Comeback kid shows spirit of champion
HELEN KEMPTON
3 May 2010
LITTLE Cooper Johnson was excited and proud when he ran out on to the field during a gala junior football day at North Hobart yesterday.
The event was held in support of the Leukaemia Foundation and the nine-year-old knows a lot more about the illness than most sports-mad children his age.
The North Hobart Reds player finished treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in December.“Cooper is full of energy and trying to make up for lost time,'' his father Heath Johnson said after the North Hobart Reds claimed victory over the Claremont Bulldogs yesterday morning.
“He had a great day and was really excited to run out onto the field with his mates.'' Cheering him from the sidelines was Jane Anderson, a support services co-ordinator with the Leukaemia Foundation, who helped Cooper and his family during his treatment.
Cooper was diagnosed with blood cancer when he was three. He had successful treatment but relapsed last year. “He is currently in remission and naturally that is how we want things to stay,'' Mr Johnson said.
Hundreds of young footballers took part in the under-nine gala day and all proceeds raised went to the Leukaemia Foundation.
Sponsored by local restaurant Fish 349, the day featured 24 teams from across Southern Tasmania.“We are delighted to support the Leukaemia Foundation again this year,'' Cripps Southern Tasmanian Junior Football League executive officer Tony Gibson said.
Farewell to a great storyteller
ANDREW DOWDELL, ADELAIDENOW REPORTER
4 May 2010
WALKLEY Award-winning journalist Murray Nicoll has died after a battle with leukaemia. Nicoll, 66, was best known for his radio broadcast from his burning Adelaide Hills home during the Ash Wednesday bushfires in 1983. He won Walkley Awards for the Ash Wednesday broadcast and another series of radio segments recorded during an expedition to Mt Everest.
Premier Mike Rann paid tribute to Nicoll via his Twitter page. “So sad to hear of the death of Murray Nicoll. Great journo. Great bloke. Honest. Liked a story with a twist but never twisted the story,'' Mr Rann wrote.
Seven's Adelaide news director Terry Plane said Nicoll was a unique storyteller across all three mediums.“The further he went into journalism, the more of a storyteller he became,'' he told ABC radio.
“I think everyone here at Seven feels privileged to have spent the last five years of his career with him.'' Nicoll also worked in radio in Melbourne, for ABC radio in Adelaide and then for Channel 7. He was diagnosed with leukaemia last September and died on Sunday at his home, survived by his wife and two daughters.
Girls just want to have fun and it's all for a good cause
Reviewed by Jason Blake
3 May 2010
TIM FIRTH'S adaptation of the 2003 movie he co-authored is as light as a supermarket sponge cake and similarly complex. The plot, if you don't know already, is spun from real events: the making of a nude calendar by members of a Yorkshire Women's Institute which became a huge seller in 1999 and raised - and continues to raise, in part thanks to this play - buckets of money for cancer research. Good little yarn, but not much to hang a two-hour play on.
Firth locates most of the action within the WI hall, funnelling the ladies in and out through one central door. There's a village am-dram feel to the staging one would like to think is deliberate.
The first half is fairly engaging as this diverse group of women - variously bored, lonely, retired, frustrated, searching and all bonded by their dislike for their snobby chairwoman - rally around the grieving Annie (Anna Lee), who has lost her hubby to leukaemia. The business of making the calendar is very much truncated (the montage of drooling, would-be photographers was one of its best sequences of the movie and isn't attempted here) and the nudity coy in the extreme. The film's emotional climax, the speech that wins over the WI conference, is slackly recreated here. The cast is valiant in its efforts to raise a pulse from the play. They time the gags well and the production benefits from not having the players obviously amplified. The trade-off is that back-row punters will be straining for some of the lines.
Amanda Muggleton doesn't miss a beat as Chris, a show pony seduced by the media attention, and Jean Kittson is terrific as the gawky Ruth. Rhonda Burchmore looks rather more Desperate Housewife than Yorkshire golf widow but is effective. Lorraine Bayly excels as the wry former schoolteacher Jessie.
David Downer, playing Annie's husband, John, fades away quite affectingly, unlike the play, which ends with a sunflower-filled tableau of striking naffness.
