Dispatches #161: Crowd collapses, orange-bellied parrots and baby bumps

Thursday, 24 August 2017

Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. I'm Andrew McMillen, a freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane, Australia. 

A final reminder for Canberra readers: at 10am this Saturday August 26, I'm recording an episode of my podcast Penmanship with Katharine Murphy, who is political editor at Guardian Australia. This is a free event that will be open to the public as part of the 2017 Canberra Writers Festival, and it's taking place at the National Library of Australia. More details about Saturday's event here. 

Words:

This isn't new work of mine, per se, but I saw that a recent story is now out from behind a paywall, and can be freely read online in full. This essay was published in Griffith Review a few months ago. Excerpt below.

Worlds Beyond (3,400 words / 17 minutes)

Teachable moments in virtual reality



The blue whale is only a metre or two away from me, and its huge right eyeball is level with mine. I have never seen the largest creature on Earth from this angle, at this depth, in these dimensions. Its body mass fills my vision, and I have to turn my head 180-degrees to take it all in. I'm standing on the bow of a sunken ship, and I have watched, enthralled, as this dweller of the deep sea approached from the dark-blue distance on my left. The surrounding schools of fish and graceful manta rays take little notice of the giant: for them, its presence deserves the equivalent of a submerged shrug; it's something they see every day. But for myself, standing here on the ship, rooted in place in wonder, it is an extraordinary encounter.

As it hovers before me, the beast blinks and emits a few curious groans before tiring of this underwater interloper. Just another human being. Boring. When it swims to my right in search something more interesting to look at, its tail-flukes almost lash me on the way past. In sum, I've spent only a minute in its company, but I feel as though quite a few things have changed. This is a fork in the road: my life can now be categorised as 'Before Whale' and 'After Whale'. But perhaps the most astounding part of this experience is that it is running entirely on computer code. Even though every aspect of this scene feels real, it is not.

After I watch the whale disappearing into the dark-blue distance, I turn around to see white text projected on the back of the sunken ship. It is a list of credits for the team of people who worked on this convincing simulation. It's named 'Whale Encounter', and it's part of a virtual-reality game called theBlu. In reality, you see, I'm standing in a tiled living room in New Farm, in inner-city Brisbane, wearing a headset that is attached to a powerful computer by a thick, black cord. The view from the balcony outside is filled by the Story Bridge. Beneath the steel structure runs the Brisbane River, where there are no blue whales, as far as I'm aware.

Next, I use one of the wireless controllers in my hands to point and select 'Turtle Encounter'. This is just as impressive as the previous immersion - and several minutes longer, too. In startlingly clear water, with the sun shining through the surface above me, I stand at the edge of a coral reef. A loggerhead turtle cuts a lazy circle above me, just out of reach. On my right, I'm approached by hundreds of football-sized bright orange jellyfish. Before long, these small creatures are accompanied by several enormous, man-sized giants whose tentacles trail behind them like windblown dreadlocks. Using the controllers, I can prod the jellyfish to affect their trajectory. It is simply gorgeous, and like the whale, it inspires a sense of awe unlike anything I've experienced while playing a traditional video game.

When it comes to eliciting emotions, it appears that virtual reality is streets ahead of everything that's come before. Moreover, it strikes me that this sort of experience could foster new understanding for children who struggle to process information that's delivered verbally, or presented on a printed page. Any child can strap on a headset, fire up theBlu and take something away from the experience of feeling as though they are immersed underwater, inside a potentially dangerous and hard-to-reach part of the planet, while still engaging their minds in a way that a textbook, or even the most fervent educator, might fail to achieve.

To read the full essay, visit Griffith Review. The above image appears on the cover of Griffith Review 56: Millennials Strike Back, and is credited to illustrator Laura Callaghan.

Sounds:

Hello, Bump (12 episodes, ~7 hours). I really enjoyed this 12-part series about pregnancy, with episodes devoted to each month leading up to childbirth, as well as the weeks and months afterwards. One of its hosts, Monique Bowley, is childless; the other, Bec Judd, has four children. This dynamic works really well, as the apprentice and master play off each other really well, and they also interview experts when applicable: 'Midwife Cath' was a particularly valuable return visitor, as she has overseen more than 10,000 births throughout her career. This one comes highly recommended for its pure educational value, though I did find myself hastily skipping past all of the insufferably treacly ads for Westpac Bank, which sponsored this podcast series.

So, you're growing a human inside you. Or you're thinking about it. Bec Judd has been pregnant quite a lot, and Monique Bowley has nine hundred questions she wants to ask her. Together, with an in-house dream-team of experts, they will take you right through your pregnancy, month by month. This is pregnancy real talk, where nothing is off limits. From fertility to the first six weeks at home, get the most honest, practical and often hilarious talk about what you're not expecting, when you're expecting. There will be tears. There will be laughs. There will be a tiny bit of labour poo talk.

Cal Fussman and Larry King on The Tim Ferriss Show (96 minutes). This is a long conversation between two old friends, Cal Fussman and Larry King. It appears on Tim Ferriss's podcast because he is hoping to influence Fussman to start his own show, and based on the strength of this excellent interview, I really hope that he follows through. I didn't know much about King at all, but Fussman's sharp line of questioning brought out a string of stories that helped me to better understand one of America's best-known TV and radio hosts.

Cal Fussman (@calfussman) is a New York Times bestselling author and a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known for being a primary writer of the "What I've Learned" feature. He has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with a long list of icons who've shaped the last 50 years of world history. I've been trying to get Cal to do his own podcast. Rather than overthinking it, I simply asked Cal to interview a friend who I would also love to have on the podcast: Larry King. This episode is the result of that request. Larry King (@kingsthings) has been dubbed "The most remarkable talk show host on TV, ever" by TV Guide and "Master of the mic" by Time Magazine. Larry's been described as the Muhammad Ali of the broadcast interview, and he's been inducted into five of the nation's leading broadcasting halls of fame. He's the recipient of the Allen H. Neuharth Award for Excellence in Journalism, an Emmy, the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting, ten CableACE awards – the list goes on. Enjoy!

Robert Sapolsky on Waking Up with Sam Harris (97 minutes). The premise of this podcast is essentially to put a smart man in conversation with other smart people. It works almost all of the time, which is why I tend to recommend it here often. Here, Sam Harris speaks with a professor of biology and neurology about all sorts of things related to emotions, impulse control, free will and human nature. 

In this episode of the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Robert Sapolsky about his work with baboons, the opposition between reason and emotion, doubt, the evolution of the brain, the civilizing role of the frontal cortex, the illusion of free will, justice and vengeance, brain-machine interface, religion, drugs, and other topics. Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant. He is the author of A Primate's Memoir, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, and Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

Chris Jones on Longform (60 minutes). I recently had the new experience of reaching the bottom of my podcast queue, which usually bulges with 20 or 30 unplayed episodes. A bunch of travel in recent weeks has meant I've been listening more than usual, and when I suddenly found myself with dead air, I opted to go back and listen to some of my favourite episodes of Longform, which has been one of the biggest influences on my career in journalism over the last five or so years. This one, with (former) Esquire writer Chris Jones, was published in October 2012 and was episode 10; they're now up to episode 257, and the podcast is still just as good, if not better. This is an enlightening conversation about the intricacies of feature writing, with particular attention paid to the question of how to get sources to trust you to tell their story at length. Chris Jones also touches on depression and his competitive nature, both of which led to some difficulties in his life. (I also loved revisiting episode #14 with David Samuels, who is another of my favourite magazine writers.) Damn, this podcast rules. I'm so glad it exists.

Evan Ratliff interviews Chris Jones before a live audience in Bucharest, hosted by the Romanian magazine Decât o Revista. "It just feels good to fucking win ... If you want to say 'Let's get rid of [journalism awards],' no problem. But if they exist, I want to win them. Just because I won two–I know Gary Smith has won four. I want five. Unless Gary Smith wins five, and then I want six. That's just how I work. And maybe that's a terrible, competitive, creepy thing. But journalism is competitive."

Reads:

Bad Vibes by Richard Guilliatt in The Weekend Australian Magazine (3,800 words / 19 minutes). The nation's two major weekend magazines are always a good read, but they've been particularly strong in the last couple of weeks. This is why I'm devoting six of my seven recommendations this week to stories published in The Weekend Australian Magazine or Good Weekend. Here, Richard Guilliatt goes deep on a terrifying incident of "crowd collapse" that took place at the Falls Festival in Lorne, Victoria late last year. Based on eyewitness accounts and documenting some of long-lasting injuries that festivalgoers sustained during that event, Guilliatt's story provoked a strong reaction as I read, because I've been in quite a few densely-packed music festival crowds over the years, and I can easily imagine things going wrong as they did here. It's amazing that nobody died, really.

Fiona Yuen stood in the crowd crammed inside the Grand Theatre at Falls Festival and thought: There are too many people in this tent. It was just before 10pm on December 30, the third day of an annual gathering that draws 16,500 young revellers to a remote bush block near the Victorian coastal town of Lorne, where many ring in the New Year with generous assistance from alcohol and other stimulants. Under the vaulted white canopy of the Grand Theatre, Sydney three-piece band DMA's were finishing off a riotously exuberant set that had turned the mosh pit into a roiling ocean of several thousand mostly male fans, singing along in unison while hurling themselves around in giddy skirmishes that sent shockwaves rippling through the crowd. Yuen, who is 165cm tall and weighs only 48kg, found herself jammed between lurching bigger bodies and decided that leaving the tent was impossible. "I've never watched a performance where movement was so restricted – I honestly couldn't move a single step," she remembers. "It felt like the mosh was the entire inside of the tent. Even if I'd wanted to leave, it didn't feel safe going through the crowd." So the 19-year-old stuck it out and waited until the last notes had died away and the mosh had subsided. Outside the tent, several hundred metres down a hill, the British band London Grammar was scheduled to start on the outdoor Valley Stage at that exact moment. It was the signal for several thousand people inside the Grand Theatre to focus collectively on the same thought: getting out immediately.

A Cry For My Country by Tim Elliott in Good Weekend (4,200 words / 21 minutes). Venezuela has descended into chaos in recent years, and that fact is hard to appreciate through the dry, objective descriptions contained in news reports. So I really enjoyed Tim Elliott's approach here, to tell the story through a Venezuelan friend's decision to flee the country and move to Australia. By tracking the way in which events directly affected his pseudonymous friend Diego, I was able to get a much better understanding of what the nation's descent has meant for its people. Fine work, and fascinating reading.

One afternoon earlier this year, 51-year-old English teacher Diego Hernandez* walked half an hour from his home near the Venezuelan capital of Caracas to the beach at Macuto, on the Caribbean coast, where he intended to wash in the ocean with sand and seaweed. Since the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, fresh water has been rationed and finding basic items such as soap and toilet paper has become almost impossible. For Diego, a trip to the beach was the best way to keep clean. Besides, he tells me, "Seaweed is good for your skin." In the early 2000s, Macuto was a largely middle-class area. Now many of its seaside properties have been expropriated by Venezuela's hardline socialist government or taken over by gangs. Some homes have simply been abandoned. Diego sometimes walked through these properties as a shortcut to the beach. On the day he went to bathe, he entered a derelict house where there were bullet holes in the walls and the smell of rotting flesh. Following his nose, he came to a room. Blood covered the floor and the back wall was spattered with gore. "They had shot someone in there, and there were bits and pieces left on the wall." There's an endless list of things going wrong in Venezuela today, from eight-hour-long food queues and widespread grave robbing, to the fact that 28,479 people were murdered there last year. Such is the rationing of electricity, that neurosurgeons are said to finish their operations by the light of their smartphones. The currency is so worthless people use banknotes as napkins.

Culture Club by Megan Lehmann in The Weekend Australian Magazine (1,600 words / 8 minutes). I really liked this sharp, funny, first-person approach to writing about the trend of fermenting, pickling and sourdough-making that has gripped many Australians. 

Patience, care, attention. Love. I haven't had so much demanded of me since my children were newborns. They need me, these creatures that have moved in downstairs, and I must be more than a casual caretaker. They don't shriek or whine but sometimes, in the deep of night, I hear a kind of sighing burble from the shadows. They're alive and if I don't tend to them, regularly, lovingly, they'll be dead. "They're part of your family now," said Gillian Kozicki as I left her fermenting workshop toting calico bags clinking with an assortment of jars and bottles. "They will fit into your life and give you feedback when they're not happy." I'm more than a little apprehensive, as I have been known to kill a cactus through neglect. But now I have a nursery in my kitchen: a cluster of living foodstuffs that will ripen and grow over coming weeks, demanding labour and time, but promising a cornucopia of nourishment. Purple and orange carrots are pickling in a squat glass jar, alongside a smaller vessel filled with onions in brine, the salty liquid swirling with mustard seeds, coins of ginger and garlic cloves. There's a pot of pink-tinged apple and juniper berry sauerkraut and another colourful kraut with beetroot, ginger, turmeric, apples and carrot fermenting with the cabbage.

After The Storm by Melissa Fyfe in Good Weekend (5,000 words / 25 minutes). A comprehensive, well-written and satisfying profile of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who has had a hell of a year in the media spotlight after a short Facebook post she wrote – then deleted – led to her becoming "Australia's most publicly hated Muslim," as she describes herself. This is what magazine profiles are for: to go beyond the daily headlines in order to better understand people, their motivations and their decisions.

In the eye of the storm, Yassmin Abdel-Magied went to see a psychologist for the first time in her life. The former Queensland Young Australian of the Year, engineer and author was in trouble because of seven words she'd written on Anzac Day: LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine...). She had quickly removed the Facebook post and apologised, but it was too late: a national fury was unleashed. She was accused of a "vile slur" against dead Australian soldiers, of using a sacred day to make a political point about refugees. Death threats started arriving. Videos of beheadings and rapes clogged her email and Twitter account. She had to move house and change her phone number. Senior politicians called for her to be deported and sacked from a part-time ABC TV gig. Outraged Sky News host Paul Murray struggled to get his mouth around "this sheila's" name. "I've mispronounced," he said. "But who cares?" Somehow, Abdel-Magied's psychologist had missed all of that. "What's the problem?" she innocently asked her new client. "Ah," said Abdel-Magied, who soon found another psychologist. "I'm kind of like a national outrage?"

On The Brink by Nicole Gill in Good Weekend (3,800 words / 19 minutes). Decades of effort and millions of dollars have failed to stop the orange-bellied parrot's near extinction. But conservationists are not giving up, and I enjoyed Nicole Gill's intensively reported and emotive depiction of biologist Dejan Stojanovic, who cares deeply about these birds. 

Not much larger than a common budgie, the orange-bellied parrot breeds in Tasmania's south-west wilderness over summer before flying north for the winter to fossick in the coastal saltmarshes of Victoria and South Australia. Over the past few decades, millions of dollars have been spent in an attempt to prevent these small, brightly coloured birds from becoming extinct. As well as monitoring OBPs in the wild, the Tasmanian government has bred an "insurance" population at the Hobart Wildlife Centre, some of which are released into their natural habitat annually to bolster numbers. Nobody really knows why they're so endangered. It could be any combination of the loss of habitat due to land conversion, land clearing, invasion by weeds of their winter foraging grounds, increased predation on mainland Australia by feral animals, changing food availability, and catastrophic inbreeding due to their diminishing genetic diversity.

The End by Miriam Cosic in Good Weekend (3,400 words / 17 minutes). Books about death and dying have proliferated over the last few years, with many becoming best-sellers. Who is buying them in such numbers – and why? In this wonderful piece, I was surprised and compelled to see how skilfully Miriam Cosic introduced her own story of being diagnosed with cancer, which later resulted in her finding a new interest in death-centric books.

When the English writer Jenny Diski was returning home after her diagnosis of terminal lung cancer, she said to her husband, the poet Ian Patterson, "Well, I suppose I'm going to write a cancer diary... Another f...ing cancer diary." What more could there be to say that hadn't been said already? Would she find the line between depressing and banal? She did. The London Review of Books published it in instalments, starting in September 2014. It was spiky, direct and never easy, as one might expect from a novelist who'd explored themes of madness, degradation and loneliness. "Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer," she wrote. "Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing." In April 2016, the month she died, a memoir born of that diary was published. John Diamond was a journeyman writer and broadcaster (and the husband of Nigella Lawson) until, following the diagnosis of a malignant tumour in his neck in 1997, he turned his regular column in Britain's The Times into a cancer diary. His 2001 obituary in The Guardian noted: "It was a horrible irony that the illness which eventually ended his life was also, professionally, the making of him." The book that came out of it, C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too, became a best seller. As Diamond was writing, Ruth Picardie was chronicling her experience of breast cancer in The Observer. Media critics commented on the ghoulishness of it all.

New Stories Of Him by Iain Shedden in The Weekend Australian Review (2,100 words / 11 minutes). Finally this week, a story not from a weekend magazine but its arts pages: an excellent profile of songwriter Paul Kelly, written by one of the nation's best music journalists, Iain Shedden.

Paul Kelly, nursing a cup of tea in the kitchen of his record company's offices in Sydney, is waxing lyrical about the trials of being a musician. "Hanging around and trying to get work and being put off or not paid and always struggling for money," he says by way of explanation. Kelly can't be short of a few bob, but then he's not talking about himself. He's retelling the on-the-road travails of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for whom he has great admiration and whose letters, written as a struggling young muso, he has been poring over in the past few months. "That has been very interesting in lots of ways," he says of Mozart: A Life in Letters. "Generally he is writing when he is travelling; writing about being a travelling musician for hire, trying to get work at various courts of barons, dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses." It was ever thus for young musicians – the struggle at least, if not being at the mercy of nobility. Certainly Kelly, one of our most revered songwriters and performers for the past 30 or so years, did it tough early on, first in his home city of Adelaide, then in Melbourne and Sydney, as he found his feet as a songwriter, releasing albums such as Talk (1981) and Manila (1982) that did little to keep the wolf from the door. In 2017, however, things are good for the 62-year-old, Melbourne-based singer.

Thanks for reading. If you have feedback on Dispatches, I'd love to hear from you: just reply to this email. Please feel free to share this far and wide with fellow journalism, music, podcast and book lovers.

Andrew

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