Hervey Bay Gossip

None of us are getting any younger and, if you’re anything like the scribes who scribble their thoughts here, you might even be carrying a few old injuries that flare up from time to time. If you’re like us then you’ll have experienced the fun of waking only to find that sometime in the night you slept awkwardly and now you can hardly walk.

That happened to one of us this morning and so this being written while she who must be obeyed is down at the Bowen therapist having her back manipulated. If you haven’t tried it before let me tell you that it is one of the most gentle forms of manipulation you will ever experience.

It’s also one of the most unusual forms of manipulation too. I can still remember my first visit to a Bowen therapist. I went in barely able to walk, I lay on the table while Pat worked on me thinking that it was all just a waste of time and when she finished I just about danced out of there.

Wikipedia has this to say about Bowen therapy and it also reveals that the technique comes from right here in Australia.

The Bowen Technique or Bowen therapy is a holistic system of healing developed in Australia in the 1950s by Tom Bowen. The technique was limited to Australia until Bowen’s death in 1982, when it was named, and spread by Bowen’s apprentices.
Similarly to acupressure, the Bowen Technique involves a rolling manipulation of key points to stimulate energy flow, but the Bowen Technique uses only light touches, normally through light clothing. The practitioner may stimulate several points at once, identifying, as in other forms of massage, areas of built-up stress in the muscles.

An alternate view held by many Bowen Therapists is that the specific way that Bowen Technique addresses the muscles stimulates the stretch and golgi tendon reflexes as well as joint proprioceptors in a way that hightens the sensory awareness of the body in the area worked on. This can lead to strange sensations that are often mistaken as “energy movement” but actually have a sound physiological basis. Through increasing sensory awareness the move taps into the body’s ability to self regulate which, in turn, can stimulate the body to heal itself.

A typical session takes place over 30 to 45 minutes, with breaks during the session to allow the treatment to sink in. Sessions are usually part of a series of three to five sessions, beginning with general stress points such as the back and neck, before moving on to areas of stress specific to the person being treated.

There are several excellent Bowen therapists here in Hervey Bay so if you are in pain pay a visit to one because being pain free is just wonderful.

This year’s Christmas lights competition was only announced last week but already the lights are going up around town.

Your scribes may have made the first sighting of the season when they spotted a highly decorated house in Oleander Avenue Kawungan on Tuesday evening.

It must be the silly season for news but here goes.

It seems that local government in our region is on a continual hunt for qualified medical practitioners from overseas … and some of them do make very good doctors but when they come here they have one very serious problem.

They can’t understand what their patients are saying.

No … it’s not because the doctors can’t speak English, it’s because the patients use too much slang.

And so now doctors can take an accent modification programme to help them along - yep we’re gunna teach ‘em the lingo.

Perhaps some of the doctors who are already here and well established need to be taught that the two minutes of their time that they take to write our a repeat perscription is really not worth the $50.00 that they charge.

Christmas is fast approaching and that means that it’s time for this year’s Light Up Our City community event.

Well let’s be honest and call it a competition where only the brightest win

If you want to enter your home or business in this year’s competition then look for the entry forms will be appearing in the Chronicle for the next month.

And while you’re at it encourage your neighbours to join in too and maybe next year the street sign that marks your street can carry the prestigious Christmas Street sign too.

Skateboarders - love them or hate them are here to stay in Hervey Bay and they’re to be commended for confining their activities to the Hervey Bay Skate Park.

To encourage our skateboarders even further Hervey Bay City Council has arranged for Skate Australia to run a series of their Streetwise Skateboard Clinics here in the Bay on December 14, 15 and 16.

The current round of water restrictions that we are living under could only be the start of something that could become much worse - even here in Hervey Bay.

As our population continues to grow and spending on low-vote items, such as dams, fails to keep up with that development the water shortage could become much more serious. And it’s becoming more and more obvious that the resource that we once took for granted is something that is far more valuable than we realised.

At the moment we tend to treat it as something that has little value. We fill a glass of water from the tap, drink half of it and then pour the rest down the drain. We hose down our driveways and paths because it is quicker than using a broom, we leave the shower running or we over-water our plants and all that valuable water goes to waste.

That became really obvious to your scribes this week when we noticed something interesting.

The water quality in the part of town where we live is not good; there is a lot of black crud that comes through the pipes and finds its way into the water we drink. Filtering it wasn’t very successful and we got to the stage where we were not drinking enough water. So we decided to buy in some water from Cooroy Mountain Spring Water.

And it has been a great success. The quality of the water is excellent and we are back to drinking more than the amount of water we should drink each day to maintain our health.

However, there has been an interesting side-effect to us buying our water. We have noticed that we don’t waste it. We don’t fill a glass, drink half of it and then pour the rest down the sink. Subconciously we have realised that it has value and is not something to dispose of so thoughtlessly.

Maybe it’s time we all started remembering that even the water that comes from the tap has value and should be treated as a valuable resource that does have finite limits.

If you want some great tips on ways to save water then visit http://www.yourwater.com.au

Hervey Bay City Council is holding a community consultation meeting on Monday, October 31 at the Community Centre, Elizabeth Street, Urangan. The meeting will discuss Natural Area Foreshore Enhancement projects for 2005 - 2006 in the Urangan area.

The area under discussion is west of approximately 591 The Esplanade, past the Reefworld Aquarieam to the Great Sandy Straights Marina.

Input from the community is seen as vital because you may be able to help compile wildlife lists for the site, share historical information and raise relevant concerns or identify community needs.

The meeting times on Monday are 7pm to 9pm.

It seems that the successful candidate at last Saturday’s by-election was Sue Brooks and the Returning Officer will officially announce the results later this afternoon.

Ms Brooks based her campaign on a very conservative approach to future tourist developments here in Hervey Bay and so her election raises some interesting questions about the thinking of the voters in the city.

Whether or not she will actually have much of an impact on the Council and the way it operates remains to be seen but it will be interesting to see what transpires over the coming months.

It would be nice if Ms Brooks continued to communicate with the electorate - at the moment it’s almost as if members of Council are enveloped in a cone of silence from the time they are elected.

One thing we have noticed about living in Hervey Bay is the incredible amount of junk mail that we get in our letter box every week.

On the weekend we cleaned out a great lump of it that must have weighed almost a kilogram and then on Wednesday I did the same thing again so it’s time to submit a request to those who deliver that ’stuff’.

Please, I do enjoy looking at some junk mail. Anything related to computers always gets read but the rest of it tends to go straight to the garbage and that is really time consuming.

I’m a sensitive new-age type of bloke who believes in recycling and so I like to seperate the junk mail that can be recycled from the junk that can’t. And quite frankly, that’s taking up way too much of my time these days so how about it guys?

Can you presort it for me before you put it in my letterbox?

I mean, that would save me around 5 minutes week and that’s 20 minutes a month. Over a year that’s an incredible 2 hours of my life given up doing something that you could do for me.

Really, I’m not as young as I once was so every minute is becoming precious to me and you could make me very happy if you did that little thing for me.

We all love our pillows whether they be soft or hard, sculpted or just plain. In fact you scribes like their pillows so much that we take them with us when we go on the road. But I bet you never thought that a pillow could be a serious health hazard.

While a pillow can be part of a hot bed of lust and passion the pillow itself can be a hot bed of unpleasant fungii that are the stuff of nightmares.

Researchers at the University of Manchester have made some rather unpleasant discoveries about pillows. Right under our heads there are millions of fungal spores living and thriving as we sleep.

Aspergillus fumigatus, the species most commonly found in the pillows, is most likely to cause disease; and the resulting condition Aspergillosis has become the leading infectious cause of death in leukaemia and bone marrow transplant patients. Fungi also exacerbate asthma in adults.

And if that isn’t bad enough:

Professor Ashley Woodcock who led the research said: “We know that pillows are inhabited by the house dust mite which eats fungi, and one theory is that the fungi are in turn using the house dust mites’ faeces as a major source of nitrogen and nutrition (along with human skin scales). There could therefore be a ‘miniature ecosystem’ at work inside our pillows.”

Aspergillus is a very common fungus, carried in the air as well as being found in cellars, household plant pots, compost, computers and ground pepper and spices.

Invasive Aspergillosis occurs mainly in the lungs and sinuses, although it can spread to other organs such as the brain, and is becoming increasingly common across other patient groups. It is very difficult to treat, and as many as 1 in 25 patients who die in modern European teaching hospitals have the disease.

If you want to read all of the press release regarding this research you can find it here

And our thanks to Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends for the story.