Brothers in alms

Like so many things in my life, my relationship towards charity has been haphazard and characterised by chance rather than anything that might resemble a "plan". Rennes was awkward for me, as it put me face to face more directly with poverty, and a culture with a much greater culture of "direct" charity (less euphemistically called "begging"). It's possible, though, that being confronted in that way made me more conscious about giving, and I think since returning to Australia I've become more conscientious about it. The other factor influencing my increased philanthropy, of course, has been the continuing spate of charity-supported sporting events in which I or those close to me have participated. I know some people who aren't big fans, but I think they're probably pretty constructive in terms of stimulating donations and awareness for different causes. They've certainly had a significant effect on broadening my awareness and engagement.

Anyway, this year I resolved to be a bit more systematic about my donations. One of the contributing factors was a very vague awareness of a commitment (which I can't find) of developed countries to increase their foreign aid budgets. I remember the target being 1%, but I can't say of what, and I can't find any reference to it, so its possible I'm wrong. Regardless, I felt like as someone who is fairly well off by any reasonable measure, I should be prepared to make a comparable commitment, and that 1% of my income was a reasonable target to aim for. It turns out other people have the same idea, although I only found that site while looking for the foreign aid one.

So, without further ado, these are the charities to which I have donated this year.

• Red Cross Australia: In the past I've given to their specific event appeals (Haiti, Victorian Bushfires, etc). This year I gave to the Pakistan Flood appeal, and to their general Australian fund.
• Premier's Disaster Relief Appeal: I wasn't personally affected by the dramatic Queensland floods and cyclone Yasi, but I had very strong links to both. I was in Brisbane during the floods and helped with the cleanup, and I grew up in Innisfail and went through cyclone Winifred (a pale imitation of Yasi).
• Movember: I participated in this a few years ago, and if I have a friend doing it, I donate to their effort. If not, I donate generally - prostate cancer and depression are good causes, and I reckon Movember has been effective at involving in charity people who might not otherwise pay attention.
• Oxfam: Although I like Oxfam's mission, and I have donated to them in the past, I am sometimes sceptical about some of their publicity. This donation was to Meg's team doing the Trailwalker in Brisbane.
• Salvation Army: The Salvos are probably the most visible social charity in Australia (for me, anyway). In the past I've donated to them through some sporting events, this year it was through their general appeal.
• Heart Foundation: The Heart Foundation are one of the more important community health charities, and becoming more so with changes in our lifestyles. I often donate to them through sports appeals, but this year it was through the general appeal.
• UNICEF: International Children's charity. This year was the first time I've donated to them, on Lee's recommendation.
• Kidney Foundation: I know someone who's life was extended through a kidney transplant, and in the past I've donated through their barbeques, but this year I donated through the general fund.
• Fred Hollows Foundation: Eye care in Australia's remote communities and abroad. This was the first year I've donated, on Mum's recommendation.
• Endeavour Foundation: Disabled service group. We used to donate clothes and things when we were in Innisfail. I know their CEO.
• Cancer Council Australia: I donated to these guys because they are the supported charity for the half-marathon I'm doing in August. I recognise the name through sun protection advertising, I think.

This list will no doubt change next year. Some of the change will be for silly reasons. Charities that send me unnecessary or excessive mail or gifts, for example, won't be looked upon kindly. I am giving money in order that the charities use it to do good, not that they use it to make me feel good - for me, that comes with the act of donating. Some of the change will be for better reasons. I would like to donate more to charities working closer to my field (Engineers Without Borders might be a candidate, but I was underwhelmed with the material on their website; another possibility would be something to do with education or literacy), or in areas that have meaning to me (something in the Solomon Islands perhaps). If you're reading this and you want to recommend a charity, add a comment or send me an email.

EDIT: Added National Breast Cancer Foundation (Steve's half-marathon) and MS Society (Paul's bike ride)

Committed

I just signed up for the Brisbane Half Marathon on August 7th. I have been making noises about doing this for a while, but having paid my registration, now I'm committed (doubly so once I've blogged about it). In doing so, I've taken inspiration from various people - Lee, Chad, Andy and Meg among them - who have either done or made noises about doing a half marathon. I've been running fairly regularly for about 6 months now, and over the last month or two I've been increasing my distances up over 10km, and feeling the benefits both in fitness and in my enjoyment of running. On Saturday morning, I ran 14km, part of it along the actual route for the half marathon. Although this is still well short of the half-marathon distance, I'm confident that I'll be able to get through the 21.1km, even if I won't be setting any land speed records in doing it.

Like so many other running/cycling/hiking events, this do is linked to a charity. Specifically, they're calling for sheckles on behalf of the Queensland Cancer Council, who I understand do yeoman work in providing research and support for the prevention, detection and treatment of cancer in the state. In the past I've set up a page at everydayhero, but I'm not going to do that this time. They sting both donor and charity for a slice, and although I'm sure their service does help to attract donors, I'm not 100% convinced that's effective. However, if you would like to encourage me, or if you are just feeling charitable, I would encourage you to donate. And if you want to email me or leave a comment to say that I've helped prompt you to do so, I promise to feel warm and fuzzy inside and run just that little bit harder.

Chasing the White Whale

I managed to slay the lesser of my figurative reading white whales this weekend, and to resume combat with the other.

I had commented to someone during the week that it had been a while since I had finished a novel, and they had pointed out that a three week break (it might have been four) was hardly a drought, especially given that the material in question was far from the easiest.

Anyway, I finished Moby Dick this week. I'm glad to now be able to say I've read it, given its significance in the western canon, but I can't say its one of my favourite books. The first sentence, "Call me Ishmael", is grossly misleading in its simplicity. The writing style thereafter gets quite overwrought. Still, I didn't mind that so much while the narrative was advancing. Unfortunately for me, the book spends quite a significant portion of its length in discourse on the nature and history of the whale and those who hunt it. I can't say I was fascinated by this, and often wished we could get back to the story. Indeed, our protagonists don't actually sight the storied white whale until about 90% into the book, from which point everything happens in a very great rush before finishing. I suspect a contemporary editor would have very stern things to say about Melville's pacing.

Having finished with cetaceans for the time being, I've returned to weightier prey, in the form Le Comte de Monte Cristo (en francais). I made good progress on this before heading overseas, finishing off tome 1 (of 4), and resuming it yesterday reminded me that it isn't nearly as daunting as the first chapters, or its impressive size, would suggest. I'll say this, too: being such a long book, the narrative structure is much less predictable to the reader. With other books I get an idea of how, or at least at what pace, things are going to progress, but I really don't have that feeling with this book. With so many pages left, I really don't have a grasp of where the story arcs will go, and that's kind of pleasant. I don't pretend that this burst of activity will go right through to the end of the book (I had to take a break yesterday when I tired, to read some bush poetry), but I do maintain my hopes of getting through it some time this year.

Valley Jazz

This past weekend saw the Valley Jazz Festival roll around. I have at times been known to bemoan the lack of a jazz scene in Brisbane, but despite that I had been very lax about planning to get along to a festival within a half hour walk of my apartment. Fortunately, on Wednesday Paul got me interested in a gig, which resparked my enthusiasm and got me more into the proper spirit of things. In the end, over the course of the festival I managed 5 gigs - all at the Judith Wright Centre, 2 wednesday night and 3 Saturday night.

The first gig Wednesday night was the Mark Isaacs Resurgence band, a 5 piece lead by Isaacs on piano. Their stuff was pretty good - I was particularly impressed by James Muller on guitar - amazing chops - and the drummer, whose name I don't recall, but who really had a good groove going, and did interesting things with his solos.

After that, there was a free gig in the Centre's Shopfront Centre by the Marialy Pacheco Trio. I had seen her play a gig last December, mostly solo then a couple of tunes with a percussionist, but I'd been looking forward to seeing her trio, with Pat and Joe Marchisella, both really good players who I've met and seen play through Paul. The format works pretty well, too - despite not being quite as invested in his music as he has been, Pat is still such a great and tasteful player. They had a really nice, and unexpected, adaptation of Sounds of Silence, just before we called it a night.

The first Saturday night gig was Jazzgroove Mothership Orchestra with Kristin Berardi. Paul studied with Kristin, and used to gig with her when I lived with him at Ironside St in St Lucia - she has a wonderful voice, and has done some great things since that time, winning some competitions and generally becoming a better singer. The band itself was OK, a 17-piece (all male, strange!), but perhaps not quite up to the standard I had expected (Paul had hyped them up a bit) - probably only 4 or 5 of the soloists impressed me.

After that gig I had planned to see Misinterprotato's free set in the shopfront area, but it was full, so I had to wait for some people to leave before I could get in. I have an album or two of theirs - all 3 of them were at the con with Paul, and used to show up from time to time at Ironside St, although that was a long time ago. They're great players - Pat Marchisella, in particular, is one of my favourite bass players - but at times they can tend to be a bit atmospheric and not get as much of a groove going as I'd like. This concert was probably the best of theirs I'd seen though - Sean's composition has improved, I think, and they really got some nice stuff going - still very much at the quiet end, but not too lost in soundscape-y stuff.

The third gig, the Aaron Goldberg Trio, was far and away the best. Goldberg is such an amazing pianist, and Paul's forewarnings about his sidemen, Greg Hutchison on drums and Reuben Rogers on bass, being pretty famous, were well-justified. They played a mix of stuff off Goldberg's two most recent albums, plus a couple of blues bits, with a range of fast stuff that really let them show off - especially Goldberg and Hutchison - and some slower, often latin stuff, where Rogers really, really impressed me with his solo-ing. Overall, they really were a cut above, and I was glad that I didn't miss this.

I have some hopes of getting along to see Ron Carter in a couple of weeks, but if not, I can be happy that I've gotten a fill of good jazz to tide me over for a while.

Holiday Reading

Holidays are the best time to read. Even though this has already been a fairly fruitful year for me for reading, I still think that my recent four-week sejour in Europe saw a bit of an increase. It didn't start with departure, though. A couple of weeks before leaving, emboldened by my reimmersion into francophonie, I started reading Le Comte de Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas Père. This is my second attempt at what is a pretty voluminous work, but my last only managed a couple of chapters, and those with great difficulty. This time around seems much better - I finished off the first of four tomes not long after arriving in Europe, and am a couple of chapters into the second. I hope to continue and perhaps finish the whole thing by the end of the year.

Having finished the first tome, I decided that I needed some diversity, and decided to allow myself the luxury of reading an English-language book in parallel with Le Comte. My first effort was a short one. Some time ago I decided that having read very little poetry represented a gap in my greater education, and grabbed a bunch of "big name" poetical works from project gutenberg. So, looking for something short to fill a gap, I read Lamia, by John Keats. I quite enjoyed it, too - there's something very nice about the carefully chosen words necessary for the form, and I enjoyed the occasional side-quest to fill in context regarding Greek gods or the layout of Corinth.

Satisfied by my expedition into poetry, I next picked up a copy of Animal Farm that Em had lying around. I think I've said in the past how much of a fan I am of the novella as a form, and I wolfed this one down in about a day. I always think of Animal Farm in the context of 1984 (also Orwell), and Brave New World (Huxley), both of which I've read (although 1984 not as an adult), so it was high time that I completed the set. Its a good little analogy, pretty transparent but still a good yarn. I won't pretend I can summarize it better than it has been analyzed elsewhere - just go read it for yourself :)

After Animal Farm, I browsed through my collection and settled on The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. I'd been vaguely familiar with Wilde's stuff through plays (The Importance of Being Ernest) and general witticisms, but I was keen to see what he did with a more weighty medium. The book starts out fairly lightly, a fairly loosely connected collection of witticisms around a couple of characters which seemed to represent the different aspects of Wilde's character. As the story develops, though, the trite sayings are fewer, and the subject matter gets darker. Wilde never actually reveals much of the depravity that he implies about Dorian (other than opium), but the drama builds nonetheless, and generally the thing works well as a narrative arc.

The last book I finished on the holiday was A Tale of Two Cities, by Dickens. I read my first Dickens, Great Expectations, a little while back, and enjoyed more than I had expected to, and AToTC had been recommended to me as perhaps his best book, so it was next on my list. Like Expectations, Dickens doesn't content himself with a study of a few characters - he makes a quite deliberate effort to paint the period as bigger than the characters of the story, to flesh out what is happening in the place and time in which the story takes place. I felt like he let himself explore his prose style more than Expectations too, with parts being quite ambitious. The story is good too, following the characters as they dodge across the channel between the titular towns, fighting off the threat of Madame Guillotine.

Although Cities was the last book I finished, it wasn't the last I started. I am presently about a third of the way through Moby Dick, by Melville. I'm not enjoying the prose style particularly, but following Orwell, Wilde and Dickens is a tough ask, I suppose.re

Travel Planning is hard

In a few weeks I'm off to Europe for a 4-week holiday (mid-April to mid-May). Its tempting to say that 4 weeks is a lot, but it really isn't. Living in Rennes for more than 3 years means I've got a lot of friends I'd like to to visit, and in the years since I've left, they've been inconsiderate enough to scatter themselves across the continent (or so it seems, anyway). The last few weeks I've been wracking my brains to work out how I can get around to visit 20 or so people scattered over 5 or 6 countries (France, Switzerland, UK, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway). The additional complication is having other people travelling around concurrently, and trying seeing to what extent we might join forces.

Its all a bit hard. Every time I think I have a plan, something changes and everything goes up for renegotiation. I'm getting to the point where I have to start booking transport within Europe, and accommodation, at which point changing requirements will have to be ignored.

back to books

This year is proving to be extremely eventful. The end of March is not yet here, but already the year has brought me floods, a change of jobs, a couple of papers being accepted, the achievement of a long-held goal, a family wedding, a bunch of concerts and just a generally more active social life. Nonetheless, one of the things I enjoyed more and more towards the end of last year was getting back into reading, and I've managed to keep that up pretty well.

Since the start of the year, I've read 7 books, across a nice variety of genres. In a less busy time I probably would have blogged about each individually, but in lieu of that, and with more busy times ahead of me, I'll just summarize them here:

• The Code of the Woosters (Wodehouse): This was the second of three (see below) in an anthology of Wodehouse's Jeeves stories. I hadn't read any Wodehouse before, and they're nice little stories, very well written and very easy to read. They reminded me in time and tone a little of The Importance of Being Ernest, light-hearted and bouncy. To be honest, I can't precisely remember what this one was about - the three I read tended to follow a fairly similar pattern of interwoven personal intrigues - but its the tone and style and movement that matters more than the story.
• A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters (Barnes): I didn't know what to expect of this book, although Michael L recommended it, which made me optimistic. I wasn't disappointed. The book is a series of occasionally and very loosely related parables about, well, the world, I guess. Its hard to pull out more specific themes - certainly religion is prominent, and the way that it influences people's outlooks on the world. I got the feeling that there might have been deeper analogies going on than I was understanding, but that didn't adversely affect my appreciation of the book.
• Right Ho, Jeeves (Wodehouse): See above, more Jeeves, reliable and fun.
• The Breaks of the Game (Halberstam): This was an impulse buy based on repeated passing praise of this book by the FreeDarko guys and probably other basketball blogs that I've read over the years. Set around the 1980 Portland Trailblazers, its a really very well written insight into basketball people, from players to coaches and administrators, how they got to where they are and how they relate to the larger changes that were going through basketball, be the implications of race, the role of television, the growing professionalism and salaries, or the onset of injury. I can see why the book has the status it does among basketball pundits.
• Claudius The God (Graves): After finishing I, Claudius a couple of years ago, I had started on the sequel, but for one reason or another, be it needing a change of style, or because my copy was so fragile I wasn't comfortable carrying it around, I kept putting it aside. Finally this year I started again, and read it through within a few weeks. Like the first book, it treads a fine line between sacrificing narrative form for historical detail, but on the whole it manages it pretty well. I can't help but feel that the first instalment was better, just because it had more going on in terms of having 3 emperors (Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, with snippets of Julius at the start and Claudius at the end) rather than one (Claudius). I also felt that Livia, for all that I read she might have been hardly done by, made for a better villain than Messalina. Still, a good book.
• Notes From Old Nanking (Hamilton): This was a nice little book about observations made by an Australian diplomatic aid in China in the years between 1947-1949. This was the time when the communists overthrew the nationalists, but to be honest, most of the book is vignettes about the lifestyle at the time, and the revolution itself gets relatively little treatment. This surprised me, but changed rather than diminished my enjoyment of the book, in that it made for more of a historical portrait rather than a war story.
• Holden's Performance (Bail): Murray Bail is one of those Australian authors who I have been remiss not to have read before now. I can see why. This is the story of Holden Shadbolt, and his life between growing up in Adelaide in the years after WWII, before moving to Manly and Canberra in the 50s and 60s. He falls in with a bunch of delightful and delightfully named characters along the way - his stepfather McBee, his uncle Vern and friends Flies & Wheelright, the eccentric theatre owner Alex Screech, his love affair Harriet, the womanising politician Hoadsley, and the collection of bodyguards like Colonel Light and Irving Polaroid. The book is frequently funny and delightfully written, and when Bail extends himself he can be really quite adventurous with his prose. The characters border on caricatures at times, but all are treated with love and respect, and come across as very real. Its also really nice the way he taunts us with historical fact, references to the PM R.G. Amen, to the "one syllable PM" who follows him, enough to give us some context, but steering well clear of historical fiction.

So there you go, 7 books in 3 months. Last year it took me until at least September to get to that point, and so far I've been really enjoying the books, and their variety.

The IMDB Top 250

Its a bit strong to call it a quest, or even a resolution, but over the last 5 or 6 years, when I've been looking for a movie to watch, my first port of call has been the IMDB's Top 250, a list of films ranked by an adjusted average rating of all the users of the IMDB site. It has been a moving target, obviously - there are probably well over fifty films that have entered and departed the list since I started following it, so I've ended up seeing a lot more than what is currently in the list. This has been to my great profit - some of these I had never heard of, but now count among my favourite films.

On Saturday, I went down to Palace Centro and watched True Grit, the Coen Brothers' latest western, a good film with very strong characters and performances, even if the denouement was disappointing (note to self: if I start a film review blog, consider "disappointing denouement" as a name - its an epidemic). At the time I saw it, this was the last remaining film I hadn't seen on the list, so as of March 5, I have completed the list. I expect this will only last a few weeks at the most, but its something that, for no particularly good reason, I'm a little bit proud of.

I've had a wonderful time going through the list. There are so many films, directors and genres that I had never really watched, and would not necessarily have expected to like. I loved the westerns, from Sergio Leone to John Wayne, Butch and Sundance to Unforgiven, and new ones like 3:10 to Yuma (the remake) and the Coen Brothers' latest. I was surprised by how much I liked the silent films I saw, especially Chaplin and Keaton (especially Keaton), but also films like M, Metropolis and The Passion of Joan of Arc. I saw more Asian films because of the 250 list than I had seen previously, and really enjoyed Kurosawa, Old Boy, Infernal Affairs, and In The Mood for Love. Some of the films were "tough" to watch - Bergman and Fellini come to mind - but there was always something to take away from them. The worst film I saw from the list was without question A Christmas Story, which has no place in the list, but its the only one that springs to mind that really disappointed me.

In some ways, its a little sad that I've finished the list, in that I no longer have it as a reference to go to when I want to find a film to watch. On the other hand, I have a much fuller appreciation now of different filmmakers, and I know there are a bunch who I really haven't explored as much as I'd like - Truffaut and Godard, and the French new wave (having really liked Les 400 Coups and Au bout de souffle, and La Salaire de la Peur), and some filmmakers who didn't make the list, like Fassbinder. I also feel a little more comfortable now going back and rewatching some of the films, especially those I haven't seen for a long time now. Also, its only a matter of time before there are new entries to check out :)

up the creek

Some people who follow me on twitter and had some inside connections already knew this was happening, but it probably warrants a proper announcement for anyone else who's still subscribed here or elsewhere.

A couple of weeks ago I tendered my official resignation to QUT. In just over a week I will be starting a new position as lecturer in the School of ITEE at the University of Queensland.

Sudanese Australians and sport

Gee, I hope I can get the tone of this OK.

I don't know when Australia started seeing increasing populations of Sudanese immigrants. I guess it was probably in the last 10 years or so. I started noticing them more when I arrived back, and among my first thoughts were, "my goodness, I can't wait until these folk start playing the sports I follow". The physiques of the immigrants I've seen are just remarkable, fit and long and lean and lithe. The dominant sport in Sudan is probably soccer, but I just reckon they are so physically well-suited to sports like basketball, cricket, netball (which I don't enjoy much, but whose position I respect) and australian rules.

The first Sudanese-Australian sportsperson I have seen in the news is the basketballer, Ater Majok. He was a high-profile recruit to a major US college, UConn, but declared for the NBA draft prematurely, without ever having made any real impact in the college game. He wasn't drafted, and has recently been playing a couple of short stints in the NBL here in Australia. He hasn't set the world on fire, and I've heard worries about his fundamentals and his attitude, so time will tell how far he goes.

This weekend also saw the first appearance by a Sudanese-Australian in the AFL, with Majak Daw playing in a preseason game with North Melbourne. Early reports are good, and personally I really want to see him succeed. The Kangaroos aren't my team, but I really hope if nothing else that Majak can serve as a role model to people in his community.

Here's hoping we see more and more Sudanese Australians breaking into top-level sport in Australia. I really think they have a great contribution to offer to our sporting landscape.

retirement

About 18 months or so ago, I posted about my experience playing Age of Conan. At that time I'd played for just over a year, and this week will see me finish playing after just a shade over 2 and a half years of being subscribed.

When I posted last time, I had fairly recently joined my third guild, Primal Fury. Not long after posting, PF almost fell apart, as a number of the senior players in the guild lost interest and left to play other games. I was one of a few players, and along with Vic, I'd like to think one of the main ones, who stepped up and rebuilt the guild, going back to lower level raids and introducing new players until we were able to get back to where we had been. It took a few months, but PF became a very powerful guild. At our peak, we were running 2 raids in parallel through tier 2, and we were the first guild on the server to craft an Ibis blade.

About a year ago, the guild had begun to fade slightly, focussing more on PvP (which doesn't interest me) and less on PvE (which does), and the game's expansion pack was released. I wasn't excited by the prospect of playing the xpac on a PvP server, so I rolled an assassin on the PvE server (Wiccana), and joined the Third Time Lucky guild, which my friend Misaki played with. I was fortunate that I came in playing a class in which TTL were undermanned, and I was able to quickly get gear and become a regular raider. I raided with TTL as we progressed through T3, where they have now downed Thoth-Amon.

I wasn't there for that kill, though. My interest in the game started fading about 3 months ago, and in the last 2 months I've probably only played 3 or 4 times. Given that, I've cancelled my subscription. It was difficult to do, simply because there are a lot of people in the game whose company I have enjoyed for a long time, some of them, like Misaki, going back more than 2 years. Its been very interesting to see just how solid a social group can be formed over a voice chat server, when everyone is working together to achieve a collective aim. I hope I'll be able to meet up with some of the people I've played with if I play another online game.

For now, though, "serious" gaming has somewhat lost its appeal, and I'm devoting more of my time to some activities that I've let lapse in recent years, particularly books and movies.

Reading, 2010

At the beginning of last year I set myself a very vague, non-binding and unambitious target of reading 12 books. I think I'd set the same target the previous year and only achieved it courtesy of a burst of 3 or 4 books in the last 2 weeks of the year (coinciding, not surprisingly, with the only leave I took that year). Not one to break with tradition, I did a similar thing this year, excepting only that the burst period was more like 6 weeks, and coincided instead with some discussions about books.

So, the books I read in 2010 (with links, were appropriate, to what I wrote about them) were:

• The Sound of One Hand Clapping (Flanagan)
• The Big Sleep (Chandler)
• The Quiet American (Greene)
• Heart of Darkness (Conrad)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
• The Beach (Garland)
• Lonesome Traveler (Kerouac)
• Breath (Winton)
• Bike Snob: Systematically and Mercilessly Realigning the World of Cycling (BikeSnobNYC)
• The Tree of Man (White)
• The Mating Season (Wodehouse)
• Cold Comfort Farm (Gibbons)

My favourites were probably two of the Australian entries - Breath and The Tree of Man -although Cold Comfort Farm was also very good.

As to this year, I would like to think I'll read more, and have in my mind a vague, non-binding and unambitious target of 15 books. Last year was better in terms of having more Australian entries than previous years, so I'd quite like to continue that, and I wouldn't mind if I saw a couple of non-fiction entries this year. I haven't finished any books yet this year, but I'm probably 75% of the way through two.

rising waters

My last blog post was about getting a close look at Australia's propensity for natural disaster, and specifically flooding. At the end of that post, I commented that I hadn't been directly affected. That remains true, I guess, but in the last couple of weeks I've come closer.

Two weeks ago today, I was at my second day back at work. The previous day we had been confronted by quite dramatic images of flash-flooding at Toowoomba, which claimed a number of lives (2, I believe) and produced youtube videos of cars being tossed like so many rubber ducks down the erstwhile main street, now raging torrent, of Toowoomba's commercial district. The spectacular images were followed by images that were less spectacular, but to me more troubling, of a great inland sea that had descended down into the Lockyer valley, sweeping homes off their stumps and destroying entire towns. In the week that followed, the death count in that area has risen to, I think, 15 or so. The stories are horrible.

So, on Tuesday, the Bremer River (which flows through Ipswich) and the Brisbane River (which, strangely enough, flows through Brisbane) began to rise. By lunchtime, some low-lying suburbs like Rocklea and West End had begun to be evacuated. Fearing that the bus would cease to run to New Farm, I headed home. As the afternoon progressed, the predictions escalated, until by the end of the afternoon, Anna Bligh announced that waters were predicted to reach levels comparable and even beyond those of the 1974 flood (which stands as "the" Brisbane flood).

My apartment was and is at no risk of flooding, as became increasingly apparent in the subsequent days. Parts of Newstead, the suburb in which I live, are low-lying - Teneriffe Ferry had flooded from king tides in the days leading up to Christmas, though - so I was concerned that I would lose electricity, so I stocked up on bread, grabbed some supplies (batteries, tinned food, UHT milk), and bunkered in. At the behest of my mother/brewer, I also filled my freezer with ice and my fridge with beer. I'm telling people the reason was because a full fridge keeps cold longer, but to be honest, who needs a reason to fill their fridge with beer, right?

I followed the flood news assiduously, through the 2-hourly press conferences with Anna Bligh, the deputy police commissioner and the rotating cast of related higher-ups, through the excellent QPS updates over facebook, and through the dramatic images posted by people on twitter under #qldfloods. In the meantime, I sat at home, alternately transfixed by the news, and bored, unable to focus on work or reading. Although I never lost power, and I was never physically isolated, after a few days sitting in my apartment essentially doing nothing, I was feeling a bit socially isolated, and welcomed the weekend and the opportunity to get out of the apartment and help clean up.

On Saturday I joined my friends Ted & Meg on a trek over to Fairfield to help clean the house of one of Meg's colleagues. The volunteer effort following the flood has been quite spectacular and very moving, with many tens of thousands of people venturing out into the streets with whatever gear they could muster, as well as others wandering the streets giving food and cold drinks to anyone affected or working. As for me, I spent most of the first Saturday after the flood shovelling silty, sloppy mud out of the garden at Fairfield. On Monday I caught a bus out to St Lucia, where I spent the morning moving huge piles of mud-soaked kerbside garbage into trucks. In the afternoon, as it became increasingly a job for bobcats rather than willing hands, a group of us moved to Milton. There we helped with the Sisyphean task of sweeping out the bottom floor of a house that had been flooding every day at high tide (and that would be swept again 12 hours later). We also helped clean the house of a guy who had been evacuated with dysentry after his house had flooded a metre deep on the upper floor. The stories told by residents and second-hand by other volunteers were just amazing.

In the interim, when not volunteering, I was working from home. Our office building in the city had had its power shut off on the Wednesday morning, and the basement had flooded. We are now told that it won't be accessible for another month, and we are in temporary offices on the main university campus. We were allowed into the building for an hour on Friday, without power, during which time we climbed the 12 storeys up the lamplit fire stairs, and retrieved what we could (mostly laptops) from the foetid air of our office.

We live in interesting times.

of droughts and flooding rains

On the morning of Friday I played golf with Dad. It was a pleasant morning, and the weather, which over the previous month had been inclement by Toowoomba standards, held off, making for an enjoyable walk. In the afternoon, it began to rain.

All through Christmas day the rain continued, never thundering down in the way to which I had become accustomed growing up in the tropics, but unrelenting nonetheless. Boxing day was, if anything, more inclement, with the rain at times increasing in intensity. I love the rain, but come the 27th, I was becoming itchy with being trapped inside. I have the tendency while visiting my parents towards the sendentary lifestyle, reading books, watching cricket (a function of the times of year at which I tend to visit), and tapping away on my computer (the latter a vice not specific to Toowoomba, it has to be said).

By the afternoon of the 27th, though, the rain had eased, and we ventured out to inspect the consequences. Gowrie Creek was brown and angry and running at speed, but did not seem to have broken its banks, or at least not with consequence for drivers. Further out towards Meringandan, the waters encroached further and further onto the roads, until we turned around as the rain began to fall.

Later in the day, we headed west, out towards Biddeston, along roads flanked by natural gutters awash with rushing brown water, bursting out to flow across the road every few hundred meters in its rush to find lower ground. After a while we stopped at a what had once been a small creek, that had exploded into a great sea of water, more than a hundred metres across. The bridge, guarded by a police car, had a great roaring brown race of water rushing under it, emerging out the other side in great waves that wrapped viciously around a hapless telephone pole. There was an old four-wheel drive in the middle of the torrent, washed half of the road and pinned against a railing, clearly abandoned.

Two days later, and under the bright sun and brisk wind that I have always associated with Toowoomba, we headed out for another drive, starting along the same route. The water was gone, the impromptu creeks that had appeared were gone. The evidence of the flood was there, though, in the crevasses carved by the water, in the crops laid down by the rush and covered in with silt and debris. The wide and raging creek had receded to its more habitual 4m width, although water still rushed through. For hundreds of meters beyond, one could see the debris and distressed crops where the water had spread, but it was still hard to believe that less than 48 hours earlier it had been a rushing lake.

We drove on, down to Brookstead. We had hoped to see the mighty Condamine in full force, but we were stopped several kilometres short, behind a Victorian family towing a car, and a barrier blocking further access. After a few minutes a police car pulled up, and told us that the bridge was out, and that they were stopping traffic at Brookstead to prevent further damage to the road. I have to say I was disappointed. I have always heard of these great Queensland rivers - Condamine, Bulloo, Paroo, Coopers Creek - that terrorise the west as they alternate between trickling or even buried rivers during droughts, and great rushing, sprawling inland seas that isolate and inundate towns during floods, but I haven't seen them, or if I have it has been at their most unspectacular. It would have been nice to see one of the giants at its most angry, even just to say I've seen it.

So, thwarted, we turned and drove back. Like wandering tourists we picked small backroads to wend our way back north-east, driving through fields of cotton and grain sorghum showing the recent layers of silt and debris, the silt at times stacked in strata like slate. Out in the fields the water still rushed along beside the road, giving a lie to the impression of the land being flat. Every now and then we would slow, as the sunlit mirages floating on the road refused to give way to approach, and revealed themselves as swathes of water moving across the road. Once we sent Mum out as a scout to test the depth of a 50m stretch of water, but she walked across it Jesus-like, and never got more than ankle-deep. So we pressed on, past a field of sunflowers, not staring up gleefully at the sun, but gazing mournfully down at the gathered silt at their feet, and their dying lower leaves.

They say that the floods were the worst for some time. It is with a little guilt that I say that I enjoyed them - I feel reinvigorated in my Australianness having seen in flood lands that 2 years ago I saw in drought. I know, though, full well, that the reason for my enjoyment was that I saw them only as a spectator. Others were not so lucky, including in some ways, people I know. I can only hope that when the time comes for me to confront one of Australia's great natural disasters, I can show the fortitude and resourcefulness that they have.

thinking about soccer

My friend and erstwhile colleague Ricky called me out today on twitter, making reference to my past needling of him on the merits of soccer and its position in the Australian landscape. Its a timely nudge. This week in Switzerland, FIFA are (as I understand it) voting on the venues for the 2018 and 2022 soccer world cups, with Australia having thrown its hat in the ring for the latter.

I'm conflicted on this.

On one hand, I'm a nationalist, and for pure parochial reasons it might be nice to see Australia "win". From an objective point of view, the events we've held in recent times - the Sydney Olympics, the 2003 rugby world cup, the Melbourne Commonwealth Games - have gone well, in terms of getting very good attendance and generating a good atmosphere amongst fans. I have no doubt the same would be true for a soccer world cup. Also, I know that there are soccer fans in Australia, and I don't begrudge them the opportunity to see the best soccer nations in the world competing here.

Of course, I should make it clear that I'd be unlikely to attend any games. I've dabbled in following soccer - I've seen the Serie A at the San Siro, I saw France play Bosnia in an international friendly, I've seen the French Ligue 1, I've seen the Socceroos play, and during the 2006 world cup I followed a lot of games on television, in bars, at friends' houses, and in public squares. There were enjoyable moments, although for me they sprang from the company rather than the game. In terms of the game itself, I tend to come away frustrated. The tendency of the players to play the umpire rather than the ball feels dishonest, especially when I compare it with the way I like to see my preferred code, Australian Football, played. And I get bored by the comparative lack of adventure and aggression in most games, even by sides like Brazil and Holland, reputed for their attacking football. I should stress that these criticisms are of the game at its so-called highest level. I've found that the further you move away from professional soccer, the more honestly and earnestly the players play, and the more entertaining the game becomes.

My biggest concern, though, is about the impact that the event might have on the Australian sporting landscape. My biggest criticism of soccer as a culture is that in a lot of countries where it takes root, it comes to monopolise the sporting landscape. In France, I lived in such a country, where year-round (with the exception of a short summer break during which sport seemed to be ignored altogether), soccer is the only sport with any real currency in the street. I feel like the battle over the word "football", which we are told by some people can only be used for soccer, is illustrative of this "there can be only one" inclination. By comparison, in Australia, we have this beautiful phenomenon of the changing seasons of sport, from the football season (by which I mean the big three football codes in this country - Australian Football, Rugby League and Rugby Union, with netball and growing and commendable addition, even if I have little taste for the game myself), to the "cricket season", during which we also get a healthy helping of golf and tennis. There's even that strange month of October when some parts of the country obsess about horseracing (whose appeal I find much more inexplicable than soccer). For much of Australia, the changing of the sporting season is a much more significant and distinct transition than any climatic cycle.

All told, we have a wonderful diversity of sports, that cycles through seasons and offer choice to the fan as to which code they can follow. If the impact of the world cup is to raise the profile of soccer closer to the other football codes, then I'm fine with that. But I know the power of soccer and its international links. Even if I don't understand what it is that they like in the game itself, I understand the appeal of having a huge array of leagues and nations playing the game around the world. And I fear that these links, fuelled by the Australian sporting fan's parochialism, might eventually lead to a reduction in the diversity of our sporting landscape, which would be a tremendous shame.