The ageing thing

Richard Hil

Mandy Nolan’s wonderfully quixotic article (Echo, 18 January) about turning 55 and loving the ageing process took my day by storm – sort of.

If I understand her correctly, ageing is a kind of clarion call to gratitude and acceptance – those beguiling Buddhist mantras – as well as a royal F-you to those who opine about one’s chronological status. There’s no doubt that ageing is fascinating. As it progresses, you become increasingly mindful of bodily and other changes, over which most of us have little or no control. Various bits begin to wear out, fall off, sag or morph into shapes and sizes that simply amaze, and occasionally horrify.

of self-help books urging the over-somethings to do this or that, or become this or that, according to some ill-defined cultural script or biomedical model. There’s not a tome in sight inviting you to grow old disgracefully.

On 10 July this year I’ll hit 70 – hopefully. In my world, ageing is a mixed bag. It’s certainly not as brilliant as Mandy seems to suggest. It brings with it the organ recitals, the increasing visits to medical personnel, the grief and sadness of losing friends and family. And then there’s getting out of bed in the morning… And the design faults; you might have the time and inclination to do what you’d like to do, like drink, sleep all day and fornicate, but the body’s a determined refusenik.

exclusionary put downs. I’m told that this sort of thing is mostly experienced by women. I don’t know about that. It happens to blokes too, who can also get hit with the ‘old white man’ tag. That said, there are complex historical reasons why said ‘tagging’ is experienced differently across social groups.

A Gambit for the Muse

‘David Lovejoy’s latest novel, White Horses and Dark Knights, is… the story of the fictional George Marks, a British journeyman International Master whose rational mind struggles with the possibility that he may have met – or rather been chosen by – a muse, Kay Orikasa. …Fun to read, with Lovejoy keeping the action and plot twists going until the end.’

– Grandmaster Ian Rogers, Canberra Times White Horses and Dark Knights, paperback, 245pp, is available for $20 at The Echo

The most absurd Zonal tournament in history concluded in Melbourne last week with almost half of the 250 player field gaining new FIDE titles.

The Zonal tournaments are qualifiers for the next stage of the World Championship cycle and, as elite events, were given the rare honour by the world body FIDE of offering titles, up to and including the IM title, based on a single performance.

When Australia broke away from Asia a quarter of a century ago to create Oceania, it was already clear that sponsors did not exist to be able to conduct a traditional Zonal, with the top few players from each Oceania country participating.

Oceania therefore moved to a mass participation model, with the entry fees of amateur players covering the (often poor) prize fund.

While the rest of the world looked on aghast, these mass tournaments proved extremely popular, since every untitled player who scored 50 per cent or more took home a FIDE title.

FIDE later established a rating level which had to be achieved for the title to be officially granted. However, those levels were set so low that it was clear that title devaluation was of no concern.

The mass Zonal reached its apogee last week when the largest and weakest Open Zonal in history was completed in Melbourne.

Only two of Australia’s GMs turned up to battle for a World Cup slot, Perth’s Temur Kuybokarov taking the World Cup position after a playoff against Gary Lane. The other GM, Coffs Harbour doctor Zhao Zong Yuan, led from the start but a shock last round loss to veteran Stephen Solomon enabled six players to overtake him and tie for first place.

The Women’s Zonal, won by top seed Julia Ryjanova after a close race with fellow Women’s Grandmaster Zhang Jilin, also gave away FIDE titles to 19 of the 41 players. (Most will have to move their rating to 1800 –the level of a slightly better than average club player – to claim their title.)

Devaluation of FIDE titles, including that of Grandmaster, has been going on since inflation took hold of the rating system in the 1980s, although the trashing of the lower titles of Candidate Master and FIDE Master has accelerated dramatically since the Oceania zone was created.

Unexpectedly, the Asian Chess Federation, of which Oceania countries are members, is about to admit a new country – Russia! The Russian Federation has reacted to the (very modest) sanctions placed on its players by the European Chess Union and is due to be welcomed as an Asian country at the end of this month.

But there’s more to ageing than personal transformation. Demographic trends around the world are telling us that populations are getting older, birth rates are declining and, in some cases, total numbers are shrinking. The general effects of all this are profound. The age-related demarcations of old, young, not-so-young and every stage between are being radically redrawn, and with growing ranks of ‘the elderly’ and ‘seniors’, social identities are being rethought. (That said, I’ve just looked up some synonyms for ageing, and they’re truly awful: ‘declining’, ‘crumbling’, ‘stale’, ‘slumping’!). An obsession with wellbeing has taken hold, too. Bookstores are full

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Dutton’s racism

Australian politicians have regularly embraced racism when it has suited their cause.

In 1901 we established the so-called White Australia Policy, which effectively precluded non-white immigration to Australia. We proudly maintained this policy, with minor variations, until 1973.

In addition, until 1967 we restricted our First People’s right to vote in federal and state elections and did not include them in our censuses until the late sixties.

Most of our racially motivated stratagems, including those mentioned above, were introduced at the time of Federation in the beginning of the 20th century and probably reflected the mood of the country. To be fair, they probably reflected worldwide

Being older also prompts various unsought comments from people who like to remind you of exactly where you sit in the chronological order. I’ve had people refer to me as ‘young man’, or look at me with that ‘there, there dear’ countenance, and worst of all, render me and others in my age group invisible. It happens, right? It’s not necessarily deliberate. It’s stereotypes and social mores playing out according to familiar positionings when it comes to ‘the aged’. I giggle at it all, mainly because I’ve developed a sort of anthropologian shield. But I don’t like it when I witness the same stuff aimed at people I know. I think I get most upset when witnessing someone, say, in their 80s, rendered voiceless by subtle attitudes until the middle-tolate 1950s.

Menzies (and Caldwell), leaders of the government and opposition during the sixties, were enthusiastic supporters of the White Australia Policy and by today’s standards, were staunch racists. Both Menzies and Caldwell retired in 1966 and Holt and Whitlam became, respectively, leaders of the Coalition and the ALP. Neither was remotely racist and together, and separately, they set about repealing all racially offensive legislation.

Whitlam was followed by Fraser, Hawke, and Keating, all of whom were famously anti-racist and who in less than 15 years transformed Australia from one of the most racist countries on earth to perhaps the least; racism actually became unpopular.

Then, along came ‘Honest’ John Howard.

If you’re utterly secure in yourself, unconcerned by what other people think, then, hey, all this bullshit might just bounce off you. But it’s often hard not to be positioned and ‘othered’ in ways that can impact your lived experience. Our identities, after all, are formed through social interactions – how people treat you matters

As for looking into mirrors and at photographs or, heaven forbid, seeing yourself in 3D fitting rooms, well, you take your chances. Too much self-scrutiny of the compare-and-contrast sort can lead to problems. To prevent existential meltdown, I have taken to peering into a single mirror with subdued lighting and an abundance of self-delusion. I tell myself that the looks thing is superficial, but few

Howard discovered early on that Australia’s racist rednecks could be his road to electoral success. The trick for him was: ‘How do I appeal to the rednecks without alienating those racist voters with an embryo conscience?’.

His answer: ‘make racism acceptable again’. He successfully achieved this by seizing upon overtly racist incidents including the emergence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and the Cronulla riots and providing tacit support for both. He also invented incidents including the Tampa and ‘Children Overboard Affair’ and the ‘discovery of weapons of mass destruction’ that provided the excuse for the Pacific Solution and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq –all acts of extreme racism.

With a little help from Alan Jones, Andrew Bolt et al., in an individualistic culture like ours really buy that one, do they? Personally, I’m eternally grateful to Keith Richards for setting the bar so low when it comes to being seventy plus. He gives people like me hope. I’m reminded too of Daniel Klein’s observation in Travels with Epicurus that at some stage in everyone’s life there’s a reckoning with one’s face.

Maybe, as Mandy suggests, it’s not so much a reckoning as fascination with where life has taken us. Those wrinkles tell a story or two. It’s easy (or not) to write off ageing as a social construction, which doesn’t mean a lot when you’re being patronised. I also find it unhelpful to think of stages of life with discrete characteristics. The idea that ageing corresponds with wisdom isn’t all that true, either. I’ve met airheads in their seventies and super bright and wise teenagers. In truth, by the time we get into our latter years we’re a smorgasbord of life experiences and personal attributes. That’s what makes ageing interesting.

Honest John almost singlehandedly re-established racism as a popular pastime in Australia. This is much to the delight of the meanspirited Peter Dutton who seems to lack the intelligence to embrace reasonable political debate, but is clearly adept at racism and is keen to demonstrate this, probably his only skill.

Dutton paid close attention to the ‘teachings of Howard’. He knows that if he opposes the Voice outright he will be accused of racism, so he has devised the ‘provide more detail’ strategy, which will convince those who want to believe he is not a racist that he isn’t one and simultaneously convince the rednecks who want him to be a racist that he is one. He must be exposed and deposed.

Frank Kelly Crabbes Creek