It’s said, isn’t it, that it’s dangerous to meet your heroes. Heroes can be people that we build up in our minds, put on a pedestal, hold in such high regard that when we do finally meet, any flaws can be devastating. And of course there are flaws, we’re all only human.
The saying, it seems, is about people. People are our heroes.
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It happened, as many near disasters do, in an instant.
One moment I enjoying a great ride on my bike, enjoying the thrill of blasting down a fire trail in the forest, minding my own business and soaking up the adrenaline. The sun was shining, the temperature about perfect for a morning on a mountain bike. Everything was as it should be in my world.
And then a wallaby shot out of the bushes in front of me.
In an instant the human brain did what I find utterly astonishing…without so much as a conscious thought I knew without shadow of doubt that I would hit that wallaby. It’s speed and trajectory, and my own would intersect perfectly a handful of metres in front of me. It would be injured, and I would crash and find myself tumbling down the track protected only by a lyrca t-shirt and plastic skid-lid. All this registered in a split second as my painful future bounded toward me and I raced toward it.
I almost fancy that we made eye contact, the wallaby and I, and we each knew that what was about to happen would be costly for both of us.
Continue readingRecently I took my own advice on being open to life-long learning, and set out to learn something.
Specifically I decided that after years of riding mountain bikes, I should learn some proper technique when it comes to jumping. I can get down most trails, and have fun doing so, but jumps are something else. I like staying in contact with the ground, rubber firmly in contact with dirt, as it where. But at one of the places I ride there is a new trail littered with jumps, and while I can safely roll through them, it struck me that it would be more fun if I knew how to jump.
So I found myself on the trail with Peter, a friend and on this occasion mountain bike coach. We covered lots of technique, body position, movements, bike mechanics and so on, before I started repeatedly rolling through a series of turns and into the first jump on the trail. Continue reading
Before we dive in, a word of explanation: what follows is a brief reflection on the Christian season of pentecost. If this word or idea is new to you, read first the biblical account in Acts 2 and/or watch this quick explainer from Chuck Knows Church
I lay in bed on Monday night. It had been a busy few days. I was tired. I always feel tired. Still, sleep eluded me.
As I lay there I heard a sound that’s become so familiar to us in Brisbane this year that I have to say I’m sick of it: the sound of rain drops falling on the tree outside my bedroom window. At first a gentle patter, then growing louder as the drops themselves became heavier. That oh-too-familiar sound.
There was something different this time though. It wasn’t only the sound of rain I could hear, but a new sound. An insistent sound. A sound coming from the distance, but getting closer and closer.
Continue readingMemories are a funny thing, particularly as you get a little older. Sometimes you have to dig around to find that lost one just out of reach somewhere in the dim dark recesses of the extraordinary thing we call the human brain. Other times though, they come flooding out, unbidden, unexpected and impossible to resist. And music has a way of drawing out memories more than just about anything else, transporting us in an instant to another time and place.
Last night I had just such an experience.
I was standing in a crowd of 8000 at Brisbane’s Riverstage, singing and dancing (yes, true, I did dance) along with the incomparable Midnight Oil. They’re in the middle of what is billed as their final tour after thrilling crowds for more than 40 years. As a lifelong fan, I had to be there, there was no option.
And as we stood, sang, danced (ok, I confess, it was what might be charitably described as “dad-dancing”), the memories came pouring forth.
Memories of sneaking an under-aged brother into a licenced venue gig in the early 90s. Of Boondall Entertainment Centre absolutely packed to the rafters for Crowded House and Hunters and Collectors…but clearly most of the punters there mainly for Midnight Oil. Of gig, after gig, after gig.
Perhaps most memorable, an insane Saturday night at the Alexandra Headlands Hotel, the room heaving with sweaty, singing, dancing bodies, the atmosphere so intense the room practically had its own weather system (and eventually it did as Peter Garrett threw jugs of water over the crowd from the stage, and the lads up the back started doing the same with jugs of beer).
At most of those shows I shared the joy with Sheri, and in recent years had the opportunity to take my then 14 year old son, and last night my now 14 year old daughter for not only their first big rock concert, but their first (and probably last) Oils gig.
These memories and more came flooding back as we rocked away the night. I wasn’t exactly sad, though I’ll definitely miss seeing this band live. More that the band and the music took me on a tour through some of the key moments of my own life as they played through a phenomenal back-catalogue interspersed some belters from their latest (trust me, it’s worth a few listens to the new album Resist).
I sometimes wonder what it is about Midnight Oil that I find inescapable. Why I have a full set of their albums; why I still send spotify playing an Oils playlist; why my most prized possession is a signed postcard from the band on the occasion of my 30th birthday (thanks Tracey…still don’t know how you organised it!).
Continue readingWhitehaven Beach, on Whitsunday Island off Queensland’s central coastline, is an amazing place. It’s regularly named as one of the top 10 beaches in the world, and it’s no wonder. 7km of stunning sandy beachline, backed by pristine coastal forest on an island that is 100% National Park. Apart from a few picnic sheds up one end, and the steady stream of visiting tourist boats anchored off-shore, you could be forgiven for thinking that the beach hasn’t changed in centuries.
On the day we visited it was overcast and moody….the brooding clouds dark on the horizon lending an amazing atmosphere to the beach and the surrounding islands. Swallowtail dart swam around us as we floated in the pristine waters (wearing our seasonally necessary stinger suits of course!). Even without a postcard blue sky and sunny day, it was astonishingly, achingly beautiful. The natural world at its very finest.
Except that only moments before diving into the waters we had wandered along the beach, beyond the designated tourist area. There on a 15 minute walk along these pearly white sands my eye kept being caught by things that didn’t belong. Bits of plastic, and rubber and rope. A face mask that had protected someone from COVID. A used bandaid. A piece of pipe. Some were fresh – likely bits of deck rubber from stand-up paddle boards that came in with tourist boats that dotted the waters off the beach – but others were weathered and windblown, clearly washed up on the tides from who-knows-where and who-knows-how-long ago. In 15 minutes we collected a couple of dozen bits of rubbish, from the fist-sized to the tiny.
Continue readingIt was a balmy Sunday afternoon, the kind where you’ve finished the jobs that need doing, there’s sport on tv in the background and the outcome is an inevitable dozing off on the couch while the kids do who knows what. Perfect right?
Into this nirvana came the distant, but distinct sounds of the Mr Whippy van. I’m guessing Mr Whippy and its unmistakable melody is a thing in the rest of the world too, but in Australia it’s akin to the pied piper – an ice cream van serving soft serves cruising suburban streets and calling to anybody within earshot. Kids come running. Parents too…even if they’re being dragged.
Those tones echoed up the street, cut through my dazed state and immediately had me reminiscing about my childhood in the southern Townsville suburb of Wulguru. That same tinny Greensleeves tune some 40 years earlier was a well known calling card. The connection on this summer day was instant and even as I remembered Kelvin St, Wulguru, the song called me to my modern day footpath where I flagged down Mr Whippy and ordered a soft-serve (with embedded Kit Kat of course!). Bliss.
There’s something extraordinary about the human brain and it’s capacity to make those kinds of connections over a sound, a smell or a taste. Just a few bars blaring from the ice cream van’s over-worked speaker and I’m transported 40 years in time and 1500km in distance.
Continue readingOne was called simply “The Track”, and the other “The Red Desert”. The were they places that Wulguru kids hung out after school in the early 80’s. The Track was a network of dirt tracks criss-crossing a gully behind the local primary school, while the Red Desert was a vast (or at least it felt that way) area of eroded red gravel trails in the foothills of Mt Stuart.
For a Townsville 10-year-old, these places were magic. We’d race home from school, dump our bags, grab a biscuit and a bike, yell out “see you Mum, we’re going to The Track” and be out the door. Those hours of messing about on bikes, doing jumps and skids and having races with whoever else showed up that day shaped our childhood.
Later as a teenager living in Brisbane’s western suburbs, the story wasn’t much different. A narrow downhill bushland trail a couple of hundred metres from home turned into a race track where we’d meet neighbourhood mates to race bikes down the hill, putting the stopwatch to work to determine who was the day’s fastest. Lots of fun, and the occasional gravel rash and one memorable crash resulting in a cracked collarbone for a visiting cousin were the results.
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I think I’ve written before about how my current midlife crisis involves riding bicycles in the bush. I’m not very good, or very fast, but I have a good time exploring with mates, experiencing an adrenaline rush and finding beautiful places.
Every now and then it doesn’t go so well and I find myself experiencing what I euphemistically describe as a rapid unplanned dismount (RUD). In other words: I crash.
Once such recent RUD resulted in my tumbling for quite a way through the bush and coming to rest with a dislocated and fractured finger. Not much fun, and it did hurt a bit but I honestly found myself thinking “that’s actually not so bad….it could have been a much worse injury!”.
The injury has been healing and a most excellent Occupational Therapist at the local hospital has been providing great advice on rehab, along with a few different splints and strengthening devices. It’s amazing what she can do with thermoplastic, Velcro and several variations of blue-tac.
Continue readingThis week I sat on my couch watching TV. Nothing unusual about that, it’s one of my favourite places.
What was slightly unusual was that I watched live, in high definition, while four astronauts launched aboard the latest Space X Crew Dragon space vehicle, a commercial partnership between NASA and Space X.
I watched live, in high definition while the launch rocket returned safely to earth, landing on a drone ship in the north Atlantic Ocean after depositing its cargo in space.
I watched live as the Crew Dragon orbited the earth a couple hundred miles above the surface, and at thousands of miles per hour.
27 hours later I was back on the courch and watched live, in high definition while the ship approached the international space station, a football-field sized mechano set similarly orbiting the earth, docked and the four went aboard to greet three other astronauts already on the ISS.
As an aside, there are only 6 sleeping cabins on ISS, so one of the new arrivals has to sleep on the Crew Dragon which will remained docked at the ISS until next March. I guess it’s like a visitor sleeping in their caravan parked out on the driveway!
All this happened less than 60 years after the first manned space flight, 12 years after Space X flew its first rocket into orbit, five years after they first successfully landed a launch stage rocket, and six months after the first crewed Space X test flight.
By any measure, the pace of development since Yuri Gargarin did a lap of the earth in his Vostock spacecraft back in 1961 is astonishing. It’s a testament to human ingenuity, determination, technology, ability to learn and problem solve, ambition, creativity, collaboration, desire to explore and a thousand other things.
Honestly, as I sat there I was gobsmacked as I processed what I was watching. Sure none of what I saw was the first time you could live-stream a rocket launch or watch video from the ISS, but I guess there are moments when you realise the significance of what’s happening.
As I watched, enthralled, my 13 year old wandered past. I called her over, told her what I was watching, how amazing had been the technological growth and how astonishing it was to be able to sit on the couch in Brisbane, watching all this unfold in real time hundreds of miles overhead.
She said “What’s the big deal dad? It’s just some people going to space.” and went back to reading her book. She barely feigned interest for 10 seconds.
This is the same kid who will never know life without the internet, or mobile phones, or streaming video. Youtube started two years before she was born. She beat the iphone into existence by a handful of days.
It’s no insult to her of course, she only knows what she knows. She’s only lived the life she has. She has never known any different.
To me though, it was an extraordinary thing to watch. And I was left pondering the meaning of it all.
Just how much further will human ingenuity, ambition, creativity (and yes, greed) take us over the next 60 years? I’ll be approaching my 110th birthday by then, so I’m not sure I’ll see the answer, but can you imagine what we’ll be up to if the rate of change continues?
I put that experience alongside the global scientific community’s response to the COVID19 pandemic and the phenomenal rate of development of treatements, medications and vaccines for a disease essentially unknown 12 months ago.
When we collectively put our mind to something, there’s almost no limit to what can be achieved.
My last thought was to wonder what other things could be figured out if only we could genuinely turn our collective will and wisdom to it. World peace. Global food security. Clean energy. Heading off the looming environmental catastrophe. Calorie free chocolate that tastes amazing.
So many possibilities.
And in 60 years time, some 13 year old will say to their dad “What’s the big deal?”
ordinary wonderer 