Jim, a crusty old sports announcer of my acquaintance, was celebrating his retirement at the pub. “I’m glad to be out of it,” he said. “Tennis nearly did me in. I’d break into a sweat when the Wimbledon or Open results came to hand.”

Samantha Stosur and Lleyton Hewitt were the last Australian players whose names he felt comfortable saying on air. “Then suddenly Thanasi Kokkinakis and Ajla Tomljanovic and Daria Gavrilova were winning matches. As for the internationals, I managed Sharapova OK, but the women began to be called Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Agnieszka Radwanska and Garbine Muguruza.”

The men were no easier. “I always struggled with Vasek Pospisil. It sounds even worse if you break it down into syllables and say it slowly. Just quietly, I always hoped he’d be out in the first round.”

He grappled with Phillip Kohlschreiber, Alexandr Dolgopolov and Mikhail Youzhny. “As for Nick Kyrgios, with him being Australian and always in the news, I had to manage it, but it wasn’t easy.”

Strangely, Jim could pronounce those names now, even after a few beers. But it was a different matter on air. “It’s a whole new world,” he said, since the beginning of his broadcasting career in the days of the pronounceable champions, Laver, Emerson, Newcombe, Hoad and Rosewall.  The same with the women. Margaret Smith became Margaret Court, so no worries there. And Yvonne Goolagong had a comfortable beat to it.”

Above: Not the best possible name for a sportsman?

Peter, an old newspaper sportswriter, interrupted him. “What are you whingeing about? At least you didn’t have to write their bloody names down correctly. Sport now takes twice as long to write. Especially football stories,” he complained.

“Take the two rugbys. Most of the league and union players are Pacific Islanders. You know what that means – apostrophes everywhere: Manu Ma’u, Kirisome Auva’a, Sione and Pat Mata’uta, Ben Te’o and Angus Ta’avao. And you try spelling Apisai Koroisau or Sio Siua Taulkeiaho or Dallin Watene-Zelezniak right first time! Typing out the their playing lists each week is a full day’s work.”

“At least you didn’t have to say Dallin Whatsisname,” grumbled Jim. “Bring back the old Anglo names.”

“You must be joking!” said Peter. “They’re even more confusing because they catch you napping. Take the AFL. It’s chocka with Anglo names but now they’re spelled funny. There are even 17 current players with the same first name but varying spellings!”

He listed them. There was one Jaryd and one Jarred, two Jarrods, three Jarryds, three Jareds, five Jarrads, and their cousins Sharrod and Jarryn. “I don’t care if a boy called Jarrod kicks ten goals and has 50 touches, he doesn’t get my vote,” Peter snorted.

He mourned the days when you could field an Aussie Rules team called Ray, Ron, Doug, Bob, Alan, Geoff, Clive, Dennis, Neil, Keith, Colin, Roy, Steve, Ted, , Peter, Bill and two Johns. “No spelling problems there.”

He moaned on. Why were the parents of the current crop so in love with the letter Y that they insisted on turning it into the sixth vowel? “So now we’ve got Ayce, Blayne, Arryn, Claye, Ayden, Cadeyn, Danyle, Dayne, Jarryn, Jayden, Tayte, Kamdyn and Kyal.”

Their grizzles recalled the entertaining AFL name-analysis column begun in The Monthly magazine several years ago by Peter Cronin. Along the lines of Cronin’s column, these recent players could fill the following categories:

Names suitable for a faded aristocrat or equerry: Will Hoskin-Elliott, George Horlin-Smith, Henry Slattery, Toby Nankervis, James Polkinghorne, Lewis Roberts-Thomson, Piers Flanagan, Jasper Pittard, Thomas Bellchambers, Angus Monfries.

Names suitable for bushrangers and plucky English heroes: Jack Darling, Jack Watts, Jack Grimes, Jack Redden, Jack Crisp, Jack Frost, Jack Redpath. Also Tom Rockcliff — and Patrick Dangerfield, of course.

 Names suitable for rascally Dickensian criminals: Sam Grimley, Sam Siggins, Sam Darley, Sam Rowe, Sam Docherty, Sam Kerridge.

Names that leave one feeling curiously unsettled:

Tyson Goldsack, Dayne Zorko, Jordan De Goey, Kirk Ugle, Steele Sidebottom, Blaine Boekhorst, Joshua Prudden, Travis Boak, Tomas Bugg, Llane Spaanderman, Alipate Carlile, Kristian Jaksch.

 Names suitable for an outer-suburban outdoor wedding venue: Beau Waters, Oliver Wines.

Surnames suitable for a cocktail incorporating Campari or Amaretto: Cassisi, Firrito, Morabito, Deledio, Bontempelli, Menegola, Fantasia.

Surnames suitable for middle-European smoked meats: Schoenmakers, Schroder, Leuenberger, Petrenko, Malceski, Karnezis.

Names suitable for the location of an English murder mystery: Campbell Heath, Harrison Marsh, Easton Wood, Bradley Hill, Dean Towers.

As his retirement party wore on, Jim the ex-broadcaster revealed his biggest fear – spoonerisms. “Once you worry about them, you can’t help saying them. Nat Fyfe always bothered me. And Jed Bews, Dane Rampe and Matt Shaw. I was really pleased when Karmichael Hunt gave the game away.”

Robert Drewe’s latest book, The Beach, an Australian Passion, is published by the National Library of Australia and is available here: the-beach-an-australian-passion His other recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au

The post What’s in a name? Quite a lot these days according to Robert Drewe appeared first on .

Did you know that the male echidna has a four-headed penis?  Or that the female echidna has two vaginas?  No?  Well neither did Robert Drewe until he went in search of stories about the prickly little fellow making holes in his lawn…

The mystery of the neat holes in our lawn every morning has been solved: we have a resident echidna. He or she (with an echidna who can tell?) makes the holes with his/her beak while hunting ants, termites and worms. It’s amusing to watch Spike trundling importantly around the garden, like a cartoon character on a mission.

Echidnas are my favourite Australian native animal, and Spike (an original name, eh?) appropriately came along just when I was asked to give a talk on a subject new to me, Animals in Literature. Aha, here’s my lead, I thought. Well, I looked up Echidnas in Literature and despite their popularity in kids’ books, as lolly logos, and on coins, I couldn’t find them anywhere. All I found of a literary nature was the following reference, from Greek mythology:

“Echidna was a monstrous she-dragon, with the head and breast of a woman, who presided over all the corruptions of the earth: rot, slime, poison, fetid waters, illness and disease, and who spawned a host of terrible monsters to plague the earth.”

A bit harsh, I thought, watching roly-poly Spike nuzzling his/her way into an ant nest. Was the British naturalist George Shaw, who first described echidnas in 1792, thrown by their uniqueness? It’s unlikely that George was aware of the males’ four-headed penises and the females’ two vaginas, because echidnas are notoriously shy. Captive breeding is unknown, even in the libidinous 21^st century. They hate to be observed while mating, and in the circumstances who can blame them?

Anyway, George was possibly not the man for the job, having already failed to conceal his scepticism when confronted with a platypus (the echidna’s monotreme cousin) and concluding that the specimen was a fake.

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, meets the Cobras.

For my talk, echidnas, sadly, were out. I cast my mind back to the first animals to thrill me in books, and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the valiant young mongoose in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, sprang to mind. This story was read to us by Miss Dunkley in Grade One, and I must say its plot still lingers, chiefly in my concern about venomous snakes entering the house (again).

The story follows the adventures of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the pet of a British family in India. Other animals in the family’s garden warn Rikki of the presence of two cobras, Nag and Nagaina, who are furious at the family invading their territory.

Nag enters their bathroom before dawn but is attacked by Rikki. Their struggle wakes everyone and the father kills Nag with a shotgun. So Nagaina attempts revenge, cornering the family as they eat breakfast on the verandah. While Nagaina is distracted by a tailor-bird, Rikki destroys the cobra’s brood of eggs, except for one. He carries the egg to where Nagaina is threatening to bite the little boy, Teddy. Nagaina, enraged, recovers her egg, but is pursued by Rikki to the cobra’s nest where a final battle takes place. Rikki emerges triumphant. Nagaina is dead.

Phew! An environmentally-incorrect verandah breakfast these days (“Look dear, there’s another nice cobra! An even bigger one. Yes, it’s his house, too. Eat up your huevos rancheros”). But powerful stuff when you’re six.

Animals feature prominently in children’s books, where sentimentality is given free rein (think Black Beauty, The Yearling, The Chronicles of Narnia) and where moral questions can be safely planted in young minds by making the animals think and act like people.

From books to films C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia have thrilled generations of children with his stories of talking animals.

From Aesop’s Fables to Animal Farm, animals have brought many a philosophical and political message to adult novels (White Fang, Call of the Wild, Watership Down, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Life of Pi, Maus), and to poetry, from T.S. Eliot (Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which as the musical Cats, brought Eliot’s publisher, Faber, more money than any poet ever has) to Ted Hughes’ many wildlife poems. And to The Island of Dr Moreau, where H.G. Welles had his character Dr Moreau create human-like beings from animals via vivisection, and dealt suspensefully with a number of philosophical themes still current, including pain, cruelty and human interference with nature.

Nowadays while we’re talking about animals we have to consider a subject that didn’t even occur to the omniscient Welles: global warming. When it comes to ecological footprints, a dog is allegedly the equivalent of two Toyota LandCruisers, and this includes both the manufacture and running of the car. There are more than three million Australian households with at least one dog. That’s a lot of LandCruisers.

Dogs can’t take all the blame – a cat is the equivalent of a Volkswagen Golf. And a guinea pig has the same carbon footprint as a plasma television. As my old Dad used to say, you wouldn’t read about it.

Robert Drewe’s latest book, The Beach, an Australian Passion, has just been published by the National Library of Australia and is available here: the-beach-an-australian-passion His other recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au

…

The post Of Monotremes and Mongooses – Animals in Literature appeared first on .

You might recall our interest in such language curiosities as menu-speak, real-estate-speak, and menswear-speak. Police featuring prominently on the TV news lately reminded me of the most bizarre speech pattern of all: cop-talk.

In younger days on newspaper police rounds I spoke to cops on the job and sometimes in the pub, and they spoke like normal Australians (more vigorously and colloquially, in fact). No cop ever said to me: “Whilst presently in attendance in this hotel bar I observe that my glass is empty and I ascertain that it’s your round.”

But in Police Court, or on television, they talked like aliens. This also seemed true of British and American police. I wondered whether police academies trained them to speak in a convoluted way.

The argument that they spoke like this so they couldn’t be legally misinterpreted seemed like nonsense when a “man” became a “male person” or a “male individual”, “while” became “whilst” and “car” became “vehicle”.

An individual in charge of a vehicle, as police prefer to describe him, is less – not more – precise than a man driving a car. (So is the subject maybe driving a bus? A truck? Perhaps a bulldozer?)

I respect what police have to do and endure on a daily basis. But it can’t make their lives any easier to have to learn and speak another tortuous language. Is the gobbledegook designed to confuse the public? To sound important? To preserve a barrier between them and us? To get themselves off the hook if things turn pear-shaped?

A classic court example: Lawyer – “What happened then, officer?”

Copper: “I attempted to apply an escort hold to the individual but I noted resistive tension in his arm so I applied pain compliance instead. The individual actively resisted so I administered a focused knee strike to the lower abdominal area, and decentralized the individual.”

Lawyer: “In other words, you tried to grab my client’s arm, and when he pulled away, you twisted his wrist, and then kicked him in the groin and threw him down on the pavement.”

Copper: “Well, I wouldn’t put it in quite those words.”

You might have noticed that cops don’t get into their cars — they enter police vehicles. They don’t get out of a car either – they exit the vehicle. They don’t go anywhere (nor does anyone else) – they proceed. They don’t go to a particular place – they proceed to its vicinity.

They don’t watch or look – they surveille. They never see anything – they observe it. No one ever tells them anything either – they’re advised. A person doesn’t say something – he indicates. Nor does he tell them his name – he identifies himself. They don’t listen to a telephone conversation – they monitor it.

A brief glossary of common police-speak:

Male person (Man).

Gentleman (Man. Oddly enough, he mightn’t be at all gentlemanly. He might even be a serial killer.)

 Female person (Woman).

Lady (Woman. She needn’t be ladylike though. She might actually be rude and slovenly).

Juvenile person (Child, teenager).

Youth (Troublemaker).

Individual (Suspected person).

Official firearm or sidearm (Gun)

Vehicle (Car).

Myself (I, me).

Whilst (While).

In attendance (There).

In possession of (Has).

I ascertained the location of the residence (I found the house).

Person of interest (The one we’re hoping to arrest).

Police would like to speak with him (We really want to arrest him).

Incident (Anything from disorderly conduct to mass murder).

Attempted to avoid police (Ha! Didn’t).

Police officers apprehended the alleged perpetrator (We caught him).

Is helping police with their inquiries (We’ve dead-set got the bastard).

The individual was observed by myself fleeing on foot from the location (I saw him running away).

Whilst in attendance I ascertained that a firearm had been discharged into the head of a male person whilst lying in bed by an individual in his immediate vicinity (I saw the man had been shot in the head in his bed).

The male person was armed and dangerous and reported to be in possession of an improvised garden implement (The man had a spade).

My absolute favourite example of international cop-speak, however, comes from a recent incident at Dallas airport, when I saw a traveller try to pat a sniffer dog.

Police officer, tersely: “Do not touch the Federal agent!”

Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au

The post Speaking ‘police’ – it’s not that easy appeared first on .

Ah, the main season of the Sport of Kings is upon us again. A regal time you’ll agree: when women across the nation don bizarre headgear, get drunk on champagne, totter into the street, and try to hail taxis with their high heels in their hands.

Yes, the Sport of Kings, where finely tuned thoroughbred horses compete in stylish sporting events called the Le Pine Funerals Handicap, the Drink Driving – Say No Stakes, the Greg Bottomley Plumbing Services Handicap, and the Pizza Pasta Schnitzel Plate. Majestic, or what?

Speaking of nobility, when I was a cadet journalist typing up the race results, snobbish newspaper style insisted that owners were granted a “Mr” and a first and surname (as in “Mr Frank Packer”), but trainers and jockeys only achieved an initial (as in “T. Smith” and “G. Moore”).

At this stage I should say that I won the princely sum of $13 ($10 each way on Bernie of Babylon) in the XXXX Gold Lismore Cup recently. Bernie, selected purely because his and his race’s name matched the theme of this column, came a fading second after leading all the way.

I’m glad I stuck with Bernie of Babylon and XXXX Gold though because my other fancies that race day: Mile High Madam (rather risqué, I thought) in the North Coast Petroleum Handicap, and Quackerina in the Herne’s Freight Service Maiden Handicap, came nowhere.

To be fair, dopey names are probably unavoidable given that naming a racehorse can be far more difficult than, say, naming a newborn baby, where trying to combine the names of the child’s sire and dam doesn’t normally apply. Or having to wait until your child is 25 before you can use a name that’s been chosen once before

Strict guidelines allegedly apply with horses. The Registrar of Racehorses wishes it to be known that she “considers very seriously what is publicly acceptable, and the name of the racehorse should not create controversy nor bring the racing industry into disrepute.”

The Registrar, Judy Stevenson, says she finds “unacceptable” names of over 18 letters, brand and company names, first name and surname combinations, names that are suggestive, scandalous, vulgar or obscene, or names that may be offensive or humiliating to a specific individual or religious, political or ethnic group.

In which case I suggest the Registrar gets out more, because a few dodgy ones have slipped through the cracks over the years, though not necessarily on her watch. Some recent Australian ones: Super Shag, Smut, Sweet Jugs, Perfect Cleavage, Porn Queen, Dirty Weekend, Don’t Come Yet, Don’t Tell the Wife, Silent But Deadly, Knickers In a Knot and, an early favourite, Richard Cranium.

Not that a sense of humour isn’t welcome. Who could resist an each way bet on an Aussie stayer named Tom Likes Beetroot, The Dingo Dunnit, A Horse Called Man, Beer Belly Bob, Let Her Rip Hughie, Fax Me Back Jack, Amanda Huggenkiss, the New Zealand trier Waikikamukau (Why Kick a Moo Cow), or the gelding called Altered Boy?

Despite the registration rules, in the nudge-nudge-wink-wink, unreconstructed macho world of horse racing (yes, there was a horse called Nujnujwinkwink), smutty innuendo always seems worth trying on. Hence these racehorse names that have slipped past the US Jockey Club in the past 20 years: Spank It, Date More Minors, Bodacious Tatas, Sexual Harassment, Wrecked Em, Hoochiecoochimama, Panty Raid, Thong or Panties, and Boxers or Briefs.

American horse owners, bless them, are on a constant quest to give race callers a hard time, from the recent Onoitsmymotherinlaw, to Doremifasolatido, Arrrrrrrr and the wonderfully cruel–to-callers, Flat Fleet Feet, all of which passed the registrar. As did the notorious English horse, Hoof Hearted.

In such cases (“Flat Fleet Feet is forcing forward!”) listening to the races suddenly has great entertainment value far beyond the flutter. As does the strange headgear that women have taken to wearing whenever horse races and champagne are in close conjunction.

No longer hats, but peculiar semi-hats, these are compulsory not only at the race meetings themselves but even in liquor-licensed premises where women gather thousands of kilometres from the actual event.

Not being the slightest bit knowledgeable about Fashions in the Field, I was trying the other day to remember the name of this peculiar form of horse-race millinery. Wasn’t it the Titivator? That seemed to ring a bell. The Tantaliser? The Tittilator? Maybe the Perpetrator? The Terminator? The Benefactor? The Interrogator? Or was it the Vindicator? The Fornicator?

Oh yes, the Fascinator. But from the look of those comatose punters in the Melbourne Cup car park at 5 p.m., the Defibrillator would be more appropriate.

Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au

The post Titilators, tantalizers…aha…fascinators! Robert Drewe on the racing season… appeared first on .

The metric system may well be almost 50 years old in Australia, but old habits die hard when it comes to measuring, writes Robert Drewe.

My 14-year-old daughter came into the room with an announcement. “Guess what? I’m nearly five foot seven now,” she said proudly. “And I’m still growing. I reckon I’ll easily reach five foot eight.”

“What’s all that in centimetres?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Dunno. One-seventy-something?”

The metric system of measurements officially began in Australia 49 years ago but common usage often shuns decimals and prefers the old imperial system. Acres are still to be found all over the real estate world; cricket pitches are still 22 yards; furlongs hang on in horse-race calling; and, for safety reasons and uniformity between countries, aviation measurements are always in feet.

The Australian Dream is still a house on a quarter-acre block. Your new plasma TV screen (and teenage boys) boast their size in inches; vehicle tyre pressure is measured in pounds per square inch; new parents like to announce their babies’ birth weights in pounds; ships, planes and winds like their speed in knots; and, as every surfer knows, wave height comes in feet.

If something is far distant, as we all know, it’s miles and miles away.

Literature doggedly hangs on to the imperial system, too. Metric just doesn’t have the same ring to it. How irritating it is when a pedantic book editor changes a line like “Uncle Tom was now six feet under” to “Uncle Tom was now 182 centimetres under”. Or, “Frank drank a gallon of grog last night” to “Frank drank 4.5 litres of grog last night”. Believe me, it has happened.

Would the best-selling novel by Erskine Caldwell have been so successful if it had been called “God’s Little Half Hectare”? And Robert Frost’s famous poetic line loses something if it becomes “And Kilometres To Go Before I Sleep”.

Anyway I then subjected my daughter to a nostalgic blast from the imperial past, a time when the back covers of our primary school exercise books all carried an incredible list of length, area, weight, volume and money tables, and times tables as well.

Inches, feet, yards, acres, miles, pints, pounds, furlongs and pennies, she’d heard of, but for the rest I might have been talking Swahili.

“Stones?” she said. “Ounces? Hundredweights? Pecks? Bushels? Knots? Chains? Halfpennies? Fathoms? Guineas? Drams? Gills?” and that was before we got onto rods, poles, perches and roods. As for virgates (30 acres) and hides (four virgates), fortunately they never crossed my path.

Perhaps roods, rods, poles and perches have proved to be invaluable in your adult professional and private lives. For myself, not so much.

At school, all these complicated measurements (whose origins went back centuries to Rome and early Britannia and make really interesting reading now I don’t have to study them) seemed to exist purely as tests for mental arithmetic, the subject we knew then as Mental.

Mental was well named. After lunch of a Friday afternoon on a hot summer’s day, Mental could really do your head in, although when the temperature reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.5 Celsius) we were allowed to go home.

To prepare you for a period of Mental, you had to chant all the times tables, from two to 12. If you were lucky enough to be outside the classroom cleaning dusters, or visiting the toilet, the rhythmic chant of 40 distant voices shouting “Six eights are 48! Seven eights are 56!” sounded like a Nuremberg rally. (But, unlike today’s schoolkids, I’ve never forgotten my times tables.)

Fortunately, Mental was usually followed by Manual, during which the rods, poles and perches, and Farmer John with his 12 hens and 13 geese, three pigs, four ducks, six turkeys and 17 cows (*how many farm birds does Farmer John have?) could quickly fade from our bursting brains.

Manual, not surprisingly, was the opposite to Mental. It was divided strictly on gender lines. Boys did woodwork, cutting things out of three-ply with fret-saws, and girls sewed or French-knitted, although the creation of Mothers’ Day hessian potholders, Father’s Day clay ashtrays, and siblings’ Christmas-present cardboard-and-wool book protectors were unisex activities.

Perkins’ Paste, Clag and plasticine were also gender-neutral construction aids, used to make papier-mache puppets and regarded by some of the Mental strugglers as tasty foodstuffs.

Like the cube-shaped yellow erasers, which some boys seemed to confuse with cheese, they provided many a mid-afternoon snack, at least until the hungrier kids were on their way home and could continue consuming the leather straps of their schoolbags.

My daughter was rolling her eyes by this stage of my primary school reminiscences.

“You’re lucky to have the decimal system,” I told her.

“And calculators,” she said.

* Farmer John had 35 birds.

Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au/RobertDrewe

The post Mental (and Manual) as anything appeared first on .

Once observed, they’re pretty unforgettable: stringy red creatures usually between twenty centimetres and a metre in length, with whiskery legs, like an elongated centipede, they can grow to three metres.

They’re called polychaetes. They live under the sand in the shallowest water of the smooth, flat shoreline around here, and eat dead and decaying sea-life. They’re slimy, shy, segmented, strong-jawed and very strong, and fish, especially bream, whiting, mulloway and flathead, love to eat them when they get the chance. Consequently, on this coast they’re in great demand as bait and have given rise to one of the oddest and most difficult occupations in the country: the beach-wormer.

As someone professionally interested in Australia’s version of homo sapiens, I find beach-wormers an intriguing off-shoot of the common-or-garden coastal dweller. They all seem to be men over sixty for a start, with a uniform physique.

I’ve never seen a young beach-wormer. Or a tall one, or a skinny one, though I did see a female wormer once. Of necessity, wormers have a low centre of gravity, with knees surprisingly close to the ground, widely splayed toes, and calves like clenched fists. They wear their shorts well below their impressive stomachs (which perhaps aid balance), exposing buttock cleavage that lengthens alarmingly as they bend and sway surprisingly nimbly over ankle-deep water on the tidal sand flats. A dodgy lower back will end a wormer’s career.

They take their work seriously and silently. The constant bending over, the effort involved, and their age, combine with sun and wind to give the typical wormer a ruddy, almost purple glow. Facial veins and eyes swell and strain. A wormer has to stay patient and alert at all times, his reflexes snappy, so you rarely see one who isn’t frowning.

So swift and elusive are beach-worms that even though thousands of them lurk just beneath the sand on any New South Wales beach it might take two or three years of training and observation before a new wormer actually pulls up his first worm. For amateur wormers the official bag limit is twenty worms a day, but they’re by no means endangered and commercial wormers, who are licensed, may take more.

That a whole secret stratum of hungry beach-worms with carnivorous mouths lives inches under your bare soles is a rather creepy thought as you wade out into the surf. Little is known about them: whether they live only on the shore, whether they always lie flush with the surface or burrow deep. Their sex lives is a mystery but their large numbers indicate that reproduction presents no difficulties: their sex organs make up the middle third of their entire length.

So how does a wormer conduct his delicate craft? He carries an old nylon stocking containing rotten meat and oily pilchards in one hand and a pair of worming pliers in the other. (As a backup, he anchors a second smelly bait-supply in the sand with a stick.) Then he gently waves the lumpy, smelly stocking back and forth over the receding wavelets. If he’s lucky a worm will pop its head up, its V-shaped mouth breaking the surface, to see where the tasty stink is coming from.

The wormer then bends over the worm’s head with a tidbit of rotting fish in his fingers. He’s coaxing the worm into tasting it. As its mouth bites the bait, he fits the jaws of the pliers gently around the worm’s head and hopes that its hunger will counter its shyness and lightning-fast movements.

Seconds pass. He mustn’t scare it away. The wormer is bending over for so long his eyes seem ready to pop out. A seizure looks imminent. Abruptly he closes the pliers’ grip, deftly flicks the worm out of the sand, and runs a quick gnarled hand down its length to remove its slime. He has it. The worm is in the bag.

Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: www.penguin.com.au.local-wildlife

The post Profile of a Beach-Wormer appeared first on .

I was quietly pleased to read the other day that child psychologists now think it’s great for young children to have imaginary friends. Phew. At last John Gordon can step out of the shadows.

John Gordon was my imaginary friend between the ages of about three and five. He was my age, looked like me, and had the same interests, though I always chose our games. He was luckier than me in one respect: he had a dog and I badly wanted one.

As a playmate, John Gordon sometimes needed help doing complicated things like climbing flights of stairs while carrying brimming glasses of water, and he didn’t appreciate being teased by my Uncle Ian when doing so.

“Whoops! I accidentally tripped up John Gordon,” my uncle said one day. “And there he goes, tumbling down the stairs! And he’s spilt his glass of water!”

John Gordon was inconsolable. And so was I. Even Jemmy, the imaginary dog, wasn’t too happy.

My son Jack used to have an imaginary friend called Datesy. Every morning as I walked him to pre-school, he’d point out a Range-Rover that was customarily parked nearby. “That’s Datesy’s car,” he’d say. “He and his parents are shopping in the supermarket. They’re buying eggs and carrots and shampoo.”

“They must like eggs and carrots,” I remarked after several weeks of the same story. “And have very clean hair.”

“Yes, they’re a healthy family,” he said solemnly.

One morning, as he was starting Big School, the Range-Rover wasn’t there. “I wonder where Datesy and his family are,” I said.

“Oh, their house burnt down,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’re all dead.”

“Mandy would much rather have imaginary friends who were real than real friends who were imaginary.”
― Rebecca McNutt, Smog City

A lawyer I know used to have an imaginary friend called Mr Dummy. Mr Dummy was a stockbroker who lived in Bellevue Hill and collected vintage cars. Already showing the character traits of the ultra-conservative lawyer he would become, the five-year-old was quite clear about this. Mr Dummy would often play Monopoly with him, but was always argued out of winning.

One day, presented with a baby brother, the budding lawyer had no further need of Mr Dummy as a playmate. Asked what had happened, he said dismissively, “Oh, him. He’s gone to live in Old Kent Road.”

The unfortunate Mr Dummy and the Datesy family notwithstanding, imaginary friends are now regarded by psychologists as beneficial to children. Once thought by some to be indicators of mental illness, fantasy characters are now seen to develop kids’ social, linguistic and cognitive skills.

A recent paper by La Trobe University and the University of Manchester concluded that children with imaginary friends were advantaged throughout their lives, grew up to be better communicators and were more creative and achievement-oriented.

The child psychologist John Rosemond told the Sydney Morning Herald that parents needn’t be concerned about young children telling fantastical stories – like a four-year-old insisting he rode a dragon and defeated an evil wizard.

“Some parents mistakenly think these stories are lies and must be punished, but this isn’t lying. By definition, lying is either harmful to other people or meant to deceive. A four-year-old who insists he rode a dragon and fought a wizard is guilty of neither.

“With a child this age who is otherwise functioning normally, this isn’t anything to be concerned about. They’re simply highly imaginative, and the imagination of a child is a thing to be treasured, especially in these digital times.

He had something to add: “Please, parents, don’t give pre-schoolers digital, screen-based devices to occupy themselves. There’s no evidence that these gadgets produce future computer geniuses, and growing evidence that they interfere with normal brain development. Young children need to be engaged in play that’s self-directed and open-ended.”

Young children also needed to play by themselves. The ability to regularly play independently for at least an hour at a time was the best marker of good development in a three-year-old. So if your youngster is playing in his room, chattering away as if there’s another child there (but you know there isn’t), don’t go and “check.” Leave well enough alone.

Many successful adults have had imaginary friends. The author A.A. Milne gave his character Christopher Robin a friend called Binker: “Binker — what I call him — is a secret of my own. And Binker is the reason why I never feel alone. Playing in the nursery, sitting on the stair, whatever I am busy at, Binker will be there.“

“See!” I remarked to John Gordon. He and I — and Jemmy, too — were very pleased to hear of all this. “We’re OK.”

The post Imaginary best friends are forever appeared first on .

If you met me today, you mightn’t automatically assume that you are looking at someone who’s been  going to gyms for many years. I’ve lifted weights, pumped iron, hoisted metal all over the country. I can remember when gyms were called health clubs and fitness centres and health studios. I go back so far I can recall when gyms were called gyms the first time around.

I remember when gyms didn’t have wall-to-wall carpets and women weren’t allowed. I remember when they were smelly places where surly heterosexual sportsmen went to get fit off-season or sweat out hangovers. There were no models, lawyers, airline stewards, hotel receptionists, accountants. Definitely no journalists.

The drill was that you joined up for six months, or 12 months, or – what a bargain – life, and when the proprietor went bankrupt two months later you were left with a minimally muscled body and a long membership of a large empty space over a hamburger shop.

I’ve momentarily changed shape several times at gyms, sometimes for the better. I saw my most memorable gym, on Sydney’s sedate North Shore, turn gradually into a massage parlour. For weeks I was mystified by all the Crows Nest businessmen coming up the stairs with nary a bench press to follow. I finally became suspicious when a woman in a green negligee began sauntering into the showers for hot water for her mug of soup. Suspicions were confirmed when various King’s Cross personnel began calling in for “management consultations”.

‘When you arrived in his gym, Omar would always grunt, “You need sun-tan. Have sun-tan now. Ten dollars more. Pay me.” If you were someone, unlike me, who did want a sun-tan, you had to settle just for a tanned upper right thigh.’

The proprietor, a 160 cm, 130kg Turk named Omar, was arrested on the premises twice in one week for diverse offences, the gentlest of which was tax evasion. Omar was a very savage health entrepreneur. He used to handle his business affairs by throwing his bills, Tax Office correspondence and summonses into the steam-room boiler, when it was working, or tearing them up and throwing the confetti out into the shopping centre.

His bulk made Omar look even shorter than he was. He was the shape of a refrigerator, and had to edge through doors sideways. As is common among gym instructors, muscles were a height substitute. From the waist up he was bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger, from the waist down he looked like a fat jockey. When he walked he more than rolled from side to side; he rotated.

The first time the police came for him, on behalf of the taxman, he went quietly. Just a bit of arm-waving, swearing and shouting. The second time it took eight rapidly bruised cops to get him down the stairs, even with the handcuffs, and they confiscated our personal membership cards “for the department”.

Omar epitomised the breed. Not only did he refuse to pay creditors, but he physically threatened them. Omar’s whole muscular life was a threat to everyone and everything he encountered. He threatened us to lift heavier and heavier weights. He threatened us to leave two hours before closing time because he was tired. He threatened the barbells themselves into weightlessness. He put up threatening signs all over the gym. “Put Weights Back or Many Hurt” and “Not My Folt (sic) You Injure” and “Who Made Lat. Machine Unfix Monday Night? Omar Punish.”

The lat. machine was always “unfix”. So was any gym equipment the least complicated. Omar didn’t pay for maintenance. He soon presided over a steam-less steam room and some stationary bicycles that were absolutely stationary. I can’t imagine Omar having the yoga, Pilates and yogalates rooms of today. I cherish the impossible vision of Omar leading aerobics instruction and Zumba dance-fitness classes. Omar never talked of having a conscious tie with his physical body or asked members what star sign they were.

When you arrived in his gym, Omar would always grunt, “You need sun-tan. Have sun-tan now. Ten dollars more. Pay me.” If you were someone, unlike me, who did want a sun-tan, you had to settle just for a tanned upper right thigh: five of the six ultra-violet globes were “unfix”. Sometimes the green-lingeried woman would be sitting in the sun-room drinking a mug of soup.

These days I exercise — sort of — in a terrific gym attached to the Lennox Aquatic Centre. It’s a calm, uni-sex place. Occasionally, between extremely moderate bench presses, I recall Omar and his fellows. Between them, they owe me five life memberships. That’s a lot of muscle.

Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au.local-wildlife

The post Robert Drewe on the gym that Omar owned appeared first on .

The sensation that nowadays I seem to be living in a parallel universe began calmly enough. There I was, sitting in a Qantas plane to Perth, reading about the latest Canberra shenanigans, when I was served a snack called Bare Bites: Ready to Eat Fresh Sliced Apple.

I was a little staggered to read the warning on the packet: ‘This product may contain apple.’ (Who would have thought?) And further surprised to see the use-by date, December 16, 2015, by which time I imagine the freshness might have dissipated somewhat.

Clearly, Qantas and the Bare Bite company weren’t about to risk being sued by passengers who were not only allergic to apples (a rare condition suffered by people who are allergic to birch tree pollen) but who couldn’t read that they were consuming a food product with the dangerous word ‘apple’ emblazoned on its label.

On reaching my destination, I opened a bottle of Wirra Wirra sauvignon blanc over dinner. Wine bottles tell you the number of standard drinks they contain, and this one announced, confusingly: ‘7.7 standard drinks at sea level.’ I wondered if I’d I get more or fewer drinks at, say, Mount Tom Price (elevation 726 metres), or, especially, on Mount Kosciuszko (2228 metres or 7310 feet)?

The next day the GST was in the news again, as certain financial types suggested that only an increase to 15 percent would end the country’s economic woes. Worriedly, I made the mistake of idly Googling the words Australian GST. Well, I won’t do that again. I quote Australian Tax Code, Section 165-55:

The Commisioner may treat a particular event that actually happened as not having happened; and treat a particular event that did not happen as having happened and, if appropriate, treat the event as having happened at a particular time; and having involved a particular action by a particular entity; and treat a particular event that actually happened as having happened at a time different from the time it actually happened; or having involved particular action by a particular entity (whether or not the event actually involved any action by that entity).

Is it just me, or does confusion reign supreme? From the home front, where every food, clothing and bathroom cupboard these days contains product warnings so ridiculous that it’s hard to imagine even the most litigious customer bothering to sue (but they do), to everyday objects in the world around us.

From the ubiquitous warning on packets of peanuts: ‘May Contain Nuts’; on sleeping pills: ‘May Cause Drowsiness’; on a curling iron: ‘Not For Internal Use’; in a microwave-oven manual: ‘Do Not Use For Drying Pets’; on a Superman costume: ‘This Does Not Enable You to Fly!’; on most clothing irons: ‘Do Not Iron Clothes While On Body’; and in a manual for a child’s stroller: ‘Caution – Remove Infant Before Folding and Storage.’ (I’d like to know the number of unfortunate infants folded and stored before the stroller company and its lawyers woke up to this product shortcoming.)

Of course there are more exotic warnings: ‘Use Care When Operating Car’ (on a bottle of dog distemper pills); ‘Do Not Use Orally’ (on a toilet brush); ‘Do Not Try To Stop Machine With Your Hand’ (on a chainsaw manual); ‘Do Not Eat’ (on Apple’s website for the Ipod Shuffle; ‘This Product Moves When Used’ (on the Razor scooter); not to mention the terrifying warning, ‘Not To Be Inserted In Penis’ (on the 6PCS Precision screwdriver set).

One really scared company, keen to avoid any possible litigation about anything whatsoever (but still missing the key point, I think) simply warns: ‘If You Cannot Read This Warning Do Not Use This Product.’

Even so, the lawyers roam unfettered and a company can’t be careful enough. A McDonald’s customer in Pacoima, California, is suing the fast food restaurant for $1.5million because he was given only one napkin with his meal. Webster Lucas claims he is now unable to work because of the ‘undue mental anguish’ and ’emotional distress’ caused by the incident, when he was given just one napkin with his Quarter Pounder.

Good try, Mr Lucas. But you have a rival in the litigious stakes: the American advertising executive, Laura Ziv, who sued her boss for $6 million over a claim he accused her of looking like the Scottish singing star Susan Boyle. Ms Ziv, 45, from New Jersey, said she was so upset by the facial and physical comparison to the I Dreamed a Dream singer that she became seriously ill.

If I were Susan Boyle, I’d sue Ms Ziv for that rudeness. Twenty million should cover it.

 Robert Drewe’s most recent books The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon are on sale here: penguin.com.au.local-wildlife

fremantlepress.com.au/books

The post Warning: Please do not read this column appeared first on .

Robert Drewe discovers that one man’s Kipfler is another man’s Red Rascal, that Iceberg lettuces are out of fashion, and that the local markets are places of wonder…

You say potato, I say Kipfler. Or maybe Bintje, or Red Rascal, or Dutch Cream, or Pink Eye, or any of the other eighteen varieties of spuds now available in Australia. You say tomato, and I won’t even begin to describe the many types you can buy nowadays.

There are fifty of them, from the Amish Paste and Apollo to the Tiny Tim and Tommy Toe. And they’re not necessarily red either. Non-red tomatoes? What’s going on? They might be yellow, green, orange, pink, chocolate, even black. And they mightn’t be round shaped. They could resemble flattened eggs or pears or be as small as cherries. Or they might be bigger than softballs. Some tomatoes (the Green Zebra) are even striped.

I’m a weekly visitor to either the Bangalow or Byron Bay markets, places of wonder whose choices make your head spin. For example, it seems only yesterday that a single variety of potato existed. It was round, brown and dusty, but perfectly suited to either mashing or baking, chipping or boiling, and you bought it in bags weighing one stone (6.35 kg), much of which was encrusted dirt. It had a name. We called it a “potato”. Now, potatoes are washed and brushed and custom-grown for a particular cooking process.

Remember when we ate one variety of tomato? A “tomato” it was called. And guess how many types of lettuce there were? One — it was called a “lettuce”. As for carrots, well, you get the picture.

Carrots today? Would you prefer a Stefano, a Navarre, a Red Hot or a Cellobunch? Perhaps the Condor, Red Brigade, Red Count or Red Sabre would better suit your taste? Western Reds are popular, as are Majestic Reds.

The Royal Chantenay variety, I learned from the website of the World Carrot Museum (motto: “Discover the Power of Carrots”) is “wide-shouldered and highly tapered, with good internal colour”. It sounds like pretentious wine-speak. Thankfully, as far as I can see, carrots have remained orange.

How about the humble lettuce of yesteryear? The staple of our salads (always lavishly smothered with mother’s mayonnaise made of Nestles condensed milk, Keen’s mustard and vinegar), has been revealed nowadays as an Iceberg. Alas, the crunchy and often shredded Iceberg has long been overwhelmed by its fashionable cousins: the Butter, the Red Butter, the Cos, the Baby Cos, the Red Oak, the Green Oak, the Red Coral, the Green Coral and the Mignonette.

If it’s still a mainstay in sandwich shops, the Iceberg has long been elbowed off the restaurant plate by those more stylish salad greens: the endive, radicchio, rocket, witlof and watercress.

Incidentally, for all its many varieties and colours, the tomato is strangely absent from the traditional Aussie salad. Sadly, one day it just disappeared. Maybe it was seen to have design flaws. Like the poor Iceberg, it was suddenly shunned by smart diners as out-of-date, surfacing apologetically as an Italian or Greek peasant-style side dish.

Fruit is another sad story for me. Strawberries aren’t what they used to be: smaller and sweeter. Yes, there are plenty of apple varieties around, some of the recent types, like the Pink Lady, the Jazz and the Sundowner, even trademarked. Granny Smiths are still hanging in there, but try buying the crispest, sharpest apple of all, the Jonathan.

According to the Aussie Apples website, “The Jonathan is an old-fashioned eating apple favoured by many mature Australians who treasure their crisp, juicy flesh and tangy flavour.” (“Old-fashioned”, “mature”: that’s damning with faint praise.) So most orchardists have given up on them.

Produce now has to meet the glossy appearance and storage standards of the supermarkets; taste seems secondary. Food is more brightly coloured. Grey used to be a meal’s standard shade. Recalling the dinners of my childhood (known as “tea”), all lovingly prepared and relentlessly overcooked (“well done” in the 1950s and 60s Anglo-Australian style), tough grey lamb and grey beef spring to mind.

I especially remember my mother’s grey Brussels sprouts, and grey beans that after ten minutes’ chewing turned to strings of sisal in a child’s mouth. The Aztecs could have woven rugs from them.

No longer. Today’s veggies might be flashier but there’s a bonus – at least you can swallow them. For freshness and taste, however, buy them from the markets.

Robert Drewe’s latest books, The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon, are now in bookshops.

The post You say potato – I say what kind? appeared first on .