Goodbye Paul

There is a moment, when you have found out someone is dead, when you wonder if you are going to cry.

It’s called shock, I suppose, those ten minutes where you sit, and you frown, you try to understand what you’ve heard, and you work out whether you’re going to cry.

And then, of course, if you’re me, you do. The lip wobbles and the eyes well and you suddenly comprehend exactly where that person sat in your estimations, what you were, if anything, to them… and then you cry.

When someone like Paul dies so inexplicably, so young, one thought thrums in your head while you’re waiting.

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

The religious might spend that time asking a god “Why so young?” I just ask science how. How can a guy who is 32, who is  fit, who is happy, who is strong; how can someone like that die of a heart attack, of all things? It is impossible, and it is unfair.

And after the shock and the disbelief? Well I took my tears to the tennis. I sat in the back  row of Rod Laver and dabbed my eyes with a napkin while Maria Sharapova shrieked her way to the quarter finals of the Australian Open. It made sense in an odd way. A banshee howling for the dead.

I met Paul because he danced with me. I didn’t dance well, I didn’t even behave well, but he didn’t seem to mind. He danced with me, and every other follow in the world, I’d bet, like I was exactly the right person to be dancing with at exactly the right time.

I have never been comfortable swing dancing. Never. I’m beleaguered by nerves, uncomfortably aware of my own limitations. I say the wrong things, I don’t behave myself. Frankly I drink too much, because I’m frightened.

But there are some dancers who are so disarmingly kind, so comfortable, so likeable and reciprocally liked, that they make the fear evaporate. They make you feel safe, they make you laugh, and most of all they make it seem as if you know what you’re doing. Paul did all those things, and when the dance was over he’d have a drink with you too. I don’t think he ever met a woman he didn’t think was beautiful, and he made every one of us absolutely feel that. For me it was only when he walked back onto the floor that the trouble began again.

Paul’s kindness was a humbling antidote to the white-hot disdain I carry around with me. His enthusiasm was infectious, and we were all better for it. He may not have, because perhaps it’s not possible, but he seemed to love everything. He was a magic-trick-playing, swing-dancing, ukulele-strumming, trapeze-swinging, dress-up-loving maniac.

His stage name was “Mr Amazing”. He used it with a straight face, and so did we. Because he was.

I have to admit that I didn’t know Paul well. In am the casual acquaintance who was compelled to eulogise Hitchens after his death. I can’t fathom how the Martin Amises must feel.

But I do hope we were friends. Facebook said as much, and it was there that I saw Paul painstakingly chronicle the process of buying a house, demolishing it, and building a new one exactly to his needs. It is beyond senseless that this house, with all those floors primed for dancing, is uninhabited so soon after it was finished.

I don’t know if I’ll swing dance again. Most of the time it seems far too difficult to try. But if I do step back onto the floor, inconceivable as it may seem, it will be in the hope that I will meet another Paul Verevis.

Why I flipped off “Kiss Cam” at the Boxing Day Test

It’s an odd feeling, flipping the bird in front of 50,000 people. It’s even more bizarre hearing 50,000 people laugh, cheer and boo you at the same time.

But this is exactly what I did on Tuesday, because a hapless, and no doubt very well-meaning, cameraman decided I might like to play tonsil-hockey with my manfriend in front of a baying crowd.

Yes, we had been featured on the all-new Vodafone Kiss Cam.

There I was, relaxing in the drinks break after watching Sachin Tendulkar effortlessly waltz to make 50 off nearly as many balls when I looked up and saw myself on the big screen, encircled by a large red heart. Me and, of course, my boyfriend. The implication was clear. We were to get it on for the amusement of the crowd.

Instead of obligingly locking lips, I swivelled round and thrust my middle finger upwards in entirely the wrong direction (when will I work out where the big screen cameras are?). The boyfriend ducked.

Now I know test cricket is in crisis. Two lovely-sounding cricket enthusiasts told me as much on the radio yesterday during another break between play. They’re so interested in the fate of the game they’re making a documentary about its potential death.

And I understand what Vodafone and the MCG are trying to do to address the decline of the gentleman’s game. They are attempting to make test cricket more entertaining, more like the ODIs and Big Bash games, where there are fireworks and sideshows galore.

But what they’re actually doing when they home in on unsuspecting couples and associates alike, coercing them into kissing for kicks, is undermining Tendulkar’s elegance with the bat, Sehwag’s solid-footed theatrics, Hilfenhaus’ resurgence with the ball and Siddle’s terrifying aggression with the same. Cricket be damned, they’re saying, let’s watch people make out for no reason.

Even worse than that, they’re alienating a huge potential fanbase when they engage in this kind of facile populism. They’re pissing off the women.

One of my best friends and I have been going to the Boxing Day Test together for years. Sometimes our male friends, boyfriends or fathers might come along, but the two of us are always there.

And we don’t go to the cricket to holler at hooligans getting ejected, to howl at opposing fans, to make giant towers out of beer cups or engage in Mexican wave after Mexican wave. We do not don hats sculpted from watermelons. We do not drape ourselves in Australian flags. We do not fashion beer paddles out of cricket bats. We go, astoundingly, to watch the cricket.

We certainly do not go to be forced into kissing for the amusement of a belligerent, boozy crowd. But that’s what so many female fans were bullied into on Tuesday when Kiss Cam (laughably referred to by Vodafone as an “At-ground privilege“) singled them out. Some acquiesced and were greeted by roars of approval. Some, clearly uncomfortable, demurred and were resoundingly booed for their efforts. It’s intimidating, facile and unutterably chauvinist.

I’m fairly used to women being cajoled into kissing for men’s titillation in clubs and bars. I’m not used to seeing it done for a cast of tens of thousands with the endorsement of a once venerable institution such as the MCG.

I’m not surprised at Vodafone, whose modus operandi this summer appears to be simply to ruin games of cricket. But I’m also not their performing monkey.

It’s not often I trumpet the achievements of the AFL when it comes to respect for women. In fact I’ve been known to do the opposite. Hundreds of sex scandals, alleged rapes and a couple of viewings of the Footy Show have made sure of that. But in one regard they have got it right.

According to AFL CEO Andrew Demetirou, 48% of people who attend AFL games are women. At the cricket, we’re outnumbered two-to-one.

So here’s an idea for Cricket Australia, the MCG and Vodafone, one that could help stem the haemorraghing of test cricket attendees they’re currently experiencing. Instead of marginalising women, why don’t you try to engage us a bit more? Why don’t you do something to address the misogyny that permeates your average cricket crowd, members of which frequently yell “tits out for the boys” at each passing woman? Why not get yourself a female commentator to go with the guffawing boys’ club that currently occupies the commentary box?

Or, for a simple start, why not take your infantile, patronising, offensive Kiss Cam and throw it in the Yarra?

Otherwise we will, in no uncertain terms and with the power of one digit alone, tell you all to get f***ed.

Melbourne’s media apocalypse: what to do with the newspapers

“Newspapers,” he said. “You could have done something with newspapers. We didn’t do it. No nation did, because we were all too silly. We liked our newspapers with pictures of beach girls and headlines about indecent assault, and no Government was wise enough to stop us having them that way. But something might have been done with newspapers, if we’d been wise enough.” 

…

“I’m glad we haven’t got newspapers now,” she said. “It’s been much nicer without them.”

***

These words are from Nevil Shute’s mid-apocalyptic disaster novel, On the Beach. I say mid-apocalyptic, rather than post- or even pre-, because the majority of the book centres on people waiting for the the end to arrive. Like technology, new-release films and high fashion, the apocalypse comes late to Australia, in the form of radiation that seeps towards the Southern Hemisphere from a north already wiped out by atomic bombs.

On the Beach is a novel in which Melbourne simply waits to die.

And just as Shute is wrapping up his parochial, at times jaunty, but ultimately crushing experiment with the end of the earth, just as a husband, wife and infant stare euthanasia in the face to escape the death throes of radiation sickness, just as I weep into my glass of wine and bowl of curry at the senseless loss of it all, just as it’s all winding down … comes is this odd aside.

“You could have done something with newspapers,” says Lieutenant-Commander Peter Holmes.

A strange thing to say on your deathbed. Particularly to your naïve wife, who babbles about what to put in the garden next summer – a summer in which Melbourne will be inhabited only by mice, according to the CSIRO – and refuses to countenance her, or indeed anyone’s, impending doom.

But there it is. A simple regret, from a simple Navyman, in a simple Antipodean town on the edge of the Earth as humanity takes its final stagger and shuffles off its collective mortal coil. “You could have done something with newspapers.”

Since On the Beach was published in 1957, when the Doomsday Clock sat at two minutes to midnight, the threat of the planet being engulfed by a life-destroying nuclear winter is mercifully much diminished. In fact, an all-consuming dose of radioactivity is so low on priority for the timepiece of catastrophe, it’s begun to concern itself with climate change.

But it’s hard to escape the feeling that, particularly in Melbourne, the newspapers, just like the Shute’s ill-fated families, are waiting to die.

If Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood were here (which would admittedly be weird), he would tell me I’m mistaken in my concern. He recently gave a lecture with the snappy title, ”If you ask me about the future of newspapers you have asked the wrong question.”

But as sales and circulation figures plummet like a Geiger counter moving south in On the Beach, it’s hard not to ask how long humanity will have to worry about ink-stained fingers as well as climate change and other harbingers of our imminent destruction. How long will the houses and units of Berwick, Falmouth and Williamstown wait for the thud of The Age, The Herald Sun or The Australian hitting their doorstep in the morning?

And as I read Shute’s criticism of news consumers’ appetites – “Pictures of beach girls and headlines about indecent assault” – I thought of last weekend’s front pages. The Age went with Warnie snogging Liz, The Australian carried the sad tale of an innocent “victim” of, well The Age. The beach girls and assaults could quite easily be there next week.

Shute’s characters deal with the coming of the end in various, painfully human ways. The American Commander with his polite, profound and largely uninteresting stoicism, sticks to the rule of law right up until his final act of patriotism. Peter Holmes’ wife continues to blather about garden seats, the trees in the garden and what she’ll do in the years that will never come. Young, sassy Moira Davidson give up her brandy-soaked sailing hijinks and a penchant for whipping her top off, instead taking up, most disappointingly, a typing course and a pining obsession for the American.

But one man, John Osborne, takes a radical approach to his final days. The unassuming CSIRO scientist knows what will happen to the residents of Melbourne: when the radiation will come, how it will infect people and how long they will have once it does. So the amateur enthusiast with a latent car obsession buys a Ferrari and enters the world’s last-ever Grand Prix, carving out a position on the track as his competitors tangle, crash and combust behind him. He wins. And then he dies as he had never lived before he knew the end was coming – at the wheel of the fast car he’s always dreamed of, suddenly becoming the man he wanted to be.

I think the end of newspapers is probably coming, and if circulation figures in the US and Europe are anything to go by, it will probably reach Australia a bit later than the rest of the world, along with Adam Sandler’s latest offering, no doubt.

But before the a-paper-lypse hits this Antipodean outpost, I hope one of our dailies steps up. I hope someone is smart enough to let the other players deal with cricket kisses, media spats, confected city violence and bikini girls. I hope someone gets behind the wheel of a Ferrari and goes out in style, doing what journalists have always dreamed of doing, unfettered by commercial concerns. I hope someone decides to rise above the rubbish and tackle the powerful and the corrupt. That someone decides to talk about big ideas without talking down to their readers. That someone chucks a story away if it’s not going to, even in some small way, change the world (or at least make it more interesting). Even if it means an outlet careens dangerously off-course, even if it ends in an explosion, in the twilight years of newspapers as we know them, it seems to me to be worth a try.

The dog days, the dying days, the doomsdays of Australian papers could then become the most exciting, and when it’s all over no one will have to say, “you could have done something with the newspapers.”

Review: Alan Hollinghurst – The Stranger’s Child

I remember sitting in the bedroom of a holiday house, with the sun blazing outside as the summer raced away, tearing through the last pages of The Line of Beauty. The heady, scandal-laced tale of conservatism and counter-culture, cocaine and class that veered between parliament house and the bath house was a startling evocation of gay life in the 80s. It hurtled towards a breathtaking conclusion that smacks of the current British media crisis. It was dangerous. It was clever. It was brave.

The Stranger’s Child is certainly clever. But it’s a ponderous tome that plods through the twentieth century and dips its toe into the twenty-first, never committing itself to a particular decade. And it’s Hollinghurst, so it’s written with an casual ease that belies its deftness, but for those of us who waited seven years for his next novel, The Stranger’s Child is ultimately unsatisfying.

Which is not to say that it’s not a good read. Hollinghurst writes convincingly with the ambition of a late career author. He has the confidence to spread his net wide enough to capture one hundred years of history, and give it a new voice. One of the major delights of the novel is the way he weaves references to time through the text as he jumps between decades. Rather than merely emblazoning each chapter with a date, we are allowed to feel our way round the narrative, slowly working out whether we’re in 1967 or 79, 1913 or 39.

And when he gets it right, he soars. The first half of the novel, set before and after the two World Wars, is full of the cutting social satire and intrigue we have come to expect from Hollinghurst. He takes on the pragmatic, intellectual world of Robert Graves’ Good-bye to All That, creating a wistful, puckish, bisexual poet and dropping him in the trenches of the First World War.

For a while, The Stranger’s Child becomes a study of what war does to men – how it maims, it kills, it mars. We see survivors bumbling through the post-war years, limping on wounded limbs, humbled by agoraphobia, haunted by the dead.

But the further we get from the war, as we enter the latter half of the twentieth century, the novel loses its grip. We don’t care for the new characters as much as the old, and the chronological signposts begin to jar. By the time we reach 2008, we’re rattled by awkward references to iPhones and text-speak. We long for the languid, gin-soaked afternoons of 1913, our Gravesian hero and the people he burns.

In many ways, The Stranger’s Child is a study in literary lightweights. We start with Cecil Valance – the charming, dangerous, but ultimately second-rate poet. It’s a brave challenge to insert a new, invented member into the British literary canon, one taken on with hubris, and success, by A.S. Byatt in Possession (1990). So it’s a relief when we find out that history has not smiled on the precocious poet, that his poems are seen as, as they seem to us, twee, pastoral fancies.

And it doesn’t stop with Cecil. His brother Dudley writes a marginally successful work, never tops it and remains forever bitter. Valance’s late-century biographer is seen as salacious and untrustworthy in literary circles, his wartime fiancée Daphne writes an error-riddled memoir of muddy recollections, her brother Gerald manges to bash out a school history book before descending into dementia.

What are we to think of this study in partial success and humbling failure? Why does Hollinghurst deny his characters greatness? Why does this ambitious novel pull back before it reaches the crest of the ogee?

It seems in more ways than one, Hollinghurst is reluctant to follow the line of beauty.

No womb in the Channel Ten commentary box

Give me strength, I can’t believe I’m pondering this again. Women and AFL, AFL and women.  Females and footy.  Sheilas and Sherrins.  A question so vexed it’s in the news seemingly every week.

I’ve been loath to wade into the legal quagmire that is the recent St Kilda farce, the latest installment of which has seen Nick Riewoldt scuffling in South Melbourne over the now-infamous image of him posing naked with a teammate released by a 17-year-old girl. Suffice to say, however, that my sympathies lie less with the cashed-up footballers and more with the girl, who has allegedly (and I do mean allegedly) fallen pregnant to a St Kilda player, suffered a miscarriage, been forced to leave home and is now being sued by the club.  And Martin Blake reckons Riewoldt  “has been having a tough time recently.”

It’s a tragic reality: both of the clubs that participated in 2010′s Grand Final(s), have more than one player on their list who’s been involved in sexual assault or rape investigations.  It’s more than tragic, it’s utterly damning.

And against this seedy background of sex scandals and alleged criminal behaviour, abuse and exploitation, what do we, the media, do? How do we try to redress the woeful attitudes towards women that seem to permeate every club in the AFL?

We sack the first and only female football commentator on Australian television.  That’s right, the glass ceiling ‘smashed’ by veteran sports journalist Kelli Underwood two years ago when she was appointed to the Channel Ten commentary box is being hastily glued back together.  Underwood has been demoted, and we’ll no longer be hearing her voice calling the play, but will instead be seeing her providing comments from the boundary line.  Or, if you’re into netball, she’ll be commentating that, which is assumedly okay because the players wear skirts and don’t have the tackle that’s been getting poor old Riewoldt into such scrapes.

Underwood’s relegation comes on the back of a Herald Sun poll in which 39.5% of readers voted her the most ‘annoying’ commentator going round.  Now far be  it from me to accuse the Herald Sun readership of being sexist and basing their assessment of Underwood’s performance on her gender, but 50.26% of respondents to today‘s poll say there’s no place whatsoever for female football commentators in the media.  Ahem.

It took no more than this straw poll of bigots to lose the groundbreaking commentator her job.  Channel Ten heeded the cries of prejudice.  Back to the blokey stuff, boys, let’s pretend that little ‘trial’ – and they did, insultingly, call it that – never happened.

It seems the AFL-watching public can tolerate women from the sidelines, like Christi Malthouse and Samantha Lane, or in print, where Lane, Caroline Wilson and Emma Quayle are all greatly respected, but the commentary box is a sacrosanct all-male domain not to be infringed upon by ‘annoying’ females.  Much like a St Kilda training session.

Before you all trot off to the nearest calendar to ascertain that it is in fact 2011 and not 1952, allow me to direct your attention to an article on the Underwood drama by editor of The Punch, David Penberthy, in which he makes a number of similar points to those I’m making here. There’s even a roll call of lesser commentators, who frequently annoy the footy faithful with no dire consequences, from Rex ‘gibberish’ Hunt to Robert ‘solemnity’ Walls.  I’d like to add Malcolm ‘in my day’ Bligh and Brian ‘shut up about ‘Dukes’ all ready’ Taylor to that list, if I may.

But alas, even Underwood’s male supporters succumb to the sexism that runs rampant through AFL and its coverage.  In attempting to bolster the case for women commentating football, Penberthy accuses Bruce ‘stats’ McAvaney of getting “so giddy with excitement that he actually sounds more like a girl than Underwood ever could.”

Er, beg your pardon, Penbo?  Having a female commentator is okay, as long as she doesn’t sound like a ‘girl’?  Because, of course, being a girl is bad.  We don’t want our footballers to kick like them, so why should we want our commentators to sound like them? Even if they do have all the bits in the right place.

I spent the majority of 2010 doing AFL reporting in one form or another. I wrote news articles for footyheads.com.au, I covered AFL games on Twitter for The Age.  I reported from the Grand Final parade for 3RRR News.  And in all of these media ventures, the majority of my colleagues were female.  A brief look at the gender breakdown of the From the Outer team at The Age tells the story of today’s young sports journalists (there was one male member who was unable to make the photo-shoot).

So, to the readers of the Herald Sun and the head honchos at Channel Ten, even to Mr Penberthy, I have one very simple message.  We are coming.  We are women, we are journalists, we love football, we hate bigotry and we are coming to ‘annoy’ you all.  We’re sick of having to make excuses for a brilliant sport that treats women as objects and inferiors, who are there to be intimidated and ridiculed.

The glass ceiling may have been patched back together, but something tells me it’s not going to take much pressure to smash next time around, and that can mean only good things for ‘women and football’.

The views expressed above are my own, not my former employers’.

Bras and Bags Don’t Cure Cancer

“I like it on the floor.”

“I like it on the kitchen bench.”

“I like it hanging off the edge of the bed “

If you’re involved in social media, it’s likely your facebook news feed was filled with such titillating statements last week.  All of a sudden, your female friends would have started posting seemingly explicit status updates about where they ‘like it’.

You might have been confused.  “I didn’t think Samantha/Claire/Jessica was so forthright about such things,” you might have thought.  Then you probably hit Google, and found out that she wasn’t talking about where she likes to get to know people in the biblical sense, but rather where she likes to put her handbag.

You see, Samantha/Claire/Jessica was fighting cancer.  That’s right.  Just by telling us where she plonks her accessory at the end of the day, she was raising awareness about breast cancer research.  The idea, as spelled out in a message many of us received (below), was to pique the curiosity of facebook’s assumedly neanderthal men by tricking them into thinking that women were talking about sex.

This kind of campaign is becoming more common.  In fact, we’ve seen it before.  In January, there was a slew of status updates on facebook simply stating a colour.  “Red” said Emma.  “White” said Christina.  “…. Black ” teased Lucy. What were people talking about? The bra they were wearing, of course.

The intention here is seemingly to both to arouse and confuse our male friends.  This makes a certain amount of sense as a meme, ethically dubious as it may be.  Social media bible Mashable certainly likes it, saying the campaign is “cute, fun and generating some buzz”. But to link this kind of web trend to cancer research is worrying.

There’s a genuine concern that using facebook and twitter to refer to problems without actually donating time or money to their solutions acts a placebo for those who participate.  Instead of doing something meaningful, people update their web profile and feel they’ve made a difference.

I’m generally quite wary about ‘raising awareness’ through stunts.  Is there really anyone in Australia or indeed the developed world who isn’t ‘aware’ of breast cancer?  We’ve got a whole month devoted to it (this one), there’s pink ribbon days, there’s the Field of Women at the MCG each year.  Never mind the complete tizzy the media gets into every time someone with a public profile is diagnosed with the disease.

Don’t get me wrong, all that stuff is great, especially when it results in donations towards more research into causes of, and potentially a cure, for breast cancer.  My point is that updating your facebook isn’t really going to change people’s attitudes towards this very high-profile disease. No-one’s checking their iPhone on the train thinking “Crap! Breast Cancer? Thank God Laura told me she likes to put her bag on top of the piano, otherwise I’d never have known it existed!”

No wonder we’ve seen a significant backlash against these trends by those weary of “awareness raising” and sceptical about the effectiveness of such campaigns.

Tokenism aside, though, there’s a more sinister subtext permeating this game women are playing with social media.  We’re linking cancer – a serious, devastating killer – to sex.  Breasts are sexy, right?  So why not sell cancer like beer and deodorant, with sex? Because it’s cynical, because it trivialises disease and fetishises suffering.  Further, by pursuing this campaign, women are purposefully cutting men out of the dialogue.   We’re playing a game of hide and seek.  Whispering “don’t tell the boys!” to each other in the playground at lunch.

Trying to keep 50% of the population in the dark by distracting them with sex is hardly the best way to ‘raise awareness’ using social media.

I got 99 problems but a government ain’t one

Oh Australia, you capricious little minx. Look what you’ve done.

I understand you couldn’t make up your mind. It was difficult. You weren’t given enough to choose between. Nauru or East Timor? Super-clinics or mental health reform? Broadband or wireless? No significant action on climate change or… no significant action on climate change?

But look what your indecision has produced.

This guy is now in charge:

Do you really think that was a good idea? Do you think he’s going to treat parliamentary exchanges any differently to the way he’s treating that fibreglass croc?

And I hope you realise that you’ve given the major parties license to act like children. Well, even more than they did before.

Julia won’t let Mark Arbib go out and play anymore, Malcom Turnbull’s been getting round in a flipping bomber jacket and Bill Heffernan is prank calling the country’s most powerful people for reasons best known to himself. No, he isn’t asking people if their fridge is running, instead he’s been introducing himself as ‘The Devil’.

That prank would probably work better on Family First Senator Steve Fielding, but he’s no doubt too busy to answer the telephone right now. No, he’s not out in the club and sippin’ that bubb, he’s performing the senator’s equivalent of blowing a raspberry and saying “ya boo sucks” to the ALP. Senator Steve, who lost his seat this election, threatened to block legislation in the Senate if the ALP gained power.

It all makes Wyatt Roy look perfectly well-seasoned.

And what about the aspiring journalists? Do you realise how hard it is for us?

My fellow student and I were charged with writing the election coverage for our student magazine, Catalyst. It seemed like such a good idea when we signed up. How were we to know there would be no result for weeks? The deadline was yesterday but the magazine comes out in two weeks, when we will apparently have a government, even if it is being run out of Bob Katter’s wool shed. Anything we wrote for deadline will be out of date by the time of publication. The shame! The horror! The obsolescence!

And worst of all, Australia, is a scenario I’m sure you didn’t consider as you queued up at primary schools around the nation, freshly sizzled sausages in your hands. One of the three wise monkeys, Tony Windsor, is threatening to MAKE US DO IT ALL AGAIN! That’s right, friends. It will be more party hacks all up in your grill waving How to Vote cards, more election day traffic, more moronic ads, more wall-to-wall coverage on the telly, more election graphics, more Kerry, more Laurie, and probably, Australia, probably more Latham.

I bet you didn’t think about that last weekend, did you?