By Ian Warden
Today, using the kind of sentimental mathematics Dr Brendan Nelson used to calculate last Saturday's attendance at the Dawn Service (he imagined 120,000 were there) we address this column's teeming millions of readers.
Readers, what's the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile. So, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile at this little story's rather heart-warming outcome.
Shen Morincome and his experiment
With that timely allusion to a Great War ditty we remind you that as reported here (Gang-gang, 7 April) student Shen Morincome was required, for a school project, to devise a scientific experiment that might be of benefit to society.
The Telopea High School student contacted ARF (the organisation rescues dogs facing euthanasia; training and socialising them and finding them ideal, doting foster homes) to ask permission to use ARF in his experiment.
His idea, he explained to us was to find out what colour people are more attracted to when asked to donate money and put it in a collection box. He thought the findings might prove useful for battling not-for-profit organisations, helping them to know which colour people are most attracted to when asked to make a donation.
So to conduct the experiment he used four ARF donation boxes of different colours and conducted three collecting trials on different days at three different spots. At each he presided (wearing an ARF T-shirt) over a table bearing the boxes, and invited people them to help the ARF cause and make a donation, putting it into the box of their choice.
Xena - cattle dog princessCredit: act\ian.warden
We will come to the facts and figures of the experiment (and, unlike Brendan Nelson's imaginative assessments of Anzac Day Dawn Service attendances they'll be figures you can trust) in a moment.
First, though, we report something delightful that came to pass while Shen was out in the field separating passers by from their shekels. At his third and final funds collecting/experimenting occasion (it was in Civic at the City Walk fountain) he was accompanied by some, real, live ARF "poster dogs".
One of them, Xena, a cattle dog cross about a year old, was in need of a good foster home. And lo and behold a passer-by was utterly beguiled by her. Now, (after ARF's usual painstaking investigations of the potential owner and of the home Xena would be going to) Xena and that beguiled passer-by are united and hitherto-orphaned Xena has a home, at Womboin.
Here, then, are the unNelsonesquely trustworthy calculations supplied to us by Shen Morincome.
"The total amount of money I raised for ARF [from three fund-raising experiments] was $495. The coloured box that received the most donations overall was BLUE. Here is the order from the amount of actual donations made per box overall. First, Blue (42 donations), second Yellow (36 donations), third Red (26 donations) and fourth Black (13 donations)."
And so our prime minister's cunning psychological choice of blue ties is vindicated.
We alluded, above, to the Anzac Day Dawn Service. If you were at Saturday's occasion and if you have been to a full MCG do you accept Dr Nelson's calculation that there were enough people (120,000) at his memorial at dawn on Saturday to fill a fullish MCG and, plus that, to fill the 15,000 seat Rod Laver Arena twice?
Just as truth is the first casualty of war it has for some years been the first casualty of Anzac Day, in the form of the Australian War Memorial's ludicrous declarations of the numbers attending the Dawn Service.
Though not there this year I've been to almost every Dawn Service in recent years, always noticing how the AWM's official calculation of the congregation (always dutifully parroted by an unquestioning media, as the gospel truth) is at least double my own. I've known my estimate of 15,000 become 35,000 according to the memorial's rose-coloured abacus. Suspecting this year's Dawn Service might lure an actual 35,000ish (too many for me) one was braced for Dr Nelson and the memorial to at least double that. And they have, with knobs on.
Those of us who are serial sports fans familiar with packed venues of precisely known capacities think we may be moderately good at guessing crowd sizes. What's more some of us, unlike Dr Nelson, have no axe to grind in Anzackery matters and can do our crowd sums dispassionately.
Surely, when one is a grown up, the Dawn Service at the memorial would be just as profound if just a few dozen were there. Pumping up the imaginary attendance at something because we think it is a deserving occasion seems immature.
At anti-Vietnam War rallies we long-haired Maoists always did something similar, something Nelsonesque. We'd tell the media there were 200,000 of us there (in our Nelsonesque idealistic delirium we imagined it to be true) and the killjoy police would scoff to the media that, no, the student scum only amounted to an unwashed 8,500 of us at the most. In those good old days the media would publish both bizarre claims, and a roughly truthful figure might emerge between the lines.
Now, with no one knowing how to think and speak dispassionately at times of sentimental khakimania, the estimated quarter million Dawn Service congregation may (virtually) gather in our lifetimes.
Correction. Monday's column featured a memorial on Gallipoli with a poppy (hand-made made in Hall) arranged beside the name of Stephen Eugarde, killed on Gallipoli. He was not as reported a relative of Hall's Phil Robson but was the great uncle of Hall resident Ken Heffernan.