Reign of Fire

Well Red

Flight of Fantasy

William Shatner’s James T. Kirk was, at heart, an ordinary guy who did extraordinary things—such as pleasuring multiple green-skinned Orion slave girls while karate-chopping knobby-headed Klingon warriors with his other hand.

Sure, he was the only Starfleet cadet to ever successfully conquer the impossible training scenario known as the Kobayashi Maru exercise, but he cheated, because that’s what smart-arsed everyday blokes with pot bellies and cheeky grins do.

Christopher Pine’s younger James T. Kirk was less an ordinary guy than a Gen Y gym rat and part-time model, who had just enough bad-boy street cred to make him attractive to the space ladies without barring him from Starfleet Academy on a character test.

Anywhere Shatner’s Kirk went, he arrived a few moments after the bright yellow curve of his tummy. Pine’s starship captain, on the other hand, was able to wear a skin-tight skivvy without irony or embarrassment.

His physique recalls the type of sculpted douchebags you find at www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com—where guys who spend too long with fake tan are so inordinately proud of their massively ripped abs that they give them absurd names such as ‘The Situation’.

I’m sure that, like all Hollywood stars, Christopher Pine is a lovely bloke. It’s just that, like most modern male actors, once he gets that shirt off, he looks like a bunch of coconuts and half bricks jammed into a tight rubber bag. When the hell did this happen? It used to be that when big-name Hollywood actors took off their shirts…well, mostly they didn’t. And if they did, they looked like normal guys—guys who’d taken some care to look after themselves, but still normal guys.

The only muscle definition with which they were familiar came out of a dictionary, and some of them were so close in their physical build to you and I that they looked less like a bag of shit than they did a bag of shit that had spent months on the couch inhaling pizzas and playing video games.

Gentlemen, I do not see this as a positive development. I don’t imagine for a second that many of us are going to develop immediate eating disorders or exercise addictions just because we’ve seen Brad Pitt get his gear off in Troy; that’s not how the male mind works.

I fear, however, it’s exactly how the female mind works. It cannot be a good thing for the ladies to be constantly disappointed by the gap between what our culture imagines to be a perfect, or even an average, male form and the saggy, hairy, kinda blotchy and lumpy reality. Not good for them, and most assuredly not good for us.

It’s not a two-way street, of course. Men have long divided the world into the hotties of their imagination, and actual women. Probably because of all the training we get in as teens with magazines such as this.

A psychology has evolved within the male gender to help us cope with this disconnect. The idea of the unattainable: Megan Fox, for example; smokin’ hot, but unobtainable. Sports Illustrated swimsuit models? Smokin’ hot, but unobtainable. Penthouse Pets…you get the idea.

But when have the females of the species ever considered anything as unobtainable? They see, they want, they get. Whether it be shoes, bags, naughty treats from the dessert tray, more damn shoes, extra closet space for the extra shoes, another bag, and a few more shoes.

A woman who can own more pairs of shoes than there are days to wear them between now and the combustion of the universe is not going to be put off by any man who tells her to forget about finding a set of rock-hard, washboard abs anywhere other than up on the big screen. She will see. She will want. And she will kick our fat arses until she gets. God help us all.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Mad for Mel

The book has started a war of words among music aficionados across the country. Was that one of your aims?
We understood that when we started everyone was going to get upset; no-one was going to be completely happy. Even we’re still not completely happy. I get blamed for Beaches being in there. John Farnham’s Whispering Jack is there and I don’t particularly like it, but I understand that the record stands the test of time; so many people bought that record. I wanted The Avalanches’ Since I Left You to be included, and they [John and Toby] didn’t understand it.
So what makes a great Australian album?
Sometimes a record that we included refuted those qualities of having a distinctly Australian setting or pioneering a genre. But they had to be taking something further in a direction. So they might not be completely revolutionary. An artist like Powderfinger or The Saints, and coincidently they’re both from Brisbane, they built on the shoulders of other people and made their sound based on that.

How did you come to agreement on what would be number one?
We all agreed that Midnight Oil mattered. Diesel and Dust is a great example of where the country was at and where the band was at. We have a great connection to it. Toby and John were running Rolling Stone [magazine] singlehandedly at the time Diesel and Dust came out. They both had a feel for how straight-jacketed race re lations were in Australia at that time. You play it, and it takes you somewhere, to that point in time. You know how incredible the songs are, 20 years on. Diesel and Dust is a big record.

Was it important to represent a wide spectrum of artists?
Australia is very rock-oriented. We wanted to reflect that, but there’s always been an underground, there’s always been something that’s oriented to dance or electronic music, or soul bands. There aren’t just rock bands. At the same time, people have said there’s a lack of female solo artists [in the book]. But as I always ask them, “Can you name five we have missed?”, and they can’t. It seems to be that music narrowed in the 1970s and ’80s and you can’t rectify that. You have no quotas.

What excites you about the future of Australian music?
I think the most interesting records are the ones we don’t foresee. Looking at this book, I hope we do get a hip-hop artist that is as exciting and important as Nick Cave or who is as popular as Normie Rowe was. You just hope for another transcending pop artist, someone like Sarah Blasko, and for the next wave of pop to be more male-orientated. You know, there are a lot of solo artists out there, and I’d like to see more bands. I’d like to see a band be like the next Jet but with two females and two males.

What’s your favourite Australian record of all time?
Hi Fi Way by You Am I. It’s a great record. I think it was almost the only five-star review I wrote at the time.

Born in England, Nigel gained a reputation as a skilled street fighter in post-WWII London and found himself in serious trouble when he stole a rival gang member’s girlfriend. Fearing for her 15-year-old son’s safety, Nigel’s mum sent him off to Australia in 1959, where he found work on a farm in Victoria. For the next four years, Mason travelled the country doing a variety of jobs: cutting timber and sugar cane, picking fruit, hunting kangaroos, and helping construct the Sydney-Melbourne standard gauge railway line.

Following a failed marriage, Nigel travelled to Bali with a couple of hippie mates in 1980 and liked it so much that he decided to stay. He fell in love with a local woman named Yanie and the couple tied the knot in 1985. Together they opened the successful Yanie’s Restaurant in Kuta, and went on to set up a popular tourism business called Bali Adventure Tours in 1990. Six years later, Mason stumbled upon nine elephants stranded in a dried-out rice paddy near the remote village of Taro. Unable to abandon the stricken creatures, he bought the land they were on and landscaped every centimetre of the 3.5 hectares until it bore no resemblance to its barren beginnings.

The Elephant Safari Park was born that same year. Through rescue efforts and a world-class breeding program, the park’s elephant herd now numbers 30; three of which were born in 2009. “The baby elephants have become attractions in themselves,” says Nigel, “because unlike at the zoos in Sydney and Melbourne, you can actually interact with them here—touch them, feed them—it’s a very special experience.”
The park also boasts a five-star lodge, allowing visitors to eat and sleep amongst the huge animals and interact with them in a variety of ways during their visit.
“People meditate with the elephants, kiss them, and spend hours just sitting and watching them until dark,” says Mason.
“Every one of our 30 elephants has a different personality, so the diversity of those [human] interactions work just as well for them.”

“Outside our park, things are not too good for Sumatran elephants, as the jungles of Sumatra have been mostly destroyed,” Nigel explains. “Sadly, there is not much the average Aussie can do to change that. Corruption and greed are the great destroyers of Indonesia’s rainforests, and until that changes this situation will continue.”

Since 1985, almost half of Sumatra’s forests have been wiped out through logging or cleared to make way for crops, such as oil palm plantations. And since then, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the elephant population has declined by almost 85 per cent.
As the elephants’ natural habitat is reduced, they are forced to feed on the new plantations, much to the annoyance of local farmers. It’s not uncommon for elephants to be killed as common pests.

“When it comes to animal-related business in Indonesia, the animals take second place and are too often exploited and abused,” says Nigel. “Many Asians don’t have our love for animals because they are just too busy surviving.”

In 2002, Nigel Mason set about rescuing 10 distraught Sumatran elephants, including babies, from one of the camps. However, the massive operation, that was to feature a convoy of trucks and a 3000km journey across three islands, was scuttled when the Indonesian Government changed the law, effectively preventing the rescue from taking place. Just months later, some of the captive creatures died.

“Leaving Riski, a baby elephant that was stuck in the camp, is one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve had,” sighs Nigel. “I knew it was going to die, and it did. So when our third baby elephant was born at the park two years ago, we named it Riski, after the one that was left behind.”

In a happy twist, a determined Mason returned to the same camp in 2005 and successfully saved 10 elephants. The devastation of the first failed mission and the subsequent white-knuckled attempt that lasted 100 hours is all captured in the documentary film Operation Jumbo, which has screened on the National Geographic Channel.

The Elephant Safari Park has now been open for 14 years and is regularly voted Bali’s number one must-see attraction.
Well-regarded travel website tripadvisor.com recently awarded the park a 4½ Star Certificate of Excellence, and it won the ‘Best Management’ gong at Indonesia’s 2010 environmental tourism awards. Fellow wildlife warrior, the late, great Steve Irwin, declared it the best elephant park he had ever seen.

As a flip side to the good work the park continues to do with animal conservation, it has also become a destination for the rich and famous; 2010 saw Julia Roberts, Tony Blair, Calvin Klein and Michael Franti visit. But despite the support of wealthy celebrities, Nigel says he receives the most consistent support from “good old Aussies”.