The Western Independent, Volume 21 Number 4, November 2015

November 2015 – Volume 21 No 4

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Confiscation laws ‘need review’ page

Gwynette Govardhan

John Quigley has promised to commission a review of WA’s tough criminal property confiscation laws if he becomes WA Attorney-General.

Under the Criminal Property Confiscation Act 2000, the assets of any person who is declared a drug trafficker are confiscated to the state, regardless of how they were obtained.

A person is declared a drug trafficker if they are convicted of two or more serious drug offences, or if the amount of drugs involved in a single offence exceeds a certain weight.

This has led to situations in which drug traffickers have been stripped of assets they bought legally or inherited from family members.

Mr Quigley said some Supreme Court judges were concerned the laws inflicted “great injustice” upon some innocent people, including those who had lost their home because of offenses committed by family members.

“Upon becoming Attorney-General, I would ask the law reform commission to prepare an urgent report on these injustices and publish it for the community’s and parliament’s consideration,” he said.

Australian Lawyers Alliance member Tom Percy said the legislation was “wrong” and “completely draconian”.

He said the legislation should allow people to keep their assets if they could prove the assets were legally acquired.

“In every other state in Australia,

if you can demonstrate that the asset was legally acquired, you can keep the asset,” he said.

Mr Percy said politicians seemed unwilling to change the laws because they were worried they would be seen as being soft on crime.

“The politicians of both colours have not seen fit to change it in the nearly 15 years it’s been in,” he said.

“Given the current paranoia about the drug problem, the average member of the public sees that any legislation that is doing something extensively to solve the drug problem has to be good.”

A spokesperson for AttorneyGeneral Michael Mischin said the State Government did not plan to change the legislation.

“The fact that families of offenders may be disadvantaged as a result of an offender having their money or property seized must be offset against the fact that the money and property from these offenders is returned to the community through a grants program,” he said.

The latest round of grants were announced last month and involved the distribtuion of about $4 million to community groups. More than $24 million has been given to more than 250 organisations since 2004.

Former Labor Attorney-General Jim McGinty said he had little sympathy for convicted drug traffickers who had their possessions confiscated.

“I don’t particularly think that confiscating property is something that’s an issue,” he said.

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“I doubt parliament would be particularly interested in that.”

But he said there was always some scope to change the laws if they were considered too severe.

“Where you’ve got innocent third parties, I think it’s certainly worth looking at those cases,” he said.

Mr McGinty said there was a simple solution that would protect innocent victims of crime.

“That’s simply to give the court enforcing the order a discretion to protect the interests of truly innocent third parties,” he said.

“Of course, a lot of drug traffickers and drug dealers lie about their circumstances.

“It’s a matter of ascertaining how innocent a third party is.”

Mr Percy also said the legislation could be easily amended.

“The law can be reformed quite easily, simply and effectively by inserting a section in the act that says, ‘if a person claims to have legitimately acquired any asset which is ceded subject to this Act, they may apply to the Supreme Court for an order to the effect that the asset was legitimately acquired’, in which case they should be allowed to keep it,” he said Lawyer and confiscations expert Edward Greaves said the laws should be reviewed.

“If you’re convicted of growing 22 or 23 plants in your backyard, or in a hydroponic set up in your roof, every single thing you own is confiscated to the state,” he said.

“There is just no justification for

FOR THE LOVE OF RESTORATION: Hot rod enthusiasts on Beach Street, Fremantle.

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JUSTICE CONCERN: John Quigley would initiate a review.

saying that someone’s inheritance from their great grandma is the proceeds of crime. Unless, of course, great grandma was a gangster.”

Mr Greaves said the law was unnecessarily tough on people who had done nothing wrong.

“Particularly on spouses and children of people who have committed crimes,” he said.

He said he believed the grant scheme

PHOTO: Supplied.

should be scrapped.

“The government should not be in the business of playing Robin Hood,“ he said. “The good end does not justify the means.”

Mr Greaves said politicians on both sides of parliament through the laws were too harsh.

“Neither of them are prepared to blink for fear of being called weak on crime by the other side,” he said.

PHOTO: .

Photo Essay page 10 - 11.

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Joseph M Fernandez STAFF EDITOR Sean Cowan STUDENT EDITORS Charlie Lewis Stephanie McGann NEWS EDITOR Gwynette Govardhan DEPUTY NEWS EDITOR Gareth Thomas FEATURES EDITOR Maddie Jensen PHOTO EDITORS Anne Gevaña Brooke Rolfe PRODUCTION MANAGER Aimee Hughes SPORTS EDITOR Kathryn Croston ARTS EDITOR Abbey Tobin CHIEFS OF STAFF Nicole Hamer Martin Busk

November 2015

NEWS

A message from the student editors So it’s time to throw this paper plane into the breeze and reflect on what we learned in building it.

Of course, there’s an element of presumption in all of this – these words could sit unread on a hard drive somewhere if we fail to complete this newspaper. We can’t possibly be the first student editors who’ve had that worry.

Oh hey, first lesson – clear thinking while drowning in panic. This is not something we claim to have mastered, but we sure as hell grasp its importance to good journalism.

Clarity and the power of language; there’s another lesson. At the end of this little adventure there isn’t an evasion, euphemism, ambiguity or cliché that could get past us.

We learned about responsibility; journalists draft ‘history on the run’ and our tiny contribution to that process is something we took very seriously.

Finally, we learned a great deal about our own capability. This could be practical – imagine our surprise at finding that

we can, as it turns out, function adequately on four hours of sleep, greasy food and instant coffee. We can find a lead hidden in the depths of six pages of interview transcripts at 2am. We can write a story in an hour. A story worth telling, at that.

Equally, we were surprised at our capacity for contempt as we chased evasive talents and unresponsive authority figures. However, this was more than matched by the gratitude we feel for those who shouldered this burden alongside us, in the pursuit of truth.

If we were to try to describe the contribution of those with whom we shared the newsroom, who dedicated their every sinew to completing these pages, we would run out of superlatives.

But, having spent 10 days obsessing over the mechanics of language, it’s oddly nice to be faced with a situation where words fail.

- Charlie Lewis and Stephanie McGann

State should spend more money with Aboriginal businesses — Opposition Nicholas Phillips

CHIEF SUB EDITOR Jess Thomas DEPUTY CHIEF SUB EDITOR Sophia Constantine

DESIGN ADVISOR Tom Henshaw LEGAL ADVISOR Joseph M Fernandez TEACHING STAFF Sean Cowan Nicole Cox Shannon Harvey Daile Pepper Chris Thomson Western Independent Telephone 08 9266 7038 08 9266 7878 Facsimile 08 9266 7142 Postal Address GPO Box U1987 Perth WA 6845

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Ethical Guidelines

The highest standards of ethical conduct are expected in the way the Western Independent's journalists obtain and present information. One of the course requirements is that they abide by the Media Entertainment and Arts Code of Ethics and Curtin University Department of Journalism's ethical guidelines in all aspects of writing, photography and production. The MEAA Code of Ethics and Curtin's journalism guidelines are designed to safeguard individual rights while respecting the public's right to information.

BEN WYATT: Reform was insignificant.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

New laws that allow councils to bypass tender rules to sign contracts with Aboriginal businesses don’t go far enough, according to Opposition Aboriginal affairs spokesman Ben Wyatt.

The changes took effect last month and were part of the Department of Local Governmentt’s Aboriginal Economic Participation Strategy.

Similar legislation was put in place for State Government agencies in 2012.

Mr Wyatt said the 2012 laws had little effect on the activities of State Government agencies.

“Those changes delivered inconsequential opportunities for Aboriginal businesses,” he said.

He said it would be better to set each agency a target that required it to direct five per cent of its spending to Aboriginal businesses.

Aboriginal Affairs Minister Peter Collier said the reforms, which apply to contracts of up to $250,000, were aimed at maximising Aboriginal business and employment opportunities across the state.

“In the past two years, this exemption has provided increased opportunities for Aboriginal businesses to secure contracts and to support their sustainability and increase Aboriginal

employment,” he said.

“Changes allowing local government entities to access this exemption will further support this.”

The Prime Minister’s Closing the Gap Report for 2015 showed 47.5 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged from 15 to 64 were employed in 2012-13.

In 2008, that figure had been 53.8 per cent.

Mr Collier said the strategy was aimed at removing the barriers Aboriginal people experienced when trying to find employment and become self-sufficient.

“The strategy is one component of a wider commitment to closing the gap,” he said.

Western Australian Indigenous Tourism Operators Council chairman Robert Taylor said the changes were good for councils and Aboriginal people.

“This provides the opportunity for local governments to buy locally and see their investment flow back into Aboriginal families and communities,” he said.

“It’s an opportunity for Aboriginal businesses to become more visible to local governments by demonstrating their ability to successfully deliver quality goods and services.”

Maalinup Aboriginal Gallery owner Dale Tilbrook said the new strategy would help those who were struggling, but her business was too small to benefit.

Ban on insecticide spray hurts WA farmers Rowland Gwynne A ban on an insecticide that is considered harmful to humans takes full effect at the end of October.

Orchardists previously used fenthion to control mediterranean fruit fly, but the Australian Pesticides and Veterinarian Medicines Authority restricted use of the insecticide two years ago.

Hills Orchard Improvement Group spokesman Brett DelSimone said Mediterranean fruit fly was endemic in Western Australia and the restriction on fenthion had caused big crop losses.

Mr DelSimone said he knew of farmers who lost 50 per cent of their yield and some who had bulldozed their orchard.

“We’ve had fruit producers on both sides of the country, the west coast and the east coast, remove their orchards due to these restrictions and eventual banning,” he said.

Former peach and nectarine farmer Ray Hick said he bulldozed his

orchard because his business was not viable without fenthion.

“There is no effective alternative to fenthion,” he said.

Mr Hick said he believed the fenthion ban would destroy the stone fruit industry.

Department of Agriculture and Food WA senior research officer Sonya Broughton said the chemical was banned because it had the potential to infect people, animals and birds.

She said fenthion was a nerve toxin that attacked the neurons and rendered insects immobile.

The effects were less severe in humans, she said.

“These particular chemicals came out of a lot of work done in the Second World War,” she said.

Mr DelSimone said new products were not as effective as fenthion.

Dr Broughton said growers had access to a wide variety of fruit fly control methods, including weekly foliage baiting.

“Baiting uses a tiny amount of insecticide and protein, which basically attracts the fly and kills them,” she said.

INSECTICIDE BAN: Harmful pesticide taken off the market. Photo: Supplied.

November 2015

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Foster children fall behind

Nicole Hamer

The literacy and numeracy levels of children in state care are substantially worse than those of other students, according to a recent study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

The Educational Outcomes For Children In Care study conducted by the AIHW is the first to compare National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy results with national child protection data.

The AIHW counted children and young people with court-ordered care arrangements as children in care.

Children whose parental responsibility was transferred to a state or territory government were also included.

The study found 71 per cent of year 7 students in care met the minimum standard for reading, while 94 per cent of all students nationally met the standard.

AIHW spokeswoman Justine Boland said children usually performed poorly when they first entered care.

“The academic achievement of children in care is affected by complex personal histories and forms of disadvantage,” she said. “This can be poverty, maltreatment, instability in care

and family dysfunction.”

Foster Care Association WA director Faye Alford said the results were not surprising.

“It would be normal that a child coming into care would be behind,” she said.

University of Southern Queensland senior literacy and education studies lecturer Stewart Riddle said there was no easy solution.

“The idea of learning to read and write and doing really well in NAPLAN can’t be treated separately to the home in which children live and to the experiences that they have had throughout their lives,” Dr Riddle said.

“In a lot of situations of state care, the child goes into multiple homes of care facilities within a single school year.”

He said the impact of such instability was “enormous”.

The AIHW study showed 81.4 per cent of year 3 students in care met the writing benchmark, but only 43.9 per cent of year 9 students in care met the standard.

Dr Riddle said there were educational barriers for children in care andt they had to be addressed through funding.

In 2013, five state and territory

governments signed the Gonski agreement with the Federal Government to improve the way schools were resourced.

Queensland, the Northern Territory and WA did not sign the agreement.

Dr Riddle said the Gonski model was the key to helping children in care reach the literacy and numeracy benchmarks.

“The key difference between the proposed Gonski model and the model we currently have was that the Gonski model funded per student on a needs basis,” he said.

“If you had a lot of students who were living in care, then the school would be funded to give the teachers better in-service professional development.”

The Association of Children’s Welfare Agencies chief executive officer Andrew McCallum said it was the states’ responsibility to effect a change.

“It is incumbent on the states who have the responsibility for these kids to make sure the remedial work is put in, so these kids can reach national benchmarks,” he said.

“If we really want to break the cycle so these kids do not repeat the cycle that got them into care in the first place, we have to invest in education.”

Nets, barriers stop suicides

FALLING BEHIND: Kids in care need extra support. Photo: Dechen Wangmo.

Nicola McNamee

EYE HEALTH: Screen-based learning damages eyesight.

Photo: Nicholas Phillips.

School computers hurt kids’ eyes

Aleisha Archer

Computer screens and tablets in the classroom are contributing to an increase in myopia, according to industry group Optometry Australia.

Optometry Australia spokesman Luke Arundel said 30 per cent of 17-year-olds now suffered from myopia, which is commonly known as shortsightedness. In 2000, 20 per cent of 17-year-olds had myopia.

Mr Arundel said the use of tablet technology in classrooms was part of the problem.

“Eyes need to track and follow moving objects and accommodate near and

far to develop good vision,” he said.

“Looking at a one-dimensional screen that doesn’t move will reduce the time doing important eye movements required for good vision.”

Mr Arundel said limiting screen time was important for children’s eye health.

He said Optometry Australia encouraged a balance between “screen time and green time” because too much time indoors, not just time on a computer, aggravated myopia.

Specsavers optometrist Michael Stewart said the increased use of screens damaged children’s eye health.

“We believe it is from more and more hours of sustained work,” he said.

A Department of Education spokeswoman said it was up to individual schools to decide on their own policy regarding the use of laptops and tablets, but the department had developed tools and guidelines to assist.

W.A. Secondary School Executives Association president Janette Gee said the use of laptops and tablets at school was vital.

“Using them is a skill they need for contemporary work practices, therefore it is absolutely essential that they engage in computer-based learning,” Ms Gee said.

“Otherwise they will not be up to speed with what they are required to do in work training and further education.”

funded project established by European Space Agency scientist Arno Wielders and Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp.

The project aims to establish a human colony on Mars by 2027.

Dr Kennewell said radiation would present a big problem for those involved in the project.

“On earth, we are protected from galactic cosmic radiation, by our atmosphere and magnetic field. Out in space this protection is not present. Space radiation is the one factor that is currently

almost impossible to overcome,” he said.

Perth-born Josh Richards, 30, is on Mars One’s shortlist of 100 candidates vying for a one-way ticket to visit the red planet. Mr Richards said he believed the mission would go ahead because of the innate human desire to explore.

‘There are thousands of engineers and scientists around the world who sees the challenges and are wiling to dedicate their lives to finding solutions to problems that plenty of professors claim will stop us,” he said.

Barriers and safety nets could reduce suicide at high-risk locations by 90 per cent, according to a new study in a leading psychiatry journal.

The Lancet Psychiatry study found suicide prevention methods being used at known ‘hotspots’ in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Hong Kong were proving effective.

The measures included installing signs, providing crisis telephones, increasing CCTV surveillance, and suicide patrols.

Lifeline WA chief executive officer Fiona Kalaf said the organisation was proactive nationally at suicide hotspots.

Ms Kalaf said Lifeline had worked with local councils to establish fences to create a physical barrier.

Telephones had also been installed so people could reach out directly if they were having suicidal thoughts.

“This is a body of work that Lifeline knows will make a difference to suicide prevention and we are working actively and proactively with local governments where we can,” Ms Kalaf said.

Suicide Prevention Australia cor-

porate communications manager Kim Borrowdale said crisis intervention was important but other methods could also be used to reduce Australia’s suicide rate.

“More than 2500 Australians take their own lives each year, more than double the national road toll,” Ms Borrowdale said.

“We also need to ensure services and programs that are building our individual and community resilience are co-ordinated and appropriately funded so that less Australians reach that crisis point.”

“Suicide and suicidal behaviour arise from complex social, situational, biological and other individual causes which isolated people and eroded their hope.

“Understanding risk and protective factors for different groups and environments is vital to effective response.”

Ms Borrowdale said the community needed to be more aware of issues surrounding suicide if the rate was to be reduced.

“Suicide is everyone’s business and we need to talk about prevention in a safe and supportive way to continue to build a resilient society,” Ms Borrowdale said.

Mars One probe doomed — Space Academy

Jessica Arthur

A proposed manned mission to Mars will fail because of financial and technical barriers, a director of the Australian Space Academy says.

ASA director John Kennewell said there were no shortage of people willing to make the one-way trip to Mars, but “financial, technological, political and military events would overtake it”.

Mars One is a not-for-profit, privately

PUBLIC PROTECTION: Barriers reduce suicide risks. Photo: Shaun Buchan.

November 2015

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WA fisheries seek sustainability WA could soon have four more fisheries certified as being sustainable.

The state is already home to four of Australia’s 10 certified fisheries, but the Marine Stewardship Council has confirmed another four are being assessed.

Among those being considered are the Broome Pearl Fishery and West Coast Deep Sea Crab Fishery.

“In total, we now have over 400 individual fisheries around the world engaged or certified, and they land nearly 11 million metric tonnes of seafood, so that’s about 11 per cent of the entire global landings,” Marine Stewardship Council chief executive officer Rupert Howes said.

During the pre-assessment stage, external assessors monitor the fishery and identify any improvements that are required.

A team of experts conduct the final examination of the fishery.

On October 25, two West Australian

prawn fisheries were certified - Shark Bay and Exmouth Gulf.

A spokesman for Fisheries Minister Ken Baston said a fishery was certified as sustainable against the MSC Fisheries Standard if it scored well against 28 performance indicators.

They fell within three key areas - sustainable fish stocks, minimising environmental impact and effective management.

“A fishery must score at least 60 for each performance indicator and have an average score of 80 across all performance indicators under each of the three principles,” he said.

“The assessment team members are fisheries experts that receive regular training and monitoring to ensure they comply with MSC requirements.”

Mr Howes said the assessment process was optional and fisheries did not have to be certified to continue operating.

“If fisheries aren’t certified, it doesn’t mean they’re not sustainable. It just means they haven’t chosen to go through a voluntary third-party process to demonstrate that good governance,” he said.

Mr Howes said the length of the assessment process varied.

“A small, not very complex fishery may take six months. A more complex, multi-species fishery might take eighteen months,” he said.

MSC media representative Charlotte Connell said the State Government committed $14.5 million in 2012 to have their fisheries assessed.

Conservation Council WA director Piers Verstegen said it was important for fisheries to be certified because consumers were looking for sustainable seafood products.

“People are willing to pay a premium,” Mr Verstegen said.

“Uncertified fisheries will start to lose market share because people will be so actively purchasing sustainable seafood products.

“If fisheries aren’t certified as sustainable, I think it’s going to be more difficult for them to sell their product.”

The world’s first MSC-certified fishery was in WA. “Western Rock Lobster was the first fishery ever in 2000,” Mr Howes said. “It’s been through three re-certifications.”

Media Access Australia chief executive officer Alex Varley said this allowed blind and vision impaired people to watch ABC programs, but would not allow them to watch programs on other networks.

He also said the ABC had announced it would not provide audio description services after the trial finished in June 2016.

“They are not required under regulation to do it,” he said.

Mr Varley said the high cost of data and the delay in programs being screened on iView meant the trial was

not a realistic long-term alternative to broadcast television.

According to Australia’s leading provider of vision services, Vision Australia, 350,000 people in Australia are blind or vision impaired.

A Vision Australia campaign, Tell The Whole Story, started in March to provide audio description of television programs.

Vision Australia spokesman Bruce Maguire said audio descriptions would help vision impaired people and people with learning disabilities.

“The incidences of vision loss are increasing with age, as time goes on there will be more people who won’t be able to appreciate or comprehend the visual aspects of television programs,” he said.

“Audio description builds in the gap between the visual content of television programs and the audio.”

Mr Maguire said television was an important way of distributing information about entertainment and culture.

He said being unable to watch television limited a person’s ability to effectively participate in the community. “The fact that audio description is provided in other countries indicates that it is not a technological problem, primarily, as much of a lack of will,” he said.

Advocacy group Blind Citizens Australia said audio description services would help networks to attract more television viewers.

Group spokesman Rikki Chaplin said the ABC had committed to providing services on some platforms.

The ABC and Department of Communications and the Arts were not available for comment.

TV networks ‘should cater for blind people’ Sophia Constantine

The absence of audio descriptions on free-to-air television services prevents blind and vision impaired groups from enjoying TV in the same way as others, according to an advocacy group.

In April the Department of Communications and the Arts introduced a trial audio description service on the ABC’s iView mobile app.

The service provides a soundtrack that describes what is happening on the screen for vision impaired people.

SOUND OFF: Descriptions are missing from broadcasts

Photo: Supplied.

GONE FISHIN': Phil Bruce, Rupert Howes, George Kailis PHOTO: Supplied.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

Maddie Jensen and Jess Thomas

LEAVERS CRACKDOWN: WA Police will target sexters.

Jail time for sexting Jasmine Cookson and Martin Busk Leavers WA has warned that students caught sending explicit material at this November’s event could face up to 15 years in jail and be placed on the sex offenders register.

Leavers is an annual event where Year 12 students celebrate the end of their schooling.

Leavers WA project manager Clint Browning said this was the first year half the WA school leavers would be 18.

Mr Browning said WA Police and Leavers WA support groups would target sexting at this year’s event.

“It’s inevitably going to become a bigger issue and we probably need to tackle it with a lot of awareness,” he said.

Mr Browning said it was challenging to educate 18-year-old students on the consequences of sexting.

It’s too easy to get hold of heroin in WA — researcher Maddison Simmonds An increase in the number of people overdosing on heroin in WA is because of the fluctuating purity and increased accessibility of the drug, according to the National Drug Research Institute.

The institute’s deputy director Simon Lenton said he was concerned that heroin had become easy to obtain.

Education was the key to reducing the number of people who overdosed, he said.

“Most overdoses don’t just involve

heroin, they often also involve other central nervous system depressants containing opioids such as benzodiazepines like Valium or alcohol,” Prof.

Lenton said.

According to St. John Ambulance, an average of 46 patients per month have been treated for a heroin overdose this year. In 2012, the average was 30 patients per month.

WA Substance Users Association outreach co-ordinator Paul Dessauer said a wide cross-section of people overdosed on heroin.

He said it was the older users who

were more likely to overdose.

Recovering heroin addict Matthew Mansell, who is a patient at Northam’s Fresh Start clinic, said the inconsistent purity was what made heroin so dangerous.

“One day it might be 10 per cent pure and the next it might be 90 per cent pure,” he said.

Metro Ambulance Service general manager James Sherriff said paramedics treated those who had overdosed on heroin with naloxone, a drug that blocked the opioid receptors in the brain.

Mr Dessauer said the WA Substance

Users Association had been running an overdose education program to teach survivors and overdose witnesses how to administer naloxone.

“In Western Australia, 60 per cent of fatal overdoses occur while other people are around,” Mr Dessauer said.

“We’ve been running the program for two-and-a-half years, and so far we have had 70 successful overdose reversals.”

The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration has already announced naloxone will soon be available without a prescription.

Under WA law, 18-year-olds who received an explicit image from a juvenile could be charged with possessing child pornography.

“That’s probably the hardest thing to get across because you could be doing something with your 17-yearold friend who’s still a juvenile while you’re an adult, so there are different consequences involved,” Mr Browning said.

Frame Initiatives director Dan McGrechan said sexting had become a form of sexual expression for teenagers and was becoming part of the culture at Leavers.

Frame Initiatives is a program that partners with high schools to promote safe school communities.

Mr McGrechan said many students did not understand the laws and issues that could arise from sexting.

University of Western Australia Faculty of Law Associate Professor Meredith Blake said an 18-year-old should be subject to adult criminal penalties But she said criminal responsibility developed well before the age of 18.

“There are certainly occasions where juveniles have been sentenced as an adult because of the seriousness of the offence in question,” Ms Blake said.

Mr Browning said he hoped educating students about the legal implications of sexting would help reduce the number of people inolved.

Red Frogs Australia WA general manager Hayden Glass said his group, which aimed to empower young people to make positive life choices, had identified sexting and social media as areas to address when talking to high schools.

The last WA Certificate of Education exam will be held on November 20 and Leavers kicks off on November 23.

November 2015

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Bone density gene discovered Joanna Delalande

The discovery of a gene that helps to determine the density of our bones could be used to identify those who are at a greater risk of developing osteoporosis.

University of Western Australia molecular geneticist Scott Wilson, who was one of dozens of scientists involved in the worldwide project that identified the EN1 gene, said it had been shown to affect bone mineral density and fracture tendencies.

The results of the research were recently published in the science journal Nature.

More than one million Australians suffer from osteoporosis and Prof.

Wilson said up to 80 per cent of cases were genetic. The rest were caused by other factors, including a lack of physical activity, smoking, alcohol use, low body weight and age.

Osteoporosis Australia scientific advisor Lisa Croucher said the new research, which was based on a study of 50,000 people worldwide, could be used to help determine the likelihood that a person would develop osteoporosis in future.

Prof. Wilson said the gene was uncommon but had twice the effect on bone density of any previously identified gene.

He said one in three women and one in five men in Australia would suffer a bone fracture caused by osteoporosis during their lifetime.

Prof. Wilson said the same method could also be used to help scientists identify genetic markers that would indicate the likelihood of people developing other diseases.

“The work will be of value in gaining a deeper understanding of osteoporosis, and this approach can be used for other diseases as well, like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases,” he said.

OSTEO BREAKTHROUGH: Professor Wilson’s team discovered the new gene.

they also sell white goods.

But Mr O’Keeffe said allowing Masters to open at 7am wouldn’t solve the problem because Bunnings was allowed to open at 6am.

Mr O’Keeffe said the main entrance at Bunnings stores opened at 7am, but the trade entrance opened earlier.

Masters managing director Matt Tyson said in a statement that Masters had been designated as a retail store because it sold white goods, and were unable to open at the same times as other hardware stores.

Shopping Centre Council of Australia senior advisor Kristin Pryce said the council wanted longer trading hours.

“Our analysis has shown there is customer demand for earlier trading hours and we strongly support the pro-

consumer direction the government is taking,” Ms Pryce said. “Customers want flexibility and choice to do their shopping or to go to a café when it is most convenient for them.”

Mr O’Keeffe said Masters’ problems could be solved without changing trading hours for all retailers.

“There are nine Masters stores in WA so if you want to fix up a problem for those nine stores, you don’t change the trading hours of the entire industry,” he said.

A Coles spokeswoman said the company supported the proposed changes.

“Coles fully supports further gradual liberalisation of trading hours in Western Australia in order to provide our customers with even greater convenience all year round,” she said.

Union: trading hours should not be increased Rachael Tan

The Barnett Government’s plan to allow shops to open at 7am is “ill-advised”, according to the union representing retail employees.

Proposed changes to the Retail Trading Hours Act 1987 will be introduced to State Parliament next month.

They will allow all retailers to open at 7am , except on Sundays, extending the trading day by one hour.

Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association secretary Peter O’Keeffe said the changes were being made to allow hardware store Masters to compete with Bunnings.

Under current laws, Masters stores are not allowed to open until 8am because

MIND THE GAP: Allan Macdonald.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

Microchip your dog or face $5,000 fine

Andrew Charlton

WA dog owners will face a $5,000 fine if they fail to microchip their dogs by November 1.

The mircochip, which stores information about the dog and the owner’s contact details, is implanted beneath the skin between the dog’s shoulder blades.

Australian Veterinary Association spokesman David Neck said the aim was to reduce the number of dogs being abandoned and to help reunite lost dogs with their owners.

Dr Neck said people who could not

look after their pets should not be able to get another.

“Every single lost dog can be traced back to a person,” he said.

“That’s not just lost dogs who need to get home.

Dr Neck said microchipping could also helpt to identify dogs who were found attacking wildlife.

Saving Animals From Euthanasia president Suzanne Campbell said microchips would help reduce the number of dogs being abandoned.

But other measures were needed, she said.

Ms Campbell said the new laws required the micorchip to be updated

each time a dog changed hands.

Cockburn Mayor Logan Howlett said rangers would door-knock houses in the Cockburn area to enforce the new law.

“If we find animals roaming the streets or parks that have no owners in sight, then they’ll be taken back to our animal care facility and they won’t be released back to the owner until they have been microchipped,” he said.

Since November 2013, all new dogs, dogs being sold and dogs considered dangerous have been microchipped.

South Australia and the Northern Territory are now the only areas in which microchipping is not mandatory.

PHOTO: Supplied.

Pay gap continues to shrink - study Jade Colman-Vegar

DOG ACT: New laws require all dogs to be microchipped.

PHOTO: Dylan Websdane.

Australian companies are now more likely to take action to close the gender pay gap, according to a recent study by the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.

The study found there had been a 17.6 per cent increase in the number of organisations that conducted a gender pay gap analysis over the past 12 months.

The study showed 51 per cent of organisations that conducted an analysis in 2015 had taken action, compared to 41 per cent in 2014.

But WA women still had the highest pay gap in the country, earning 26 per cent less than men.

The national average was 17.9 per cent.

Equal Opportunity acting commissioner Allan Macdonald said more WA women had become involved in the mining industry in recent years, but it had not had a major effect on pay gap data.

Mr Macdonald said businesses should consider quarantining positions for women.

He said they should invite women to apply for both entry-level roles and senior management positions when they became vacant.

Workplace Gender Equality Agency communications manager Jackie Woods said a wages review could help companies to identify a pay gap they

had not previously noticed.

“They don’t set out to pay women less than men necessarily,” Ms Woods said.

“Stereotypes about workers can just be so ingrained.”

The most common action taken by organisations were in identifying the cause of the gap, reviewing the decision-making processes and reporting pay equity to management.

Department of Commerce policy director Lorraine Field said analysing wages was the best way for businesses to determine whether there was a problem.

“We recommend that businesses do undergo a pay audit, and that audit enables them to determine the extent to which they have a pay gap,” Ms Field said.

One quarter of the 11,000 businesses involved in the study said they could not find a gender pay gap in their organisation.

University of Western Australia Business School Assistant Professor Jacquie Hutchinson said ongoing monitoring was crucial in reducing the pay gap.

“There has been a pattern where men are paid differently,” she said.

“We need to look at the reasons why does this exist.

“Once businesses know there is an issue they can go back and have a look.

“They can then intervene and give pay increases.”

November 2015

6

NEWS

Approval system a ‘conflict of interest’

PHOTO: David Atwell.

Nicholas Phillips

Building industry still ‘lawless’ BUILDING COERCION: The commission is clamping down on illegal activity.

Charlie Lewis

Fair Work Building Commission director Nigel Hadgkiss says there is an alarming rate of lawlessness in the construction industry.

Writing in the agency’s 2014-15 annual report, Mr Hadgkiss said his agency was working to clamp down on illegal activities within the industry.

“Despite the best efforts of my agency, the unlawfulness within the building and construction industry continues,” Mr Hadgkiss said.

Court action by the agency led to $1.39 million in fines being issued, most of which were directed at the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy union, including $697,500 in penalties for coercion.

Fair Work Building Commission advisor Kathryn Scully said the agen-

cy did not target any particular organisation.

“It is the courts, not FWBC, who decides whether there has been a breach of a workplace law, and makes the decision on what penalties, if any, should be applied,” she said.

UnionsWA secretary Meredith Hammat said the commission should be more balanced.

“Too often, construction corporate profits are extracted by cutting corners on safety or through sham contracting arrangements, about which the FWBC could and should do more,” she said.

“Anyone facing prosecution deserves their matter to be tested in our courts without prejudice and according to principles of natural justice.”

Ms Scully said the agency had prosecuted six employers and several individual workers for allegedly breaching workplace laws.

Debate over proposed cycling laws intensifies Sophia Constantine

PHOTO: David Atwell.

The Barnett Government’s proposal to allow West Australian cyclists to ride on footpaths will not make anyone safer, according to a WA bicycle advocacy group.

Under WA’s Road Traffic Act 1974, only children under the age of 12 are allowed to ride their bicycle on a footpath.

Bicycle Transport Alliance director Michael Haynes said the State Government would be “forcing a risk on to road users” if it did not alter the footpaths.

“All it’s doing is transferring the risk from the pedestrian to the cyclist,” Mr Haynes said.

“There’s room for innovation to make footpaths a little bit wider and provide space for people.”

Opposition Leader Mark McGowan said allowing cyclists to use footpaths

could pose a safety risk.

He said only children under the age of 16 and their parents should be able to ride their bikes on the footpath.

“Pedestrians and cyclists together on footpaths could create conflict, both can be unpredictable, particularly younger children,” Mr McGowan said.

Mr McGowan said the State Government should focus on dedicated bike lanes.

WestCycle chief executive officer Matt Fulton said he supported the proposal to allow bikes on the footpath.

He said the law would make cycling safer for those concerned about riding on the road.

The current laws did not make sense because parents could not ride with their children, he said.

Mr Fulton said he encouraged cyclists to show respect to pedestrians.

Laws to allow cyclists on footpaths took effect in South Australia on October 25.

CYCLE SAFETY: WA laws ban adult cyclists from footpaths.

Giving the Department of Mines and Petroleum power over all land clearing applications will lead to a conflict of interest, according to the Conservation Council of Western Australia The Mining Legislation Assembly Bill 2015, which is being debated in State Parliament, will allow all land clearing applications to be handled by the Department of Mines and Petroleum.

They are currently handled by the Department of Environmental Regulation, though the Environment

Minister delegates authority to the Department of Mines and Petroleum for some applications.

Conservation Council of WA director Piers Verstegen said the Bill didn’t include measures to protect the environment.

“The principle objective of the DMP was to promote mining and to facilitate mining and, while they do have a role in minimising environmental impact, they are always going to put mining first,” he said.

“The DMP doesn’t have in its mandate the protection of the environment, so the regulatory aspects of mining that relate to environmental protection

really should be coming under environmental agencies that do.”

DMP Environment Division executive director Phil Gorey said the department’s processes were appropriate.

“Environmental regulation by DMP is undertaken as part of the approvals process for exploration, prospecting and mining activities,” he said.

“Protection and management of the environment are key considerations in assessing these proposals.”

Opposition environment spokesman Chris Tallentire said he was concerned the State Government did not adequately record how much land was being cleared for mining.

MINING CONFLICT: Mr Tallentire is concerned about the environmental impact of mining.

PHOTO: Supplied.

Shopping centre parking bills illegal — union Aleisha Archer

The union representing retail workers is threatening legal action against Karrinyup Shopping Centre management for sending $66 parking bills to centre employees.

Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association secretary Peter O’Keeffe said private businesses did not have the legal right to issue infringements.

“We’re taking action against them for issuing these fines,” he said.

“Based on the legal advice we’ve received, we’re very confident that we will succeed in having them withdrawn.”

Karrinyup Shopping Centre assistant manager Sandi Swan said the bills would not be withdrawn.

“As far as we are concerned, there is no issue,” she said.

Mr O’Keeffe said the union had sent centre management a letter in an attempt to resolve the matter.

“It may not get to court,” he said.

“We will attempt to resolve the matter by negotiation, but we are making it clear that we will take all action necessary if no agreement is reached.”

In a letter to union members in July, assistant secretary Ben Harris said the fines were not parking infringements but “a claim for liquidated damages for breaching the ‘contractual terms’ of parking at the shopping centre”.

Kyle Bower, a director of industrial relations consulting firm Certus, said

liquidated damages were the result of a breach of contract.

“If there is a sign which says, ‘if you park here you will pay a fine’, that is part of the contractual terms,” he said.

Mr Bowyer said liquidated damages had to be a genuine estimate of the loss experienced by the business.

“You could argue that $66 is not what they are losing if you park there

for 10 minutes,” he said. “The most they are losing is 10 minutes of fee from someone else or from whoever is parking there.”

Mr O’Keeffe said the union had received the same complaints from employees at other shopping centres.

“I think it’s fairly widespread, but Karrinyup is the focus of our legal action,” he said.

Too many bikers die on our roads — report Aimee Hughes and Gareth Thomas

The number of motorcyclists who die on roads worldwide is “intolerably high”, according to the World Health Organisation.

While Australia has one of the lowest road tolls in the world, the World Health Organisation’s 2015 Global Status Report on Road Safety showed 18 per cent of those who died on Austalian roads were motorcyclists.

WA Road Safety Commissioner Kim Papalia said people who died riding motorcycles were often inexperienced riders.

Mr Papalia said alcohol, drugs and speeding were big risk factors.

WA Motorcycle Riders Association president Dave Wright said motorcyclists only made up six per cent of road users.

He said motorcyclists were the most vulnerable road users because they did not have any protection.

According to the Office of Road Safety, motorcyclists are 26 times more likely to be killed or injured than those in passenger vehicles.

Motorcycle Safety Week runs from October 30 to November 7, during which Mr Papalia will present the Road Safety Commission’s data from a two-year study of unlicensed motorcyclists.

Mr Wright said there were now more motorcyclists on WA’s roads and education was the key to ensuring the fatality rate did not increase.

November 2015

7

NEWS

Australia’s eco jet ski Kathryn Croston and Martin Busk

Australia’s first electric jet ski is quieter and more environmentally friendly than its petrol counterpart.

Created by University of Western Australia honour students, it was launched in October.

Police say most complaints about jet skis are about driver behaviour.

WA Water Police senior constable Rob Jennings said jet skis posed a risk to wild life, ferries and boats.

University of Western Australia mechanical engineering student Michael Stott, who helped develop the electric jet ski, said he understood the police concerns.

“At the end of the day, it is a powered watercraft and has the ability to cause injury just like a regular jet ski,” Mr Stott said.

He said it would be great to see the electric jet ski on waterways where petrol-run boats and jet skis could not operate.

“I think it has a number of uses that

will appeal to people other than typical jet ski owners because it is so quiet and environmentally friendly,” he said.

UWA renewable energy vehicle director Thomas Braunl, who led the project, said the electric jet ski was the only one in Australia.

Professor Braunl said the design could now be developed commercially, but some improvements would be required.

“We would like to double, if possible, the battery capacity, which is mainly a financial issue,” he said.

Prof. Braunl said the electric jet ski could reach a top speed of more than 40km/h, making it almost as fast as a petrol jet ski.

Former UWA student Alex Beckley, who worked on the project, said the biggest challenge had been in mixing electricity with water.

“It’s a dangerous place for businesses to go, so it’s better for the realm of universities at the moment,” Mr Beckley said.

He said the issue had been solved through the use of double insulation and automatic power cutting systems.

Religous law stalled HATE VANDALISM: Perth's Suleymaniye Mosque.

Taylah Strano

Opposition citizenship and multiculturalism spokeswoman Margaret Quirk has urged the State Government to support proposed laws that would increase penalties for people who were involved in religion-motivated vandalism.

In March, Ms Quirk tabled a Bill in State Parliament that would allow the courts to sentence a person convicted of causing criminal damage to a place of worship to a maximum of 14 years in jail. Under current laws, the maximum penalty is a 10-year jail term.

Ms Quirk said the Bill was not well received by the State Government.

“The government … overreacted I think, to what I’ve proposed,” Ms Quirk said.

“They’re very much opposed to it.”

Ms Quirk said three Barnett Government ministers had told those present at community meetings that they did not support the proposal.

Attorney-General Michael Mischin said the State Government consulted with religious leaders about the changes.

“Most religious leaders expressed preference for an educative regime to promote multiculturalism rather than an increase in penalties to the criminal code, which they believed would promote disharmony,” Mr Mischin said.

Mr Mischin said there were already adequate penalties in the Criminal Code for people who destroyed or damaged property.

“Although the government does not support the private members Bill, the government is committed to promoting multiculturalism and intercultural and religious harmony,” he said.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

Western Australians for Racial Equality chairman Suresh Rajan said education was the key.

“Almost all cases of racism and religious villification are a result of ignorance,” Mr Rajan said.

“An ignorance of what adherents to a particular religion actually do.”

Southern River Mosque’s Sheikh Shabir Mossa said he did not support the Bill.

“In my opinion, changing it from 10 to 14 years changes nothing,” he said.

Gurdwara Sikh Temple treasurer Amandeep Singh said authorities had done little to help his group recover after the temple was damaged by graffiti last year.

“When the Bill was put into parliament, we were in favour of it,” Mr Singh said.

“These crimes should be taken seriously,” he said.

WA doors open for disabilities Joanna Delalande

BRIGHT SPARKS: The brains behind the jet ski.

PHOTO: Phoenix Hudson.

Students should be educated about fertility factors — expert Christine Min Thein

Australian students should be educated about fertility choices, according to the head of a national public education program.

Your Fertility chief executive officer Louise Johnson said she believed students should be made aware of the causes of infertility, including the effect of excessive alcohol consumption, smoking and weight gain.

She said students should also be taught about the risks of having children late in life.

“It’s certainly not a matter of educating to influence whether people want children or not,” she said.

“It’s about providing information for young people who may be thinking they want a child some stage later.”

Ms Johnson said women were more likely to conceive during their 20s and 30s. Women became less fertile during

their early 30s, she said.

Fremantle Women’s Health Centre clinical services manager Dawn Needham said students should be aware of factors that affected fertility.

“There is a lack of teaching, in general, in sexual health,” Ms Needham said.

“We’ve seen a general pattern of older women coming in to plan for their first children.”

Department of Education spokeswoman Ella Garland said the school curriculum should force schools to provide information about fertility.

“In primary years, students are taught how to maintain healthy relationships and how to manage the physical, social and emotional changes to their bodies that occur during puberty,” Ms Garland said.

It has been reported that 12 schools in London will introduce a fertility module into sexual education classes for students aged between 16 and 18.

West Australians with disabilities now have greater access to specialised products after the state’s first smart home display centre recently opened in Cockburn.

The Independent Living Centre WA, which helps people live more independent lives, opened the display home’s doors on September 3.

People With Disabilities WA president Greg Madson said it helped to have all the information about home automation services in one place.

“In the past, we haven’t had such a thing and people had to travel all over the place to find different appliances and assistive technologies,” Mr Madson said.

“There’s a lot of information to consider and it’s good to have a place you can go to trial something beforehand, so you can see whether it would meet your needs.”

Independent Living Centre executive director Gerri Clay said elderly people and people with disabilities would now be able to maintain their independence.

“Many homes are not well designed to meet the needs of older people or those with disability,” Ms Clay said.

All home appliances, including lighting, heating, air-conditioning, and TVs are controlled remotely. This can be done from any room in the home, as well as by phone or the internet.

The automated systems can be installed when a new home is being built or they can be retrofit to an existing property.

A spokeswoman for the Disability Services Commission said the commission commended any services, facilities or equipment that supported access for

INDEPENDENT LIVING: Testing the facilities.

those living with a disability.

Independent Living Centre occupational therapist Sacha Marchant said home automation would also help with security.

“For people who have carers, it means they don’t need to give them a key to their property,” she said. “They can actually let the carer in from inside, which means they have more control over the security of their home.”

PHOTO: Supplied by ILC.

Mrs Marchant said home automation had been the most asked about item.

“It’s quite popular for people to come and have a look at, probably because it isn’t necessarily well displayed elsewhere,” she said.

“Everything that we have on display here is displayed in context, which makes it a lot easier for people to understand how it works and actually see if they can use it effectively.”

8

November 2015

PHOTO ESSAY

Save our Swan

A photo essay by Nicholas Phillips

"The tidal flats are still; pied shags Rest on island rocks; the swans Are motionless on far pale water."

- James McAuley Australian literary critic and poet James McAuley describes the Swan River in all its glory.

It is Perth 's most iconic natural feature, but just like the swan that glides effortlessly past while its feet work feverishly to keep it afloat, all is not as it seems. Pollution, expansion and other human activities threaten our river’s ecosystem.

The river is home to many native bird and animal species. It is a source of beauty and a site for leisure. It has also, unfortunately, become a dumping ground for litter.

According to the Department of Water, the quality of water in the upper and middle sections of the Swan Canning river system are in moderate-to-poor condition.

A chip packet and discarded hat on the river's edge.

Organic matter from urban and rural areas leak into the river, contributing to harmful algal blooms.

Land clearing has destroyed riverside vegetation, robbing native animals of their habitat and disrupting their breeding patterns.

Water traffic over the past century has eroded the shores.

The river is now a managed ecosystem, reliant on the efforts of professionals and volunteers who work daily to alleviate the strain.

Jane Kane examines coir logs installed to fight erosion.

The Swan River in all its glory.

The river eats into a man-made bank near Mounts Bay Road.

Mark Cugley from the Department of Parks and Wildlife collecting samples.

November 2015

9

PHOTO ESSAY

Building bodies of work Artificial eyes that didn't make the cut.

A photo essay by Michael Roberts

Losing a limb visits great trauma upon the victim. It denies them quality of life and leads to great emotional and physical stress, depending on the amenity lost. Is it an arm? A leg? An eye? Thanks to prosthetics and other physical and cosmetic aids, the victim’s loss can be alleviated.

Emily Geelen is a third-generation ocularist. That is, according to the Ocularists Association of Australia, a person who manufactures and fits artificial eyes for those who are missing their own. Geelen’s role, however, entails more than taking impressions of eye sockets and skilfully fashioning plastics to fit them. “It’s to make an artificial eye that doesn’t look like an artificial eye, to help people get on with their lives,” she says.

Prosthetic technician Jon Chalcraft has 18 years’ experience in the prosthetic industry, and says he mainly creates legs. “Diabetes is a big cause of losing a leg because the things furthest away from your heart are what usually go wrong first,” he says. “Missing arms are more accidents or birth defects.”

When a person has had a leg amputated, they need more energy to drive the artificial foot, which prosthetic technicians give back through legs made from carbon fibre, hydraulics and springs. “One minute you are laminating and then you’re doing spray painting and leather work,” Chalcraft says. “I love the variety.”

An Australian loses a lower limb every three hours because of diabetes-related diseases, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. The professionals who replace those limbs not only offer mobility, but also confidence. Similarly, although artificial eyes cannot restore sight, those who make them fulfil their creed: to help people move on with their lives.

Geelen hand paints tiny blood vessels onto an acrylic eye.

Artificial thighs and hands ready for fitting.

Chalcraft applies a fresh coat of paint to a prosthetic leg.

November 2015

10

PHOTO ESSAY

For the love of restoration

A musical mechanism. PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

Schneider’s workshop.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

“It's a work of art.”

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

A photo essay by Western Independent staff.

Across Perth, there are people who see treasure where others see trash.

West Coast Street Rod Club president Neil Gibb says more than 800 of those people are ‘hot rodders’, who restore and customise old Ford Model Ts with parts salvaged from other cars. “The hot rod scene is growing big-time in Perth,” he says. “You go to wrecking yards and pick up what you need.”

Gibb spent about $20,000 on his Model T, which he bought in 1975, but didn’t get on the road until 1982. “It’s a game of patience. If you want to build the car yourself, you’ve got to have patience and time.” He now drives it every day.

A carton of beer as a trade secured Peter Daw the rusted old car frame he’s hoping to hot rod for $10,000. “I wanted to do something for myself,” he says of the hobby.

Most hot rodders are over 50, but that hasn’t deterred 20 year-old Michael Ramsey from building his first hot rod in time for the Sandgroper Street Rod Nationals in Busselton next year.

Munich-born clockmaker Willi Schneider has been restoring and repairing clocks at his home in the Perth hills for more than 30 years. He says he has no interest in clocks that are not mechanical. “Antique clocks are like cars,” he says. “They need a good servicing, including a wash and oil.” Only clocks older than a century are considered antique.

Schneider says everyone wanted to be a clockmaker in the late 19th century because it was considered a sophisticated profession. Now, he is one of only a handful left in Perth.

John Rose, who masterfully restores English and European antiques in Wembley, honed his craft in Cork, Ireland from the age of 17.

PHOTO: David Pekel.

“I’m very lucky in that I love what I do.”

Daw's hot rod in progress. PHOTO: David Pekel.

November 2015

11

PHOTO ESSAY

Rose restoring an 1860 English sideboard.

PHOTO: Abbey Tobin.

Working with traditional animal glue.

PHOTO: Abbey Tobin.

“There is restoration and there is conservation.

The difference being, with conservation you're all about trying to keep it as original as possible.�

- John Rose

Ramsey's first project.

PHOTO: David Pekel.

Paul Graffin of the Cranksters Rod and Kustom Club.

Gibb says hot rodding is the "ultimate recycling".

PHOTO: David Pekel.

PHOTO: David Pekel.

November 2015

12

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Aussie acts head for New York Abbey Tobin

The Australia Council for the Arts has signed a three-year deal with a New York-based arts organisation to guarantee Australian artworks are showcased in its prestigious annual festival.

Performance Space 122 will hold its COIL festival in January and will now feature pieces from three Australian companies.

Australia Council for the Arts director of international development Collette Brennan said COIL was the biggest meeting of performing arts professionals in the world.

“January in New York is the place to be,” she said.

“They all converge there because there is all these other events on, like the International Society of Performing Arts or the American Presenters Association or Under the Radar Festival.”

Sydney’s Ranters Theatre will perform two shows at COIL. Ranters Theatre artistic director Adriano Cortese said COIL was a great event for international and local artists.

“It’s a very busy time in New York, so it’s a fantastic opportunity to present work there because there is a lot of presenters from the US, but also inter-

nationally coming to see work,” he said.

The Australia Council is providing $60,000 annually for the three-year partnership.

Ms Brennan said the Australia Council’s funding would be used to get the artists to New York because Australia’s isolation meant taking work overseas was expensive.

Mr Cortese said the new partnership would provide a “fantastic opportunity” for Australian artists.

“There is a lot of great Australian work that would be lapped up overseas, so I think it’s a fantastic initiative from the Australia Council,” he said.

Ms Brennan said it was important for Australia to have international partners to create long-term interest in Australian art.

Ranters Theatre will perform Intimacy and Song at the festival.

Mr Cortese said Intimacy was based on intimate conversations theatre members had with strangers one night.

“These conversations were quite intimate and became intimate quite quickly so we created a show based on them,” he said.

“Song we made with a Brazilian visual artist and an English musician. It is an immersive sound installation with a perfume scent of the sea and forest.”

ART PLATFORM: Ranters Theatre’s production of Intimacy.

PHOTO: Supplied.

Up close and personal Abbey Tobin

The Art Gallery of WA is hosting the first one-on-one live performance festival in Australia.

Artists from the UK, WA and the Eastern States will perform in 90-minute rotations at the Proximity Festival, which runs until November 8.

Proximity Festival co-founder and curator Kelli McCluskey said the festival was unique, sending members of the public into a room where they would be alone with an artist for 15 minutes.

“We have artists on the gallery rooftop stargazing with audience members and artists speaking frankly about their sex lives in the middle of the gallery,” she said.

Ms McCluskey said it was exciting to have an iconic institution opening its doors to the festival and allowing differ-

BOOKING PROFITS: Aussie writers are popular.

ent forms of art into the gallery.

“There is an incredible amount of innovation and experimentation that happens in Perth,” she said.

University of Western Australia cultural precinct director Ted Snell said he was pleased the gallery had embraced the festival.

“It’s a credit to the curator Robert Cook for bringing it into the mainstream and giving it a wider audience,” Dr Snell said.

Ms Mccluskey is also a part of the PVI Collective, a tactical media arts group that has been running in Perth for 18 years.

“We make participatory artwork in public spaces to disrupt everyday life and encourage people to question the status quo,” she said.

Dr Snell said the Proximity Festival and groups like the PVI Collective made WA a focus for experimental art.

One of PVI’s projects, Blackmarket, involved a game in which goods were available for sale but the participants had no money with which to buy them.

As a result, they had to try to trade whatever they brought with them on the night.

Ms McCluskey said she had already had conversations with other festival directors about applying the Proximity Festival model at other locations.

“We are proud that the roots are firmly grown here in WA and that we are bringing people to us rather than going to them,” she said.

Art Gallery of WA associate curator projects Dunja Rmandic said hosting the Proximity Festival challenged the gallery’s traditional model.

“It is an exciting new experience to have the traditional collection of the gallery co-existing with Proximity Festival,” Ms Rmandic said.

PHOTO: Rhiannon Arnold.

Authors sell rights to overseas­markets Abbey Tobin Half of all Australian writers are selling their work overseas, according to a survey by Macquarie University.

Macquarie University post-doctoral research fellow Jan Zwar said The Australian Book Industry: Authors, publishers and readers in a time of change survey showed the cultural reach Australian writers had achieved.

“Nearly half of all authors had sold rights to their work overseas and 60 per cent of children’s authors,” she said.

“Thirty per cent of authors also responded saying they had their work translated.”

Australian Society of Authors director Angelo Loukakis said the research would help to inspire authors. “It’s a sign of hope,” he said.

Dr Zwar said the research showed Australian authors earned an average

of $12,900 a year, despite being well educated.

“When you actually look at the education levels of Australian authors, they are far more highly educated than the general population as a proportion,” she said.

Mr Loukakis said the average income of Australian authors had not improved.

“Its hard to tell whether its going to improve in coming years because I cant see where that improvement will happen,” he said.

Mr Loukakis said prices fell when Amazon started and fell again when the company behind both Borders and Angus & Robertson closed in 2011.

“About 25 per cent of the retail space was knocked out of the industry and that too has made an impact on sales. So the numbers that we were experiencing a decade ago have been reduced,” he said.

ONE-ON-ONE: Kelli McCluskey & UK-based artist mentor Helen Cole.

PHOTO: Rhiannon Arnold.

November 2015

13

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

No country, no art Shaun Cowe

The possible closure of remote Aboriginal communities will mean the end of traditional Aboriginal art, according to the state’s peak body for Indigenous visual arts.

Aboriginal Art Centre Hub of WA chief executive officer Christine Scoggin said there were 28 Aboriginal art centres in regional Western Australia.

She said Aboriginal art came from the ancestral ties to those places.

“When those communities close, those people are going to have to go somewhere or they are going to stay on that land and live in absolute squalor,” Ms Scoggin said.

“So there’s that impact on artists themselves, but there is also the impact on the industry because it impacts on the supply chain.”

Ms Scoggin said people were interested in Aboriginal art because of its diversity.

“If there was a focus on closures in

the western desert, we would be likely to lose a whole portion of that cultural content that comes from there,” she said.

“Art in the Kimberley is very well known, even for its diversity of styles across east to west, and if we lose a sector of that then that’s just gone from our diverse industry.”

Flinders University Australian Studies lecturer Christine Nicholls said any exodus of people from Indigenous communities would have an impact on the diversity of local art.

“The art is totally founded on country, peoples’ specific tracks of land and how they navigated the landforms on it,” Dr Nicholls said.

“Once you remove people from their country, they won’t be able to do any kind of traditional art.”

Department of Culture and the Arts director of arts policy Colin Walker said the State Government had measures in place to keep Aboriginal art alive in regional WA. “First and foremost, we want to make sure Aboriginal culture is prop-

erly recognised,” Mr Walker said.

“We want to make sure, because of all the research that’s come out of the Federal Government on closing the gap and social failures, that we place value on Aboriginal culture.”

Dr Nicholls said the State Government had not been able to identify which Aboriginal leaders at each community should be consulted over the decision to cut services.

“It’s not like our non-Indigenous system where you have a mayor, someone seen as a leader,” she said.

“There is normally a whole bunch of people who need to be consulted, but normally it’s the person who speaks the best English.”

Fremantle’s Japingka Art Gallery director Ian Plunkett said Aboriginal art was better appreciated overseas.

“Anyone who is aware of Australia is aware of Indigenous art and culture and knows there is nothing like it on the planet,” Mr Plunkett said.

“At the end of the day, it’s not a vote winner so it’s not high on a politician’s list of priorities.”

PAINTING HISTORY: Aboriginal art will be hit hard if communities close.

PHOTO: Brenda Kho.

Netflix, Stan hit piracy rates

NETFLIX CHILL: Streaming services have reduced piracy. PHOTO: Anne Gevana.

The launch of online streaming services Netflix and Stan has reduced the amount of online piracy by one quarter, according to CHOICE Australia.

CHOICE’s latest survey of 1100 people found 17 per cent had illegally downloaded material from the internet in recent months. Last November, before Netflix and Stan were launched, 23 per cent of respondents said they had illegally downloaded material.

CHOICE spokeswoman Sarah Agar said Australian consumers were willing to pay for a service if they could access the content they wanted.

“We found that Australians were paying for content more often than they were pirating it,” she said.

“It does show that the best way to fixing these issues isn’t to install internet filters or other complicated legislative processes.

“The way to do it is to fix the market problem, the market issues being price, ease of access, availability of content and timeliness of releases.”

Intellectual Property Awareness Foundation executive director Lori Flekser said the group’s own research also showed piracy rates had fallen.

“It’s not simply about new services, although that plays a very large part, it’s also about awareness of new legislation for site blocking and high profile cases, such as the Dallas Buyers

Club case,” she said.

Ms Flekser said not everyone had stopped illegally downloanding material. She said 40 per cent of people who illegally downloaded material more than once a week were pirating more than they did 12 months ago.

“It will only decrease if people really start to understand that there is a direct impact of that behaviour on the creative industries and it’s simply not a victimless crime,” she said.

Murdoch University digital media Associate Professor Ingrid Richardson said Australians did not think illegally downloading content was immoral or unethical.

“People are increasingly feeling, ‘why should we pay premium costs?’, particularly in Australia when they can download for free,” she said.

Dr Richardson said attempts to block illegal access to content were ineffective. “People can basically use proxy servers to access the content they want,” she said.

“If people are not given the opportunity to easily access content and to access it at a reasonable price, they will go elsewhere to get that content.”

Dr Richardson said Netflix Australia had less content than its American counterpart, which was a problem for Australian consumers.

She said more online streaming services would eventually hit the Australian market, making more content available to consumers.

nities for graduates to find local work before the company started.

“The best graduates from WAAPA were then leaving the state to find work elsewhere,” she said.

“The situation before was that there were more opportunities for younger dancers that haven’t yet made it into tertiary training, and the ones that were training in the tertiary system didn’t have the same opportunity.

“It is very important that when they finish the training they have something to do.”

Co3 marketing and communications manager Georgia Malone said having

WAAPA graduates in the company was a good indication of the talent emerging from WA. “This was one of the drivers for the company,” she said.

“Many of the best dancers in the country are from or trained in WA.” Dance student Ayesha Katz, 20, said the new company gave her an incentive to stay in Perth.

Co3 community engagement director Richard Longbottom said it had been 20 years since WA last had a contemporary dance company.

“We are the last state in Australia to have its own flagship dance company.”

Rachel Wong

Dance graduates stay in WA Aimee Hughes

The launch of West Australian dance company Co3 will provide dance graduates the opportunity to kickstart their careers in WA, according to a WA Academy of Performing Arts dance lecturer.

Seven out of nine dancers taking part in Co3’s first performance from October 28 to November 1 at the State Theatre Centre of WA are WAAPA graduates.

WAAPA dance lecturer Susan Peacock said there were few opportu-

YURTING THE PLANET: Finch in his tent.

PHOTO: Michael Roberts.

Tent life for sustainability Molly Schmidt

A local artist is travelling around Perth in a nomadic tent called a yurt, hosting concerts and community dinners to raise awareness about sustainable living.

Steven Finch said the main event of his Grr Project involved him hosting a community dinner each Sunday.

People brought raw ingredients from their gardens to cook, he said.

Finch said he wanted to focus on reducing waste and sharing resources.

Murdoch University sustainability

senior lecturer Martin Brueckner said Finch’s idea was important because the average Australian household wasted at least $1500 worth of goods a year.

“This includes food, but also purchasing books you never read or clothes you don’t wear,” he said.

Fremantle Arts Centre spokeswoman Sheridan Coleman said Finch’s project was aimed at helping people achieve low-impact living.

Dr Brueckner said Finch’s project would appeal to like-minded people, but it would be difficult to get the wider community on board.

STAYING PUT: Co3 gives graduates like Talitha Maslin the chance to work in WA.

PHOTO: Supplied.

November 2015

14

FEATURES

A question of character

DENIED ENTRY: Troy Newman of Operation Rescue giving a speech.

Charlie Lewis

“W

hat are you afraid of?” US anti-abortion campaigner Troy Newman demands of the airport staff.

The question punctuates a tense conversation at Denver International Airport as Newman tries to embark on a journey to Australia for a series of lectures at ‘right to life’ events across the country.

He is not being allowed to board the plane because the Australian Government has revoked his visa.

Footage of the incident, filmed by Newman himself, flooded Facebook late last month, eliciting both support and outrage.

Newman is among the high profile figures who recently had their access to Australia debated, denied, or revoked on the grounds of what the legislation calls “character”.

The other high profile figures are singer Chris Brown, rapper Tyler the Creator, and Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Newman is the president of anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and author of Their Blood Cries Out!, a book about abortion.

In one section of the 2003 book, he

argues doctors who perform abortions are murderers and should face the death penalty. It’s the section most often quoted by people who argue he should be banned from Australia.

University of Newcastle philosphy Conjoint Professor Russell Blackford sees no problem with letting Newman in.

“I find his ideas preposterous, I would argue against them and have done, but it’s about suppression of ideas,” he says. “Newman has done nothing that’s illegal in this country – he’s being kept out solely for what he says.”

Blackford, however, says he is not favouring absolute freedom of expression.

“Chris Brown beat up his wife, so he might be the kind of person you decide you want to keep out, Tyler the Creator was, I believe, charged with inciting a riot, so if that’s the reason to keep him out, I don’t have such an issue,” he says.

“But if it’s keeping out people based on what they might say, I think we should be very reluctant to do it.”

The Department of Immigration website lists various reasons one might be denied entry to Australia under the law. Under section 501 of the Migration Act 1958, a visa can be refused on character grounds.

New South Wales University School of Law visiting senior fellow Arthur Glass describes the section as “a weighty bit of machinery”.

“The test is in two parts – a structured decision as to whether you fail.

So, in Brown’s case, he was convicted of crimes of domestic violence, which would be enough, and then structured reasons as to why the failure should be waived.”

As to whether a visa rejection can be reviewed, Glass says it depends on whether the

minister personally makes the decision, or if it is delegated to a “department bureaucrat”.

“If a delegate makes the decision, the decision can be reviewed by the Administrative Appeals RACE ROW: Geert Wilders. PHOTO: © Metropolico.org All photographs published under Creative Commons licence. Details available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Tribunal for a review of the merits of the decision.

If the minister makes the decision, however, the process is much harder to reverse.

In this case, “judicial review is possible, but only as to the legality of the decision,” Glass says.

Civil Liberties Australia vice president Tim Vines, is concerned about the “huge consolidation of power” the lack of judicial oversight gives the Immigration Minister.

University of Sydney faculty of law lecturer Louise Boon-Kuo says the legislation is “very wide ranging” and gives the minister broad discretion.

“If a person has a substantial criminal history, meaning they have been sentenced to 12 months imprisonment, or periods totalling 12 months, then a person will not meet the character test,” she says.

“There are also much broader grounds for refusing or cancelling a visa, such as if the minister forms the view that a person doesn’t pass the character test based on their past or present general conduct, which need not be criminal conduct.

“The other controversial area is the possibility that someone might be refused a visa based on the risk of certain conduct – such as the risk that a person might engage in criminal conduct, or incite discord in the Australian community.”

Collective Shout, a group that focuses on representations of women in popular culture, campaigned to stop Tyler the Creator entering Australia. The group refers to him as a “pro-rape misogynist”.

The group’s campaigns manager Caitlin Roper says the rapper, whose lyrics have created controversy for their apparent violent misogyny and homophobia, posed a risk to Australian women.

The Immigration Department was considering revoking Tyler’s visa when he announced his tour would be cancelled, via a tweet telling Collective Shout Director Coralie Alison “You Won”.

“Yeah, that was a win,” Roper laughs.

Roper says, with Tyler, the issue goes beyond freedom of expression.

“It’s not about offence, or personal taste. If that was the case, maybe we’d campaign against Nickelback for being rubbish,” she says.

“It’s about the promotion and normalising of hostile and hateful attitudes to women. But our campaign went further than that. When we appealed to the Immigration Minister to deny Tyler a visa, we pointed to his real-life behaviour.”

According to Roper, Tyler singled out a Collective Shout activist for a “really

AXED TOUR: The UK banned Tyler The Creator.

vicious” tirade from the stage at his Sydney concert in 2013.

She says the group targets artists with a strong youth base. That’s the reason the group didn’t campaign against Troy Newman. Roper says in deciding who can and can’t come to Australia, the law “doesn’t seem to be applied consistently”.

Vines says it leads to inconsistencies in the law’s application when people are kept out the country because of what they say.

“So we have a situation where someone with anti-abortion or misogynist views are not allowed, but you may let in someone with, say, virulently antiIslam views,” he says.

“Once you start denying people a visa based on the expression of their thoughts, you’re getting into a pretty dangerous area” Vines was referring to Geert Wilders, the right wing politician whose platform includes a ban on all Islamic immigration and who has had better luck than Newman. He arrived in Australia in early October to help launch the Australian Liberty Alliance, a political party that shares his antimulticulturalism views.

Wilders was in Perth in 2013, and was due to speak at a public event, before public pressure led to the venue

PHOTO: © Robin Marty.

PHOTO: © demxx.

he had booked pulling out.

“Let me take some credit for that,” says West Australians for Racial Equality chairman Suresh Rajan.

WARE was formed by academics in the late 1980s. They campaign against racial vilification and in areas such as refugee rights. Rajan says he does not agree with Wilders’ views, but that doesn’t mean he should be denied entry.

“Once you start denying people a visa based on the expression of their thoughts, you’re getting into a pretty dangerous area,” he says.

“What we have to do is engage with him about his views on Islam, but once that goes into the area of inciting racial hatred, that’s when it becomes a problem.”

Ultimately freedom of speech must cut both ways, he says.

“The Australian Liberty Alliance is a political party, and if I expect the right to criticise them, I have to expect that they have the right to criticise me.”

Vines says you risk creating martyrs when you ban controversial points of view.

“In this day and age, it’s essentially futile to try to ban anyone’s point of view by physically keeping them out of the country – people can just go on Facebook or YouTube and listen to the speeches that would have been presented here anyway. You just draw attention to it,” Vines says.

“You confirm in their minds that they are being suppressed by a majority that they’re trying to fight against – so it actually lends legitimacy to their grievances.”

The question lingers.

What are you afraid of?

November 2015

15

FEATURES

A hero’s tale of survival Dechen Wangmo

I

t was pitch black on the night of April 28, 1944. World War II was raging. Robert Graham Peter, a West Australian Lancaster bomber pilot, was returning to base with six crew members after bombing the German town of Friedrichshafen when an enemy fighter attacked them head-on.

“Wilhem Johnen,” Peter says, “He was a night fighter, the ace of the whole of Germany, the top man. He attacked us.”

Peter, who was originally from Geraldton, is one of more than 50,000 surviving Australian World War II veterans and one of more than 5000 who have taken part in a photographic project honouring the country’s fighters.

The project, Reflections: Honoring our World War II, was launched earlier this year and ends next month. An initiative of the Australian Institute of Professional Photography, it aims to create a series of portraits that will serve as a pictorial record of Australia’s returned wartime servicemen and women.

Department of Veteran Affairs records show that 993,000 Australians volunteered in World War II. More than 75 years later, and at 98 years old, Peter effortlessly recalls every detail from that night, which he describes as the night he was born again.

“They hit us right to the belly, setting us on fire and also putting us into a fatal spin that I couldn’t pull her out of,” Peter recalls.

The Lancaster, which was flying at about 1800m, lost altitude fast. At 900m, Peter finally succeeded in pulling it out of the spin.

“Once I managed to stop the spin, there was only one thing to do and that was to land on the lake below,” Peter says, referring to Lake Constance, which is wedged between Switzerland and the German town of Gaienhofen.

Peter moves around with the ease of someone much younger. His voice is anything but feeble and his amazing memory, which only fails when it

comes to exact dates, is something that fascinates his carer, Kunga Om. “I am just 30, but I don’t remember half the things from my past. Bob remembers everything. It’s amazing.

Bob never ceases to amaze me with his brain power,” Om says.

Peter’s story of survival is remarkable. Flying with bomber command was seen as one of the most dangerous tasks for a pilot. Many of them never returned.

But death was the last thing on Peter’s mind as he struggled to steady the stubborn aircraft on that spring night in 1944.

Death is not what comes to your mind. Your whole body mobilises into action. You are thinking clear. You do what you have to do and leave the rest to God,” he says.

Peter was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for landing the Lancaster safely that night. The award is only given for “an act or acts of valor and courage or devotion to duty performed whilst flying in active operations against the enemy”.

“One moment you are a teacher and the next time you are in a bombers aircraft dropping bombs on Hitler’s places and Hitler’s people” Murray Bartle from Perth, was also on board. He was the wireless operator and Peter’s longest standing crew member. In his short account of the night in the book Duel Under the Stars, written by Wilhem Johnen, Bartle praises Peter for managing to land a badly damaged aircraft on a lake in the middle of the night. Bartle describes it as an outstanding effort which was worthy of the award.

Johnen, the German night fighter who downed Peter’s aircraft, describes it as a miraculous feat of airmanship.

Peter says all he could do at first

was to concentrate on saving the aircraft. He had no idea whether his crew had survived. He considered jumping.

But he then realised bomb aimer Noel Davis and gunners Paddy Balmer and Vin Graham were still on board. He later found out that flight engineer Bob Brereton and navigator Geoffrey Foulkes had jumped.

After the aircraft hit the lake’s surface, Peter and the three other men made a frantic break for Switzerland, where they were taken as prisoners of war and later released.

Peter, who was married and had a daughter, was a teacher before he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force in August 1941. He was trained as a pilot, got his wings a year later and was posted overseas to join the Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force.

“It was a revolution. One moment you are teacher and the next time you are in a bombers aircraft dropping bombs on Hitler’s places and Hitler’s people,” he says.

“Everyone enlisted in Australia.

Australia was a very loyal member of the British Empire. I needn’t be enlisted, but I did. For me that was a duty.

“War was where the glory was.”

After the war, Peter returned to work in the education sector. He worked as a school principal, lecturer and a teacher consultant during the course of his career. He was also a marriage celebrant.

A quick look around his room in a Perth nursing home shows Peter is an orderly and organised person. This is exactly what caught his second wife Susie’s eye.

Susie first met Peter through her daughter Penelope, who had hired Peter as her wedding celebrant.

“I stood at Bob’s front door with my daughter getting out to lunch and he came to the front door. He had highly polished shoes and his home was so neat and in such good order and he looked at me and smiled and I just looked into his eyes and I thought you are the most adorable creature I have ever met,” Susie says.

Susie is from England and also served in World War II. She enlisted in the Women’s Royal Naval Service in London and later moved to Australia with her first husband, who was also a bomber pilot.

“We have both parted from our part-

WAR HEROES: Susie and Bob both served in WWII.

ners,” Peter says. “They died after the war around the same time. There was a hole in the heart that needed fixing. For both her and me.”

Peter was very close to his mother.

Every time Peter talks about her, a smile brightens his face and his eyes well up. A lump forms in his throat as he talks about his mother’s death. Peter was not home when his mother died in 1949. He was away in Indonesia working with the UNICEF. “That was a very sad moment because I was in Indonesia with no phone and no chance of getting back here because of the bureaucracy. They said it would take three days to get my visa,” he says.

FRIEDRICHSHAFEN CAMPAIGN: The wreck of Peter's Lancaster ND759 is salvaged from Lake Constance in 1953.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

Peter’s mum was the only family he had.

“Always ask a boy about his mother and if he says he has got a beautiful mum and he loves her dearly, it's a good start,” Susie says, with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

For a man who started his working life during the Great Depression, letting others take care of him in a nursing home is difficult. “I like to run things, but here I am being told to do this and that,” he says, looking at Om. “Young people like her run my life now.”

Peter’s story is just one of the thousands of wartime stories that are worth capturing before they are lost forever.

PHOTO: Supplied.

November 2015

16

FEATURES

Blown out of all proportion VIOLENT SPECTATORS: WA Crowd aggression isn’t the worst.

Shelby Brady

I

n September, Hawthorn Football Club took on the Fremantle Dockers in the preliminary final at Domain Stadium in Subiaco.

The game attracted attention when footage of a male football fan hitting a young mother went viral on the internet. The video attracted more than 1.5 million views on Facebook.

Following the incident, the man was arrested and charged with common assault, obstructing a police officer and disorderly behaviour in a public place.

He was banned from events at Domain Stadium for life.

Despite the public interest in the video, the incident was minor when compared with incidents in other countries, according to Victoria University

Published under Creative Commons licence. Details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Photo: © Mikael Miettinen.

Associate Professor Ramón Spaaij.

In 2011, after their team lost a game during the Stanley Cup finals, Vancouver Canucks fans rioted through the city, forcing police to use riot shields and tear gas to control them.

Local businesses were looted and cars were set alight.

In 2012, 74 people were killed and many others injured when spectators invaded a soccer stadium in the Egyptian city of Port Said.

Spaaij says parts of South America, including Argentina and Brazil, have the most regular instances of violence.

“Fifteen to 20 people die each year through fan violence, where guns are being used as well,” he says.

“The other area that’s increasingly looked at is Eastern Europe, but it’s not necessarily so much in terms of physical violence but particularly in the rise of real racism.”

Compared to these incidents, Spaaij says Western Australia fares extremely well.

“When an incident happens and it gets hugely covered in the media, it

might appear to the general public that it’s out of control in Australia, and I would say, ‘no, it’s not, it’s not really out of control’,” he says.

“More collective violence, more large-scale fighting or incidents that you sometimes see overseas, we haven’t really seen in Australia for a very long time.”

One of them yells “Come on Greg!” as he zip lines down the side of the snowcapped mountain at great speed.

This would be a rush for anyone.

Madson, however, is totally blind. The experience is an adrenaline rush most can’t fathom. His zip-line challenge in New Zealand was part of a tour for the vision-impaired run by Leederville tour company Travel Tree.

He says he started to put his disposable income towards travel after catching the travel bug during the 1990s.

“I was in a Paralympic cycle squad in the 90s and I started travelling then as a person who was blind and visually

impaired, and from that I just enjoyed it.”

Madson says he has met other visually impaired people who inspire him, including Felicity Douglas, who experienced snow for the first time on their trip to Queenstown.

He says Felicity was totally blind and totally deaf and was communicating through an interpreter.

“Unfortunately a few of these isolated incidents have probably tarnished the 99.9 per cent of fans who are really well behaved” Spaaij says minor incidents like those in WA during the AFL finals should be put into perspective.

If people are stopped from expressing their emotions at a sporting

event, the sport loses its attraction because passion is a big part of sport, he says.

Sports lawyer Paul Horvath says Australian fans are well behaved at sporting events.

“I think that we’re pretty fantastic attenders at sporting events generally in Australia,” Horvath says.

Horvath says it is sometimes unclear where the line should be drawn in terms of behaviour, but swearing at the football is quite common.

He says things have gone too far when there is physical contact, racism or religious vilification.

But banter between fans in the grandstand is often enjoyable.

Domain Stadium media and communications manager Steve Tuohey says the stadium’s management company does not tolerate any antisocial behaviour. Offenders can be removed.

“Unfortunately a few of these isolated incidents have probably tarnished the 99.9 per cent of fans who are really well behaved,” he says.

Tuohey says alcohol plays a part in

the violence, and measures have been put in place to address this.

“All of the staff that are working at licensed areas at the stadium have responsible service of alcohol certification and there is also security on all the bars to make sure that no one intoxicated is being sold alcohol,” he says.

According to Spaaij, the relationship and communication between fans, police, and security is vital to stopping spectators from becoming aggressive or violent.

“A lot of research shows, particularly from Europe, that we’ve got to be really careful that with police and private security, that we don’t overreact because it can actually escalate,” he says.

Examples of such “overreactions” include the police use of pepper spray on fants involved in minor incidents.

Spaaij says there needs to be a balance.

Fans need to be able to express themselves at sporting events without making things unsafe or unpleasant for other spectators, he says.

tures could be a challenge because people sometimes reacted differently to people with vision impairments.

According to Vision Australia, 350,000 Australians are blind or visually impaired and three quarters of blindness and vision loss is caused through four conditions – cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and muscular degeneration.

But people with vision impairments are showing there are no limits to living an independent and adventurous lifestyle.

Blind Citizens Australia national advocacy and policy officer Rikki Chaplin, who was born totally blind, says travelling is extremely rewarding.

“That atmosphere of a place you go is just as powerful as being able to see something,” he says.

Chaplin says travel provides visionimpaired people with independence and a sense of achievement.

“The benefits of travel for people who are blind are that it’s a real selfconfidence builder once you get out there. It can make you realise that the things you previously feared and once had anxieties about are quite possible and quite achievable.”

Chaplin also has a hearing impairment, which makes understanding foreign accents a challenge.

Despite the benefits, Chaplin says travelling is challenging.

“It’s the insecurity that you feel when someone says to you they will meet you at a certain point and certain time,” he says.

Chaplin says the surroundings of unfamiliar airports were also daunting.

Erika Webb, Madson’s partner, says she is conscious of having to relate the sights to her blind companion.

“You tend to describe things more than you would if you were travelling with a fully-sighted person,” she says.

“I’ve been travelling with blind people for years so I’m in the habit of describing things as I see them. It makes you stop and think about what words you would use to describe certain things.”

When they travel, Webb focuses on where they are and the physical aspects of travel, while Madson focuses on what they’re going to do and gets an audio description of his surroundings from Webb.

Travel Tree tour escort George Booth and his wife Josephine have been running the tours since 2008. The tours take about 30 people. Half are visionimpaired and the other half are sighted companions.

Booth has escorted tours to Hong Kong, China, New Zealand, Thailand, and Sabah, and Singapore. He says the number of blind travellers has increased dramatically since 2008.

Madson says one of the highlights of his travels was a visit to a museum in Thailand where the blind visitors were able to touch and feel the sculptures on display.

If vision-impaired people have a lesson for others, it is that being blind imposes no limits. Whether it is ziplining across mountains in New Zealand or waiting to be met at an airport on the other side of the world, the satisfaction of tackling fears and overcoming obstacles makes the experience enjoyable.

A heightened sense of adventure Sophia Constantine

G

reg Madson stands nervously on a wooden platform, 30m off the ground. He smiles as a guide secures the harness before releasing him into space. The surrounding tour group cheers and applauds.

TRAVEL BUZZ: Greg Madson zip-lined in New Zealand.

PHOTO: Supplied.

“It can make you realise that the things you previously feared and once had anxieties about are quite possible and quite achievable” VisAbility, formerly Association for the Blind of WA, spokeswoman Michelle Frith says it is important for people with vision impairment to have the same opportunity to travel as anyone else. She says unusual surroundings are a challenge for the vision-impaired.

“A lot of our clients are used to their routes, so they can safely navigate their way to the shops or their way to work, because they are journeys that they take every day. Going on a holiday would place them in really unfamiliar surroundings,” she says.

Frith says interaction with other cul-

November 2015

17

FEATURES

Surviving the Nepal Quake Caleb Gorton

R

aoul Poncin thought hiking through Nepal with two friends would prove to be the trip of a lifetime, but the 19-year-old’s first overseas experience quickly turned sour when the group was caught in the middle of the country’s deadliest earthquake in recent memory. Now, Poncin is writing a book about the experience.

It was around midday on April 25 when the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal. At the time, Poncin was walking along a cliff face with friends Rin Hutcheson and Jalada Wilson, both 18, in the Langtang valley.

A fist-sized rock came flying at them, narrowly missing Poncin and Hutcheson.

More than 900,000 homes were destroyed and 5.6 million people were affected. At the time, 549 Australians were known to be in Nepal.

“Everything started going sideways and shaking and then everything went up and down,” Poncin recalls.

He says the group was “yelling and pretty excited” at first. The mood soon changed.

“There was a massive cliff face hanging over 100m high, and all started coming down and we were directly under it,” he says.

Poncin says boulders crashed around them as they ran. “I took a step and saw a big rock coming towards me,” he says. “If I had taken another step, the whole rock would have cleaned me out.” He used his tent as a shield to protect himself and then took shelter under a boulder.

“I jumped behind there and I literally thought, ‘Rin’s dead’ because he kept running. Jalada was behind me and a car-sized boulder went over his head and just missed him,” Poncin says.

The earthquake caused so much noise that Hutcheson and Wilson could not hear Poncin’s desperate cries.

Hutcheson describes the sound as a deep, thundery rumble that came from beneath. “You can hear cracking and trees and rocks falling and sand flying.

It goes for about a minute,” he says.

The trio was overjoyed when they were able to be reunited after the earthquake, waiting an hour before they trekked to the nearest town. It was only then that Poncin started to realise just

how lucky they had been.

“When we started walking back to the town, there was a 100m landslide and no path, and 10m on the other side there was another 100m landslide,” he says. “We were in this little safe pocket.”

The group continued through a valley that was blanketed in ashen dust.

“Everything was grey, every single plant and every tree, there was no green,” he says.

They headed for the nearby town of Syabru Bensi, but their journey was riddled with close calls. It was a stray dog that proved their greatest ally as they approached a cliff face.

“We knew that dogs have better hearing so they could hear something crack,” Poncin says. “It looked at us with a full human expression, like ‘can you guys not hear this?’ It started jogging so we started jogging, then it started sprinting so we were fully running.”

By the time they reached the nearest village, the area they had run through had been taken out by a landslide.

“So many close calls,” Poncin says.

The boys made it to Syabru Bensi, where only one building was left standing.

“It was complete chaos,” Poncin says. “We set up our tent and didn’t have breakfast, lunch or dinner.”

“Everything he had he fed to people, and now he’s in Kathmandu living in a tent on the street” Once they settled into a makeshift camp in the town, the boys were finally able to appreciate the scale of the disaster. Death soon became all too familiar.

“One day, we were by the river and there was a cremation going on 15m next to us,” Poncin says. “Rin was washing his socks and we were cracking jokes. Then it hit me. When I think about death before then it would be a touchy subject. That was the first time reality hit.”

The boys hadn’t eaten for two days when they befriended Joku, a local who gave them food. Joku was eager to walk

LUCKY SURVIVAL: (L to R) Poncin, Wilson and Hutcheson in Langtang Valley.

to Kathmandu to see whether his family had survived the earthquake. The boys convinced Joku to stay with them in Syabru Bensi for one more day.

As it turned out, this was the right move. Many of those who walked to Kathmandu were caught in a deadly landslide.

“We were lucky we didn’t go with them,” Poncin says.

Joku set off the next day with the boys’ names written on a piece of paper.

He was to have found them on Facebook when he reached Kathmandu, but the boys never heard from him again.

After hearing about the Nepal earthquake, Wilson’s mother Ida Chamidah flew to Kathmandu.

“She had no idea that we were alive.

She thought she might have had to go there to identify three bodies,” Poncin says.

By the time she located them, the boys had been camping without supplies for seven days. After a helicopter ride to an army base in Dhunche, Wilson was reunited with his mother.

“Jalada’s mum was like, ‘my baby!’ and drops all her stuff and bawls her eyes out and grabs Jalada in front of 200 people,” Poncin says. “Everyone got up and started clapping.”

The group then walked seven hours to Kalikasthan where a jeep was meant to be waiting for them.

RESCUE RELIEF: The Nepal Army Air Service.

The driver, however, had left.

“We were there for seven nights at the camp, we were told every single day that we were going to get out next,” he explains. We finally get out, finally get there, and he had left.”

So they paid a driver $200 to take them to Kathmandu. Two days later they were on a plane home.

Poncin spent a month in Indonesia with Hutcheson and Wilson before travelling to Nepal and had planned to travel through India for three months before moving to Amsterdam.

Instead, he decided to head back to Perth. Hutcheson says the boys joked about their photographs being on the television news or on a Facebook page.

“When we came back it was pretty insane to see so many people caring and

PHOTO: Supplied.

PHOTO: Supplied.

worrying for us,” he says.

It’s now six months since the earthquake that changed their lives. Since returning home, Poncin has been involved in five fundraising events and particularly wants to help those who helped him.

He plans to raise money for Babou, a Syabru Bensi man who fed the boys even though his restaurant had been flattened by the earthquake. Poncin remembers digging through the rubble with Babou to find rice.

“Everything he had he fed to people, and now he’s in Kathmandu living in a tent on the street,” Poncin says.

International Federation of Red Cross Nepal head of delegation Max Santner says the scale of the disaster was huge and Nepal had only just started to recover. The Red Cross hopes to raise $122.4 million to help those affected by the earthquake.

“It will be a huge job and take years and many partners to rebuild Nepal,” Santner says.

Reflecting on his experience, Poncin simply says: “I don’t know how us three all survived. Now I appreciate just a cup of water.”

DEADLY DISASTER: The Gorkha quake was the worst to strike since 1934.

PHOTO: Supplied.

November 2015

18

FEATURES

Growers have royal blue Louis Zambotto

I

n WA’s potato industry, tensions are boiling over.

It’s Spudshed owner Tony Galati who has perhaps the biggest chip on his shoulder.

The Potato Marketing Corporation limits the amount of potatoes Galati can grow as part of its efforts to protect the market from oversupply.

Galati wants a deregulated market, which will see more potatoes grown in WA , more competition and cheaper prices for consumers.

But it will also lead to lower profits for growers.

With both sides of state politics committed to deregulating the market by 2017, the days of the PMC appear numbered.

According to the Potato Growers Association of WA, 78 growers supply WA’s fresh market produce. They range from small, family-run businesses, to bigger businesses like Galati’s Spudshed empire.

PGAWA president Dean Ryan believes deregulation will send half the growers bankrupt within three years.

He paints a grim picture of the industry’s future, saying profits will be slashed and businesses like Spudshed will expand, forcing smaller growers out of the industry.

Ryan predicts smaller growers will eventually be sub-contracted by Galati, effectively going from a position where they are Galati's competitors to one in which they become his employees.

“Over the next two or three years, we’ll lose at least 50 per cent of the growers,” he says.

“We’re talking about smaller, family-run businesses. The outlook would be very bleak for small, and even medium-sized growers here.”

POTATO WARS: Tony Galati favours industry deregulation.

Ryan points to the situation in the Eastern States when talking about the effects of deregulation.

He says prices have fallen and are no longer profitable.

“Corporate growers have entered the industry over there, and they dominate it now,” he says.

Baldivis Farms managing director Sam Calameri grows 35 hectares of potatoes, and wants a regulated industry.

He says regulation brings stability to growers.

“It costs you about 45c a kilo to produce potatoes, it’s a very costly exercise,” he says.

“The average selling price in a regulated system could be anywhere from 60c to 70c, depending on the yield and the time of the year.

“But some growers struggle and make 50c a kilo. It’s pretty tight sometimes.”

Calameri says the current system provides support for all growers.

“All our money goes into a pool system, and each grower subsidises each

other,” he says.

“If a grower has a poor crop, he’ll still get to sell his produce and get paid.

“Whereas, in a deregulated system, if you’ve got a poor crop then you’ll just have to wear it and you’ll lose that crop.”

“By getting rid of the potato board, we save 14c a kilo straight away” According to Galati, this is a romanticised view.

He says the current system is unfair for the larger growers and he often has to subsidise smaller businesses by selling their products.

He says he reached his growing limit earlier this year and had to stop producing potatoes for two weeks.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.

Galati then had no choice but to buy, market and sell potatoes from other growers.

“The f***ing rubbish we got from other growers was substandard product and we had to market it,” Galati says.

“I had to then lift the price up by 50c a kilo in my shops. I had to buy crap, while ours were sitting right there in the ground.”

Galati says PMC fees also take their toll.

“We pay $780,000 a year to the potato board, just for the right to grow potatoes,” he says.

“We get nothing for that.”

For Galati, that charges effectively strips him of the first 14c from every kilo of potatoes he produces.

“By getting rid of the potato board, we save 14c a kilo straight away,” he says.

“It will make it significantly cheaper to produce over the long term.”

Galati says the PMC was designed to help consumers, but only helped the growers.

WA Opposition agriculture spokesman Mick Murray says a deregulated market will mostly benefit consumers.

“It’s part of government reform to have an open market where supposedly the consumer will win, because competition then comes into the market,” he says.

“The end result is that the consumers are the winners.”

Galati says a deregulated market will reduce the price for consumers, make growers more efficient and increase the range of potatoes on offer.

“Potatoes will definitely get to at least 50 to 60c a kilo in stores,” he said.

A PMC spokesperson says it’s important to ensure a there is a smooth transition when the market is deregulated to ensure the bigger growers don’t force smaller growers out of business.

Meanwhile, the PMC has launched legal acction against Galati, alleging he had oversupplied the market with his produce.

It signalled its attitude towards Galati in its latest annual report, which said growers faced a tough year because of weather conditions and a substantial oversupply, largely by one grower.

Galati says he just wants to grow enough potatoes to keep his own stores fully stocked.

But the PMC says Galati will exploit a deregulated market by expanding, thereby pushing smaller growers out of the industry.

“There is a real risk the transition to deregulation will be sudden, disorganised, and highly damaging to other participants, and to the industry,” the PMC said in a statement.

Galati says smaller growers will benefit from a deregulated scheme, but some will need help.

In another hit for potato growers, the Smith’s Snackfood Company has announced plans to close its Canning Vale factory next year.

Ryan says the closure, combined with deregulation, means tough times lie ahead for WA’s potato industry.

Fitting tribute to star forward Heather Miller

I

n early 2011, 17-year-old Dylan ‘Didge’ Tombides, a West Australian who had been snapped up by English Premier League club West Ham United, had the football world at his feet.

He had just made his debut for the Australian under-17 team as a freshfaced Perth boy with goal scoring talent, and was arguably on his way to becoming one of the nation’s best young footballers.

By April of that year, he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer.

“My heart sank,” Dylan’s mother Tracy-Lee says. “Jim (Dylan’s father) was with Dylan in Cancun after the under-17 World Cup when I received a call from them telling me that the Australian doctor had called. He said that Dylan had to get checked as his results from the random drug test had come back positive for the banned substance HCG, which is also a tumour marker.”

Tombides says she was shocked when she found out her son was going to be pumped full of chemicals that would kill everything in his system.

“I felt absolutely helpless,” she says.

Family and friends describe Dylan as a “considerate, determined and ambitious boy, who brought out the best in everyone”. He battled the disease for three years. Even while being prodded with needles and with drugs being

pumped into his bloodstream, Dylan continued to play.

“Dylan could always find something to laugh about,” Tombides says.

“This gave us huge comfort to see him coping so well. He stayed positive by focusing on his football, planning his treatment around his training sessions and games, and spending as much time being active with friends as he possibly could.”

After three years of treatment, however, Dylan was moved to recovery when the cancer returned, this time more aggressively. Tombides says her son had a reputation as “the happiest kid with cancer”.

Dylan died in a London hospital on April 18 last year, with family and friends by his side.

WA Cancer Council statistics show testicular cancer is one of the most common types for young men, accounting for one in every five sufferers.

The disease was found in 68 West Australians in 2013, but only a handful of men died that year.

Tombides says she promised Dylan that something good would come from his battle.

“When we took Dylan home for his service, we knew we had to do something in his memory and we weren’t quite sure in which direction we wanted to go until we were talking with his mates,” she says.

“They said to us that they didn’t even know what Dylan’s symptoms were, what he was feeling and they had very little education on this men’s health issue.

“It was then we realised that aware-

ness around the disease was necessary. We officially launched DT38 in February 2015.”

The Dylan Tombides Foundation — more commonly known as DT38 because of the number Dylan wore at West Ham — was established to remember his rich personality and to teach kids to dream big.

“DT38 aims to use Dylan’s story to inspire people to lead positive and meaningful lives,” Tombides says. “It breaks our heart to think that this could have been prevented.”

“He was a role model and someone that others looked up to and admired, both as a footballer and as a person” Dylan’s story is quickly spreading across the footballing world. Socceroos and Crystal Palace captain Mile Jedinak is now DT38’s chief ambassador after meeting with the family just days after his passing “Dylan’s story affected the footballing world in a variety of ways,” Jedinak says.

“The DT38 foundation means an awful lot to me, having been named chief ambassador and having got to know Dylan’s story through his immediate family and close friends.”

DT38 has adopted “delay is deadly,

get educated” as its official slogan to remind young men of the importance of being checked for testicular cancer.

WA Cancer Council spokeswoman Melissa Ledger says the disease is the most common cancer in men aged 15 to 39 and that one in every 275 men will be diagnosed with the disease before they turn 75.

“This is an age when many younger men may not think they are at risk of cancer,” she says.

The disease is, however, one of the most beatable forms of cancer, with up to 99 per cent of young men surviving it. Early diagnosis is crucial, she says.

Natasha Evans, a Tombides family friend, says she felt she had to do something after watching the boy she had always known as “Didge” fight for his life.

“When everyone should’ve been raising his spirits, Didge was raising theirs,” she says.

“He was a role model and someone that others looked up to and admired,

DYLAN TOMBIDES. PHOTO: Supplied.

both as a footballer and as a person.”

The primary school teacher moved from WA to London to help set up the foundation and kickstart a new educational program that will be included in UK and Australian school curriculums next year.

Evans says she hopes to increase awareness of testicular cancer and to help children recognise the symptoms.

A statue of Dylan was erected outside nib Stadium in September.

“The fact that a statue would stand at the home of football in Perth, his hometown, was an acknowledgement of not only the footballer he was, but as a role model that people of all ages could look to as inspiration,” Tombides says.

Although he couldn’t attend the unveiling, Jedinak says he was amazed at the support the foundation had received.

“The people and organisations who have been in direct contact with DT38 after hearing about what we stand for and their willingness to help out, only makes its name and ambition grow,” Jedinak says.

Evans says the foundation will work with West Ham and the Socceroos to spread the word about testicular cancer.

November 2015

19

SPORT

McInnes hopeful of filling Sinclair’s shoes

Callum Gordon

DREAM BIG: McInnes wants to play more in 2016.

PHOTO: Stefan Gosatti.

West Coast key position player Fraser McInnes says the departure of Callum Sinclair means he is likely to get more opportunities to play in the AFL in 2016.

McInnes was drafted by the Eagles in 2011 and made his AFL debut in April. He played seven games during 2015, kicking six goals.

He said he still needed to improve.

“I’m confident I can go up a notch and hopefully contribute to some team success next season,” McInnes said.

Competing with McInnes for a league berth will be new recruit Jonathon Giles, who came to the Eagles from Essendon during the trade period.

McInnes said he hoped to impress the coaching staff during the preseason.

“I’m looking forward to the challenge. That’s what summer is about, constant improvement,” he said.

“Even though pre-season games and round one are still months off, it is still in the back of your mind to put

in a really strong body of work to give yourself the best possible chance.”

The Eagles recruited three established AFL players during the trade period in an effort to make back-toback grand finals for the first time since 2005-2006.

Lewis Jetta came to the club from the Sydney Swans, while Jack Redden was at Brisbane. Giles had also previously played with Greater Western Sydney.

McInnes said West Coast had an aggressive mindset going into the trade period and did most their trades in the first three days.

“To bring in two proven and hardened players such as Jetta and Redden is only going to bolster the club,” McInnes said.

“The inclusion of Giles is a really good one, we only gave up five spots in the draft,” he said.

Club spokesman Gary Stocks said the Eagles had targeted players who would bring something new to the team.

“Jetta gives us a bit of pace through the midfield. We reckon he’ll be ideally suited to Subiaco,” he said.

Stocks said the Eagles needed

another tall player after they traded Sinclair for Jetta.

Giles had proven he could play at the top level and offered support to Nic Naitanui and Scott Lycett, he said.

Midfielder Brant Colledge, 21, said he would stay with the Eagles despite attracting interest from the Bombers.

But the Eagles later de-listed the 2013 draftee and announced they would re-draft him as a rookie if he wasn’t drafted by another club.

Colledge has played three games for West Coast since his debut in 2014, but injury has hampered his development.

“With a few guys going elsewhere hopefully I can work my way into the team for 2016,” he said.

Others who were de-listed included Simon Tunbridge, Murray Newman, Will Maginness, Dylan Main, Rowen Powell and Alec Waterman.

Waterman is also expected to be redrafted as a rookie.

Scott Selwood was allowed to join his brother at Geelong under free agency rules, Matt Rosa was traded to the Gold Coast and veteran Beau Waters retired from football.

She said 19 swimmers got hypothermia on a 46-degree day in 1991.

Mr Corney said hypothermia could be managed with an appropriate diet, fluid intake and warmth.

“All swimmers are notified of the risks associated with open water swimming and are required to sign a waiver that outlines that they have

understood what’s involved,” he said.

A medical risks form given to competitors warns that those most at risk of suffering hypothermia have low body fat, a slow swim time and limited open water experience.

The first Port to Pub Rottnest Channel race is expected to attract up to 1200 competitors.

New trails for tourists Wetsuits allowed in new race Callum Hunter

New mountain bike trails will be built in Dwellingup under a $1.2 million plan aimed at drawing more tourists to the area.

Shire of Murray chief executive officer Dean Unsworth said the Murray Valley Concept Plan would see up to 20km of downhill and cross-country bike tracks built.

Mr Unsworth said mountain biking was an important part of Dwellingup’s tourism industry, which was worth $27.5 million.

He said Tourism WA research found Dwellingup was known worldwide for its mountain bike trails.

“It’s the one point where the Munda Biddi trail meets the Bibbulmun Track, so that really attracts people who have a passion for bikes and walking,” he said.

WA Mountain Bike Association president Louise Wallace said the plan would boost tourism in the shire.

Mr Unsworth said the facilities built

as part of the Murray Valley Concept Plan would include quality bike trails, walk trails, backpacker accommodation, public wifi and other amenities and facilities.

The State Government has identified mountain biking as one of WA’s fastest growing recreational sports.

In September, it announced it would give $450,000 to the WA Mountain Bike Association and WA’s peak cycling body over the next three years to help expand the sport.

Environment Minister Albert Jacob said about 120,000 mountain bikes were purchased each year in WA and almost 500,000 people in WA owned a mountain bike.

Department of Sport and Recreation senior policy officer Steven Bennett said the government grant was part of the WA Mountain Bike Strategy.

“We’ve spent about three years in researching and developing a strategy for mountain biking in WA because we know it’s growing faster than the environment can tolerate,” Mr Bennett said.

Shelley Stallard

A wetsuit swim will be included in the new Port to Pub Rottnest Channel race in an effort to help competitors ward off hypothermia.

Event organiser Ceinwen Roberts said hypothermia was one of the reasons many swimmers did not complete the Rottnest swim.

She said allowing triathlon wetsuits in the new event would attract first-time competitors, although wetsuit swims would not be counted as official.

Ms Roberts said the new race would use the Rottnest Channel swim regulations.

Other swimsuits had to comply with those regulations, she said.

“A swimsuit must not extend beyond shoulders or ankles,” she said.

“Swimmers must not wear any item with neoprene or any other buoyant material.”

Rottnest Channel Swim Association president David Corney said solo swimmers often finished the race with hypothermia.

Mr Corney said four swimmers were evacuated because of hypothermia last year.

Masters Swimming WA executive officer Wendy Holtom said hypothermia could happen on a hot day.

OPEN WATER: Hypothermia poses a serious threat. PHOTO: Lauren Pow.

Concussed footballers play on — study

Shaun Buchan

HAPPY TRAILS: Scenic rides will help to boost tourism.

PHOTO: Callum Hunter.

Almost half of all players who are concussed while playing Australian football return to the field, according to a new study.

Research published in the Injury Epidemiology journal, published in September, was based on a study of 1564 players from 18 amateur adult clubs across WA and Victoria in 2007 and 2008.

Sports Medicine Australia concussion in sport manager Debra Row said concussions weren’t taken seriously because the effects were not always visible.

She said concussion wasn’t being managed effectively at the amateur level. “First aid is extremely important for everyone to have, but I don’t think you can make it compulsory for coaches because lots of coaches are volunteers,” she said.

The study, Concussion In Community

Australian Football, found an average of 4.9 concussions occurred during every 1000 hours of play It found that management of players after concussion was generally poor as more than half the concussed players continued to play in the same game.

Ms Row said it was important to help coaches understand how serious a concussion was and how it should be managed.

She said people often failed to recognise the signs of concussion because concussions were difficult to diagnose.

“The only people that can diagnose

a concussion are qualified medical doctors,” she said.

She said a coach’s responsibility was to be able to recognise a suspected concussion.

St John of God Ambulance WA media officer Blake Wilshaw said all club events should have someone with first aid training in attendance.

“Concussion is one of the topics covered in first aid training. It is relatively simple to learn,” he said.

A new sports injury first aid course is available through St John.

Retraction Our article New netball centre has girls in a sweat in the September 2015 edition stated: “WA's new State Netball Centre is under fire after recieving several complaints about a lack of ventilation.”

The Western Independent wishes to retract this statement. The State Netball Centre says it has not received any complaints.

We regret the errors and appologise for any inconvenience caused.

NOVEMBER 2015 – Volume 21 No 4

Sport Fan violence

15

Rotto freeze

19

Didge's legacy

18

Downhill fund

19

Top talents unite for Big Bash page

Gareth Thomas

The Perth Scorchers have recruited some of the best Australian and international players in preparation for the inaugural Women’s Big Bash League, which kicks off in December.

Captain Nicole Bolton, 26, said the inclusion of two Australian national players and four international players, including England captain Charlotte Edwards and New Zealand one-day captain Suzie Bates, would stand the Scorchers in good stead.

“We have some really key players in our team,” she said “As a collective we should be a force to be reckoned with.”

Edwards, the only woman to score more than 2000 runs in international T20s, said she did not hesitate when she was offered the chance to return to to Perth.

“I met a lot of the girls when I was out here last summer, so the transition should be pretty smooth,” she said.

All-rounder Bates, 27, spent the past three seasons playing for WA’s first class women’s team, the Western Fury.

She was named women’s One-Day International Cricketer of the Year in 2013. The WBBL starts on December 5 and will run alongside the fifth edition of the Big Bash league.

The eight women’s teams will play a total of 59 matches in 51 days.

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Both Bolton and Edwards said the introduction of the WBBL would help to improve the profile of women’s cricket.

Edwards said the WBBL would be the best competition in the world and the only tournament that brought so many international players together.

“I think there’s eight of the England team are coming out to play,” she said.

“A number of West Indies, New Zealand and South Africans too.”

Bolton said the recent success achieved by the Australian national women’s cricket team had helped to increase interest in the WBBL. “They’ve won world cups and a recent Ashes tour,” she said. “There’s players in the team that are promoting the game in a really good light and getting young girls playing cricket.”

Bolton said the WBBL would help to provide a career parthway for young female cricketers. Edwards said a T20 tournament would be launched in England during 2016.

The Scorchers’ first round fixture will be played on December 11 against the Brisbane Heat at Aquinas College.

The Heat have served up an unusual recruit in former professional tennis player Ash Barty.

Barty reached the 2013 Australian Open, Wimbledon and US Open doubles finals with partner Casey Dellacqua, catapulting her to a world ranking of 129.

She decided to take an indefinite break from tennis in 2014.

In a statement, Barty said she played cricket in the backyard at school but playing for the Heat would be a big challenge.

She said she had focused on the basics since she started training.

Edwards said the Queensland team would be strong but she wouldn’t underestimate any of the teams.

“South Australia is a team that has been really strong in the 50 over competition,” she said.

“New South Wales have historically been the best team in the competition.”

Bolton said the states with only one team would dominate the competition.

put a slab in and it’s already got toilets and clubrooms and a bar and license and food and everything,” he said.

Mr Lay said bowls club memberships had been dwindling, but 540 roller hockey players had now joined the bowls club.

Lourey said the bowls club was in debt and both parties would benefit from the arrangement.

The league paid for the rink’s construction and each player pays the club $10 a year to use its grounds.

“You’re helping a club who are struggling and the struggling club’s helping us,” he said.

Lourey said the new rink legitimised the league.

When the league started, one school allowed the players to use its ground.

Lourey said the league had found a semi-permanent home at the Margaret Baldwin Centre on Gibbon Street in Mosman Park, but were unable to continue playing at the facility.

“We got kicked off Mosman Park after a year and a half over there,” he said.

Town of Mosman Park communications officer Libby Collett said it could no longer allow the league to play there because of the resurfacing of the courts and some complaints from residents.

“We had the courts resurfaced less than a couple of months ago,” Ms Collett said.

“You can never be 100 per cent sure

of how these things happen because people can access courts at anytime, but there was damage to the surface of the court that was consistent with roller hockey use,” she said.

“We tried to negotiate a solution, but basically we couldn’t really guarantee that no further damage would happen just because of the way the sport plays.”

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New home for roller hockey league Stephanie McGann & Aimee Hughes

Perth’s underground Street Roller Hockey League has moved aboveground, thanks to a new $40,000 rink at the Bayswater Bowling and Recreation Club.

The league, which started in 2013 when Perth boy Eamonn Lourey picked up a hockey stick in in an op shop, has grown from 10 teams to 88 teams in the past two years.

Games have been held in abandoned car parks, primary schools and recreational clubs each week, with teams vying for a trophy made of beer cans, known as the ‘Canley Cup’.

Bayswater Bowling and Recreation Club president Steve Lay said the club offered its car park to the league, but the bitumen was too rough for rollerblades.

“It wasn’t about setting up a rink or anything like that, it sort of morphed into that over a period of time,” Mr Lay said.

He said the bowls club then offered the league a bowling green that had been damaged during a storm.

The club could not afford to have it repaired, he said.

“It was just a reconversion of a sporting field, so we didn’t even need planning because it was the same as putting the bowls green in,” Lourey said.

“We found a place with lights and

WA RETURN: Charlotte Edwards in action.

PHOTO: Getty Images for ECB.

Ms Collett said the Town of Mosman Park would like to have been able to reach a compromise with the roller hockey league.

She said there were occasional noise complaints from nearby residents, but “never anything major” and the wear and tear caused by the rollerblades only became apparent once the new

surface was installed.

“We actually really loved the street roller hockey guys,” she said.

“I think sometimes when they got together for training they were maybe having fun and making noise and sometimes brought music with them and stuff. They always took steps to fix the situation.”

AMATEUR HOCKEY: Saving the Baysie Bowl Club.

PHOTO: Brooke Rolfe.