MORE SHARK NEWS

Monday
Morning
Barcino, a restaurant and coffee house in Albany

The Albany schoolteacher bitten on the weekend by a white pointer has spoken.

Local doctors operated on him for close to 6 hours and he appeared on TV and radio news.

It seems when the big lady grabbed him she dragged him under water and only let go because he poked her in the eye.

This is a bloke you want with you in a crisis.

As the woman who dragged him out of the water said “he is the real hero”.

People involved in pulling him onto the beach and working to stem the bloody flow and make sure he was comfortable said he remained calm throughout, even though he was clearly in intense pain.

So, who was the real hero?

In my view, as a casual, but keen, observer, and peripheral participant, there were no heroes, just a bunch of fine people who knew each other and knew what had to be done and who could best do what and they got on with it and did it.

Excellent humans, each and every one of them and not once did I hear calls for revenge on the big fish lady.

This town, Albany, is where I and my partner intend to live, permanently. The weekend intensified my desire to live and breathe in this far corner of this vast state.

SHARK ATTACK

Note: This is a blog. It is not an accurate record of events. No-one was interviewed in the process. It is the work of the writer, his selective memory and is biased and filtered.

Searching for the white pointers at Ellen Cove, Middleton Beach.

Searching for the white pointers at Ellen Cove, Middleton Beach.

Saturday
Albany
Western Australia

It’s about 8am. I arrive at Albany’s popular Middleton Beach for my morning run and surf.

I get out of my car, run across the short piece of lawn, round the corner of the Surf Club building and face a small gathering of people around an ambulance.

Oh, I think, an early morning beach-side exercise.

I know some of them: the local member of State Parliament, a couple of friends and I recognise surf club members.

The politician turns to me and asks: You swimming?

I think: Yeah, of course I’m swimming. I swim every morning. I’m dressed for it. You know I swim. You being a smart-bum?

I nod, sideways.

“You swimming?”

“Yeah. So?”

“Shark attack.”

“Serious?”

He nods to the ambulance.

I look at the friends. They are agitated, focussed. They look through me. Something is clearly wrong.

The tale unfolds.

The early morning swimmers were about 20 metres from shore when one of them spotted a fin and said to his companion “dolphins.” His companion agreed, but then they both had second thoughts and a mate, one closer to shore, yelled “shark.” And in the same instant, the shark attacked. He yelled. The two out near the buoys decided to swim together for shore, keeping close and talking their way in. The shark circled and charged. Three times. They kicked hard and kept talking. On their way in they grabbed their mate. Another early morning swimmer, not yet in the water, saw their plight, ripped off her clothes and charged into the water, grabbed the severely injured man and dragged him ashore. Meanwhile, two others arrived, one raced in fully clothed, the other went for his mobile phone to call an ambulance. With the bitten man on the beach, they cared for him, wrapped him in towels, applied a tourniquet to stem the flow of blood to his badly lacerated leg and the man with the phone called the injured man’s wife. Within five minutes the ambulance had arrived and the injured man placed on the stretcher.

I see the fin. It’s big. Around it the surface water changes texture, like it’s tense, nervous, agitated. Then more fins, not fish, mammals, dolphins. The big fin is clearly a shark, a big fish. Others see it.

The ambulance leaves. A police vehicle drives onto the beach and heads north to warn walkers and swimmers along the beach line. A city vehicle arrives with an electronic sign: Beach closed because of shark.

Someone says the sea rescue boat is on its way. We can see it now.

The fin is moving around the pontoon, a popular destination for kids who like to jump and dive. No-one is in the water now.

I go to my friends. Now they see me. We talk. We agree to meet for coffee. They leave for the hospital with clothing belonging to the other friend, the one who was in the water, the one who was charged, and survived. She was in the back of the ambulance with the badly bitten man.

People arrive ready to swim. We send them away.

The sea rescues boat arrives. A surf lifesaver points to the pontoon. The boat circles it then begins searching in a deliberate pattern.

I stand around, listening, waiting for decisions to be made and ready to offer assistance, a car, a shoulder, whatever.

I see the woman who ran into the water sitting alone. I go to her.

“You remember me?”

“You’re the laughing man.”

“Yes.”

She laughs. Then cries. Then talks. She says she’s ok. She will call her son. She knows she’s wobbly.

I leave, meet my friends for coffee. They are wobbly, emotional, bonded.

Sunday
8am

I’m at the beach again. Talk to a bloke from Fisheries. He tells me they spotted two sharks, females, one 4 metres and the other 5 metres. Big fish. Hungry fish. I ask if it’s safe to swim, anywhere. It’s all a risk, he says.

I drive out to Goode Beach, 20ks out of town, facing King George Sound. I run in the soft sand. I run up a sand hill. I’m hot. I want to go into the ocean. I find a clear spot, no weed and watch. Nothing. I go in. I’m cautious, swim with eyes wide open above and below the surface, head swinging both ways and taking breaths from left and right. It feels good, wonderful, invigorating.

I get out, run up the beach, grab my chamois towel, turn, and tense: two fins. Bugger, dolphins.

Later Sunday morning

I’m back at Middleton Beach. A crowd is building. TV crews are lurking. Two boats are sweeping, one with a loud speaker system: “Keep away from the beach.” A helicopter sweeps with a leaning cameraman. Families arrive, park and rush to the shoreline. I meet an artist I met the previous day at the Albany Farmers’ Markets. He’s from Austria. He tells me it is madness, that on this very day many people will die on the roads, that people in other countries are starving, that people in Burma have no homes, that the Junta will take advantage and kill people they don’t like, that in Austria unspeakable things will continue to happen to innocent people and that people in the Western world watch too much television and the media feeds their insanity. Two dolphins frolic in the shallows. Some are interested in them, most seem eager for another sighting.

I get in my car and call the friends who were involved in the attack and the rescue. None of them slept well. They have heard others involved also did not sleep well. I did not sleep well, a night plagued with dreams about losing control and one about swimming over dark weed and panicking because I could no longer see the shark I was sure was there, even though I had not seen it.

A dolphin frolics while humans seeks white pointers.

For the news, as the news does it, go here:

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23675280-5008620,00.html

If you own a house, hang on to it

If you’re wondering why this blog has been dormant, well, ask yourself this: What would happen if I tried to sell my house in a flat market, found a buyer, got all excited, named a settlement date, packed half the house, sold half the furniture and the deal fell through because the buyer could not arrange finance?

Got an answer?

Well, the first thing you should do is have a bloody good lie down because chances are you’d be exhausted from all the excitement, the going away parties, the selling and the packing.

Did we lie down?

No.

What did we do?

We unpacked, and we thought seriously about calling in a distant cousin from another country to whack the real estate agent.

Why, because we needed someone to blame, a victim, a scapegoat, because he overdid the personal deodorant? No, because he did two things we did not appreciate and didn’t do a number of things we would have appreciated.

For a start, he dropped the price on our house without any consultation. We simply woke up one morning, picked up a paper and found our house had gone from $609,000 plus to $599,000 plus.

The “plus” was his idea, part of his create selling plan.

Then, after he thought the deal had fallen through, he dumped the buyers, put the house back on the market and announced a house-open, all without consulting the vendors, the sellers, us.

We called the buyers, who we had shown over the house the previous weekend and they said: “We are still interested. His phone call upset us. We thought he was acting under your instructions.”

Instructions? Sellers would issue instructions to intimidate buyers? This happens? Anyway, good point. We suddenly remembered who was acting for whom.

Which was all fine and good but we still owned a house we didn’t want to live in any more and had a mortgage on another house we did want to live in, sleep in, eat in and do all the other things happily married baby boomers do in after they have relieved their cluttered lives of vast amounts of superfluous junk they have no wish to leave behind for their children to sift through when they finally move off to the planet they thought they were on in 1966.

In short, our agent was not acting in our interests, but in the interests of someone who wasn’t talking to us.

Such matters take their toll.

Especially on the person who is left living in the house we don’t want to live in any more and that wasn’t me.

Where was I?

Doing what I do, driving all over the South West of Western Australia, working my guts to the bone, or the gristle, talking, back slapping, hand shaking and falling onto the nearest bed in a collapsed heap dreaming dreams that suggested my life needed a settled home life.

Meanwhile, Tibetans and Zimbabweans battled enemies of a much greater consequence.

Perspective is a great leveller. We may be experiencing some confusion, but we still eat well, get some sleep, feel safe in whatever house we are in, enjoy the companionship of fine friends and here, where I am now, in Albany, next stop Antarctica, most days the surf rolls gently onto fine beach sand and I get to feel at one with the universe.

The Dangers of Facebook

Facebook, I love it. Almost.

If you are on it you will remember the cute little dog. You may well have got yours from me. “Fast forward” said the instructions and you will be “surprised”. So was everyone on my list.

Eventually, I got an irate message from a Facebook friend who claimed too many of us were sending “stupid stuff”, meaning cute little doggies, and not respecting the personal relationships, the innateness of friendship.

I apologised for the dog. Then I sat down and had a good think.

Sure, he was right, and I get the crap too, but I delete it. The dog didn’t bother me that much, and once I learnt its innate stupidity, when it arrived, again, and again, and one more time, I binned it.

But there is something, oh yes, something that really pisses me of about Facebook and that is all the people who want to be my friends who I have never heard of and once I check them out I discover they want to be my friend because they are the friend of some other friend of mine.

To quote Steve Martin, Excuse Me, being Jim’s friend gives no right to Joan to be my friend. I like Jim, but who the jack is Joan and what makes her think I will like her just because I like Jim?

And that’s not the end of it.

What about all those people I do like who get bored with Facebook and sign up to Shoulderstrap, or Earlobe, of Headspace, or any number of other Facebook Wannabes?

Well, get jacked Headspace, that’s what I say, because I barely have the time in a day to service Facebook and the 16 blogs I’m running, in addition to making a living, nurturing the marriage and pretending to father.

In addition, I’m an almost dead Baby Boomer and there’s stuff I have to do before I leave and one of the last things I need is a new website for friends I don’t know and don’t need.

There.

I feel better now.

Well, not quite.

I’m still a little nervous.

Because you and I both know that out there, in cyberspace, yes, they are amassing, gearing up, getting ready, you know who I mean, The Amway Salespeople.

Oh yes, I’m your friend, because you know Jim and I know Jim and so we should get together and maybe this weekend for coffee and an idea I want to run by you, I think you’ll like it, you could make some money, then BAM, they whack you with it, friendship is nothing more than a front to flog jack shit!

Flying

It all started with the late taxi. Sorry, the taxi that never was. It should have been, but wasn't, because when I called to ask where it was, I was told: "There's nothing coming up on screen. Your booking has not been registered."
Ok, don't panic, I've got plenty of time.
The call centre books my taxi: "Don't worry, there's plenty of taxis in the area and there should be one there quickly."
There isn't.
I call again: "Yes, your booking is registered, but you will have to wait because there are no taxis in the area."
All right, "there are taxis in the area", "there are no taxis in the area." I'm fine with that. I'm modern. I'm into chaos. I have a plane to catch.
At the top of Kalamunda Road which, by the way, offers a great view of Perth, the city, where most folk who live in West Australia live, there is a road block.
The taxi driver gets testy: "Why? There is room. These people are idiots."
We wait. Then wait. Then move.
No traffic lights work for us, not one, not even the last one, the one that lets us into the airport precinct.
I am out of the taxi, running, to the darleks, the self-boarding passenger terminals. My flight is not registered.
I rush the counter: "Do you mind, I'm sorry, my flight is leaving." The man lets me through, a kind man, a potential passenger.
At the desk, I breathe, but it doesn't help: "Your flight is closed. You won't get on."
Then I say that word, the F one, the one I don't normally utter in a public, bureaucratic setting.
The counter attendant sends me to another counter. As soon as I get there the attendant gets up and moves away to fiddle with stationary, not to fill it out in order to help an anxious passenger, no, to unpack it, to spread it out over the blank space behind him.
Eventually he turns and looks at the blank space in front of him. I fill it.
"My flight is closed. They won't let me on. They said you would put me on the next flight. Can you?"
He says nothing, not even: "Who are they?"
He doesn't look up. He works his screen. Finds something. Writes something. Looks up: "4.15. You are on that flight."
"Thank you."
I have four hours to wait. I settle in.
Airports are interesting places. I like waiting in them. In the 1970s I once lived in Heathrow for three days, waiting for a flight, any flight, home. Perth airport, with heightened levels of chaos, gets more and more interesting.
While waiting I recognise that I consider it remarkable that flights take off, stay up, and arrive at a destination. Given the increasing levels of anxiety, chaos and incompetence, it is astounding that things work, not that they don't work.
A plane arrived. It let me on. I landed in Sydney.
At the Holiday Inn reception desk I was told: "I'm sorry, but you have checked in already."
"No I haven't. Have you seen me before?"
"No, sir."
"Then this is me. This is my passport. This is my birthmark. My mother's maiden name is Brooks."
"Yes, sir."
"So, either you have given my room to someone else, or there has been a mistake, but, I would still like a room, please, any room, but one with a bed, a basin and a bible."
"Yes, sir. I will check, sir."
He leaves.
The man standing next to me asks: "You were on the Perth flight?"
"Yes, QF577, but I should have been on QF580. They wouldn't let me on. I was late."
He laughed: You know what happened to QF580?"
"No."
"It was delayed 30minutes, took off, experienced engine trouble, then returned to Perth and did not leave for another 3hours."
I laughed. What else could I do?
The receptionist returned and gave me a room.
Phew.
Ok, everything else ran smooth. Until departure.
At Sydney airport, two hours early, I booked in, thinking that would be plenty of time for the necessary folk to do what they had to do with my baggage and for me to get on the flight.
It was. I browsed. I drank coffee. I bought books.
As the lights flash "boarding" we are informed by a Qantus attendant that we have to face the counter near Gate 13 and collect a form to fill in to enable us to have our luggage delivered to us after we land in Perth.
Why?
Because there is a problem with the warning light in the baggage hold and if there is a fire on board no-one will know because the warning light doesn't work. And nobody smells anymore.
We line up, some anxious, because the boarding light is still flashing, we collect our forms, and run to Gate 7.
Guess what? Once we are in the air, flying high, and the seat belt light has disappeared, an attendant walks around handing out the very same forms we had only 15minutes ago lined up for.
I love it.
As we are leaving the plane, the only attendant I can pick under 45 laughs at me and says: "Good luck with the baggage."
"I don't know whose I'll get but it won't be mine."
He laughed: "I know."
Then he laughed harder.

LATE NEWS:
My bag arrived, yes, mine.
I looked stunned.
"This the wrong bag?" asked the courier.
"No, no, it's mine all right."
"What?"
"That's why I'm stunned."
"We do a pretty good job, mate."
He looked hurt.
"It's not you, mate, it's the others. No courier has ever delivered the wrong parcel to me. I admire couriers. Some of my best cousins have been couriers. But airlines, huh!"
He smiled: "Yeah."

Get those spots checked

This is a cautionary tale.
But first, 2008 has got off to a bad start - the stock market has crashed, the US has a an election coming up, I pulled a muscle running along the beach alongside the Great Southern Ocean, fruit and vegetable prices are set to rise, the planet is in deep pain, more people than ever have lost it - so do your best to stay sane.
By now you are wondering why the little pic above.
Good question.
It's a Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC).
While in Albany, home of whales, deep on the south coast of Western Australia, I decided to visit a local doctor and ask him to check the lump on my arm.
He said: Mmm, looks nasty. It's a Squamous Cell Carcinoma,
I said: Yeah, what are you going to do about it?
He said: I could cut it off for you.
I said: What, the arm?
He laughed.
I said: Go for it.
He did, like a butcher: in went the knife, one straight line, no artistry, slash.
Brilliant, I thought, I could do with another manly scar.
Eight days later, in I go, out come the stitches and I leave town.
Five kilometres up the major highway, splut, the wound opens, flesh reveals itself, blood flows.
Here's what I learnt:
- keep applying sun screen
- insist on retaining stitches until they fade
- don't go to butchers for cancer removals
- remind myself that whatever happens, George W Bush is done for

POSTSCRIPT:
The cut has healed.
It has healed nicely.
The butcher organised a better scar than first look suggested.
In fact, I will no longer refer to him as "the butcher".
Henceforth he is "the nice bloke who cut the cancer out of my arm".
All right, I know, a bit long.
What about: Quarti Tunis?
(I have no idea where that came from.)
As for you, get your spots CHECKED TODAY!

Strange Turns

The Weekend Australian
8/1/22007

Given the above article I decided to finally run a tale I first wrote for the Saturday edition of the West Australian, Western Australia's only daily newspaper. In its original form it was rejected by The West's lawyers.
The lawyers were concerned that Peter Foster might sue. I think in the original I called him a "fraud".
I rewrote the piece about five times, trying to get it right for the legal brains, but never succeeding.
Here is the version we are left with.

Every so often this column takes a strange turn.

I think it is important to note that the writer is still me, but not quite me, not the full me, the me you have grown to know and love, more a channelled sort of me, from somewhere else within me.

Are you still with me?

Thing is, truth is stranger than fiction and most of us can tell the difference, but every now and then you meet someone who can’t.

Along the way I have met more than my allotted share of these folk and, I must say, for the most part, I enjoyed their company.

Indeed, I lived in Israel for three years and while there I met five men who claimed to be the reincarnated Jesus Christ.

One was a train driver from Arkansas, another a bookkeeper from Wyoming, one was a butcher from Scotland and two were very crazy men who confronted me in Jerusalem and yelled at my face and behaved in a way that led me to believe they were not Jesus after all but people desperate to be somebody. So I gave them both time and a little money.

Along the way, many of us, due to accident, biological distortions, life circumstance, or excessive imbibing of one thing or another, manifest some of the characteristics of people without a good grip on reality.

As someone once said: There is a fine line between sanity and it’s opposite.

And someone else, George Santayana, a Spanish-born American philosopher, added: Sanity is a madness put to good use.

After all those freeform, earlier years, my life has reached another, tamer stage and is heavily influenced by a long-term and stable marriage, fatherhood, regular intakes of fresh fruit, vegetables, especially locally grown garlic, and nothing more intoxicating than air skimmed off the Great Southern Ocean.

I’ve tried stand-up comedy, street theatre, television, movies, live theater, video games and badminton, but none of them match the early days of abandonment.

What moves the blood a little is body surfing, certain kinds of performing, meeting the occasional psychopath and reading.

My tastes are eclectic. I read anything from Phantom comics to Nobel Prize winning novelists, gritty crime, rampaging adventures, philosophic meanderings and academic works on psychopaths.

Psychopaths fascinate me, always have.

I’m not big on the violent criminal psychopath, the people everybody thinks of when they think of the genre, people like Hannibal Lecter, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman and WA’s own David Bernie.

They still fascinate me, but I don’t fancy meeting them.

The folk you and I are more likely to meet are the ordinary every day psychopaths, the workplace psychopaths, the corporate psychopaths and range of people seemingly not conversant with a the standard moral code.

In an earlier column I referred to Peter Foster, not a psychopath, but well known as a con-artist and corporate conman, a man I have never met, although I claimed in one of these columns that he was a family friend.

The corporate conman also fascinates me and recently I almost threw out a sack of newspaper clippings collected since the early 1980s, but curiosity got the better of me and the resultant lingering produced an article from the Sydney Morning Herald of June 1988, all about a much younger, recently bankrupted and much photographed, Foster.

When I say photographed, it’s not really him they want, rather his busty British ex, Samantha, his Gold Coast stripper, Tina, or his whatever from wherever who is inevitably blond, striking and adoring of himself.

But let me get back to psychopaths, who abound, according to Australian Dr John Clarke, psychologist and author of Working with Monsters, How to identify and protect yourself from the workplace psychopath.

Dr Clark describes the corporate criminal psychopaths as having behaviours that “may be criminal and/or sub criminal (ethically and/or morally wrong but technically not illegal) to gain a financial or other advantage for themselves at the expense of other people. This category includes bank employees who defraud their employer, stockbrokers involvd in scams, builders who con clients, real esrtate agents wo dupe homeowners, lawters who spwend their clients trust funds ….”

Given the tameness of my current life I rather like the ability of the mind to take the strange turn and, when writing about people who I think are somehow disconnected from social mores, or psychopathic, rather than mocking them in the traditional, arrogant manner, I prefer to find the disconnection within, the bit that lives inside me, let him out, and see where he takes me.

So next time you read this column and think: Either this bloke’s nuts, or this is complete claptrap.

Then you’d be right: I am, or it is.