Malaria – a retrospective

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Only fourteen more sleeps until World Malaria Day! How are you going to celebrate this special day?

Me? I’m probably going to cast my mind back to late 2001 when I was living in Vanuatu and malaria decided to take me for a spin. What a ride that was.

According to the World Health Organisation’s figures, 200 million cases of malaria occur every year.

“Symptoms of malaria include fever, headache, and vomiting, and usually appear between 10 and 15 days after the mosquito bite. If not treated, malaria can quickly become life-threatening by disrupting the blood supply to vital organs. In many parts of the world, the parasites have developed resistance to a number of malaria medicines.” WHO

Rather than try to recall the terror, I’ll share some words from a travel diary. Here’s what I wrote shortly after meeting malaria for the first time:

My most intense health-related experience came in late December 2001. I was looking after Masaaki – a 15-year-old Japanese boy who spoke virtually no English but yet had a mature and effective approach to cross-cultural communication. We had just walked around 10km to and from a beautiful waterfall – I did not at this stage realise that it was going to be my last trip before an earthquake altered the area. It was Christmas Eve and we were downtown in the Seafront Park waiting to see all the well-anticipated night-time action unfold. I felt extremely lethargic so I lay in the foetal position while my friends were taking care of their respective needs.

As I lay there alone two men, who I was immediately suspicious of, approached me and began talking to me in a way that seemed insincere. They asked me what I was doing and I told them I wasn’t feeling too good so I’d probably head straight back to my house. One of them suggested, by using an idiom that he assumed I would not know, I was then going to proceed to masturbate. “What?” I asked him, somewhat shocked by his vulgarity. He was surprised that I understood and gave a pathetic apology in response. Then he asked me if I could buy him some beer seeing as though we were friends. After I rejected that ‘offer’ he asked if I could buy him some cigarettes. “No!” I was often asked to buy cigarettes for people and I always told these people that I would not support the tobacco giants. In a final plea I was asked to buy some orange juice for my “new friends”. “No,” I replied again. Clearly frustrated, they left mumbling some profanities under their breath. Soon Masaaki reappeared and I thought that it was time that I headed back home and got some rest.

Approximately two weeks before I came down with malaria.

Approximately two weeks before I came down with malaria. | Efate, Vanuatu | 2001

The next few days were horrible. I initially thought that I had sunstroke. Then I thought it was maybe the flu. I didn’t want anything for my condition because I wanted build up my immunity system as much as possible. But after two days I was feeling progressively worse and I could barely walk. So I went down to the hospital and collapsed on the dirty vinyl floor until I was attended to. The nurse laughed as I described my symptoms. “I think you have malaria,” she told me calmly. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – I didn’t want to hear this. They took a blood test and sure enough I had malaria. My temperature was over 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) and in three days I had lost 15 kg (33 pounds). I felt terrible. I was given numerous bags of medicine and told to come back the following week. Malaria did not justify special treatment – there was too much of it around.

I knew that it normally two weeks for malaria to incubate so I did the maths and realised that the offending mosquito probably bit me when I was riding around Efate with my brother and a childhood friend. We were riding around Efate – we were supposed to be in Malekula but our ship failed to leave the harbour. We had slept at “Mosquito Corner” one night without nets. We had been making a short film that was to become a collectors’ item for people in Mele Maat village (due to the various scenes shot in Mele Maat) and lovers of pre-teen intellectual comedies.

So I spent close to two weeks in bed with aching bones, stinging headaches, intense fevers, violent nausea, hunger pains, dehydration, nervous shakes etc. Anything I ate or drank came straight back up, I was dry-retching bile, unable to sleep for more than 20 minutes, simple conversations were exhausting – virtually everything I could imagine was in a bad state. After swallowing the bitter medication I often felt depressed, I would spend hours thinking about all the people throughout the ages who had suffered: those who were factory workers during the industrial revolution who worked when they were sick, slaves who did the same for their cruel masters. These kinds of topics occupied my thoughts for several days. I tried to remain as optimistic as possible but that too required a lot of energy – something I did not have. There were a lot of great people around me who made numerous sacrifices to look after me and then I could really appreciate a side of friendship that I had not experienced before. I also learnt that the other two people who stayed at Mosquito Corner with me had also contracted malaria – I was not suffering alone.

After two weeks I was back on my feet. People told me I looked like a neglected prisoner – my eyes were deeply sunken with bags and I was extremely lean. Most people had heard about my bout with malaria but those who had not, were able to establish that something had happened to me just from my physical appearance. Masaaki, who had came over for his first holiday in the South Pacific had spent his first two weeks looking after me and for that I feel eternally grateful. He was incredibly mature for a boy of 15 years and his generous spirit still does not cease to impress me.

After this experience I was extremely proactive in my endeavours to avoid contracting malaria again. Every day I applied insect repellent, slept under a safer net, wore long sleeved shirts when possible, burnt mosquito coils and took Qing Hau – a herbal malarial preventative medicine that tasted worse than kava. Somehow mosquitoes often got into my netting and I would wake up in the morning to find a mosquito, full of my blood, buzzing around trying to escape from the netted area. I saw people in Mele Maat suffering from malaria but they would be lying outside alone taking the sun’s wrath during the day and then the mosquitoes at night. I could not think of worse circumstances in which to attempt to recover from malaria.

Conversation with a wrestler

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Dick was always the comedian. In the mid-nineties this meant he would run through the shopping centre erratically with a can of Pepsi Max clenched in his raised fist as he recreated one of their television commercials. And other times he would launch himself, fully-clothed with inline skates on, into the Redcliffe public swimming lagoon. He may have had us in hysterics, but the city-funded security guards were not as impressed. In any case, I was not completely surprised when I recently learned – through social media – that Dick had started wrestling. I sent out an email asking friends and family if they were interested in watching Dick wrestling. My sister showed the most interest until she realised that she had misread the email and it wasn’t in fact dick-wrestling – but that Dick, as in Richard Atterbury, would be wrestling. She must have thought it was something not unlike the notorious Puppetry of the Penis. Undeterred, I pressed on and got a small crew together to watch Richard wrestle. Ladies and Gentlemen, Richard Atterbury.

 

Richard Atterbury

Dick, all strapped up, prepares for a wrestle. Photo: DDS

How did you get into wrestling?

I watched it regularly as a kid, and then as a teenager. I stopped watching for a few years, but then ended up with cable and access to the big tv shows. The internet opened up access to a lot of stuff I’d never seen before, like wrestling in Japan, Mexico, the UK so I was watching it pretty regularly.

In regards to actually training, there was a little bit of luck involved to be honest. I travelled down to Sydney to watch an international wrestling tour. Through a lack of numbers in the actual crowd, I ended up moving from the 10th row to the second. The entire row in front of me was a group of wrestlers from Queensland and they gave me the contact details for the wrestling school. Coincidentally my future wife was actually travelling with that group in front of me, but was sitting elsewhere.

I called the wrestling school the next week, and started training two weeks after that. I had my first match about two-and-a-half months after starting training.

 

You spend a lot of time in Canada. How does the wrestling scene there compare to the Aussie scene?

It’s very similar in the regards that there’s a handful of excellent companies with great wrestlers, and then there’s the rest which are a step down in quality. Wrestling is an odd business in that no matter where you go, it’s essentially the same beast. I guess one main difference between the two is the proximity to the USA. I equate it to acting. The top tier of successful Australian actors have moved to the States at some point due to the opportunities that are available. Wrestling is not that different. If you’re in Canada, the US is a simple trip over the border and if you’re willing to make the sacrifices, then it’s possible that you’ll be very successful. More and more wrestlers from Australia are making regular trips to the US or Canada now for training and opportunities and conversely are bringing that knowledge back home which is improving the Australian-based product.

 

What persona do you take on in the ring? How did this persona develop?

Trial and error. With lots and lots of error. It’s evolved every year I’ve wrestled, as I’ve learned new things or gained an understanding of how to better react to a live crowd and then it’s also varied depending on where I’m wrestling, if I’m a “good guy” or a villain.

 

Richard Atterbury

Dick isn’t immune to playing the villain. Photo: DDS

You played a bit of a villain in the ring. Did people hold that against you outside the ring?

Absolutely, but then I don’t view that as a bad thing. If an audience member has genuinely disliked or even hated me, then my job as an antagonist or the villain in the match has been done well. It’s easy to get someone to not like you, but to get them genuinely hateful and angry at you takes hard work. As for other wrestlers, I don’t believe anyone has carried a grudge out of the ring. I could be wrong of course and someone out there hates me.

 

Do people completely understand that it isn’t a real fight?

In 2013, I think that everyone over the age of 12 knows that there’s a scripted element to the matches. But like any form of entertainment, it’s the job of the performers to engage the audience enough that they can suspend disbelief and emotionally invest in whats happening in front of them.

Real fights have broken out in the middle of a match, but that’s not that common.

 

You decided to stop eating meat. Is that rare in the wrestling fraternity?

Rare enough that everyone I know took the opportunity to haze me about it. Due to an illness however, I started eating meat again this year after two years as a vegetarian.

 

What are some of the sacrifices you have made for wrestling?

Time with my friends and family. As soon as I started it became a huge part of my life, be it training in the ring, training in the gym, watching wrestling or travelling to wrestle. Of course, you never see that as a sacrifice because it simply becomes something that you do. Plus, wrestling has blessed me with some of the best friends I’ll ever have.

 

Richard Atterbury

Things often go wrong. Here Dick goes down hard and doesn’t get up again. Photo: DDS

What does your wife think about your dedication to wrestling?

She spent seven years wrestling herself, so she totally understands. She gets a little frustrated at me if I push too hard through an injury and worries when I’m away from home but that’s it. I’d have never met her if we hadn’t had mutual friends in wrestling and it’s been a huge bonus to be able to wrestle and have someone completely understand the motivation behind it.

 

Do you see it more as a sport or a theatrics?

In my mind it’s an amalgamation of the two. You can’t have one without the other. I certainly train for it like a sport. The physicality has to be present, but you also require the ability to perform in front of a live audience and be able to tell a story in the match. I guess a modern day superhero morality play is one way of looking at it. There’s good versus evil, there’s guys in Spandex beating each other up and it’s being told in a way that encourages active and loud audience participation.

 
Your response to this comment on Facebook? (added after publication)

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Prior to starting wrestling I lived in the UK for a year, worked a couple of jobs that I didn’t enjoy whatsoever but were a means to end, studied some varied subjects and spent a lot of time partying. I can’t say that I was really heading in any one direction. Wrestling was a big unknown at the time, but through it, I’ve had some amazing experiences that can’t be replicated.

Follow Richard on Twitter.

A photographer returns to Fukushima

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Meet Pete. We used to skate together around Redcliffe in the early and mid-nineties.
We drifted apart in the late nineties but then in 2003 we made contact via one of those “schoolyard-chums” websites only to discover we were both living in Japan. I was teaching English in Tokyo – everyone knew Japan’s capital – and Pete was married and polishing his photography in Fukushima. At that point, very few people outside Japan knew Fukushima. So anyway, we reconnected and have been in touch ever since.

Photographer Pete Leong

Okinawa-based photographer, Pete Leong.

He has since moved to the sub-tropical region of Okinawa and, indeed, he was there in the far south when the notorious 3-11 earthquake and tsunami hit northern Japan.
Just last week I noticed Pete had returned to Fukushima for the first time since the natural disaster and had posted some photographs from the region. I asked him if he was interested in doing a Q&A for my blog. He was.

Pete’s wife Haruna sitting on the recently-laid “tetrapod” seawall at Haramachi.

What is your connection to Fukushima?
My wife Haruna was born and raised in Fukushima. We met in Australia while teaching rock climbing together. We first took a trip to Fukushima for travel and fell in love with the place. I then returned to Fukushima about six months later on a working visa and never looked back. It became home for the next 10 years or so.

How long had it been since you’d last been there?
It had been about three years since I had visited Fukushima. We relocated to Okinawa for work and to live in a warmer place by the sea. We were lucky enough to have moved from Fukushima before all the trouble went down.

Much of the damage to roads is still far from fixed.

What places had changed the most?
At first appearance not all that much had changed. But after spending some time back there I began to notice many places had gone out of business although surprisingly quite a few new places have opened up. I also noticed there was nowhere near the number of kids out playing as there were before and many people have moved away to other areas. I also found several huge pits that have been dug out to dispose of the radioactive dirt that has been removed from around the houses and gardens. There was a lot of reconstruction also going on in my favourite onsen (hot spring) villages up in the mountains as these are very old but popular tourist spots. As soon as I traveled closer towards the nuclear power plant things were very different indeed. Deserted ghost towns everywhere, police road blocks in areas where radiation levels were too high and apocalyptic looking annihilated villages in the direct path of the tsunami.

What was once the shower room at the Haramachi Seaside campground where Pete used to camp.

What shocked you the most?
The day I took a trip out to document how close I could get to the nuclear power plant and tsunami affected areas. I had learned that the government had very recently opened up the public accessible radius from the power plant from 20km to 10km. So my aim was to get in that area and to hopefully get a view from somewhere of the power plant itself. On the way out there I was turned back at police road blocks that went through villages that had ridiculously high levels of radiation. So with our trusty iPhone GPS my wife and I navigated around the heavier-radiated areas to get over to the seaside and first visit Haramachi seaside park. This is where we would often go camping in the summer. It’s a beautiful forested campground by the sea that is also popular with surfers.

A house balancing precariously where the ground has dropped away. The small house was still mostly furnished.

Once we eventually found a route to the area it was amazing to see pretty much the exact line of where the tsunami made it to about 1km inland. The area unaffected by the tsunami was still busy with people going on with their lives like normal but from about 1km to the seaside it was just a wasteland. My wife noticed, however, that the area had been cleaned up a lot since her trip to this area about a year ago. We found some volunteers still there cleaning up trash from the beaches but our little seaside camp area resembled something from a post-apocalyptic movie.
Probably the most shocking thing though, was when we made our way into the newly opened 10km radius of the plant. Inside here pretty much all the small towns by the sea are still left in ruin, houses are pretty much totalled, cars squashed like Coke cans scattered all over the place and totally deserted except for some police patrols cruising around keeping an eye out for scavengers. It was such an eerie and sad feeling walking around these neighbourhoods.

Demolished trucks and cars that were in the path of the tsunami are still scattered all around Fukushima.

What were some of the things that touched you emotionally?
Probably seeing little kids’ toys and tsunami victims’ personal effects still scattered around the place. Houses that are half missing but still full of their owners’ furniture and things. Also, brand new houses that their owners can’t return to. Very sad to see.

Plates and food still sit in the cupboards of this house in on of the new ghost towns.

What special equipment did you take with you?
All we took with us was a Geiger counter which is important to have on you in these areas because if you can’t check the radiation you won’t know if you’re in a high risk area. Most of the time our counter would be registering around 0.19uSv/h but in dangerous areas we saw it spike to over 4 uSv/h. Needless to say we got out of those areas quick smart! Apart from that, we just took our regular camera gear to document the area.

This reading on Pete’s Geiger counter caused brief panic. The couple was en route to the nuclear power plant.

Is there anything else you would like to add?
It was great to get back up to Fukushima again after 3 years away and visit my favourite hot springs, snowboarding and visiting friends/family etc. And it’s good to see life is going on pretty much as normal in most places. It’s not until you take a closer look that you can see the lasting effects from such a devastating incident. It’s going to be a long time before things are back to normal in the tsunami affected areas and they still need all the help they can get from volunteers.

Temporary housing, like these in Pete’s wife’s hometown of Iino, offered a few of the luckier tsunami victims shelter until they can get back on their feet. This is approximately 50km from the worst-affected areas.

Visit Pete’s website or read his blog.

Another year, another year-in-review video

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The end of the year signals a time for reflection on the year that has passed. The media loves compiling lists at the end of each year so it was very little wonder that I created a year-in-review video for APN. Oh, 2012 was such an eventful year. We had Julian Assange holed up in the Ecuador’s London embassy, Gangnam Style hit the interwebs, Kony 2012 did the social media rounds and much more. It was quite a difficult task knowing that I’ll be condemned for neglecting certain events. In any case, I had to create something for regional Australian audiences based largely in coastal Queensland and northern New South Wales.

 

Outlanders – Brief encounter

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Outlanders in Osaka, Japan.

Outlanders take a stroll through the streets of Osaka after a recording session. (L-R Phil, Craig, Adam, Kevin and Mike)

About five years ago when I was living in Osaka some of my workmates were in a band and recording a few original songs. I think the deal was that another bloke paid for their studio time in return for recording a couple of songs that he had penned lyrics for. They had a few catchy numbers that I liked. So when I heard that the Outlanders were heading into the studio I was keen to shoot the whole event with the tiny 3CCD Panasonic consumer-grade camcorder I was using at the time. For some reason I never got around to cutting a video together and I almost completely forgot that I had the tapes until the drummer, Craig (second from left), visited me last week. I promised him that I’d edit a video together. So here it is.

And below is the catchy number titled “Kiseichu” – Japanese for parasite – which refers to grown-up children who still live with their parents and leech off them.

Kiseichu

Parko returns to much fanfare

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World champion surfer Joel “Parko” Parkinson gave me a chance to return to my old stomping grounds – Coolangatta – on Wednesday. After winning the ASP title he was returning to his hometown and his main sponsor, Billabong, was encouraging anyone and everyone to welcome him home. He certainly returned home in style – the main feature for me was when the firetrucks on the tarmac fired their hoses high up into the air and his helicopter passed through the mist. I did the video below to accompany a story and gallery that can be seen here.

Schoolies

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For those of you from overseas, every year when Australian final-year high school students graduate they descend on the Gold Coast – namely Surfers Paradise – to participate in an event called Schoolies. They usually spend a week with friends getting drunk and enjoying their first taste of freedom in various ways. Schoolies starts today and I went down to cover Schoolies Eve for APN. Here’s the video I took:

 

And today in Brisbane we apparently had 10mm of rain in 10 minutes. I took a little bit of video with my D7000 and made a very quick edit with music courtesy of Kevin MacLeod.

Listen closely

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I’d been eagerly awaiting the second series of Lowdown – the sitcom based around the misadventures tabloid journalist Alex Burchill – ever since the first series aired a couple of years back. Sure, there’s a journalistic link, but the unique brand of humour also appeals to me.

So when the first episode of the new series aired, I was there fully attentive and ready to laugh away. What I wasn’t ready for, however, was a reference to something I’d been discussing with some work colleagues earlier that day.

We had been talking about some classic journalistic mistakes – in particular one example that had got one of our mastheads in a little hot water. Anyway, this video I made will explain how the sitcom and the mistake came together.

And have a look at the accompanying infographic here.

Gym-ball mash up

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In my early teens one of my favourite pastimes other than number plate spotting was what I’ll refer to as seaside freestyle gymnastics or SFG. After school a group of us would scurry down to the Margate beachfront and do a variety of flips from a bank onto the sand roughly two feet below. There was no “parkour” in those days. We were just restless youths making the most of our local infrastructure.

Fast forward to today, yes literally today, and as was I walking along the beach at Redcliffe with my camera I saw a couple of young gents launching themselves into the air off a gym-ball that they had partially buried in the sand.

This humble ball has more uses than just doubling as trendy office chairs and being used in jumbo soccer games.

They were kind enough to allow me to photograph what I’ll refer to as, for lack of better term, iSFG 2.0.

One of the chaps said he saw the ball being used like this on YouTube and this was the first time he had tried it for himself. Photo: DDS.

A nice way to spend a Saturday morning on a beach with no waves. Photo: DDS.

They even let this antiquated rusty dog try some old tricks. Photo: JK.

Playing the role

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I spent a day in Gympie last week for work. After an enjoyable day I was asked if I’d mind helping out a photographer by modelling in photograph. In the past my hands have played the role of a sex-predator typing on a keyboard, I’ve held my head in those same hands as I hunched forwards playing a man with IBS and I’ve pretended to be an employer scrutinising the Facebook account of a potential employee.

This time, however, I was to be a sensitive man tearing up in a movie theatre. I didn’t realise it would appear on the front page of the Gympie Times.

Nothing more manly than good cry

For the record, I can’t remember the last film that made me cry.