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Page 11
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

WITH THE OLYMPICS just around the corner the world's top athletes have started to arrive. Everywhere you look there are people sporting Olympic badges. From what I observe, people involved with the Olympics from athletes, coaches, support staff, volunteers, etc can travel anywhere on public transport for free just by flashing their badges. Officially, they are only supposed to be travelling free for the day when they are en route to an Olympic event, but I guess nobody is sticking to the letter of the law. 

I wished I was a volunteer as the fares for all public transport have gone way up; nearly double from when I last visited in 1997. There is a shortage of drivers, said to be about 600, to drive the night and early morning shifts. Many who had volunteered bailed out when they realised the hours they are going to be requested to work; in mitigation, six hundred out of the tens of thousands of volunteers for the Olympics in Sydney, I guess it is not too bad.

When I arrived mid August, families of athletes had already started to arrive. It was about 6 in the morning and, as I waited to be picked up, two other planes landed and unloaded Italian and Japanese tourists. Besides the usual JTB (Japanese Tourist Board) guides, there were people with Olympic badges greeting the new comers. The newspapers report that all four or five star hotels around the city and surrounding suburbs had already been booked solid from this week on. It is only in the outer suburbs or the budget class hotels, which still have rooms left and they have had to reduce their rates to attract customers. 

Given that the Opening ceremony is not due till Friday week (two weeks from now), seems that all the tourism related businesses will be making a lot of money. Everywhere you go there are Olympic souvenirs and they cost the earth. Matter of fact, prices generally have gone up. Whether this is directly connected to the Olympic or not is anybody's guess; but generally what goes up rarely comes down.

Actually the tickets are advertised freely over in the buy/sell sections of the newspapers. It seems that the take-up of tickets by other countries had not been as good as expected so they are now dumping the tickets on the Australian public. I must say that the Australians have been enthusiastic, more than our people were when recently hosting the Commonwealth Games. Tickets are going like hot cakes. Even some friends of mine who I would have thought are the last ones to go and watch a physical activity actually organised parties for some events. The incessant bombardment by TV, radio, newspapers and ads most certainly had its effect and helped the sales.

It looks as if I will be one of the very few temporary visitors who is not attending the spectacle. I shall watch my favourite sports at home and save the A$450 or more per ticket. Web sites are a good alternative; one of this is: http://www.smh.com.au/olympics/  run by the Sydney Morning Herald. It is so nice to be in a country where a variety of opinions are aired openly. It is possible to switch from channel to channel on TV and get different viewpoints on the same story. Case in point. Two commercial channels doing flattering background stories on the arriving IOC members, another doing an expose on how the Australian Government is treating or mistreating the African athletes from the countries which gave the block of votes that swung the Games in Australia's favour. Another quasi government channel doing a detailed story on why China pulled out 40 athletes at the last moment. All this concurrently at prime time TV. (The stories may not be factually correct but then which public domain story is not slanted in the author's viewpoint.) Well perhaps not different aspects of the same story but at least of the same current topic.

I spend all my spare time watching TV and surfing the Net. There are so many ISP's in this country providing Internet connection services here and with different packages it is very confusing. It seems like anybody who has the money to pay the licence fee can become an ISP and then market forces will decide whether he/she survives. This is good as it means the rural area gets a lot better coverage than before and bad in the sense that a lot of people lost money initially when some ISP's closed down. I am sure that there are some people who probably have not paid much for connection and just changed ISP's and used their promo offers to their advantage.

I don't think this story will be complete without a description of the parks where I do my walks. It may be of use when your readers discuss the Draft Structure Plan and the detailed local plan relating to parks in Penang. I am in a "city" called Parramatta, which is really another suburb in the greater Sydney area. I was looking for a place to do my walks and decided to walk around Parramatta Park. I must say it was an incredible experience.

There is this 80 hectare plot of land designated as parkland in the middle of Parramatta with a river running through it. There are cycle tracks, playgrounds, bridges, barbecue pits, gazebos, walkways, historic cottages and artefacts which are designated as heritage sites etc. For example, Parramatta Park is where the first cultivated crops in Australia were planted successfully. There is a Heritage cottage where the Governor first built his dairy etc. Cars are allowed into the park but there are only certain places where they can park and surprise, surprise, people actually do follow regulations. And I didn't see any parking meter attendants walking around either.

While I was jogging along the riverbank, there are flocks of cockatoos feeding right in my path and they just idly flapped their way out of my path without showing signs of alarm. I can identify five or six different species of bird life flying around and chirping and walking and feeding right next to where I was walking along the designated vehicular road. I also saw for the first time a bird which looked like a crow except that it had big splotches of white all over it's body. The sun is shining brightly and there is a brisk breeze blowing through the whole park. (It's about 3 p.m.) Unfortunately, the park is closed at night and for this reason it is not very well lit; but there are no known cases of robbery or rape in it's history that I can remember. But then no sane person would walk through any park which is poorly lit unless desperate.

There are as many as 320 smaller parks scattered all over Parramatta but none of them of this size. In the inner city suburbs there are smaller parks with better kept lawns where families can gather and kids play on the swings but in the outer suburbs, large parks seem to dominate. In NSW, most of the bigger parks have come under the jurisdiction of the National Park and Wildlife Service and while there is the intention to revive these green lungs back to their original state, the process is slow and lengthy. However the many park committees have been reasonably successful in stemming the encroachment of development. 

Another such suburban park where I walk around is called Mirambeena Regional Park near the house of a friend of mine. The authorities have distances measured and if I used certain paths along some sections of the park, I would be able to know that I have done 6.8 km. While the actual park is more than 10 acres in size, The George's River is much wider and more polluted that the Parramatta River; it has more bridges and people are told not to swim in the river. There are co-operative community funded projects involving various municipalities along the George's River to clean up some of the ponds and sections of the river but it is slow going, as the ponds are very big and the River is very long. While the ducks and geese and swans may like the ponds, a lot of them are clogged with algae.

This park is more hilly and even has a restaurant on its edge accessible by road. There is a historic site where there used to be a land grant settlement housing some soldiers along a curve of the River. Unfortunately the original location was flooded and the house relocated to higher ground. The George's River runs all the way to Botany Bay, about approximately 25 km away from the Mirambeena Park. The famous Sydney Rock Oysters are farmed near the estuary of this River. According to Park authorities, sharks come this far up the River, but boom nets submerged under the water stop them going too far. Thus the River is no more navigable and speed boating is discouraged.

The thing that really stuck in my mind was the fact that both parks are quite clean of human created rubbish. I think of the Botanical Gardens in Penang in the morning, quite filthy with condoms, plastic bottles and potato chip bags etc. scattered all over the ground instead of being put into the bins provided.  In Singapore, the parks are cleaner but then I noticed that the visitors do not walk on the grass. They keep to well-defined walkways which meander through the Rose gardens for example. What is the sense of a park with grass if users are psyched not to walk on the grass? I remember the fun I had as a kid rolling down the slope of the Botanical Gardens near the bandstand. It looked so big and vast then but now it is so busy all the time and usually very crowded. Perhaps this is part of growing old and noticing the foibles of mankind.
 
 

I speculate that the cleanliness of the various Sydney parks may be indirectly due to the Olympics but as a general rule, the park authorities do take good care of the parks and the people using them do clean up after themselves. The Federal Government is also experimenting with a "Work for the Dole" scheme where people on unemployment benefits are asked to do community work in order to be eligible for the benefits. Teams of them (together with people from Corrective Services doing community work) have been involved in clearing, cleaning and replanting (under supervision) in the parks mentioned. (I think they may also be used to patrol the trains linking the suburbs clearing the rubbish after the passengers all day long. That is something that can be
directly attributed to the Olympics.)

All along it's route, thousands have turned out to watch the Torch. Since it's arrival in NSW, the Torch has created a furore that typified the attitude of the people of this country to sports.  Everywhere the Torch travelled by road, there are relays of people who had been selected to carry it for a distance of 400M. There is a cavalcade of vans and motorcycle outriders flanking the TorchBearer. These TorchBearers had been nominated and selected based on no standard criteria that I can see. We have past and present Olympic medal winners, world famous Australian actors and actresses, scientists, politicians, sports stars, community workers and ordinary mums and dads and kids. 

Most of them have practised for weeks so that they can slowly jog the distance. Some of them are too old to jog, so they walked, some of them can't see where they are going, so they have to be led, some of them are slightly handicapped physically, so they hobble or stumble along; others get pushed in wheelchairs. There are even some who are unable to sit who lie on makeshift skateboards to be pulled along. It is said that there are approximately 11,000 torchbearers. 

All along the route, there people wait for hours just to have a glimpse of the Torch to cheer it along. The mix is young and old, healthy and infirm, black, white and yellow, all cheering at the top of their voices and waving Australian flags. Since the Torch starts out at 4:30 am in the morning and the TorchBearers don't stop until 7 or 8 pm, this means that a lot of these "watchers" have been up way before 4:30 am in order to get to where they can watch the Torch go past. Every place that the Torch stopped for the night, there was usually some kind of community  function held in the locality. 
 

In Parramatta Park, there was a 1000 member choir that had been practising for months and they were not all professional singers either. Some were just ordinary folks who wanted to be part of the choir and every one paid their own way. Some were Australians who had travelled from Europe to be able to sing under the conductress. The choir sung songs in 19 different languages ranging from the more popular ones to African to Croatian etc. The Olympic committee probably paid for the airfare of a 12 year old girl who wrote a song commemorating the Olympics and she sung her song in Parramatta Park for the first time. I know of many singers who would kill for the opportunity. Imagine singing your own song, written by yourself in front of a receptive audience of 40,000. And to top that, the Greece Olympic contingent heard the song and wanted to take it back to Greece with them. (Don't know what they wanted to do with it, but they photocopied the song's lyrics and distributed it to the athletes. Didn't even know that all the Greek athletes spoke English) 

The next day, the Torch started out at 4:30 AM from Westmead Children's Hospital and a lot of it's inmates turned out to watch it start on it's way. There were some lucky few that got to touch it before it left. All along it's path that morning, there were people sometimes 10 deep cheering the Torch. During its lunchtime stop, another crowd of 40,000 turned up to watch. Last night, more than 50,000 people turned up to watch it stop at Gladesville. I suspect the suburb was chosen for political reasons. It happened to the constituency of Mr. Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia. Obviously that man knew his politics, for he made sure that he was there for the event. I mean last weekend he was in Washington for the Millennium meeting and last night, there was another 100,000 thousand people in Homebush Bay watching the Opening Ceremony rehearsal, yet he chose to be in Gladesville, whose people elected him. 

At the time as this letter is being written, the Torch is being carried out over the sea in Bondi Beach and will rest tonight in the middle of the city. I do not know how many people will be present, for the city is zoned NO PARKING, but judging from the past two nights' crowds, I am sure that Martin Place will be crowded. Tomorrow the Torch will be carried along through the north side of Sydney and at 9:45 pm will be used to light the cauldron in Homebush Bay Stadium, which will be home for the next two weeks for the Olympic torch. That's another story ....

14th September.

from Tony Ooi

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from Lim Teong  Hock
Perth

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M Mongkol
Bangkok

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