According to Pedestrian.com, Channel Nine stalwart and long-time broadcaster Bill Lawry has confirmed that he will completely retire from commentating the game, effective immediately.
The 81-year-old Lawry had, in recent years, been reduced to guest commentary duties during the Melbourne and Sydney Tests, but the shakeup in broadcasting channels – which has seen the broadcasting rights shift from Nine to a coalition between Seven and Fox Sports – has forced his hand.
Lawry spoke with Gerard Wheatley on SEN earlier this morning, confirming that Seven had contacted him about potentially coming across to provide commentary on their broadcasts this summer, but Lawry’s loyalty to Channel Nine, where he served in the commentary team for nearly 40 years, was too great of a pull.
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Two mountains in Central Queensland will have their official names changed back to those given to them by traditional Darumbal landowners. According to the Department of Natural Resources, Mount Jim Crow and Mount Wheeler will now officially be on the map as Baga and Gai-i, respectively.
The origin of the name of Mount Jim Crow is unclear but it’s associated to the deeply racist ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws is, quite obviously, unavoidable. For its part, Mount Wheeler is believed to have been named after Frederick Wheeler, a policeman who took part in several massacres of Indigenous people in the 1800s.
As Darumbal elder Aunty Sally Vea Vea told the ABC, the time they’ve been named anything else has only been a tiny blip in their history:
“The original names had been that way for 60,000 years but in the last 150 years they were changed.”
The decision was reached after the traditional landowners spent years lobbying the state government for change.
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