Australian Football, 2005, by Frank Hicks
From MemoryArchive
Who: Frank Hicks What: Australian Football When: September 25, 2005 Where: Canberra, Australia
‘Equinox Australis’ Aussie DownUnder
Canberra: Sunday 25th September, 2005
For Australians the last weeks in September always bring football finals, blossoms and flowers, and sometimes - as is the case this season - enough rainfall to make the countryside very green.
In Canberra the flowers of Floriade are open for public display while at the same time the Lifeline bookfair opened at the Showgrounds [nowadays NATEX - the National Exhibition Centre], school holidays began and the imposing of Bush Fire Restrictions was officially delayed for a month until the end of October. The Bushfire coronial inquest will resume in a week or so, and should report sometime after the peak of the fire season in 2006. This is the much delayed enquiry into the 2003 fires, I have no idea whether the coronial inquiry into the 2002 Canberra bushfires - the truly potent portent - has ever been completed. Such is bureaucratic life, not to mention the secret life of bushfires.
Yesterday we barbecued snags on the open fire set in our front garden. Birds flew through the aromatic smoke, still happy to scavenge after winter’s thin pickings. Doves, King Parrots, Galahs, Magpies, occasional white Cockatoos and Rosellas; all very chatty and peck ordered. Young Angus comes over most Saturdays to surf the net. He oscillates uniquely between ‘Horrible Science’, insect morphology, UFO news, flying saucer pictures [jpegs and gifs now of course] and the downloading of the words of (in)famous rap songs , which he learns and performs with inappropriatley clear articulation.
Meanwhile I hovered close to the television. It was Grand Final day for the AFL. There would be pictures showing progress on the rebuilding of the grandstands in preparation for the Commonwealth Games next March. [The MCG and Spencer St station rebuilds both have excellent websites, and the excitement of unfolding engineering feats is much more alluring for this oldtimer than even one good Ashes Test series in thirty years, enough said].
Channel 10, in recouping its fabulous investment in AFL, began its coverage at 8 am and this ran, along with many adverts, until 6 pm. These days there are no lead up football matches, just wall to wall ersatz patriotism, - “Girt by sea” sung and articulated in strange, nasal Americo-Cosmo accents.
I did pause to watch the performance by Dame Edna Everage [Barry Humphries]. She entered the oval on the back of a ute, its tray decked out like a giant flower bloom. Two young male dancers accompanied her, one dressed in South Melbourne/Sydney Swans colours the other in West Coast Eagles garb. The three of them pressed an abundance of gladioli blooms - ‘Gladdies’ - into spectators hands. It was great to see the usual conservative, be-suited (and this time bemused) gentlemen in the Members Section of the MCG, waving ‘gladdies’ with sheepish grins and thereby subtly portraying Barry Humphries’ version of the ultimate Ozzie Dork.
Dame Edna mounted a large platform flanked on each side by a youthful Eagles and Swans choir. She first mentioned a trip to London, to “visit her money” in a bank vault. it was there she purloined a small urn of ashes [just like the one which held her late husband, Norm] , and thus was able to bring to the MCG what test cricketers Ricky [Ponting] and Shane [Warne] had failed to bring - The Ashes. It was Peter Allen, she said, who wrote her next song, but Edna added some inimitable Everage lyrics. Finally the Dame led all 90.000 onlookers in singing “Up There, Cazaly / In there and fight/Fight like a devil/Show them your might etc, etc”. All this with TV lenses zooming down from a high flying blimp above the stadium. Lenses so powerful they could show Edna’s high heels performing on a truly enormous Toyota logo. Well at least the Eagles are sponsored by good Aussie tucker. No, Virginia, not Four’n’Twenty pies, I think they went “into liquidation”, but rather the better ‘burgers of Hungry jacks.
The good Burghers of Melbourne would have been very pleased. Lots of money and sunshine and not a single jihadi bomber hidden out of sight. Who needs to appoint a head of security for the Commonwealth Games? The main thing for people to know is which restaurant to avoid in Lygon St in Carlton. When someone gets shot in the penne, [as they do], no-one can remember if there ever was a gun and which absent-minded ‘friend’ took it away. [Steady Francis, don’t move from scepticism to cynicism, it’s “Bad Karma” :) ].
Well the Annual Ritual of Male-Bonded Balletic Violence was way above standard expectations. The ‘blood-stained Angels’ were soon blood stained in their South Melbourne red on white colours. The commentaters were happy to recall the old ‘blood-stained’ soubriquet. i noted with interest that no-one recalled its analogous nickmame given to Essendon. It was very popular in the 1950’s when I went to the footy. Suffice it to say that Essendon’s colours are red and black, and the blood stains in those days referred to a singularly politically incorrect term, which I won’t repeat here, and which you probably can NOT look up online in the Wikipedia. Ha! Ha! you’ll have to seek out some old VFL followers. Better still why not start an Aussie online dictionary of literally correct but politically unacceptable vernacular?
Throughout the game the globalising power of mass media was powerfully disclosed. The Kenneally family in Ireland were assembled to watch their favorite son who had come to Australia in order to join The Swans and who had successfully “changed codes”, - football that is, not genetic. Periodically we had to adjust our head, not the TV set, as we plunged from the sunlight of Melbourne to a darkened room in the Emerald Isle, where sleep deprived, well primed irish relatives were being inducted, cold turkey, into the Aussie code of balletic violence, they were clearly entranced.
The match provided high quality choreography, the Swans ‘won’ by only 4 points, the Eagles were ‘not shamed’, and everyone agreed the quality of umpiring was so good as to be almost imperceptible. These days the umpies are ‘miked’ so you can hear them shout ‘No chance Nathan’ or ‘Let him up, Aaron’. The AFL won’t allow “Three Blind Mice” to be played over the public address system [they banned that in the NHL when I followed ice hockey in Canada] so The Broad Democratic Masses, remained exalted but enthusiastic.
If any religion is proof against its own internal threats of fundamentalism, perhaps this Australian sports patriotism ‘sans doctrine’ has the greatest chance. After all it has dogmatism without theology, a liturgical tradition literally rooted in a moving feast, and a vision which is critically refracted through those twin lenses “On the Piss” and “Taking the Piss”. Elder Savants are often lodged in Pubs, safe houses for the prejudices of communities wistfully recalled but which no longer exist.
Such a trope transforms rather too smoothly towards tripe, so the trick is to follow the Deputy Sherif’s orders and ‘quickly move on’.
Altogether a satisfying spectacle, collective catharsis was achieved, at the same time the Gnostic secrets of the AFL - income, salary caps, shareholder dividends, were safely guarded by its masonic brotherhood.
The hyperbole of finals football has been well marked by Mark Latham’s rhetoric. ALP apparatchiks last week were seen to buy The Diaries and immediately scan the index to see if they rated a bucketing. Julia Gillard alone struggles to survive his florid praise - what a pity Donald Horne did not survive to savour this imbroglio. One of Latham’s coalition sparring partners has been Christopher Pine, [or is that Pyne?] the well spoken Adelaide scion. This week he triumphantly announced that the government had finally lifted its ban on the importation of the French unpasteurised cheese, Roquefort. There is a website, <www.engrish.com> which includes a menu item from somewhere in the orient where this cheese is given the inimitable title of “Roguefart”. This pretty much conveys the acrid flavour of Mark Latham’s Diaries.
The daffodils of today will fade, but the grass should continue greening just long enough to see us through the Spring Racing Carnival, the Melbourne Cup - first Tuesday in November (that’s when the iris bloom in my nature strip garden, a small memorial to that quixotic ‘Appleseed’ gardener, Harry Oxley), and then on to the soporific stupor of summer sauvignon blanc, beachside breezes and sandfilled Christmas lunches. C’mon Aussie, get girt by sea.
Frank Hicks Canberra, ACT, Australia
