Mental health - Notes from Pig City

Sunnyboys say goodbye, with love

Music / June 7, 2023 / 5 minutes of reading

In an era where every Australian band who found an audience in the 1980s has reformed, the reunion of Sunnyboys will go down in history as one of the least expected, and most warmly received. The beloved Sydney power-pop quartet peaked early, releasing a classic debut album in 1981 before flaming out like a comet, derailed by overwork and lead singer Jeremy Oxley’s long struggle with schizophrenia.

After a reunion in 1998, no one expected the original quartet – singer, guitarist and songwriter Jeremy, his bass-playing older brother Peter, guitarist Richard Burgman and drummer Bil Bilson – to ever play again. That they did, Burgman insists, was a miracle: “There were about 150 to 250 things that had to go right. And if any one of those hadn’t, or if anyone along the way had said no, it wouldn’t have happened.”

It all went right in 2012, when the band reunited to play a show at Sydney’s Enmore theatre with the Hoodoo Gurus, performing under the name Kids in Dust to defuse expectations. Since then, they’ve seen their slim catalogue reissued, released multiple compilations, played a sold-out show at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall and many more sold-out tours – the very last of which begins next week, on the Gold Coast.… Read more..

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My ticker was a time bomb

Health, Life Stories / August 18, 2021 / 5 minutes of reading

The scar on my chest is seven inches long. At the top of my sternum, the incision site, it’s white and waxy, slowly fading on its journey south. But the last inch is a raised, red, rubbery knob of keloid tissue – a constant reminder, not that I need it.

It will be a year on Tuesday since I underwent open-heart surgery. I have not been quite the same person since; something for which I am mostly profoundly thankful, as much as I am to still be alive.

Mostly, I’m calmer. I had been warned of possible depression in the wake of the surgery. For years, especially in the last decade, I lived in a constant fritz of anxiety, having at least one very public meltdown. I have written openly about my mental health over the years.

These days, by comparison, I feel like a Zen master. Not that I’d recommend heart surgery as a solution to psychological trauma, but if nothing else it gave me a radical sense of perspective and gratitude, an attitude I wasn’t previously on familiar terms with.

Which means I can’t help but ask the question: to what degree was my psychological wellbeing affected by my literally broken heart?… Read more..

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Guardian Book Club: Jimmy Barnes

Music / March 22, 2021 / 4 minutes of reading

When singer Jimmy Barnes’ memoir Working Class Boy was released in 2016, it caused a sensation. Barnes’ account of his childhood went beyond the usual adjectives like “raw” and “harrowing” on the cover to something much more purgative: here was one celebrity memoir that hadn’t been written for the sake of a generous advance. Barnes had wrestled the demons of a traumatic childhood in private for decades. Now he was doing it in full view.

The other thing that made Working Class Boy so shocking, frankly, was that Barnes had written it himself. Wasn’t piano player Don Walker the literary genius behind Cold Chisel, with “Barnesy” the red-faced screamer out front? Barnes further upended expectations by gambling on the story of his pre-fame years first, but his way of telling it was riveting. His voice was urgent, empathetic, as wry as it was moving, with a gut-wrenching turn of phrase.

Inevitably, the sequel Working Class Man followed. This was the proverbial sex, drugs and rock & roll memoir that perhaps was originally craved, and certainly expected – but it was far more compelling for us knowing where Barnes had come from. Jimmy Barnes – the rock star, and sometimes the caricature – had been a fixture of Australian life for so long that we had underestimated him.… Read more..

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The fig tree

Environment, Miscellaneous / March 22, 2021 / 5 minutes of reading

On the east side of my apartment block is a large fig tree. In its halcyon days, its canopy covered the length of the balcony, providing shade from the morning sun. At the base of the trunk, an extensive buttress root system had pushed up and cracked the concrete driveway. This made the tree unpopular with the body corporate, but the tree is a protected species in Brisbane under the Natural Assets Local Law of 2003.

For a long time, that law protected the fig, and much else besides. Every spring, the fruit of the tree provided food for mobs of Grey-headed and Black Flying-foxes which chattered and bickered among themselves all night as they gorged themselves. Brush-tailed Possums ran riot. During the day, Australian Figbirds and Koels were regular visitors. The Koels would shriek their heads off at 4am almost every morning through October and November.

There were butterflies, too. When I started taking a serious interest in them, most of my early observations were from my balcony. I identified members of almost all the Australian families: swallowtails (Blue Triangles), whites and yellows (Lemon Migrants), nymphs (Evening Browns, White-banded Planes) skippers and blues (most thrillingly, a Bright Cornelian, which has vivid spots of orange, instead of blue, on the upperwings).… Read more..

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Tom Boyd lived the dream. Now let him live his life

AFL / May 21, 2019 / 4 minutes of reading

There’s a moment in David Williamson’s play The Club where Geoff Hayward, Collingwood’s prize new recruit, is confronted by his coach, Laurie (played in the 1980 film by Jack Thompson) after a game which he’s mostly spent watching a seagull while stoned out of his gourd. “Marry-a-wanna?” asks Laurie, incredulous.

Hayward is unrepentant. He identifies the absurdity at the heart of what he does. “It’s a load of macho competitive bullshit,” he says. “You chase a lump of pigskin around a muddy ground as if your life depended on it, and when you finally get it, you kick it to buggery and then go chasing it around again! Football shits me.”

“Well, I wish to Christ you’d told us that before we paid out 120 grand for you,” Laurie replies.

I thought of The Club when I heard of the retirement of Tom Boyd, a former No.1 draft pick, his enjoyment sucked from the game after 61 matches, only nine of them with his first club Greater Western Sydney, before the Bulldogs landed him on big money. At that time, like Hayward, he was just a kid with potential. He ended up winning them a fabled premiership.

I see a lot of parallels between Boyd and the fictitious Hayward.

Going public, or private, on mental health in the AFL

AFL / May 21, 2019 / 6 minutes of reading

Let’s say a player at an AFL club has a mental health issue. He, or now she, may be struggling with depression, or clinical levels of anxiety, or even one of the more complex conditions recognised in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

They go to see the club psychologist, and talk things over with the coach and footy manager. It’s agreed some time out of the game is required, just as effectively as if the player was physically injured.

The club and player concerned then face a difficult decision. Should they go public, as Alex Fasolo, Tom Boyd, Lance Franklin and (going back further) Mitch Clark and Nathan Thompson have all done?

In Franklin’s case, he may hardly have had a choice: his enormous profile meant that any absence from the game leading up to the 2015 finals was always going to be heavily scrutinised and would require a public explanation.

Most of us, in less public lines of work, don’t face that question. If we’re lucky, we may have access to stress or sick leave, and we go home to fight our battles privately, hopefully with the support of family and close friends.

Let’s now say a player wants to take this latter option: to keep his or her struggle under wraps, after making the decision that going public will only exacerbate the stress and pressure they’re already under.