Centrepoint Tower, Sydney, Australia, as viewed from Castlereagh Street.
As I was standing at the bus stop on Castlereagh Street earlier tonight, I looked up and saw Centrepoint Tower. And for just a moment I reflected on my life and how Centrepoint Tower is nearly always visible to me. I live in Surry Hills, I work in Ultimo. Regularly, of course, I’ll visit The Rocks, Newtown, Lewisham and Glebe. It’s very rare for me to go “over the bridge”, although that might change. Occasionally, I’ll make a visit to Bondi or Coogee. You get the drift.
I’m back at work on Monday and I guess it’s probably a little bit of restlessness associated with the end of my holiday. For the past two weeks I haven’t ventured all that far from home. I’ve been catching up with people, going out for dinner and drinks etc, and I’ve been doing LOADS of family history. But basically, throughout it all, Centrepoint Tower has still remained within sight.
Although I’d planned to go and visit Patrick in Canberra this weekend, that didn’t eventuate. Something else has come up in my life and so, at the last minute yesterday morning I decided not to go. Although it would have been fun to go away for a couple of days it’s probably best that I stay here this weekend. Yes, I know I’m being cryptic. Sorry. And don’t embarrass me by asking to me say more.
As I was catching a cab home last night, I took a photograph out of the window of the crowd enjoying their NYE in Sydney.
It was then I had what I thought at the time was a deeply philosophical thought. “Why do they drink so much on NYE”, I thought to myself. “Is it to forget the past year or prepare for the next”?, I thought to myself.
The reason why people drink alcohol is fairly complex. Why they drink so much on NYE is far more complex.
As I’ve chatted with friends and colleagues over the last few days, there’s been a recurrent theme: NYE is usually pretty crap. For my friends and colleagues, NYE never quite lives up to the hype. You go out with a bunch of people with an expectation it will be the greatest night of the year. There’s always some kind of drama (ranging from people who drink too much to not being able to get a cab). Soon, you realise NYE is not the greatest night of the year. There are probably many more far more enjoyable, far more meaningful days and nights of each year.
That said, I’ve had some really memorable NYE nights, including one with Graeme a few years back.
But generally speaking it’s all a bit too hard, and so I had made NO PLANS for this year. Well, my plan was to watch television and go to bed.
Mid-afternoon, however, my friend Kate told me she was planning to come down from Newcastle, and asked if I’d like to join her to watch the fireworks from her mother’s house at Drummoyne. Kate’s mother has a waterview, and although we didn’t see the great detail those at Circular Quay would have seen, I had a really lovely night chatting with her and her family and having a few drinks.
Kate celebrates NYE in Sydney
In my younger days I might have been tempted to have a few drinks too many and make a night of it. But this year at about one o’clock, I decided it was time to go home. “I could stay, but I just want to go home to my own bed”, I told one of Kate’s sisters when she suggested I sleep on the couch. I walked up to the main street of Drummoyne and got a cab within a few minutes of waiting.
As we made our way back through the city, there were countless people coming up to the cab as we stopped at traffic lights. “Why do they do it to themselves?”, I asked the taxi driver rhetorically.
“I’d like to know who approved this”, my friend David said today of the Jeff Koons exhibition at the Versailles Palace. “I mean, I quite like his work”, he added, but wondered why this world-famous building was deemed an appropriate space to exhibit Koon’s famous statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles.
“Maybe it’s because of the extravagance of the work. Or maybe he was influenced by Versailles?”, I wondered out loud, trying to understand myself. I mean there’s a certain extravagance in his work, and he uses a lot of gold leaf, but the works did seem kinda odd when exhibited against furnishings and art work with a definite eighteenth century feel to them.
As it was my final full day in France, David suggested we should visit Versailles. “Sure, why not?”, I thought to myself, recognising that deep inside I only had a knowledge of the palace because that’s where the peace agreement for the First World War was signed. Until I did some reading, I didn’t really know it was the home of the royal family for over 100 years, and that at one point in history, about five-thousand people had lived there.
With the memory of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in my head, I wasn’t prepared for the size of the palace and the grounds. Nor was I prepared for the huge amount of tourists who were there today. Thank goodness David knew some of the shortcuts to try, and we avoided queues all of the day.
After lunch we went on an English language tour of the royal family’s private chambers during the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. As you might expect, they were quite lavish, though not as outrageous as I thought they might have been. Our tour guide, who was excellent, also gave us an insight in the human face of these royal figures, and of their own idiosynchrasies.
The story, for example of Louis XV (I think) who failed to take communion for over thirty years because he didn’t feel he could because of his own infidelity was a fascinating one.
As was the story of the transformation of the royal guards from being made up solely of foreigners (because they had no allegiances) to being made up solely of French aristocracy (as a good PR exercise for the many different areas of France, and to help the French aristocratic families who were finding things financially difficult).
Unfortuntely, we couldn’t visit the private domaine of Marie-Antoinette, due to bad weather. As in Sydney, France had a terrible storm in 1999 which the authorities had failed to warn about. “Ever since then, they’ve over-reacted to any storm warning”, David told me, echoing the experience we have back home.
With the day cut short, David dropped me at the train station and we bid each other a fond farewell.
On my arrival back in Paris, I called in for a glass of wine to celebrate my final hours here. As I walked in to the nearby brasserie, my attempt to order a simple glass of wine failed. As in high school, when I elected to learn German not French, I’ve realised once again French as a language totally eludes me. I know the words, I hear the pronunciation, but everything just comes out wrong. So I’m back in the hostel, resting up and updating my blog.
Tomorrow is a really big day for me: I’m leaving to come home. I can scarcely believe my time is nearly up. A hideously long flight awaits me, broken up by a couple of days in Hong Kong, which I hope will be just the right medicine to ensure a smooth transition back to life in Sydney.
Today, I had the opportunity to share my experiences over the past year on 774 ABC Radio Melbourne (and Regional Victoria) with Kirsten Diprose. We discussed the evolution of prosthetic technology as part of a broader, hour-long conversation that also featured other guests. You can listen to the full broadcast [here].
Here’s a transcript from the program which has been “tidied up” for spelling, brevity, clarity etc using Google Gemini (AI), and I haven’t really checked it, so there may be some errors.
Kirsten: On the ABC Listen app, your smart speaker and on AM radio. This is the Conversation Hour on ABC Radio Melbourne and Victoria. Let’s bring James O’Brien into the conversation. Peter Hawkins is still with us. But James, you’re actually from the ABC yourself, your radio planning manager based in Sydney. Welcome to the program.
James: Thank you.
Kirsten: Now, I suppose your story and experience is quite different from Peter because you’re, I suppose, someone who has recently only needed a prosthetic.
James: That’s right. Like Peter, I’m 58 years of age, but I’ve only had a prosthetic limb now on my right leg, the lower right leg for about 12 months. I was travelling overseas with some friends. I got a cut foot on a beach somewhere, came back. It all went terribly wrong. Some diabetes contributed to it as well. And I woke up out of a coma with part of my leg removed.
Kirsten: You’ve just skipped over that like, you know, it was going down to the shops and buying some milk.
James: Look, honestly, my niece was with me when I came out of the coma and she said, look, Jim, I’ve got something to tell you. It’s really upsetting, blah, blah, blah. And I was just pleased to be alive, to be honest. And early in the piece, I received a phone call from an organisation called Limbs for Life, which is actually based in Melbourne, which is a peer support organisation of people who are also amputees or using prosthetics. And look, that phone call from a guy called Clay made a huge difference to my attitude. He had a very similar circumstance to mine. And apparently, it is pretty common for lots of blokes of a certain age not to look after their health and to find themselves in this sort of position. So having that sort of peer support very early in the piece just made me feel good about it all.
Kirsten: That’s fantastic to hear that there’s such a proactive group that so obviously the hospital must connect you with Limbs for Life.
James: Yeah, the hospital that I was in connected me with Limbs for Life and they’re a national organisation. They’re all over the countryside, actually based in Melbourne, set up, I think, by a woman called Melissa Noonan initially. And, you know, it’s there’s a Facebook group and we share stories and anecdotes and there’s really nothing quite like to actually talk to someone else in a very similar position. There’s a woman I work with here at the ABC, Liz Wright. Liz is a Paralympic swimmer. And when I was in hospital, she reached out to me, medal-winning, I should emphasise too. She reached out to me, said, Hi, James, you know, I work at the ABC, blah, blah, blah. I’ve seen what you’ve gone through. And she was actually born with different length limbs, but she still wears prosthetics. And again, just having that sort of peer support or someone you could, you know, you could have these very short conversations and know exactly what’s going through. So, for example, I still get a bit tired and I said, I get tired. She goes, yeah, I get tired too. And it’s because we’re doing a lot more exercise and there’s more strain and those sort of things. And I’m not sure, Peter, if it’s still fatigue is an issue for you still after even though it’s almost 60 years for you.
Peter: Not really. But then I don’t remember what it was like before. So I’ve got very little to compare it to. But not really. I think it’s just, you know, just wait another 50 years and you’ll be fine.
Kirsten: So, James, what sort of prosthetic do you have?
James: Well, actually, I’ve still got my interim. It’s called the interim leg and the federal government funds each of the states to provide an interim leg. So in Victoria, the program is called the Victorian, the Victorian Artificial Limb Program. And basically, they receive some money from the federal government is administered through the hospitals. And what they do is they give you an initial one to start out with because your leg will shrink over the next couple of years. And like Peter mentioned, a plaster of Paris, you know, I was I had the fitting in the hospital where they, you know, got out the plaster and wrapped a creoe paper around it and all those sorts of things. So I’ve still got the initial interim leg. Last Wednesday, I had a fitting for my NDIS funded limb and it was a bit painful in the first couple of days, didn’t quite fit. So I went back to the company who looked after me and on Wednesday and they shaved a few things off it and made it fit better. And so what will happen now is we’ll see how it goes for a couple more weeks and then they’ll probably do the final fabrication of my new limb. And I’m also hopefully getting a wet leg as well, also funded by the NDIS. So I can go to the beach.
Kirsten: What does that mean? Does that mean like a swimming leg?
James: Not so much a swimming leg, but something I can wear in the shower or something I can go to the beach at and not worry about it rusting, basically.
Kirsten: What’s the NDIS one that you’re getting fitted with? What’s it made out of?
James: Look, I don’t really know, actually. I’m not really I’m listening to Peter talking all about the technology and I don’t really know.I think it’s carbon fibre, I think. And I think the wet leg has got some titanium there, which is rust resistant. Look, I’m not really great on the technology. All I know is it’s has made a huge difference to my life because, you know, for the first few months of last year after this happened, I was still getting around in a wheelchair and hopping around. And that was really hard and really tiring. So when I actually got the limb to wear, it made a huge difference. I still had to wear, like I said, go with the wheelchair for a while and crutches for a while. But now I can pretty much walk around without any additional support aside from the limb. The only thing I had to keep an eye out for is people kind of don’t notice it. And sometimes, you know, I’ve had people sort of push me out of the way. I did actually fall over once. There was a young person who sort of didn’t see that, you know, I still had some mobility issues and actually pushed me over accidentally and then felt mortified. And then also things like getting on trams. Some people just don’t even see it. So there’ll be people sitting in the disability seats. And I have to ask, you know, can you get up, please? Because I need to sit down.
Peter: And you’re right about the people being mortified. I went to something on the weekend and a young lady didn’t notice and accidentally shoved me from behind. And I stumbled. And then she realised and she felt awful. And you think, oh, but that’s not your fault.
James: No, absolutely. And you just want to make somebody realise, well, look, you were just unfortunate. You happened to pick the wrong person. You know, don’t feel so bad about it. We’re OK. So I do get cross with people who sit there looking at their mobile phones for the entire trip in the disability seats. And I think, just look up and see if someone else needs a seat more than you.
Kirsten: Yes, that is annoying. And I mean, it’s not just disabled people, those seats are reserved for, it’s people that, you know, eight months pregnant and that sort of thing. And it’s really selfish. It’s interesting, isn’t it? I mean, James, as someone who has only recently acquired a disability, have you changed the way that you see the world or are you more cognisant of things like this?
James: Absolutely. I mean, one of the interesting things is early in the piece, too, some friends didn’t know how to cope because there was quite a significant chance I might have had brain damage. And I did find that they were speaking to me a little more slowly. And I’ve even had colleagues at work speak to me in a much slower manner. And I go, it’s actually, it’s not my brain, it’s the leg. So that’s one of the things I’ve noticed. I’m much more aware of being on public transport in particular and the needs of other people. That has made a huge difference to me. And it was so interesting at the Disability Expo a couple of months ago and I volunteered at that sort of meeting and greeting people. And I am just so, I mean, I was always pretty aware of some of the issues of people with disability. But let me tell you, I’m much more aware of them now.
Kirsten : James O’Brien, thank you so much for joining us. I understand that you are blogging now about your experience. Yeah. Where can people find your blog? I
James : Just search for James O’Brien Amputee will probably find it. It’s a WordPress blog and I’ve been writing about my experiences all the way through. And I’ve tried to be as honest as possible.
Boys should make passes at boys who wear glasses...
Amazing Grace
How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…
I once was lost, but now I’m found
‘Twas blind, but now I see…
The first thing I noticed when I picked up my glasses (set of two) was how suddenly clear the text before my eyes became.
The bottom three lines of text on a piece of carboard I was shown went from blurry-incomprehensible, to an almost-alarming level of clarity.
Reading in bed is going to be so much easier.
My intention is to use the multi-focals at work – where I’ll probably need to go between reading and typing and having face-to-face conversations – and to keep the reading glasses strictly for home.
On the way home I thought I’d keep the multi-focals on, in an effort to get a little acclimatised to them. According to Damo, it should take no more than half-a-day.
Nonetheless, walking was quite a disorienting experience, as my natural inclination is to look down when I’m walking. There are probably self-esteem issues there, but of course, that is where the reading lens is focussed. Quite an odd feeling, I must say…
And then, on arriving home I’ve discovered my keyboard is filthy, and I really should clipper my nails.
These are the downsides of suddenly being able to see things so clearly.
On Monday, sadly, I had to drive to Wagga Wagga for the funeral of Chris Jones. I first met Chris a couple of weeks after the first Gay & Lesbian Social & Support Group meeting was held at his farm, near Wagga Wagga in 1992. I remember preparations for that event vividly: mowing the grass, cleaning up the place, the attendance of about 60 people.
And over the next few years living in Wagga I got to know Chris reasonably well. He was a man I respected immensley, for his honesty and integrity. He was also good fun and always had a smile.
Chris on ABC TV for the Wagga float in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
He died last week in his sleep, with a heart-related condition. It was the first time I’ve been to a funeral since mum and dads. I explained to Colin, “I don’t normally do funerals, but this one’s different”. The tributes paid to Chris were wonderful. After the funeral, we went to Silver Springs, the property near Wagga Wagga, where Chris lived.
He was planning to build a house right on the top of the hill with spectacular 360 degee views. It was a great spot to sit, relax, and reflect.
Property near Wagga Wagga, formerly owned by Chris Jones
That night, we – Glen and I – joined a number of people who attended the funeral for dinner at Romano’s Hotel.
In 1977, ABBA visited Perth for just five days, but their time in the city left an indelible mark, with their contributions to “ABBA – The Movie” and the bootleg CD “Live At Last.” My research in the State Library’s archives has allowed me to compile a chronology of ABBA’s stay in Perth.
Upon arriving in Perth, ABBA surprised their fans by heading straight to the Swan River for a sail on the yacht Sir Henry Merkin, rather than going directly to their hotel, The Parmelia Hotel. Promoter Patti Mostyn revealed that “The girls brought their bikinis in their hand luggage,” and “They have not had any time off since they arrived in Australia and they wanted a swim.” Some of the most famous photographs of ABBA during their 1977 concert tour were taken on the Swan River.
ABBA on the front page of The West ABBA arrived in Perth at 1.30pm on Wednesday, March 9. Journalist, Jill Cromellin, writing in “The West Australian” noted that prior to their arrival, “The tarmac beside the aircraft was alive with cameramen, reporters and airport staff all waiting for the first glimpse of the four Swedish millionaries who have sold more records in Australia than anyone at any time. A small fierce man approached the Press and said: “If anyone asks Abba single question the Commonwealth Police will see that he leaves this area”. when they arrived in Perth in 1977
Meanwhile, a group of 30 to 40 fans eagerly awaited ABBA’s arrival outside Perth’s Hilton Hotel, The Parmelia. Among them were Evan Burton and Jim Snee, who were interviewed by the “Daily News.” Jim had written poetry for Agnetha, while Evan had brought a synthetic rose. Security was noticeably lax, with only one lounge-suited man dubbed “Mr. Meany” by the fans. As the cars pulled up and ABBA stepped out, the fans were unable to contain their excitement and began to mob the group. Mr. Meany warned them repeatedly, “You’ve blown it now, you’ve blown it for all time,” but to no avail. ABBA, in keeping with their amiable image, remained gracious and even rewarded the fans with the occasional peck on the cheek.
Another of the local newspapers, “Daily News” noted that, “The crowd swarmed around the cars but there were no incidents apart from damage to a girl’s bicycle. The airport security for the superstar groups was by no means as stringest as for many lesser important groups. By comparison with some pop star arrivals it was a casual affair, in keeping with the casual attitude of the four people in the limelight.”
During their time in Perth, ABBA had several encounters with fans and other famous guests. One such encounter involved Local Aboriginal leader, Ken Colbung, who brought a group of children from the “New Era Fellowship” to the Parmelia hotel to serenade ABBA with a number of their songs played on the didgeridoo.
Unfortunately, the first concert at the Perth Entertainment Centre on Thursday night was marred by a bomb hoax. According to “The West Australian,” the pianist Benny Andersson found himself alone on stage with the three other members absent, and they did not return for several minutes. A voice then came through the amplifier announcing a 15-minute internal break and asking the 8000 people to leave the hall in an orderly fashion. The start of the second performance scheduled for 9pm was delayed by 15 minutes. Despite being worried about his son’s safety, Benny Andersson continued with the concerts.
A major photo opportunity occurred on Friday at the Parmelia Hotel where ABBA and other famous guests, including Alice Cooper, The Dubliners, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Searchers, Stephane Grappeli, and the Diz Disley trio were photographed together for the “Weekend News”.
Although many concert sequences in the movie ABBA – The Movie were filmed in Perth, the editing makes it difficult to build a meaningful chronology. The “Live At Last” CD contains six tracks recorded during one of the Perth concerts, including Tiger, That’s Me/Waterloo, I Do, When I Kissed The Teacher, I Am An A, and So Long.
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Hope everything is going OK and the first day back at work was survivable!
Hope everything is going OK and the first day back at work was survivable!
Hi Tom, yes it was surprisingly good. No dramas, no tantrums, though I did have two people sick. Let’s see what happens on day two. James