web tracking and government spying. Many internet security companies are now advocating the use of a virtual private network (VPN) which encrypts your data and hides your internet address. And, as this article reveals, the Internet of Things poses new cyber threats, as security is often lax or absent in domestic items like smart TVs, fridges and microwaves and other connected devices.

This week I conducted an IT security review after a sudden flood of spam emails jammed up one of our addresses (not this one). She Who Goes By Various Acronyms was extremely pinged off with the 200 dodgy emails that came several nights in succession. They were dressed up to look like emails we’d sent but had been ‘rejected by sender’.

I can’t say our Internet Service Provider (iinet) was overly helpful. They insisted that the email address had not been hacked or compromised. The support team advised me to change my password (duh) and later referred me to a service where you can report ‘new’ spam. That didn’t really help much, so I spent a good few hours doing my own troubleshooting.

As part of a usor emptor security review, I reset my WIFI router to its default settings, and then re-installed it with a complex admin password and a new WIFI password. Tedious, yes, and the tediousness extended to relaying the new WIFI password to every device that shares the same router. As a result, we slowed the spam to a trickle and now it has stopped altogether. (Yay, techy Bob-Ed)

In the early days of starting a WordPress website, my weekly posts were inundated by what is known in blogger world as ‘comment spam’ – most of it from Russia. We slowed the onslaught by installing an effective anti-spam plugin (Akismet) and stopped it by limiting post comments to 14 days.

I began to wonder about spam; who distributes it and why. Do they want to sell you stuff or are they just creating mischief? What they want more than anything is for you to click on the inevitable malware-ridden attachments. Do so at your peril.

I discovered that a sudden flood of spam can (a) bury messages you did need to find and (b) sometimes they are phishing emails. These are emails that purport to be from one of your legitimate service providers. You can usually detect them by the stilted use of English and also by the fake email address

Later, I forwarded the bogus email to iinet support and complained. Since then, I have had other attempts by swindlers to milk credit card details by forging emails. It is beyond me why a large ISP (iinet, now owned by TPG), can’t put a stop to this. I’m told scams like this are commonplace, no matter which ISP you use.

There’s a lot of it about. As you may have read recently, cyber crooks impudently set up a facsimile of the MyGov website, which holds an enormous database of tax, medical and social security detail.

Many of my Facebook friends are currently complaining about nuisance calls, phishing emails, spam or hacking of their ‘Messenger’ app. These scams are becoming so prevalent it behoves us all to put another layer of security in place. Many banks and institutions (including MyGov), use a ‘dongle’ or some form of two-step verification (a time-sensitive pin sent to your mobile).

There is a certain amount of sales-driven hysteria promulgated about the ability of ‘Russian hackers’ to covertly take control of your computer and start delving into your private details. Some swear by online password managers, but I favour an in-house, two-step method. It is tedious but safe, provided you don’t fall into the trap of allowing your web browser to save logins and passwords. Surely you don’t do that?

The anti-virus programme I uninstalled this week was quite good at doing what it is supposed to do, but it kept alerting me to potential threats and PC performance issues. Solving these supposed threats and issues meant upgrading to one or more ‘premium’ programmes.

Hassles aside, when technology works, it can be a joy to all. Last week I compiled a short video to send to my Auntie in the UK who was turning 100. My sister and her daughter sent me a video on Messenger as did my nephew. We recorded our own video greeting on the veranda at home, complete with kookaburras in the background. I called my other sister in New Zealand and recorded her audio message and then edited the clips into a 10-minute video and slideshow. I then uploaded it to YouTube with a privacy setting. My cousin in the UK said it came up great when cast to the big screen TV.

That milestone occasion got me musing about my teenage years (Auntie outlived her sister (my Mum) by 52 years. Technology sure has changed from those days as a rugby-mad teenager in New Zealand. I bought the transistor radio for one purpose; I’d set the alarm (a clock with two bells on top), and get up in the middle of the night to listen to (e.g.) the All Blacks play England at Twickenham.

Dad (left) had no interest in sport, but as a volunteer member of the St John’s Ambulance, he spent many a cold Saturday afternoon on the rugby sidelines, first-aid kit at the ready.

He’d have probably credited the ‘Deil’ with this 2019 example of electronic surveillance of professional athletes. When professional rugby players run out onto the field, a small digital gadget is tucked into a padded pouch on the back of their jumpers. The GPS tracker relays performance information to the coaching team (and, apparently, to rugby commentators). From this wafer-thin tracker they can upload data and analyse the player’s on-field movements. This is how Storm winger Josh Addo-Carr was proclaimed the fastest man in the NRL. He set a top speed of 38.5 kmh chasing a scrum kick down the left touchline in the round five match against the North Queensland Cowboys in April. He’d still get run down by a panther or a tiger, but it’s pretty darned fast.

While the top 10 stats look thoroughly impressive, I doubt the general public will get to hear about the half-fit players slacking off in the 63^rd minute.

Fair go, as we say in Australia, as if it isn’t intrusive enough going into the dressing sheds and interviewing sweaty blokes in their underwear.

*general interjection of confirmation, affirmation, and often disapproval (Scots)

A Few Observations About Ice and Glaciers

ice-glacier-climate-change — Fox Glacier image by Cath Singleton

One Thursday night while watching rugby league, I went to the freezer, extracted some ice cubes and wrapped them in a tea towel. The aim was to encase my throbbing thumb in an icy blanket of numbness.

It’s just arthritis, the doctor said, examining the swelling of the thumb joint. Gardening, playing guitar and driving tends to bring on the pain and swelling. Importantly, the doctor did not recommend ice, instead suggesting anti-inflammatories (tablets or gel).

For athletes the world over, ice has for decades been part of the treatment for swelling and pain brought on by sporting injuries. It was quite a revelation, then, to discover that ice no longer has the imprimatur it once had for treatment of bruises and sprains. It seems that doctors and physiotherapists now believe that moving the injured body part helps more with recovery than numbing it with ice.

To digress for a moment, a Deloitte survey of media and entertainment habits cited here a few weeks back found that 91% of survey participants multi-task while watching TV. I scoffed at the time, then started thinking about the things I was doing while ‘watching’ footie.

The ritual of icing my thumb expanded into googling (on my phone) all manner of references to ice (frozen water) as a future FOMM took shape. I may have toyed with my crossword book (seven down: a permanent mass of ice caught in a mountain pass).

I may also have left-handedly replied to two texts and three emails while watching the Brisbane Broncos make multiple mistakes, run sideways, miss tackles and wonder why they got beaten.

When it comes to ice and rugby league, you often footie players sitting forlornly on the bench with bags of ice strapped to their shoulders, knees, thighs or ankles. The most common rugby league injury is what is euphemistically known as a ‘cork’ which is what we kids used to call an ‘Uncle Charlie’, that is, when the schoolyard bully knees you in the thigh muscle. The result is extreme pain, as a deep-seated bruise takes shape within the traumatised tissue.

You will notice I have reclaimed the original definition of ice (the solid form of water). It takes this form when subjected to temperatures of zero and below. In contemporary culture, ice is most frequently used to serve chilled drinks and to create temporary fridges at large family gatherings.

The times when ice (frozen water) most often makes it into the news is when storms drop hailstones as big as golf balls, tennis balls, cricket balls or even bowling balls. It’s no fun being caught out in a hailstorm and can even be dangerous. There have been reports of people dying, going back to France in 1360, during the Hundred Years war, when 1,000 English soldiers were killed in a freak hailstorm. The deadliest of the last century was when 246 people died in Moradabad, India, in 1988.

Hailstorms bring out the worst in headline writers, as they struggle to find four or five letter words that create panic pictures (‘wreak havoc’ is a favourite) and so is ‘freak’, as in ‘a very unusual and unexpected event or situation’.

Hailstorms also play freakish havoc with the balance sheets of general insurers. The Insurance Council of Australia reveals its biggest payout in recent times was the $1.7 billion in losses a 1999 hailstorm caused to Sydney’s city’s east. Then there was the $31 million in losses caused by Sydney’s Anzac Day hailstorm of 2015. Not to mention the trauma and loss of production suffered by crop farmers and fruit-growers and the long queues of car owners waiting for their turn in the panel shop.

You may have already gathered I might steer this conversation from freak hailstorms to what climate change means for the world’s glaciers and arctic ice sheets.

As Sarah Gibbons wrote in National Geographic this week: “Like an ice cube on a hot summer’s day, many of Earth’s glaciers are shrinking.”

The article is based on new data from researchers at the University of Zurich. They found that melting mountain glaciers contribute roughly a third of measured sea-level rise. This is about the same sea level rise as the Greenland ice sheet and more than the contribution of the Antarctic. Their research also highlighted that many of the world’s glaciers may disappear in the next century. Sea levels rose 27mm between 1961 and 2016, roughly half a millimetre a year. NASA now says sea levels are rising at the rate of 3mm a year, with melting glaciers contributing about a third of that volume.

Glacial movement is caused by variations in temperature with snow accumulating or melting, the evidence seen at the glacier terminus. The sheer weight of the glacier causes it to move slowly downhill, whether or not the glacier is advancing or retreating.

New Zealand’s Fox Glacier advanced between 1995 and 2009 at the rate of a metre per week. Since 2009, the glacier has begun retreating again, as it did in the decades prior to 1995.

Fox and neighbouring Franz Josef are not typical glaciers, though. They retreat or advance 10 times faster than glaciers located in other countries. This is partially to do with the excessive precipitation on New Zealand’s west coast, but also the extremely large neve* above the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers.

(*that’s glacier-speak for snow accumulated above a glacier).

The New Zealand situation seems anomalous, however, as US scientists found that 2017 was the 38^th year in a row of mass loss of mountain glaciers worldwide. According to the State of the Climate in 2017, the cumulative mass balance loss from 1980 to 2016 was 19.9m, the equivalent of cutting a 22m-thick slice off the top of the average glacier.

My original premise of using ice to soothe pain arose again when friends came over to watch A Star is Born. You know that scene where Bradley Cooper’s character Jackson Maine drags Lady Gaga’s character Ally into a suburban all-night supermarket? This is not long after Ally has biffed an off-duty cop in the face and apparently damaged her hand.

“Better get something on that, before the swelling starts,” Maine says.

So he scurries around the supermarket, putting together a makeshift icepack to soothe Ally’s bruised knuckles. (I read this as a bit of rock star foreplay, giving Jackson an excuse to stroke Ally’s hand).

Gabe Mirkin, author of “The Sports Medicine Book,” where the RICE (rest-ice-compression-elevation), acronym first appeared in 1978, now says the rest and ice part of the cure is no longer recommended. He changed his mind after reviewing the latest research, which includes a study published in 2014 by the European Society of Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery & Arthroscopy. The report found that icing injured tissue shuts off the blood supply that brings in healing cells. “Ice doesn’t increase healing — it delays it,” Mirkin says, and the studies back him up

It would seem the rugby league fraternity did not get this memo.

Perhaps they should take the tip from commentator Gus Gould, who, despite a seven-year footie career marred by injuries, appears to advocate stoicism.

“Aw that’s nothing,” says Gus. “It’s just a cork – he can run that off.”

#shutupgus

The ballet dancer and the footie player

ballet-footie — Bob and Laurel at the ballet – photo by Belinda

As we settled into our ballet seats at the Lyric Theatre for Sunday’s matinee of Queensland Ballet’s Cinderella, two kilometres away another group of elite athletes were preparing for their own performance.

It wasn’t much of a decision, whether to take up our pre-booked $100 matinee seats or go to the last-minute NRL home game between the Brisbane Broncos and St George Illawarra Dragons.

“At least nobody spills beer on you at the ballet,” I jested, as She Who Also Goes to The Ballet ironed my suit. I’d have done it myself but she’d already hogged the ironing board.

The performance – the timeless story of Cinderella, a fable of class warfare and how goodness and generosity should always prevail, did not disappoint. It was another flawless piece of work from the Queensland Ballet company and the Queensland Festival Philharmonic orchestra. The audience was dominated by children and parents/grandparents and the usual gang of gangly girls whose curious splay-footed stance gives them away as ballet students.

The choreographer (Ben Stephenson) played it for laughs, casting Vito Bernasconi and Camilo Ramos as the ugly sisters. Tradition requires that the ugly sisters be played by men. Bernasconi and Ramos tried their best to look ungainly and uncoordinated, somehow falling on their faces without injuring themselves. Stephenson laid on the magic tricks, with the old woman transformed, with a minor explosion and cloud of smoke, into a svelte fairy godmother. Later SWAGTTB nudged me: “Did I miss the part when she changed the pumpkin into a coach?” Feed two old people lunch outdoors in the Queensland sun and then put them in a stuffy dark room for a few hours – someone’s bound to nod off.

During one of two intervals, SWAGTTB demonstrated her classical education by recounting the gruesome Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, where the ugly sisters, in failed bids to fit into the glass slipper (and thereby become an idle rich Queen), mutilate their own feet.

I mentioned a favourite radio comedy skit from my childhood where the fairy story is told in spoonerisms – Rindercella and the Pransome Hince. It has an opaque provenance, this sketch, with some attributing it to Ronnie Barker. The latter may have performed it, but this much-recycled skit dates back to the 1930s. I’m sure Barker didn’t write it, as he was much funnier than Rindercella, which quickly becomes tedious and predictable. Eight year old boys find it hysterical, though.

Later, driving home and resisting the urge to listen to the rugby league ‘sudden death’ semi-final, we marvelled that QB could finance lavish productions like this, with top-level dancers and an orchestra. We’ve been subscribers for a long time and have seen this world-class company grow and prosper. QB’s annual report shows it made a net operating profit of $1.64 million in 2017. They did this with the help of some $5.38 million in ticket sales and $7.25 million from sponsors and State Government grants.

Not for nothing do I make comparisons between Queensland Ballet’s company of dancers and the injury-depleted Brisbane Broncos squad. Those of you familiar with arts productions will know about ‘notes’ – the after-performance meeting when the producer/director goes through the things that worked and the things that could have been better. I can’t imagine QB”s ballet master having too much to say except maybe chide someone for raising the curtain a few seconds before everyone was in place for the third curtain-call.

Post the 48-18 drubbing by the Dragons, I imagine Broncos coach Wayne Bennett had a few terse things to say to his squad who, well, just didn’t cut it. In the spirit of Rindercella, the Sisty Uglers (all Dragons forwards) bullied Rindercella (Broncos forwards and halves) into submission. There was no Gairy Fodmother to save the day. The final whistle blew and the Broncos turned into pumpkins and field mice and retreated to the sheds.

As Wayne Bennett said later, the squad was decimated by injuries all year including losing three top players for the season.

Now here’s something: you never hear a ballet company complain about the inevitable stress fractures or knee, ankle and back injuries. While dancers’ rarely suffer the traumatic torque injuries common among rugby players, the cumulative effect of injuries can be serious.

When key footie players are injured, there are constant media updates. For example, when Broncos playmaker Andrew McCullough was taken from the field on a stretcher a few weeks back with serious concussion, the updates and speculation on his welfare were continuous.

Rugby league players can all have a month or two off now before the pre-season training begins in November. All the while they are pulling in salaries which range from the minimum ($80,000) to $1 million a year for top players like Cameron Smith or Johnathan Thurston. The average NRL salary is $371,000.

After Cinderella finishes on September 16, Queensland Ballet dancers will be straight into rehearsals for The Nutcracker, which starts its season on December 8. It’s a big deal, being appointed principal dancer of a ballet company, but it’s not something you’d do for the money. Averages are suspect in such a small field, but it seems principal dancers in Australia can earn around $75k-$85k. The average salary for a company dancer is about $48k.

Budding footie players and ballet dancers start working on their craft at an early age. Their parents foot the bill and the time to take children to dance lessons or footie training. Both disciplines require intense training and perseverance, particularly through injury and rehabilitation.

Then there’s the ongoing expense of buying ballet flats ($25 a pair) or pointe shoes (up to $100 a pair). You could argue that parents of footie-mad kids are up for a new pair of boots every time Junior moves up a size. That’s around $200-$250 a pair for the best, or they can browse Gumtree for second-hand boots.

A hard-working ballet dancer, however, can go through 50 to 80 pairs of pointe shoes ($5,000 – $8,000) a year. Some companies buy dancers’ shoes, others can’t. Professional dancers and aspirants may have to factor it into their personal budgets. If you wondered why pointe shoes wear out so quickly, every time a dancer jumps on pointe, three times her body weight is carried on the tip of her big toe. QB has a donation page where you can help out with this inevitable expense.

In arts as in sport, many have expectations, but only a small percentage make the grade to top billing. The difference in sport – and this is particularly noticeable in soccer and American basketball’s NBL – the top-level salaries can be huge.

Contact sports like rugby union or rugby league attract the support and big dollars from television broadcast rights and sponsorship and, more recently, from betting agencies.

Meanwhile, it is up to supporters of the arts to make sure superb creative companies like Queensland Ballet can cover their costs each and every year. I can’t see anyone promoting a televised State of Origin dance-off between State ballets anytime soon, even though it’s not a bad idea.