Talking Point: Striking gold as cabin fever looms

IAN COLE: I didn’t know what cabin fever was until Chaplin entered my Moonah home.

Actor Charlie Chaplin in scene from Gold Rush.

BECAUSE of all of those in compulsory self-isolation and all of us who are locking ourselves away anyway, I couldn’t help but think about Charlie Chaplin in the 1925 film The Gold Rush and his consequent “cabin fever”.

Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush. Picture: SUPPLIED

I had no idea watching that silent film as a kid, either at the Moonah pictures or on television, what “cabin fever” was all about. In the film, nominated for academy awards and directed, produced, written by and starring Chaplin, he finds himself cooped up in a snowbound cabin and begins to suffer some strange effects from his isolation.

My main memory of the film is that he starts to cook and then eat his shoes! Chaplin may have got his idea from a famous case in the US where some people trapped in the snow reputedly tried to survive by chewing the leather on their boots.

Hopefully, through entertaining ourselves with anything from Monopoly to Netflix, we can avoid Chaplin’s fate and not eat our shoes or even end up doing a Howard Beale in the film Network and rush to the window shouting, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!”

Those of us who are a little claustrophobic may have experienced a touch of cabin fever in a crowded aeroplane about to undertake a long international flight.

You may believe a miracle has occurred when the only empty seat on the jam-packed plane is next to you. Then of course with five seconds remaining before they close the cabin door the inevitable occurs.

Walking down the aisle toward you is probably not the nine-foot tall Hell’s Angel that confronted Bob Hudson in the Newcastle Song outside the Parthenon milk bar, but closer to the “Big John, Big Bad John” that Jimmy Dean sang about who was six foot six and weighed two forty-five (pounds that is). And so begins possible cabin fever, but at least it’s for a maximum of 24 hours on a plane flight!

But then there are those who propose solutions. Entertainer Joe Cocker in his later years isolated himself in a cabin in the mountains of Colorado and was once asked the solution to cabin fever. “Easy,” he replied.

“Get a big cabin!”

Probably not helpful. Meanwhile some who are lamenting the loss of their favourite drinking hole with the closure of hotels have come up with their own unique solution.

“Put a can of beer in every room and then, go on a pub crawl!”

Tasmanian Ian Cole is a retired teacher and a one-time state Labor MP.