John Stapleton
28 February 2024, 5:21 PM
Some people are born naturally optimistic. Happy, healthy, productive, they just laugh at the many challenges life throws at us on a daily basis.
Not me.
Only just last winter, having finished writing the book, Australia Breaks Apart, done a flurry of interviews and revelled in the somewhat unusual sensation of reading positive reviews, I decided I’d celebrate for a week. Go to the pub. Drink, smoke, party like I was still in my 20s.
One week turned into another week, and soon enough into a month and beyond.
It wasn’t long before I found myself sitting in the kitchen drunk, depressed, smoking way too much. At my age, early 70s, it wasn’t just clinically ill advised, it was downright insane, in effect slow suicide. I was becoming a person I did not want to be: a totally miserable sod.
Through the fog one voice kept repeating in my head: “The solution is in front of you.”
It was around this time I went down to Bunnings for the odd bits and pieces we all go to Bunnings for, and outside doing the sausage sizzle that day was a funny mob calling themselves the Sudu Dragon Boat club. I stopped, ordered the more or less obligatory $5 drink and sausage package, and asked them about dragon boat racing.
It truly was the last thing on my mind. But for some reason, that voice in the head again, I was drawn to it. The people were friendly, funny and encouraging. Now, after all these months, I know them all as separate characters, but back then they were just a bunch. Not long afterwards, I looked up their website, rang one of the organisers, and was invited down to Deakin Reserve on Lake Illawarra at the back of Oak Flats.
The legendary Norman, known as a tough task master, took me aside, found a paddle whose length suited me, showed me the basic steps, and all of a sudden I was out on the water with a bunch of people I didn‘t know. That evening I got home and I swear, every muscle in my body ached; muscles I never knew existed.
But that voice in the head kept going, “the solution is in front of you”, and I kept showing up for those mid-winter practices in the freezing cold. Slowly, I would have to say very slowly, I got fitter. A repetitive strain injury in my shoulder from years of pounding away at the keyboards as a big city journalist got better. And best of all, I got to know people, after the long isolation of lockdowns, and the equally long isolation of book writing.
My work as a journalist was often adversarial, we weren’t out to make friends. While journalism has changed a lot, back in the day we were paid attack dogs. Many of the people we staked out or interrogated were not in the least bit happy to see us. But with dragon boat racing, you have to cooperate with the entire team. You have to keep in time with everyone else in the boat. If you slacken off, the entire boat suffers.
At first I really didn’t think I would persist. The failure to succeed at dragon boat racing would be just another reason to cement my misery, to stare at the world through a glass darkly. But I did persist. And I couldn’t be more grateful for it. The fitness that comes with dragon boat racing is a positive, being forced to cooperate with others has been very good for my mental well being, and being out in the early morning on one of the most beautiful waterways in the country, well, that’s a huge plus, soul tonic if you will.
So, if you have a voice in your head telling you to get out of the house and get back into life, you could do a hell of a lot worse than joining the Sudu Dragon Boat Club.
The Sudu Dragon Boat Club is participating in the Shellharbour Festival of Sport Regatta on Saturday 2 March at Skiway Park, Mt Warrigal.
There will be a “Come and Try Day” on Sunday 17th March at Deakin Reserve, Oak Flats, where one and all are welcome to give dragon boating a try (Contact Jody 0412 939 312).
It’s not all that easy, but it’s great fun. And it just might change your life.