By all means go for a swim, but keep your wits about you

I thought about one family earning $745 million and wondered how much of that represented losses of everyday Tasmanians on the pokies? I thought about the lockdown surge in online gambling. I thought about greyhounds eating racehorses again.

I bought my first wetsuit on Tuesday.

It was a day for swimming not tussling with neoprene in a shop cubicle, but I wanted to blast my quandary out of the water once and for all.

No matter how hot it is on land in southern Tasmania, I find the swimming temperature too cold.

Given how much I love ocean swimming, my avoidance eats away at me like failure. It was time to change the story.

Did I grab my seal suit and head to the beach? I did not. I was on deadline.

Simply knowing I could dive under a wave without screaming and practically dying of a heart attack felt good enough the next day, too, so after school drop-off I went to Room for a Pony instead.

I could wash away my worries in the sea another time.

With my back to the wall and a flat white to hand, I sat in the cafe’s aquarium-like front room surveying the outdoor table action. When I opened a newspaper on the ample table top, I surveyed the spread of stories, too, enjoying the sense of breadth you get in print.

I felt another old pleasure returning to me: the simple act of taking time to properly read a newspaper.

A Girl in a Wetsuit does not have a heart of stone. Picture: Shirley Sinclair

It wasn’t simple, though. The day’s news hit me hard. Knowing that disengaging is a cop out, I read on with a sinking heart.

It wasn’t just Trump’s flying start that dismayed me. (As I write this Friday it’s 253 Biden/214 Trump, with Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania to come.)

It was just about everything I read. A man with disabilities had allegedly been habitually sedated and locked in his room by his NDIS provider. Elder abuse was on the rise over lockdown. National spending tracker Alpha Beta showed online gambling was up 94 per cent on this time last year.

It was the Melbourne Cup coverage that tipped me over. It was not the mawkish, against-the-odds line of the stories trotted out at this time of year I reacted to; in fact, I kind of gag when people who are not especially kind sentimentalise sport with a bunch of cliches.

I wept over lameness of another kind, specifically a catastrophic leg injury that ended not just the race but the life of Cup favourite Anthony Van Dyck on Tuesday.

When the young stallion was euthanised after pulling up injured in the race, it was history repeating. In all but one year since 2013, a Cup runner has died after sustaining injuries in the race that no longer stops a nation.

anthony van dyck

The newspaper quoted the Animal Justice Party, which said one racehorse died every three days on Australian racetracks, essentially for somebody’s gambling profits.

It also reported that Cup runner-up jockey Kerrin McEvoy was fined an unprecedented $50,000 for excessive whip use in the final stages of the race.

Is a call for greater animal welfare protection to flog a dead horse when profits are so huge? Call me old-fashioned, but I’m all for independent watchdogs.

I thought about recent reports that unprofitable racehorses are being fed to greyhounds and wondered how often that was happening.

I thought about gambling in Tasmania. Perhaps because I was thinking about horses and gambling, I thought about the Federal Group’s owners, the Arab steed-loving Greg Farrell and family, who came in at 131 on last year’s Australian Financial Review rich list, with an estimated worth of $745 million.

“The exclusive right to operate poker machines in an entire state of Australia sounds like a licence to print money,” the publication said. “So it has proved for the Farrell family.”

I thought about one family earning $745 million and wondered how much of that money represented losses of everyday Tasmanians on the pokies? I thought about the lockdown surge in online gambling. I thought about greyhounds eating racehorses again.

I tried not to conflate, but my mind was spinning.

I went home. I did not swim. I worked on.

At my desk on Thursday morning, I opened an email from the media team of Andrew Wilkie, our local independent Federal MP and a dogged anti-pokies campaigner.

The press release wasn’t about pokies, though. It was racehorses being sent to the doggers. Wilkie was holding a press conference at 10am, having been approached by Tasmanians with links to the racing industry reporting unwanted racehorses were being turned into dog food for greyhounds.

“If they are, this represents a ghastly circle of cruelty in the racing industry, where animals that don’t run fast enough are killed,” Mr Wilkie said.

It was all too awful. I focused on my jobs at hand.

At 4pm, I broke. I shutdown my laptop and drove to Hinsby Beach where I wriggled and staggered into my new wetsuit, balancing myself on a rock beneath a gum tree as a kookaburra laughed.

My padded burkini worked a treat. I did not feel the cold on my body. As I went underwater, I felt the bliss of submersion.

Soothing, but I realised oblivion was the last thing I needed. The ocean’s real gift was a blast of energy, jolting me wide awake and back on the alert.

Trump or no Trump, we must sharpen up and beware simplistic messages that fuel fickle tribalism.

Let’s push back against populist manipulation from across the political spectrum.

Let’s remember simple-sounding solutions rarely solve complex problems.

Let’s not get played like a poker machine. Again.