Monthly Archives: September 2006

Trophies without winners

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Spotlight

TRYING to explain the national obsession with football, a fresh-faced young woman says innocently, “It’s something nice for people to believe in.”
That is the first and last time innocence appears in the documentary Footy Chicks. For the most part, the people who are its subjects detail with artless vulgarity the pornographic sexual pastimes of players and the often painfully young women who are their groupies.
This film’s material is fascinating, if appalling, but it has been pulled together in a way that is ultimately shallow and unsatisfying. It could even be argued that it exploits the young women to whom the filmmakers had wanted to offer a voice.
Director Rebecca Barry has said the idea for the film came from news of allegations of sexual misconduct by professional footballers, which “really disturbed me. Whether or not the allegations were true, it became apparent that in the footy world, there were real problems in players’ attitudes to women.”
Barry found the media reporting sensationalist and was frustrated not to hear from any women who were part of the game’s off-field activities. She made Footy Chicks – with the help of producer Michaela Perske, who also did much of the camera work – as a way of redressing that imbalance.
The documentary, scheduled to screen the night before the AFL grand final, portrays a Darwinian world in which footy players are hunted by young women who see them as the ultimate trophy males (“as close as you can get to prime beef, I suppose”, says one male sports journalist). The women’s comments back this up: they talk of wanting to have sex only with big strong men who have great bodies. One woman displays a picture on her mobile phone of a naked young man and says, “He loves his body. I love his body.”
An 80-year-old woman who is a veteran fan of the Manly Sea Eagles in the NRL says the women to whom the players are attracted also tend to be a type: tall, slim (“anorexic of course!”), with hipster jeans and dirty blonde hair. There are stories here of gang bangs, of rape and near-rape, of the infamous “pig on a spit” phenomenon. This is a culture fuelled by youthful insecurity, booze and narcissism, in which the men and the women use sexual scoring to prop up egos apparently frozen in adolescence. For the men, it’s the age-old confusing of dominant sexual behaviour with manliness. For the women, it’s the same equation employed by middle-class suburban trophy-wives: they derive their social status from the men to whom they attach themselves, however briefly.
In several of the anecdotes told, moral and legal lines are badly blurred: encounters that began as consensual ended up with women feeling violated, or a woman who had sex with one player found herself unexpectedly accommodating half the team.
One retired player describes a scene in which “a young lady known for having enjoyed the attentions of more than one bloke” was drunkenly vomiting over a balcony at a party. A player came up behind her, pulled down her knickers and began having sex with her. The story-teller seems confused about his own moral stance: “I don’t think there was anything malicious in it – but of course there was, she wasn’t consenting and was being sick. The last thing you want when you are being sick is to have some bloke come and shove his willie up you.” But his voice is uncertain and he laughs awkwardly. It’s like he can’t find the words to express his disquiet and so pushes it aside.
This film seems to do the same thing. In some ways it lacks a moral compass. The only value endorsed by those analysing the phenomenon is rejection of the sexual double standard that judges women more harshly than men. Is it as simple as that? Does perceived equality mean that it is now impossible to criticise women for conducting themselves as some men do, for aping the worst of male behaviour?
That the women consent and pursue these encounters disguises the underlying power dynamic. The men still regard them as spoilt goods, unfit material for being brought home to meet mother, in a different category to their wives and real girlfriends. The women say they’re OK with that – but they also say they are looking for something more, for a “real relationship”. The women talk about how they have to know “where to draw the line” so as not to be abused, but the film does not explore what that line is or how women enforce it. It ignores some very uncomfortable questions about the risky behaviour of women who could be seen as “asking for it”.
Several of the young women are photographed and their first names used. All of the men talking about personal experiences do so anonymously (at their own insistence). The unintentional result is that it is women who will bear any odium associated with this venture.
There are also many things this film does not tell us. What kind of class or family background produces a footy chick? Where does she go when her time is done? Does she find that this phase of her life was psychologically destructive?
And how universal is this behaviour among the players? Would a competition for best and fairest off the field have few contenders?
This is a sad film but worth watching with your teenagers as a talking-point. The moral that mine drew from the story is that it might be “nice” to believe in football, but it would be emotionally healthier if these young people believed in themselves.
Footy Chicks screens Friday at 10pm on SBS.

First published in The Age.

Meet the Faids, who would be kept waiting by new rules

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ANDREW Robb smiled and congratulated the beaming Faid family as he handed them their citizenship certificates yesterday.
If the parliamentary secretary for immigration’s Government has its way, though, families in the Faids’ situation would not yet be eligible for citizenship.
Khadiga and Mohamed Faid and their five children came to Australia from Sudan two years ago. Mr Faid has little English, but has learned the main words to explain his story. Why did they come? “War,” he says. “Refugee.”
Why Australia? “Australia freedom country. Safe here.”
His oldest son, Abdelaziz, must help translate the next question from reporters. How does Mr Faid feel about the Federal Government’s proposals for an English test and a test of Australian values before migrants will be given citizenship?
After rapid consultation and much gesticulation, Abdelaziz shakes his head. “Doesn’t want it. He doesn’t know English.”
But Mr Faid wants to make it clear that learning it is one of his goals. “I am doing the language classes, and my wife. In Footscray.”
Asked about the Faid family after the ceremony at the Immigration Museum in Flinders Street, Mr Robb acknowledged that, under planned changes, such migrants would have to be in Australia for at least four years, not two, before becoming citizens.
They would also need a working knowledge of English so that they could integrate effectively, “to hold down a job, and be able to talk to their workmates, read a safety sign, fill in a form”.
Is the citizenship test proposal aimed at Muslims, or is it coincidence that the question of Australian values among migrants has arisen at the same time as concerns about Islam and terrorists?
“The whole issue of terrorism around the world, in combination with globalisation, has created a sort of general anxiety amongst not only the Australian community but other communities, and a threat to their identity,” Mr Robb said.
“A lot of Australians feel, ‘who are we, and where do we fit in the world?’ And they want migrants to come – we are a migrant country – but I think they increasingly want to feel that anyone who comes does form a commitment to the country and does understand the country. That if they take the pledge at a citizenship ceremony, they understand what they are pledging.”
So that no Australian citizen would argue for the setting up of sharia law here, for example?
“No. Well, whatever – I mean, it is not directed at Muslims, but it will help the Muslim community as much as it will help Eastern Europeans, South Americans, anyone coming here,” Mr Robb said.
The Government has prepared an advertising campaign encouraging citizenship, which began in the media last night.
Among others who “took the pledge” yesterday, views about the test proposal were mixed. Kimberley Anderson is a teacher from the US who married an Australian. She decided to take out citizenship after boys in her history class at St Bede’s College, Mentone, wrote essays about why it is great to be Australian.
Regarding an English test, she said: “I think there’s a place for it. But I taught these boys about the White Australia policy, which I found appalling, and if there are echoes of that in this test – if it’s used to exclude – then I feel seriously uncomfortable with it.”
Fiona Morris is a nurse-manager who arrived from England with her husband and their three children three years ago. She questions how an English test could be applied. “Which English are you going to test? Australian, American, British? It’s very colloquial. And at what level are you going to test it?”
As for values: “That’s all very nebulous. Are you talking morality? Culture? Politics?”
Her husband David Morris, an engineer, believes that anyone who wants to be a citizen should speak the language of the country, but he says the values push is “a bit of fluff, really”.
“I didn’t hear any definition of Australian values today . . . unless you ask whether they drink VB, and if they don’t they fail.”

First published in The Age.

Finding hope in a healing place

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RECOVERY
It has taken many years for Ian Gawler’s holistic approach to helping cancer patients to take hold. But his methods are finding currency among conventional medical practitioners – and helping thousands of people deal with their illness.
PEOPLE are gentle with each other here. A couple married for more than 40 years kiss before even the briefest parting. A husband caresses his wife’s hair as she lies propped on a mattress and pillows on the floor at his feet, too weary to sit up. Her slender arm rests on her rounded belly, which is curved as if it is carrying a baby rather than a tumour.
No one here has to be told that life is fragile, and loved ones precious.
The word cancer comes from the Latin word for crab, that little creature that scuttles so quickly and so unobtrusively across a landscape. The word has also become a metaphor for anything evil that quietly spreads and destroys. Here, in a room of 40 people it has touched, it has many names.
A Kiwi nurse-artist calls her ovarian tumour “Jenny Craig” because of the sudden, dramatic weight loss it has caused. Another woman, a mother of three, found that the real name for her “slight cough” was advanced lung cancer. Helen Emmett, who has two small children, one only a year old, discovered that the name for that odd lump in her groin was stage-three melanoma (skin cancer).
Her doctors never did find the primary site of Emmett’s cancer. “One in 20 people with melanoma don’t have a primary,” she says crisply, with the clinical distance of one who has had to repeat this many times. “Melanoma can be as small as a pin prick, or actually live under the skin. It’s quite scary.”
When doctors talk to her about her condition, she says, “Everything is ‘unfortunately. . .’, ‘unfortunately . . .’, ‘unfortunately’. . .” But Emmett is only 38, and she desperately wants to see her children grow up. So she has moved heaven and earth and family arrangements to get here, to learn how to fight her illness from Ian Gawler, “the fella in a dress” (his own words) who is living proof that it is possible to stop the C-word becoming a sentence.
It is 25 years today since Ian Gawler set up his first cancer support group, which took off after he announced its inception in a story that The Age ran on its front page. In the decades since then, 15,000 people have directly used his cancer services, and more than 75,000 have attended his programs in healthy lifestyles, disease prevention and meditation. He has written four best-selling books, including what patients here call the “cancer Bible”, You Can Conquer Cancer.
Gawler began as a voice in the medical wilderness, arguing that diet and meditation could arrest and even cure cancer at a time when conventional medicine dismissed such therapies as quackery that offered false hope. The years have seen conventional medicine start to adopt some of his strategies: “You go into most of the major hospitals these days and they’re running groups, they’re running meditation, they’re talking more constructively about diet and exercise, and they’re recognising the power of the mind,” he says. “I think GPs have moved a great deal in terms of adopting a more integrated approach towards medicine and a more holistic way of dealing with cancer specifically.
“But I think in oncology it’s been incredibly slow and very disappointing. People diagnosed with cancer are still being told by their cancer specialist that what they eat doesn’t matter, and (cancer specialists are) not addressing lifestyle issues. My view is that these things should be part of the first cancer consultation, like they are with heart disease and diabetes.”
Gawler is tall and lean, his elongation emphasised by the full-length tailored kaftans he has adopted since losing a leg. He has a lined face that looks melancholy in repose but which often breaks into flashing smiles over small ridiculous things that take his fancy. When they are not occupied with his crutches, his graceful hands move expressively as he talks. He is not always easy with small-talk one-to-one but when he is leading a session his words flow effortlessly. He intersperses advice and the findings of medical research with daggy jokes and powerful anecdotes about the healing of former patients that have the impact of parables.
Gawler is therapeutic director of the Yarra Valley Living Centre in Yarra Junction. Also working with his team is his wife, Ruth, a GP with an interest in natural therapies who has a post-graduate qualification that equips her as a counsellor.
Gawler could have found no more serene place to set up shop. His centre nestles in a cleft of land out of sight or sound of any road, with undulating paddocks and kangaroos in front and bushland full of the calls of magpies, kookaburras and bellbirds behind. The most beautiful room, the meditation sanctuary, is an airy hexagonal space with windows that look out into treetops. It has taken on an air of stillness, like a chapel, as if it has absorbed the peacefulness of the people who have calmed their minds in it. In this program, which ended on Thursday, participants at the first meditation of the day often closed their eyes to a misty morning and opened them 40 minutes later to sunlight streaming through the eucalypts. Nature offers its own metaphors for transformation.
Most people here have been told that conventional medicine cannot offer them a cure. The mood in the first couple of days is low; people are reserved, tired, anxious, aching. Belinda Irvin, 35, looks worn and is fretful about her pain; her breast cancer has spread to her bones and she limps along with the aid of crutches. Her mother, Nell Deeth, has a face set in lines of anger and sadness. In the past three years Deeth has buried her husband, and lost her mother and sister to cancer. She would be shaking her fist at the gods if only she had the energy, but that is all taken up with caring for her sick daughter and her daughter’s two active children.
Michael Allis, 68, is one of many here who talks about how frantically busy his life had been before he got sick. His wife called him Action Man because he never stopped. He says: “Cancer got my dad, and it got my brother as well. I thought cancer would never catch me because I was too fast for it.”
Gawler talks in one session about the Type C (cancer-prone) personality. Such people need the liking and approval of others to the point where they have trouble saying no, and trouble accepting the help of others. Their self-esteem is propped up by externals, such as a significant relationship or a successful career, and they can fall into profound hopelessness if they lose one of these things because their sense of self-worth will go with it. “This isn’t the sole cause of cancer, but often a significant event (of this kind) has occurred about 18 months before the cancer is diagnosed,” Gawler says.
Seeing is believing and seeing him is, perhaps, a central part of the Gawler experience for cancer patients. Before the first session, a couple of the patients on this program wondered anxiously between themselves about whether they would meet the legend himself. To the observer, their awe seemed uneasily akin to a desire to touch the hem of his kaftan, as if mere proximity to the master would have its own magic. But Gawler drily resists being enthroned in guru-dom, despite the fact that his life story – and his kaftans – would fit the template perfectly (see box).
In the first session, he says, “In each one of you, the outcome will depend on a whole lot of factors. It will be lovely to get cured of cancer so that you can look forward to dying of something else. If you were coming here hoping to learn the secret of keeping alive forever, there’s a real possibility we will disappoint you on that one.” Preparing for a mindful, peaceful death would also be part of what they would learn: “I think dying well is important too.”
They learn a lot about pragmatics: how to analyse the medical statistics related to prognoses, the importance of the enzymes in vegetable juices, the gentle exercise that can be done even by those with low energy and painful scarring.
Science is now starting to back some of Gawler’s philosophies. New research has found that for a woman with primary breast cancer, exercise for half an hour to an hour a day halves her risk of dying of the disease, and there have been similar findings for bowel and prostate cancer.
Recent findings also back Gawler’s insistence on the importance of vegetables in the diet. “For women diagnosed with primary breast cancer, having a high level of carotenoids in their blood – which is a direct measure of how much vegetable they are eating – reduces their risk of recurrence by 40 per cent,” he says.
Other lifestyle factors are beginning to emerge as significant too. “Lack of sunlight has been implicated in cancer, with up to 30 per cent of all breast cancers diagnosed in Europe now thought to be attributable to this. The link with sunlight is through its effect on vitamin D, which affects the immune system.”
The people here learn how to relax in meditation, and how to use imagery to fight their illness. Gawler believes that it is in deeply relaxed states that healing occurs. He also teaches practical exercises for managing negative emotions such as anger, guilt, shame and fear. Many of the people here find themselves doing painful emotional housekeeping, sometimes about hurts from very long ago.
To those sceptical about the mind-body connection, Gawler points to the placebo effect (under which about one-third of people given a sugar pill and told it is medicine will improve) and the pointing-the-bone effect (under which Aborigines who believe they have been ritually sentenced to death will waste away and die). He teases patients about being positive about eating healthy food, even the green juices that taste like lawn cuttings: “If you say, ‘Oh shit, not another salad!’ you lose the placebo effect.”
Something else happens here, something hard to put into words. Maybe it’s about the openness of people who are facing what really matters; maybe it’s the compassion that pain brings. But by the end of the course, the people who arrived here isolated in their silos of suffering have melded into a group that is peaceful and warm and trusting. The chat is friendly and intimate, the humour frequent, the general feeling one of loving-kindness. It envelopes you.
The previously wilting Belinda Irvin is incandescent, lit up with happiness. Now she is on only one crutch because her pain has been reduced by meditation exercises. She feels she has finally let go of painful feelings about a family member that had been gnawing away at her.
Her mother, Nell Deeth, looks calmer and happier too. She says she had an experience in meditation that startled her, because “I’m a very down-to-earth sort of person.” Deeth saw a river of light that seemed to radiate energy. She was frightened the first time it came; the second time, she realised what to do with it. “I deflected it across to Belinda.”
Belinda says that while she was meditating beside her mother, “I saw a white light coming towards me and a person in it looked at me and grabbed my hand, and energy went through my whole body. And he said, ‘everything’s going to be all right’ and that I was going to be OK. You don’t believe these things until it happens and then it’s ‘shit, it works!’ ”
Her mother nods. “We don’t want to go home. This is a healing place.”
Karen Kissane is a senior reporter.
The Ian Gawler story
IAN Gawler was 24, a decathlon athlete and a veterinarian when he was diagnosed with a savage bone cancer called osteogenic sarcoma in 1974. His right leg was amputated from the hip. Ten months later, he had a bony outcrop of cancer protruding from his chest. He had radiotherapy and chemotherapy but was told he had only a 5 per cent chance of being alive in five years time, and that he probably had only weeks to live.
He began meditating under the guidance of Melbourne psychiatrist Dr Ainslie Meares, who said that by the time Gawler came to him, he was coughing up blood flecked with sand-like particles of bone from his lungs (his cancer created excessive bone tissue). “That means he was very close to death,” Meares told the ABC.
Gawler meditated for up to five hours a day, travelled to faith healers in the Philippines, radically changed his diet and practised positive thinking exercises. In 1978, he was pronounced free of cancer and his remission was reported in the Medical Journal of Australia. There have always been conventional doctors who point to his conventional treatment as the probable reason for his cure, and Gawler believes that it contributed. But he is convinced that the alternative paths were crucial, and that this approach can work for others. Quoting Meares, he says, “A thing only has to be done once to show that it can be done.”

First published in The Age.

Gripping diary captures pivotal moment in Australian history

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IT WAS the day after the massacre at the Eureka stockade. The rebellious diggers were shocked and subdued. In his goldfields diary, 19-year-old Samuel Lazarus wrote that they “will bear a great deal before they will risk a repetition” of “the blood-stained lesson” they had been given by government troopers.
But, that night, a lone digger fired once into the troopers’ camp. The soldiers responded with a volley of 50 or 60 musket shots, fired indiscriminately among the miners’ tents.
Wrote young Lazarus the next day, Friday December 5, 1854: “Among the victims of last night’s unpardonable recklessness were a woman and her infant – the same ball which murdered the Mother (for that is the term for it) passed through the child as it lay sleeping in her arms.”
Another young woman “had a miraculous escape. Hearing the reports of musketing and the dread whiz of bullets around her, she ran out of her tent to seek shelter – she had just got outside when a ball whistled immediately before her eyes, passing through both sides of her bonnet.”
Lazarus’ historic story is now for sale. His original hand-written diary, which runs from September 1853 to January 1855 and vividly recounts the events leading up to the stockade and its aftermath, will be auctioned on Tuesday.
Now yellowed with age, the journal was written in a modest stock notebook of the time. It is expected to sell for up to $80,000, said Jonathan Wantrup, of Australian Book Auctions, but the market for historical artefacts was hard to predict: “It might sell for three times that or half that.”
When he wrote it, Lazarus was a young schoolmaster newly arrived from England. He was in Ballarat with a business partner and a tent that could hold 600 people, with which he wanted to set up an auction house on the goldfields.
He was an intelligent, literate man with a wry turn of phrase, a contempt for the Irish and a fine sense of what he thought of as British honour – something he thought had been disgraced by the cowardice of the troopers’ assault on the stockade, in which even unarmed men and those surrendering had been slaughtered.
He did not witness the attack himself but meticulously recorded the tensions leading up to it and what he saw when he walked through the gruesome scene later in the day.
He had witnessed the earlier burning of the Eureka Hotel and the flight of its landlord, Bentley, whom a corrupt magistrate was protecting from being charged with the murder of a well-respected digger named Scobie.
Writes Lazarus: “A short time before the (hotel) was set on fire Bentley sprang on a horse and galloped away without coat or hat . . . with a yell of rage the diggers pursued him . . . he rushed past me in his flight and I think I never saw such a look of terror on a man’s face.”
Sympathetic though he was to the diggers and their burning sense of injustice, Lazarus was still judicious in his assessments. Of a petition demanding the release of diggers charged over the hotel violence, he writes: “No man in his senses can believe for a moment that the Governor will recognise the word ‘demand’ in a petition – it is easy to guess the result.”
Mr Wantrup said it was rare to get such an eyewitness account, particularly in a nomadic community, as mobile populations were notoriously poor record-keepers. “It’s also rare to get participants’ accounts of any event that show such a degree of objectivity and intelligent judgement.”
Weston Bate is a historian who wrote a two-volume history of Ballarat including the book Lucky City, which describes Eureka.
He said Lazarus’ story was valuable because there were only a handful of eyewitness accounts of the aftermath, “and a lot of them are reminiscences (written later) rather than diaries written at the time”.
He believed Eureka itself was important because it marked a crucial turning point in Australia’s sense of its own identity. “Eureka is the beginning of Australia’s understanding that it doesn’t have to behave the way the English gentry would have liked it to behave . . . Eureka was more about injustice and civil liberties than it was about mining licences,” he said.
Samuel Lazarus was also present at the other key historic event of his century: he was foreman of the jury that found Ned Kelly guilty in 1880.
Historians have debated whether the jury foreman was him or another Samuel Lazarus of the day. But Mr Wantrup said family documents showed that Lazarus’ son, Julius Samuel Lazarus, wrote to his son in 1944 confirming that his father was foreman at the Kelly trial.
That son – Samuel’s grandson – was the architect and photographer Hugh Frankland, who had changed his name from Hubert Samuel Lazarus.
The diary’s history is a story in itself. It remained quietly in family hands until 1982. Then it came to the attention of Keith Ridout, a mobile librarian. He was chatting to people in Cann River about what a shame it was that a local family had burnt all the diaries of an elderly relative who had died.
The people he was speaking to showed him their little piece of history, Lazarus’ diary. It had come to them through a relative, but they were not his direct descendants, Mr Ridout said.
“I suggested the State Library should at least know about it, but they didn’t want folks to know they had it. I persuaded them to let me send it down to the State Library and allow it to be photocopied, as long as I didn’t let the library know their name or where it came from.”
In 1996, the diary was sold to a Queensland collector through Christie’s for $38,000. It is now being sold by the collector’s estate.
Jock Murphy, manuscripts librarian at the State Library, said it would be sad if the diary went to an overseas collector, but that outcome might be unlikely because of cultural heritage legislation.
On whether the library might bid for it, he said, “We will just have to see how it works out.”
A gruesome day
SUNDAY DECEMBER 3RD
A large body of soldiers were entering the gully leading to the camp with three dray loads of dead and wounded . . . I guessed at once that the military had made an attack on the Eureka Stockade, but I did not guess that Englishmen in authority had made such a savage and cowardly use of their power.
I entered (the stockade) and a ghastly scene lay before me which it is vain to attempt to describe – My blood crept as I looked upon it. Stretched on the ground in all the horrors of a bloody death lay 18 or 20 lifeless and mutilated bodies – some shot in the face, others literally riddled with wounds – one with a ghastly wound in the temples and one side of his body absolutely roasted by the flames of his tent – Another, the most horrible of these appalling spectacles, with a frightful gaping wound in . . . his head through which the brains protruded, lay with his chest feebly heaving in the last agony of death. One body pierced with 16 or 17 wounds I recognised as that of a poor German whom I have often joked with. Newly-made widows recognising the bloody remains of a slaughtered husband – children screaming and crying around a dead father – surely the man that polluted the early dawn of a Sabbath’s morning with such a deed of blood and suffering must have a stony heart if he does not think with keen remorse on the desolation of many a widowed heart his merciless work has left. But this sanguinary carnage, revolting as it is to the mind, is not half so sickening as the savage wanton barbarity of the troopers. Did not turn their swords on armed men, but galloped courageously among the tents shooting at women, and cutting down defenceless men . . . (A) trooper galloped up to Mr Naslam (reporter for one of the papers) and ordered him to join the government force. He . . . gave an excuse (which was strictly true) that he was unwell, when the wretch at once levelled his carbine and shot him in the side. Not content with this wanton barbarity he handcuffed him and left him on the ground weltering in his blood. Another man . . . awoke by the firing, went out of his tent in his shirt and drawers and seeing the savage butchery going on cried out in terror – “for God’s sake don’t kill my wife and children”. He was shot dead.

First published in The Age.