Robert Drewe discovers that Stating the Bleeding Obvious has somehow become a well-respected profession.

Regular readers might have noticed that this column is intrigued by the absurdities of everyday life. One of these follies – an easy target, I know — is the regular, highly focussed and presumably expensive research into something so bleedingly obvious that it defies common sense.

But – I hear you say — our assumptions and guesses should be challenged by rigorous academic research wherever possible, lest civilisation fall into emotional and intellectual sloth. Evidence needs to be gathered to test those commonplace conventions and lazy suppositions, blah, blah.

So as an all-season Byron beach lover it was with great interest that I read in the Guardian of this important study: “Assessing Preferences of Beach Users for Certain Aspects of Weather and Ocean Conditions: Case Studies from Australia”, the work of researchers Fan Zhang and Xiao Hua Wang from the University of NSW, published in the International Journal of Biometeorology.

Their research was most comprehensive. Homing in on three of Australia’s biggest, most populous tourist beaches, Bondi, Surfers Paradise and Narrowneck, also on the Gold Coast, every day at 9 a.m., noon and 3 p.m. for three years, they used the services of CoastalCOMS’ people-counting computer program to count the number of people on the beach and in shallow water from webcam images.

To discover all the details of what was happening at each beach on those times every day, they obtained weather and ocean-behaviour data – air temperature, relative humidity, cloud cover, wind speed and the amount of rain, water temperature and wave height – from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and other agencies. In a nutshell, their study was endeavouring to find out, once and for all, what sort of weather beachgoers prefer.

Seriously. And this is what their research discovered: “The conditions preferred by beach users, as found in this study, are: no precipitation, higher temperatures, light-to-moderate wind speed (less than 30 km/h) and low wave height (up to 1.25m).” So at last we can announce, with some certainty, that Australian beachgoers prefer good weather.

(But wait, you cry: they only researched three beaches. Isn’t additional intense and specific research necessary before we can definitely know if beachgoers at every other beach in the country also prefer fine weather?)

Nevertheless, Beachgoers Prefer Fine Weather now enters our list of Recent Research into the Most Bleedingly Obvious Subjects, joining our current favourite study discoveries.

In no particular order these are (truly): Hanging is Bad for the Heart; Racists Are Close-Minded; Umbrellas Protect You From the Sun; Bad Relationships Depress People; Cheaper Fruit and Vegetables Attract More Buyers; Reality TV Skews Reality; Drugs and Driving Don’t Mix; and Young Women Are Attracted to Musicians.

Morbid research results first. The Emergency Medicine Journal confirmed that hanging is indeed not good for the heart. Researchers reviewing Melbourne’s emergency departments’ medical records found that four per cent of cardiac arrests were the result of hanging. The studies showed that when someone hangs themselves, the heart stops.

As for racists, a study published in the journal Psychological Science reveals that, sure enough, racism either produces or parallels a closed mind. Racists tended to be biased in other areas as well as race, and to score low in creativity and sociability.

As for umbrellas, according to the journal JAMA Dermatology, although they’re typically designed to shield you from the rain, they can also block harmful UV rays. Black umbrellas block 95 per cent of rays, the others 77 per cent. Umbrellas provide shade. Who would have thought it?

As for people buying more fruit and veggies when they’re cheaper, and bad relationships depressing people, and reality TV skewing reality, and drugs and driving not mixing, these were so far beyond bleedingly obvious, so self-evident, that I couldn’t be bothered looking up the research involved.

However, the assertion that young women find male musicians sexually attractive needed some evidence. It was provided, in part, by the journal Psychology of Music. Its study had a young man ask young women on the street for their phone numbers while he held either a sports bag, a guitar case or nothing at all. Carrying nothing at all or the sports bag got an equally negative response. When holding the guitar case, however, he did very well.

So all those unsporty Northern Rivers boys taking up the guitar in the hope of getting chicks are not too wide of the mark, after all. Unfortunately the research did not show any results for a test subject wearing a suit and glasses and carrying a violin, cello or tuba case.

Robert Drewe’s latest books are The Local Wildlife and Swimming to the Moon.

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