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NRL icon Paul Green’s death highlights Australia’s tragic suicide rates

NRL icon Paul Green's death highlights Australia's tragic suicide rates

The shock death of Paul Green has highlighted a tragic reality for so many Australians, as the country continues to reel from the loss of the NRL icon.

The former footy star turned premiership-winning coach passed away at his home in Brisbane on Thursday morning aged 49. It has been confirmed he took his own life.

Green’s wife, Amanda, found him unresponsive at their home after returning home from doing pilates at the gym, according to the Courier Mail.

His death shines a light on a heartbreaking reality so many Australian families face every single year.

On average, male suicides make up about 75 per cent of all suicides across the country each year.

In 2019 men accounted for 2,502 out of a total 3,318 registered suicide deaths in Australia.

Awareness around mental health, particularly in men, has increased substantially over the years, but these figures show we still have a very long way to go.

Mental fitness advocate and founder of the Gotcha4Life foundation, Gus Worland, said Green’s death draws a “line in the sand” for Australians.

“Unfortunately, we lose seven blokes a day every day, two women a day every day, we have people attempting suicide at a rapid rate in Australia. So when someone famous, takes their own life, all of a sudden that shines a light on it,” he told news.com.au.

“But it also should make us realize it’s not just about this moment, but how many other families and communities that have that ripple effect that’s ripping through them right now.

“So at some point, we need to put that line in the sand and say ‘You know what? No more’. We have to really start looking after ourselves better.”

World highlighted the importance of everyone understanding who their “village” is, meaning the people around them who they love and cherish.

It is incredibly important for people to identify their support network and make sure they are investing in these relationships.

Worland said this is all part of working on your “mental fitness” so that you feel comfortable reaching out when things get difficult.

“It doesn’t mean you burst into tears every five minutes or you have a deep and meaningful conversation every time you talk. It means you’ve got that in your locker to be able to have enough emotional muscle to ask for help,” he said.

In Green’s case, Worland pointed out that there were thousands of people who would have stopped everything they were doing and done anything to help him.

“That’s the point we need to get to, where people are asking for help and not making this ultimately very, very permanent decision based on a temporary situation.”

Green had arguably endured the toughest year of his life in the lead up to his tragic death, which came 11 months after he was sacked as head coach of the Maroons following Queensland’s loss in last year’s State of Origin series.

Last February he sold his family home in Townsville for $1.85 million, and admitted it was difficult to let go of the place where his two kids, Jed and Emerson, had grown up.

“It is pretty tough to move and tough on the family,” he said at the time.

On average, one in eight men will experience depression and one in five men will experience anxiety at some stage of their lives, according to Beyond Blue.

Reaching out for help is often easier said than done. For someone who is struggling, admitting that you need help can be incredibly difficult.

For men, this struggle can be the result of societal expectations to be tough and not show emotions.

“It is a difficult conversation because we’ve told all our lives to man up and shut up or take a teaspoon of cement and harden the f**k up,” Worland said.

“Even in primary school you scratch your knee and someone says ‘Come on, up you get. You’ll be right. So it is really instilled in us from a young age.”

It can be incredibly difficult to unlearn these things, but doing so is an important step in changing the shocking statistics we see every year.

One of the key things the Gotcha4Life foundation does is encouraging people to exercise their “emotional muscles” and be “mentally fit” so they cannot only reach out when they need help, but can recognize when others need it too.

Unfortunately, because many people are so used to masking their true emotions, knowing when someone is struggling can be difficult.

“Of course we all look out for our friends and if they’re changing their behaviour, their personality changes, they’ve gone quiet, or they’re just looked like they’re not well, that’s easy. But we don’t we don’t get to that stage very often,” the Gotcha4Life founder said.

“Paul Green last weekend was at the Cronulla reunion and he was the life of the party. He was playing golf the day before and he was the life of the party.

“My friend that started this whole journey for me. He had the most fantastic day on a Friday. His third and final child of him had just finished the HSC. He was buoyant. And then half an hour later he went and did what he did.”

Green looked delighted as he chatting with journalists during the meeting last weekend.

Former Cowboys chairman Laurence Lancini told News Corp that Green seemed fine three days ago when he spoke to him to say they should catch up for a beer soon.

But Lancini did say that “the last few years had been tough on” the coach.

“The last few years have been a bit tough on him because he hasn’t been coaching in the NRL,” he said.

“I said to Greeny, just take your time and the right opportunity will come along.”

Yes, speaking about these emotions can be uncomfortable, but Worland said if more people focus on getting mentally fit, then they are more likely to start having these awkward conversations and possibly save lives.

World said the simplest message he can give people is “don’t worry alone”.

“That’s a really simple key message to get away from this. So if you don’t worry alone, it means you’ve told someone whether it’s a friend or a family member, or it’s a professional,” he said.

“If you don’t worry alone, you’re more likely to get the help that you need to get through the type of stuff that life throws at you.”

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Entertainment

Everybody’s Oma is a raw, emotional and ultimately uplifting film

Everybody's Oma is a raw, emotional and ultimately uplifting film

Ever wondered what kind of lockdowns we would’ve had if covid had hit 30, 20 or even 10 years ago?

As bruising and wrought the whole experience was – and in some ways, continues to be – one of the upsides of covid, if we can take a glass-half-full approach for a moment, is that it unleashed a torrent of creativity online.

When we couldn’t bond in person, many tried to connect virtually in imaginative ways.

For the van Genderan family, from NSW’s Central Coast, a lockdown video featuring a makeshift supermarket in their family home to simulate a weekly shopping trip for Oma, their dementia-afflicted matriarch, went viral around the world, clocking up more than 100 million views .

The video and the family’s social media channels became a way for them to share their journey with Oma’s dementia, and Everybody’s Oma is filmmaker Jason van Genderen’s tribute to his mother and the whole family’s love and resilience.

It’s also a tribute to anyone who has a loved one with dementia, dealing with the heartbreak of watching them lose themselves as the symptoms take a firmer and firmer hold.

Shot purely on iPhones, Everybody’s Oma is at times an unflinching look at the day-to-day challenges of not just taking care of one person, but also the enormous emotional, physical and social toll taking care of Oma at home exacts takes on everyone else.

At its most moving moments, it’s not the footage of Oma that really hits, but the piece-to-camera confessions from Jason and his wife Megan. The camera – and the eventual audience – becomes a therapist or a priest, an outlet for them to express what they’re afraid to say out loud.

One specific admission from Jason is the kind of thing you would never allow yourself to think, let alone confront. There’s a lot of bravery in including it in the documentary and the fact Jason did speaks to his attempt to authenticity.

Taken out of context, the words are monstrous, but only someone incapable of empathy would judge him for how he felt. He was a man and a son exhausted and beaten down by the insidiousness of dementia.

There’s a lot of rawness in Everybody’s Oma and the iPhone footage helps to establish that intimate connection between the family and the audience. While the shots are crisp, it’s the nimbleness and largely unplanned nature of the sequences that makes you feel as if you’re part of it.

While it may seem as if all the harrowing realism of Everybody’s Oma makes this film a hard watch, it’s actually not.

There is a beating heart to this story, and it’s powered by love. That love is evident in every furrowed brow, every frustrated sight and every exasperated question of what’s next.

Everybody’s Oma is ultimately a stirring and uplifting feature because every difficult moment is testament to what humans are capable of in the name of love.

Rating: 3.5/5

Everybody’s Oma is in cinemas from Thursday, August 11

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Categories
Business

Melbourne real estate: Couple mocked for impulse buying $1.5m terrace

Melbourne real estate: Couple mocked for impulse buying $1.5m terrace

A young Melbourne couple have been roasted online after “impulse buying” a $1.5 million East Brunswick terrace at auction.

But the agent who sold the property has now spoken out, saying the backlash from “keyboard warriors” is unfair and that the sale has been misrepresented.

Property website Domain published an article on Saturday about the young buyers of 110 Barkly Street, which sold under the hammer after the couple pipped another bidder for just $500.

Darcy and Tessa, who declined to give their last names, ultimately paid $1,500,500 for the deceased estate, which went to auction with a price guide of $1.3 million to $1.43 million.

“To be honest we weren’t really looking, we were just looking casually and this one popped up,” Tessa told Domain.

Darcy added, “There’s a bit of concern around with what housing prices are doing but this one really stood out to us, and it turned out we got it.”

The couple said they planned to fix up the terrace and rent it out in the short term before moving in later and doing further renovation.

Darcy said while interest rate rises were “certainly something to consider”, the couple were “in a good position with renting it out at this point”.

“From our point of view we can pass that on to the rental market,” he said.

The article went viral on Reddit after a user on the Melbourne forum posted a screenshot of the headline.

“I guess I don’t feel so bad about impulse buying a Snickers at the Coles checkout now,” they wrote.

“I mean we’ve all been there, right? Just wandering down the street to get coffee or something, you’ve got $1.5 million burning a hole in your pocket and you stumble across an auction – damn it! Did I really just buy a house again? Man my wife is going to give me a hard time about this when I get back.”

One person replied, “I genuinely know two people who have done this. One whilst driving past on the way to visit a friend (investment property in Footscray), and the other whose husband came home and announced he’d bought a new family home. WTF.”

Another wrote, “Joke’s on them, be at least $500,000 less in about six months.”

Ray White Glenroy auctioneer Stefan Stella told news.com.au on Monday he felt the reaction from “keyboard warriors” online had been “pretty harsh”.

“As much as it said they weren’t really looking, they did see it on the first open, came multiple times – they were there three times,” he said.

“In my opinion they were probably always going to get it. The underbidder only saw it in the last week. I think what they may have meant was they weren’t actively looking and religiously out there every Saturday, that’s potentially the message they were trying to get across.”

It comes after the Reserve Bank hiked interest rates for the fourth month in a row last week.

The 50 basis-point increase at the central bank’s August meeting brings the official cash rate to 1.85 per cent, up from the record low 0.1 per cent it was up until May.

Already, the rise in interest rates has pushed house prices down in most major cities as borrowers stare down the barrel of higher monthly payments.

PropTrack’s Home Price Index shows a national decline of 1.66 per cent in prices since March, but some regions have seen much sharper falls.

“As repayments become more expensive with rising interest rates, housing affordability will decline, prices pushing further down,” PropTrack senior economist Eleanor Creagh said.

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Business

Horror rise in Queensland men threatening to burn their partners alive revealed

Horror rise in Queensland men threatening to burn their partners alive revealed

Domestic and family violence perpetrators in Queensland are increasingly threatening to set their current and former partners alight, a new study has found, with cases spiking after the horrific 2020 murders of Hannah Clarke and her children.

The report, co-authored by UQ TC Beirne School of Law senior lecturer Joseph Lelliott and associate lecturer Rebecca Wallis, details testimonies from seven non-government domestic and family violence service providers in the state’s southeast.

Direct and implicit threats of dousing are a form of coercive control that has not been formally studied before.

But they are on the rise: one participant told the survey of 17 workers last year that abusers sent the stories of Clarke – whose three children were burned alive in their car in February 2020 by her estranged husband – and Kelly Wilkinson – who was set alight in her Gold Coast backyard last April – to their partners as a means of telling them, “That’s what I’ll do to you”.

“Anecdotally, there have been cases where perpetrators have directly referenced the cases of Hannah Clarke or Kelly Wilkinson when they make threats, saying, ‘You’re going to end up just like her’, or saying something along the lines of, ‘That’s what you’ll get’ if news about them comes on,” Dr Lelliott told news.com.au.

“It appears that media reports about these cases, and ones like them, may lead to ‘copycat’-like behaviour, but may also be used as a tool of abuse themselves.

“Some interview respondents noted that perpetrators may also, for example, leave print outs of news stories concerning Hannah Clarke and the children around the house, or send them to ex-partners.”

The majority of participants in the study reported that cases of dousing threats within their services had become more prevalent over the past two or so years. And while no empirical measures exist yet, reasons may include an increased awareness among workers, and an increased fear among victims that such threats could be part of a pattern of escalating violence leading to murder.

“People are far more aware of it and that’s why there are so many more women, I think, talking about it,” one worker noted.

“Because now they’re really fearful and they’ve seen the consequences of that kind of threat being carried out.”

Another stated that they “see a really high prevalence of these kinds of threats, absolutely”.

“Different kinds of levels, different kinds of threats, but we do,” they added.

“So what we see most commonly are threats to burn the house down, threats to burn family and friend’s houses down, that sort of thing.”

“I actually have supported a woman whose respondent actually doused himself in petrol and threatened to burn himself at their family home where their children slept. Basically, yeah, well, it scared the hell out of her anyway,” one worker said.

“So, he did not actually burn himself because she managed to call triple-zero straight away. [But] the impact on her was really profound, because the smell of the petrol lingered for months.

“The location where he didused himself was actually close to the gas tank. So, he could have just killed everyone.”

What makes these threats – both implied and explicit – particularly “insidious”, Dr Lelliott and Dr Wallis noted in their findings, is that these “behaviours could be perceived as innocuous without an understanding of the broader context of the relationship”, but “almost always” occur in the context of an escalating pattern of “serious” domestic and family violence.

“I’m finding that it’s one of many elements. It’s not ever a stand-alone,” one worker said.

“Like they don’t just threaten to burn the house down or burn somebody – most of the time it’s because there is a domestic violence order (DVO), the client has left the relationship so there’s an escalation in the violence, and therefore it does escalate to the threats of burning either the house down, themselves or the client and the children.

“But usually there’s a lot that’s happened before it actually escalates to that point.”

Another, echoing the sentiment, noted the threats are “almost always just after separation”.

“So it’s about that not accepting that the relationship is over, and going into revenge and retaliation mode,” they added.

Their severity is also amplified by the accessibility of accelerants like petrol which, unlike the purchase of a firearm, are seen as “normal” household items.

Dr Lelliott told news.com.au that the prevalence of the study’s findings indicate “that there does need to be greater awareness of dousing threats – and indeed the use of fire generally – as a form of domestic and family violence and as a pattern of coercive control”.

“Some of our findings indicate that the severity of these threats is not always recognised, particularly by police,” he said.

“This work is, of course, preliminary at this point. We will release further papers in the future.”

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Business

Sydney couple build $1.2m property portfolio in just three months

Sydney couple build $1.2m property portfolio in just three months

A Sydney couple, who had been priced out of upgrading their family home, have managed to create a property portfolio worth $1.2 million in the space of just three months.

Amit Kumar and his wife Astha had bought a townhouse in the Sydney suburb of Quakers Hill for $610,000 six years ago.

Despite saving hard and their family home growing in value to $780,000, the couple who have two children aged three and five, discovered Sydney’s skyrocketing property market would mean it was impossible for them to find a new property in the city.
They had discussed the idea of ​​buying other homes but were nervous.

“It was the fear of the unknown,” Mr Kumar said. “You just don’t know what to do, you don’t want to overpay, you don’t want to buy the wrong place and then have it vacant for long periods and with no tenants,” he told news.com.au .

“You don’t know where the growth is going to be and you don’t know what the projects are in certain areas and things like that.”

But the couple met with a buyer’s agent and took the plunge in April, snapping up two properties in that month alone.

The first was in Adelaide in the southern suburb of Christie Downs, a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house.

They purchased it for $425,000 and it has already grown in value by approximately $60,000.

The second property was purchased in Toowoomba, Queensland – a three-bedroom house for $455,000, which has also jumped in value by $50,000.

“We were very nervous, particularly because they actually settled very close to each other… the settlement was two days apart,” he said.

“And also complicating things further was the Easter break and the Anzac Day long weekend happened as well, so it was all on short notice.

“I think at the time there was an election coming up, we didn’t know what the policies were going to be, we didn’t know what the interest rate was doing and how it’s going to affect us.”

But the gamble has paid off so far with Mr Kumar revealing they had 20 rental applications for the Adelaide house before the open home was even held.

“So we had a very large number of applications to actually choose from and we actually managed to get more than what we actually hoped to achieve in terms of rent,” he said.

“So when we bought the place, we were told $410 is a realistic expectation in terms of rent, but we actually ended up achieving $420.”

The Toowoomba home was already tenanted but Mr Kumar said it was at a significantly lower amount to the market rate.

They were told they would get $450 for the place, but after the previous tenant moved out, it was only empty for three days and then rented out for $470, he said.

Their latest buy has been in Bundaberg, a house for $387,000 snapped up in July, which is expected to rent out for $460.

All three properties were also bought sight unseen, Mr Kumar added, while the rents cover their mortgages.

The couple paid $65,000 to $70,000 for each place including stamp duty, using a 12 per cent “sweet spot” deposit recommended by their mortgage broker.

Mr Kumar, who works in sales, said the couple still plan to use their portfolio as a “stepping stone” to buy a bigger place in Sydney in the next 12 to 24 months, but they won’t stop there.

The 39-year-old never believed it would be possible to build a property portfolio but now the couple have a goal to buy eight to 10 properties in the next five to seven years.

He advised others to get into the property market as soon as they can, adding people shouldn’t be influenced by the market, but instead focus on the long-term goal of building value in their property.

“One of the things the buyer’s agent said to me and it’s just stuck out in my mind is that the earlier you buy, the sooner you buy, then the more time you’re allowing for capital growth and timing is not as critical as just getting into the market,” he said.

“Because if you buy the right property at the right price, timing is not such an important factor.

“All three properties that he’s bought for me, we’ve actually managed to get all of them under market value, so what it means is indirectly like even already now by the time we settle, we already have some equity.”

Read related topics:sydney

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