Category Archives: family

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Courtney, cabernet and camels

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camel

“Boxing Day Blues“

I know that I let you down

You’re not keen on what you found

Courtney Barnett has many musical skills. Blistering guitar and compelling deadpan vocals, but chief among her gifts is crafting exquisite lyrics. The Melbournian uses sparse, arresting questions with potency.

When’s the funeral?

Do you want me to come?

I like how within a couplet she creates a backstory of considerable heartbreak. The questions speak of a sudden schism, destruction visited upon an intimate relationship. It’s sad.

Questions hang, and generate an ocean of regret. Courtney knows when to provide space for her listeners. The song breathes and gently sobs. It’s stunning.

*

In the days after we flew back from Queensland I chaperoned into our house a dreadful Clare shiraz. It was as if the grapes had been grown unnaturally out the back of a chip shop and the wine made, even more unnaturally, in the shed of an Ipswich car detailer.

I then ventured to the safer cabernet country of Langhorne Creek. Bleasdale is a ripper winery and its Mulberry Tree from 2013 is most companionable on these bracing evenings. The luscious fruit was an insulating treat, and I’ll engage it again soon. Friday looks likely. In Singapore it’d cost one of your limbs: prosthetic or God given. Here there’s change from twenty. Genius.

*

Despite being well beyond its sesquicentenary Adelaide continues to grow up. It’s moving from big town to city. An example of this is how the Torrens Parade Grounds was recently transformed into the Alpine Winter Village.

Borrowing heavily from German Christmas markets there was mulled wine, bratwurst and sauerkraut. Decidedly warmer than Munich in December it was brief fun under last Sunday’s pale rays. As it was booked out we couldn’t go ice skating (probably not me anyhow) but found a table and drank (and ate) in the continental troposphere.

And as you’d expect in this wintry European enclave there was a string of camels! The huge, silent beasts were led through along the village paths, their bulbous, poop-matted knees brushing my shoulders as they went past like noiseless, coffee-coloured combi-vans. Just like Bavaria!

Of course, our boys scampered off about the village to do some exploring. They returned, fresh camel turds smeared and speckled across their coats, ready for our evening at the football.

We look forward to the return of the Alpine Winter Village. But the camels can go back to the desert.

The Gobi will do.

courtney

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Round 19 – Adelaide v Essendon: Dons’ Party or Don’s Party?

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l and s

And a polite patter of applause is hird (sic) for Crows coach Don Pyke on defeating Essendon. Congratulations to Don on another first in his debut year.

Like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, the spectre of the disgraced 1996 Brownlow Medallist looms large. With which metaphors do we now designate this fallen figure? Is he a cultic prophet who fabricated his own Waco? Macbeth is probably too obvious a motif, so could the golden one now be the spectral illuminatus?

But, he was an astonishing footballer. When the Bombers stole a flag in 1993 I became a fan. However, it wasn’t until this millennium when I finally watched him at Footy Park that I became certain of his genius. His grace, immaculate skill, and tellingly, preternatural vision made him among the best I’d witnessed.

*

Roy and HG once considered the sledging skill of a rugby league player, who’d run around with the Lithgow Shamrocks, under the gruff tutelage of Grassy Grannall, expertly baiting his opponents, while using subordinate clauses.

The boys and I begin our afternoon on the Northern Mound at the Adelaide Oval, a secular temple of colossal beauty. We’re adjacent to the heritage scoreboard. With its elegant lines, and yellow and white lettering evoking Bradman and Chappell and Ebert, it’s a majestic icon. I hear no insults of lexical prettiness.

*

Despite the negligible obstacle of being delisted in 2009, a disappointment is that former Crow Robert Shirley isn’t in the side to tag Bomber Jayden Laverde. Who wouldn’t love the match-up of Laverde and Shirley? Happily humming, “Making Our Dreams Come True” I skip to the bar and request refreshment from Milwaukee’s finest, the Shotz Brewery, but instead am presented with a West End Draught.

Adelaide gets one within thirty seconds courtesy of McGovern, but then the footy is marooned for six turgid minutes in the Bombers forward line. It’s much like spending Christmas in Iron Knob: unexpected and increasingly disconcerting. Then, out it pops, and Eddie is scampering across half-forward and the crowd response is customarily seismic. He bounces thrice and goals.

Former Norwood boy Orazio Fantasia replies and Essendon are away too. The early period is characterised by a tussle before the Crows begin to assert themselves and the inevitable occurs. Watching Adelaide mechanically dismantle their opponents is largely joyless. Among the many negatives of the Essendon drug saga is the loss of narrative. It’s difficult to locate a compelling story.

But, footy fights back and presents Joe Daniher. With his moustache and oddly laconic dial, he looks like he should feature in the slow-motion action of a Carlton Draught advertisement. He takes multiple contested grabs, and must be the Bombers highpoint in this most wintry of winters. With less grace than the sacrificed buffalo in the last scenes of Apocalypse Now he stumbles on the grass, but somehow goals. Daniher’s high marking is exhilarating, but his kicking is more Travis Cloke than Travis Cloke.

At the other end of the paddock Charlie Cameron is also generating joy for his club. Like David Cameron his last month hadn’t been flash, but unlike the Tory lizard Charlie triumphed today with clear public approval in getting four majors, and keeping us in Europe.

The last quarter is forgettable until Josh Jenkins- he’d been quiet, possibly fiscally pre-occupied, marks assertively and goals. A dreary Festival of Fifty Metre Penalties ensues, but only the umpires have bought tickets. Eddie earns a free and handballs to ex-Magpie Paul Seedsman who again converts from the arc with a penetrating spear. Thank you Collingwood.

Tomorrow’s a school-day for the boys, and Escape to the Country is due to soon begin, doubtless featuring a smug empty-nester couple from Middlesex who’ve convinced themselves that they really do need seven bedrooms, so we start our Riverbank Stand descent towards basecamp. The Bombers get three late goals and the Crows remain outside the top four. It’s an evening carved with Baroque shapes.

scoreboard

 

 

 

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The Oceanic Adventures of Bev Package: Our Week on a Cruise Ship

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bev

 

It’d be fifteen years since I last heard it. But it’s irresistible and in the cosy chairs of the Pacific Dawn’s Promenade Bar we all sang along

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday

A regular crowd shuffles in

There’s an old man sitting next to me

Making love to his tonic and gin

Chugging across the Coral Sea during our week I heard Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” about a dozen times, and often twice an evening. Kieran, a Welsh fellow who looks a little like the comedian Jimeon was our favourite performer, did a grand version, and indeed, the first airing was, with planned theatricality, at precisely nine o’clock on the Saturday.

Earlier, we’d endured a curious, scatting, jazz interpretation, complete with messy harmonica, by a young pianist. We also heard it a couple times on the blustery pool deck.

Although it’s about broken dreams the song rollicks along in 3/4 waltz time and demands those with refreshments to raise and swing them about like pre-fight pirates. It’s an amazing narrative, dominated by the stirring affection with which the barroom tragics: John, Paul, Davy and co are described.

It was his first hit, and in its fifth decade, still works magnificently. Just as “Fairytale of New York” always takes me to Christmas in London, and with “LA Woman” I’m driving in Santa Monica, “Piano Man” will endlessly transport me to that rousing place on the Pacific Dawn.

*

We squeeze onto a water-taxi in Port Vila and transit across Vanuatu’s harbour. It’s an attractive winter’s morning and we’re buoyant with sea spray and the promise of exploration. Rounding Iririki Island, the coast is speckled with dozens of half-sunken yachts, ghostly victims of 2015’s Cyclone Pam. Seeing these dead craft reminds me that idyllic Pacific atolls frequently turn hellish, and that people are really, really small.

Zig-zagging along the main street it’s clear that our massive ship disgorging a couple thousand folks is an event. Some load-up at a duty-free shop and then I see it, that most ubiquitous of Australian chains: Billabong. It speaks of the worst colonial toxicity; a symbol of Australia’s reptilian hegemony and doomed local aspiration. I find it troubling to visit a country which is economically obliged to try to sell me surf wear.

*

I’m hoping that somebody can help me with this. Is it true that “Reminiscing” by LRB features on each of Cruise Ship Classics: Volumes 1 – 12?

Yeah, I thought so.

*

I love regressing to boyish wonder and again finding it awesome that a plane like an A-380 can fly. The Pacific Dawn, is also a leviathan which, if dropped onto Footy Park, would flatten both sets of goal posts. Of course if this were during a 2011 Power home game, it’d scare the be-jesus out of the scattered punters and Kochie while possibly also tearing the tarps.

That our ship glides seaward across a rippling bay can appear, from our vantage point, over one-hundred feet above the sea, as the muscular act of a magical god.

Aside from the Promenade Bar my favourite place within this hydropolis was on the pool deck, with my Jonathan Franzen novel, and a crisp Peroni courtesy of everyone’s bestie: Bev Package. How could I not love being drenched in languid holiday rhythms and their drifting afternoons? Up there, our petty urgencies evaporate into brief irrelevance.

*

Each morning over the PA and in his Genoan tones our captain addressed the ship: “So, we are travelling north-east through the Coral Sea at eighteen knots. Later today we’ll cross the Tropic of Capricorn and by afternoon the winds should abate. There’s currently around four to five metre swells, and we’ve activated our stabilisers to give you greater comfort. It’s nineteen degrees centigrade and should reach a top of twenty-three. Up next, a 1973 singalong classic by Billy Joel.”

*

Trudging up the tropical hill to Our Lady of Lourdes Chapel on the eastern coast of Lifou the terrain and vegetation remind me of Singapore’s Pulau Ubin, but without the aggressive monkeys. It’s an energetic stroll across this member of the Loyalty Islands and the view is fetching. Inspired by the beauty and proximate godliness, Bazz and I exchange observations:

“Look out there. See that yacht. That belongs to Richard Branson’s butcher.”

“Sure. Did you know that Sister Janet Mead isn’t buried beside this chapel?”

“Have I told you that Leo Sayer has never toured here?”

We then gathered on the beach, and some confronted the cruel, blue water. Alex and I clambered up to the village market to buy him a coconut. As we came back down the rocky track I see my wife, crying and saying something, but it’s lost in the wind. I think: someone’s been stung by a stingray, or worse, someone’s lost their phone, or even worse, Tex Walker’s done his knee (again).

Bursting onto the seashore, the cruislings are gathered about my brother-in-law Richard and his girlfriend Jasmine. They’ve just become engaged. Months prior to this voyage, he’d bought a ring to make this their moment. There’s tears and hugs and laughter. Families are meant to get bigger. Ours just did.

And with this Lifou is changed. For us, it was just an anonymous islet, a previously unencountered paradise, but now it’s invested, and forever enchanted. Isn’t this what people should do? With love, drape their stories upon an innocent geography, and transmogrify the terrain into something wonderful and harmless and humanly sweet?

*

Billy Joel hasn’t released a new song since 1993, and like many musicians he peaked early. But how fantastic that his biggest tune was born of grinding slog in an LA piano bar. That this song about crushed dreams would make his come rapidly and unthinkably true is a joyful irony.

For most of us, going on a cruise ship was new, and “Piano Man” an old friend, a smiling stowaway, waiting to surprise us. It was excellent to catch up over a beer or two, and like the best of songs it became a unifying motif for us, on our little holiday.

 Sing us a song you’re the piano man

Sing us a song tonight

Well we’re all in the mood for a melody

And you’ve got us feeling alright

BJ

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Trish

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Imp

 

Hello from Caloundra, on the Sunshine Coast. If you’re seeing me read this, it means that Pauline Hanson and I have been kidnapped.

I remember when we were in Year 12 at Kapunda High. How could any of us forget? We’d the wonderful Mrs Schultz for English, and had to read the distinctly un- wonderful poetry of the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, or GMH for short. Maybe it was this poet from Essex who set Trish on her particularly British-flavoured life journey. However, before he’d a chance to inflict his tortured verse upon us I often wished that a GMH-assembled vehicle had run over Hopkins.

As great as Mrs Schultz was, it was you Trish who helped me most in year 12 English. With your brutal intellect, passion for argument, and literary insight you showed me how to interrogate a text. In the depths of that soggy winter I was awestruck by your skill as we also read The Grapes of Wrath. I knew it well, but what a ridiculous title! Grapes of Wrath? Grapes, I remind you, make wine. If the book was vaguely accurate it’d be called The Grapes of Enormous Eternal Joy.

There were tutorials and Trish volunteered to chaperon us through the garden of symbolism. We were in expert hands, and were about to be symbolism-ed to within an inch of our proverbial. She took us through page after page, merrily dissecting the novelist’s exhaustive, and exhausting use of motif. Most impressively, she provided tremendous detail on the book’s famous recurring turtle that somehow represents the poor, evicted families. I know! A turtle! In this Trish enthused me and challenged me and, yes, she terrified me.

And if ever again I encounter a fictitious turtle signifying displaced Oklahoman farmers, I know who to phone.

*

As is often the case with the talented, Trish flirted with many university courses. She began a teaching degree with Claire and me and in my old Holden we’d travel together daily to and from Salisbury. With the girls imprisoned in my car I’d inflict all sorts of teenaged cruelty upon them courtesy of my music. I simply refused to have the radio on. No evil mastermind leaves things to choice, and I permitted only my curated set of cassettes, and as we hurtled through Smithfield along Main North Road, accompanied these dreadful songs with my unfathomably awful singing and, on special occasions, even more unfathomably horrid kazoo playing.

For this Trish, I unreservedly apologise.

Over the long decades Trish began multiple degrees; including education, arts, and finally, communications at Magill. She’d have excelled in any of these. But, in keeping with her life’s English theme I maintain that she should’ve pursued animal husbandry, through which she might have become a Mrs Herriot, living in North Yorkshire and happily inseminating grateful cows.

*

It’s a mark of her individuality that she owned a most British vehicle too. An MG? No. A Rolls Royce? Sadly, no. Our Trish, I tell you with some delight, drove a Hillman Imp. This duo was as distinctive as Mr Bean and his 1976 British Leyland Mini 1000. Of course we’d banter about this car and I’d tease her with my revolutionary wit, for example, calling her Imp a wimp. Ha-ha. But revenge was Trish’s for when I had my mid-life crisis twenty years early, and bought an obviously phallic sports-car, she labelled it, or possibly me with the abbreviated form of “Richard.” Game over. Trish wins.

*

An idea in this speech has been the decidedly British nature of Trish’s life. She is reminiscent of an “English rose” but unlike a Kate Moss, has expressed herself through the creative and performing arts as an accomplished writer, editor, visual artist, singer and actor. Of these achievements we’re all most proud.

I reckon she’d live well in Cambridge. I can see her discussing poetry mid-morning over camomile tea, before taking a trudge through the muddy fields of Grantchester. Then returning to her homely cottage to make Brett and Riley a supper of gluten-free scones.

Indeed, as evidence that my notion is not so silly she also worked for a while in a Geezer-styled boozer, the Norwood Hotel. Like a much-loved character from East-Enders I can see Trish smiling from behind the bar, and saying to the shuffling menfolk, “You orright darling? Can I get you a ‘alf?”

*

Dear Trish. You’re a faithful and precious friend who’s taught me much about people and our planet. As you know, when she laughs with you in that beautifully abandoned way she has, it is to be alive and loved. For this, and everything else, thank you, and happy birthday!

In concluding, I can assure you that I’m on the balcony of our holiday apartment, and at this very moment, as a tribute to you Trish, am Salsa dancing in a most fetching fashion with a turtle who goes by the name of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Enjoy your afternoon.

turtle

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a biscuit, a pie and a lost tooth

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tape

When I was a boy there was a holy trinity of biscuits.

Bush Biscuits were summer afternoons at the Kapunda Swimming Pool. Skinny and brown as nuts we’d munch these while listening to Australian Crawl on someone’s cassette player. No doubt a TDK C-90 tape. These biscuits were impossibly bland- it was as if scientists had extracted their flavour in a hidden lab. If it rained you could shelter under one for they had the surface area of a picnic blanket. I still don’t know why we held such affection for them.

Then there was the Rolls Royce. The Iced Vo-Vo. Sweet and stylish, with desiccated coconut and pink fondant and strawberry jam these represent those moments of wholesome joy that punctuate childhood. These remain the anti- Milk Arrowroot; the biscuit that shouldn’t exist.

And then there’s the Salada. It’s a plain cracker that’s lasted. Forget the wholemeal or light versions. Go the original. Just as they come, or with butter, or cheese. Best of all, with vegemite, made into a sandwich so you can squeeze them together and make little brown worms. For me these are primary school and sharing these with old mate Greggy at recess before running up to the tiny oval and dobbing the footy.

And in a week of petite milestones, our boys have discovered the Salada. I’m just a little bit pleased and the memories evoked by this dry biscuit, again probably a culinary mystery, have sprinkled my week with nostalgia. When their mum went shopping last Sunday their hysteria was obvious.

“Mum, get Saladas!”

“No! Two packets,” demanded the other.

Later, I pinched one for myself and it was Abba and Grease and the Sturt Footy Club and the Jumbo Prince and Happy Days on the tele.

*

While the wife was buying these dry crackers on Sunday the boys and I wandered up to Semaphore. It is a vibrant, eclectic village, possessing the best strip in Adelaide, and we happened upon the Semaphore Bakehouse for lunch. Our next moment of celebration then occurred as we sat at an outside table and devoured our pies.

As the punters and their dogs and the shuffling folks drifted past us boys sat there and worked away at our food and it was fun. How Australian, I thought, to enjoy a steaming pie of a sunny, June morning? As tradition dictates Max removed the lid- he prefers deconstruction as his modus operandi for interrogating his world, while Alex applied himself with messy vigour to the challenge. It was wonderful.

There was but one injury. Burnt roof of mouth to their Dad.

*

It was threatening for some time. Then on Thursday it happened. Max lost a front tooth. And with this his face is forever changed, destined to march to an adulthood of deepened voice and hardening cheeks and the loss of innocence that every parent dreads.

Of course it mattered little to him, but he enjoyed the healthy handful of coins left by the Tooth Fairy, and as we set off for school this morning these were clinking away in his pocket.

Winter has rushed upon us this last week. But as we move through our routines these biscuits and pies and a tiny tooth have allowed some golden rays to bend down towards us.

As it’s Friday, I might treat myself to an Iced Vo Vo.

biscuit

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Watching Our Boys Write

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earth

On this planet here’s my favourite thing.

Monday evenings, after dinner and baths Max and I sit around the big, rustic table and he does his homework. Following our reading we move to the week’s list of words. You know the antique drill. Look. Cover. Write. Check.

I love watching our boys write.

Mostly, I sit in silence. Like his mum Max’s nose wrinkles when he’s connecting a new idea to an established one. Each squiggly letter is crafted with quiet industry. It’s a magnificent, affirming sight. Our universe tightens to this page, and his cognitive load is massive. It’s exciting, but as nerve-wracking as a footy final.

At their age it’s a tough activity. What could be more demanding for a six-year-old? But they bring such blameless engagement to the task. Vacuuming language inside and not sending their words skywards, this is an unnatural ask, the reverse of speech, but they work hard, and I’m proud.

Forming the words, Alex bursts into his future, and as our globe spins from post-industrial to digital, this learning, this language will be their elevator. I’m delighted that both boys seem to value it. Not as much as dinosaurs or spies or ice-cream, but it ranks.

I keep watching.

Why is it so mesmerizing? It’s the transparency of their concentration. All our formulated hopes are projected onto the transit of that blue ink. Max comments between words, revealing the wisdom of his interrogations. “This is hard to spell.” Or, “Bed and bread rhyme.” Or, “Cake is simple to write, isn’t it Dad?”

We invest these moments with calm. The dining table’s a still beach at dawn. These are triumphs, but I mourn my slippery seconds.

Each simple term is a thrilling performance. I pause. Instants ago, these boys were babies. Now they’re holding pens, fashioning words, making meaning, interacting with their widening worlds.

I keep watching.

boy writing

 

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It must be like Keef teaching you guitar: our footy day

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eddie

On some days footy can come at you from many directions. Like Mum’s roast it can be expected, but occasionally it’s a happy combination of the old and the new.

My wife had gone to Sam Jacobs’ territory, the Yorke Peninsula, for a friend’s birthday so on a whim the boys and I drove up to the Adelaide Hills for an early lunch. Heading to the Aldgate Pump Hotel we passed a footy ground with the reserves fixture underway, and there were sparse knots of blokes along the fence, the red beer cans contrasting with their navy rain jackets. Up here footy is often beneath a Yorkshire fog. Not far down the road as the hills become the plains is Chad Wingard’s home territory at Murray Bridge. Chad was about to wow them for Port in Alice Springs.

Between my Laksa and not plonking some coin on Music Magnate in the Doomben 10,000 I looked at my phone to check the Alice Springs score especially as my old school mate Chris is related to the Hoff from the Power. No signal. But, I reminded myself this English village sleepiness is the attraction of the Adelaide Hills. It’s why we visit.

Descending through the mist and back into the sunshine we listened to In The Superbox With The Coodabeen Champions and because it’s a family standard, sang along with Greg Champion, “You’re the player, you’re the player, Gary Ablett! Gary Ablett!” I told our eight and six year-old boys that the tune was originally about the Gold Coast star’s dad. They ignore me and keep singing. One day, it could be about a third generation Ablett too. Footy ditties, like Paul Kelly songs, are also timeless.

The car was warm with nostalgia when I found myself turning left down Belair Road and parking outside a handsome villa in Kingswood. I’d decided the boys might like to see where their Dad had a kick and a catch with the Unley Jets before his career finished one August afternoon (split eyebrow; hours waiting in Flinders Medical Centre). As the pale sunlight bent onto the forward flank, we saw the reserves get up against Port District. To celebrate we each had a Freddo Frog (caramel).

How wonderful is local footy? I love the unpredictability. There’s the moments when grace rises above danger as the gangly kid blind turns and jags one from the pocket, and the roar makes the BBQ veterans look up from their hotplate of snags. Later danger reaffirmed itself when a Jets defender surged thrillingly across the wing, but didn’t steady, and his kick squirted across the boundary, like a drive shanked onto a neighbouring fairway.

Our evening was the Crows and the Giants. As had been our day’s theme, the past and the present would again meet. Entering the competition in 2012, Greater Western Sydney has only been discussed in future tense, as a club to whom success would surely come. That day is now speeding towards us, like a growling Monaro.

For Crows fans, ’97 and ’98 have transmuted from glorious history to nostalgic, troubling distance. Is it nearly twenty years? But, yesterday and today often connect, and Andrew McLeod is the football name Eddie Betts rates above all others. Who better to mentor him than the great running half back, as beautiful a player as has strapped on footy boots? It must be like Keef teaching you guitar. With his poise and promise, Wayne Milera, Adelaide’s first selection in the 2015 draft, has been compared to McLeod by judges like Scott Thompson. It’s tantalising.

Eddie’s a senior player now; a leader. Just before the third quarter siren Eddie fabricated yet another miraculous major, one that could net him successive goals of the year. While the kick itself was impressive, it’s how he gained possession: materialising on the boundary and somehow trapping the Sherrin with the surety of a NFL holder assisting in a field goal kick, then accelerating away from a grasping Giant and curling it through at the Cathedral End.

It’s fitting that the Indigenous Round’s best moment came from a Port Lincoln Nunga, a footballer like Sir Doug Nicholls: diminutive, exquisitely skilled and shaping the game in remarkable ways.

The young Giants raced home, but once more Eddie created a goal from gossamer and his fifth in the final seconds guaranteed my Adelaide a fine victory.

It’d been a brilliant day. Yet again footy had jumped out at me in unexpected and blissful ways. Just like footy can.

 

This story was first published in Inside Football. For more go to http://digital.insidefootballonline.com. My thanks to co-founder and contributing editor of The Footy Almanac, John Harms for the opportunity to write this story.

BBQ

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Round 6- Adelaide v Fremantle: Sea Monkeys

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sea monkeys

If talking about the weather is Britain’s obsession, then I’d argue that Australia’s national hobby is yabbying. A crustacean El Dorado, trifling physical labour, kids, and refreshments. Generally yielding inedible miscellany. I love it.

After five long years we’re back in Kimba, and Friday lunchtime the ute of my old mate Bazz clunks towards a dam on the Ballumbah Hill Road.

An exploratory net is thrown in, my boys leap about, and between sips of beer, Bazz and I slap at the late April flies. Out here flies never holiday, never bugger off up north for winter. I remember wearily waving them away at nearby Buckleboo during footy season as I rested in the forward pocket, while some spectators insulated themselves with stout.

Dragging the net onto the bank Alex and Max skip and shriek.

Bazz declares, “No yabbies, sorry boys.”

Pointing at the wriggling aquaculture Alex says, “Are these tadpoles?”

“Yep. Big ones. They’ll soon be frogs.”

Max asks, “What’s that funny one?”

I instantly see my teenaged-self staring at whole-page advertisements within the horror comics I enjoyed briefly. I blurt, “Sea monkey. It looks like a sea monkey.” With exotic smiles and bewitching humanoid figures, sea monkeys belonged in Lost in Space, inspiring Dr Smith to more mission-threatening selfishness.

Sea monkeys taught me a lesson about the cruel gap between advertising promise, and consumer reality.

Thirty yabby-free minutes later, rattling to the Kimba Golf Club, the boys are singing the song they’re inventing, bemused by their own pulsing imaginations,

“Sea monkey, sea monkey, sea monkey….”

*

In opening the breezy afternoon Adelaide’s Tom Lynch forgets physics, which demands a drop punt, and instead sends a tragi-comedic dribbler across the face. It’s inexplicably ridiculous.

Fremantle commences its Behind-Fest as Mayne pushes it right. Then Mundy to the left. I’m sure Ross Lyon could watch a grim, sleet-soaked, third division Yorkshire derby that ended 0-0, and he’d say, “It were rubbish. Constant attack are useless. Too many goals.”

After nine and a half horrid minutes Jenkins gets Adelaide off the duck.

If we still had a VCR (Betamax) it would’ve been wasteful spending eight cents on electricity recording this quarter.

*

The tide’s turning at Coffin Bay. It’s just outside Port Lincoln, which produced Graham Johncock, Byron Pickett and brothers Peter and Shaun Burgoyne. All came from the Mallee Park Football Club.

We’re in the shallows of Long Beach. The boys, running and splashing, running and splashing. Their Mum then urges them to slow down, look and spot the details. Now they see them. Gazing down microscopically, their world inflates like a gaseous giant.

Sand crabs. Pale. Scuttling. Burrowing. Alex scoops some up. They escape, and tumble into the Southern Ocean. Like all younger brothers Max wants to follow, but is anxious as he’s not held a crab before. He jiggles and hesitates.

And then on his palm is a little crab. With curiosity and a pocketful of courage, a crustacean dances across his hand!

This is why we’ve driven seven hundred kilometres to a gentle, enlightening beach.

*

Second term opens with more of the same. To watch a match involving the Dockers is to observe two sloths; one willing and one captive, wrestling under a sodden army blanket.

Recent re-includee Cameron shows poise, and should still be at the club in a decade. Tom Lynch enjoys absolution by collecting plainly, pirouetting twice and snapping precisely. A Renoir in an abattoir.

Behind play Spurr flattens Betts and donates the Crows another. Meanwhile, The Dockers inch up to ten behinds.

Matthew Pavlich gets another minor score after the siren. He’s presented well today during a season in which many saw Pav not as Australia’s (New Zealand’s) favourite dessert, but month-old cheesecake.

*

So, our boys haven’t ever swung at a gold ball, but they’ve now driven a golf cart. Is this wrong? Ahead of tomorrow’s round Bazz wants a hit on Royal Kimba’s back nine.

I’m cart captain, but in turn and on my lap, Alex and Max steer and stomp the pedals. On the 12th Max accelerates up the fairway, but detours through a bush by the ladies’ tee. Crackling twigs and leaves shower us.

We’re only in Kimba three days, but the accomplishments accumulate like boy scout badges. They help in the garden, and Bazz takes them out on an electrical job, and a couple hours later they burst through the screen door. As apprentice sparkies, Alex has fifteen dollars, and Max juggles some toy trucks, bought with his earnings.

On the 16th Bazz pulls another drive left. “What’s going on?” I ask as the cart bounces along the rough. Not for the first time in the decades I’ve known him he self-analyses, “Bad golf made easy.”

We’re halfway across Australia, on a near-desert plateau, but this trip is a sea-change.

*

To commence the second half Betts is slung when not in possession, and then at the opposite end Ballantyne misses. His team-mates are secretly pleased.

Successively, Eddie provides a signature pocket-snap, and Brodie Smith delights with an equally emblematic missile from beyond fifty.

Halfway through the quarter Fremantle have kicked fourteen behinds, and only two majors. Goal scoring is as natural to the Dockers as it is to garfish (grilled).

Obviously using the Chicken Salt (yes, it’s now a proper noun) hoarding as a target, Tom Lynch guides through his second.

The Crows are in control. Rory Sloane continues to play footy the way Ringo drummed for The Beatles: possibly without constant finesse, but with a charismatic enthusiasm that kept things moving along.

In the final stanza the home side accelerates away early as if wishing to escape this dire opponent and direr affair. Adelaide produces some sunny moments, but it’s an oddly cheerless conclusion, and there’s a mechanical, Samuel Beckett-like inevitability. The last three goals go pointlessly to the Dockers, but few will mourn the passing of their season, and their turgid game plan.

I look forward to seeing the Crows and Dogs at the Docklands next week. Can you get Chicken Salt there?

*

If you’re six you run from the holiday cottage to the Coffin Bay jetty in three languid seconds. Max does this each morning.

Late Anzac Day, we’re on the jetty. It attaches us to the glimmering water, welcoming contemplation and quiet gratitude.

Along the jetty there’s ladders, and Alex hovers above one. He wants to drive into the water. The deeper water. Most of his swimming has been in a Singaporean pool.

I can see the bottom, but it’s a scary step from the lower rung. A pause, then with a triumphant splash, he chests the water, dog-paddles about in innocent, furious circles, and scrambles up into the golden light.

At sunset of our final day on the West Coast I think of my old friend John Malone, and his poem, “Jetties” in which he notes that,

 

People lean

from jetties, dream from jetties

fishing for

tranquillity. They are

walkways into and out of

the mind. Umbilical

chords attaching us to the sea.

jetty

0

Growing Up In A Footy Club

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KFC

 

The following memoir features in First Use Of The Ball- Celebrating Football In Kapunda Since 1866. I’m most grateful to sporting legend, local historian and my former teacher Paul McCarthy for the chance to contribute to this special publication.

If you love footy and stories of colour and passion I’m proud to say the book’s available at the Kapunda Football Club, and certainly not the Essendon Football Club website at-

http://www.bombers.com.au

*

Growing up in the Kapunda Football Club was fun. It does take a village to raise a child, and in part many of us were guided through to adulthood by the Bombers. Sometimes in affirming, character-building ways, and sometimes by one of the Mickan brothers.

*

Eudunda. Heading across the hills before descending into the town, a bluish plain swims into view. This flat scrubbiness seems, on certain days, as a becalmed, wintry ocean. As a kid I used to think, instead of this saltbush and mallee, it’d be fantastic if it was the sea. As it was, eons ago. Even before the Robertstown junior colts all wore mutton-chops on their colossal faces which sat atop of their colossal frames.

To the north, and by Burra Creek, is the locality of World’s End. Snaking nearby we find Goyder’s Line, which shows where rain and soil might allow crops to be grown confidently. Goyder is still right.

Sitting in Mum and Dad’s car by the Eudunda oval, Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight” plays on 5KA, in grim competition with the hail hammering on the roof.  It turns to a sleety, possibly snowy gale. It’s diabolical, even for Eudunda, and forces the footballers to scurry over the fence, and huddle between the Kingswoods and Chargers. There’s no afternoon delight for them. I’d never seen such an apocalyptic storm, and know it’s serious when I see Boo Menzel leap the hoardings and hide by a souped-up Torana.

Although I was only ten World’s End seemed even closer.

*

My old mate Trevor Lucas took what many reckon is the best mark ever taken by a Kapunda Bomber. 1985, Angaston oval, U17’s Grand Final against Riverton/Saddleworth. Still lanky even today, Trev ambled out from full-forward like a slow-motion deer, rose impossibly to the crest of the pack, and grabbed it. The footy stuck! It’s a mighty moment.

When the video was shown at their recent reunion this got the loudest roar. Like all treasured yarns it gets better over time, and Trev’s grab is now becoming stratospheric. By 2030 his mark will surely defy physics.

I spent most of that season in the Bombers’ B grade. We barely won a game. In the forlorn huddle at three-quarter time of the final match we were down by truckloads. Our coach’s address- he may have been a Mickan- was less Barack Obama than drunken barracker. “Well boys we’re in trouble. Again. And we’re out of excuses. The season’s done. I don’t know what to say. Just go and run a lap. Or something.”

*

Now demolished, Kapunda’s Railway Hotel hosted a fleeting infamy, among the ridiculous, by opening at 8am on Sundays, when because breakfast was apparently too early for beer, we’d get raspberry cordial splashed in our West End Draught butchers. Once we were chaperoned down there in the cool morning air by none other than Mick Dermody.

Years before this the publicans’ son, Mick, went briefly to Kapunda High.  In the hotel ballroom he inflicted upon me Rick Wakeman’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Once. I recovered. I tell you, everything about the Railway Hotel was ridiculous.

But Mick could play footy. He was a thumping kick, and when he connected, he sometimes achieved the mythological quality known in country sport as, “good purchase.”

In the Junior Colts one Saturday at Dutton Park our ruckman got the tap from the centre bounce. Mick seized the footy in that clean, untouchable way he had. Suddenly frozen as if in a sci-fi telemovie, the Tanunda boys were incapable of tackling. They simply stared, wide-mouthed and slack-jawed.

Mick surged towards the half forward line. Fifty-metre arcs were yet to be discovered, and he was outside that when he bombed it, a monstrous dob. Perhaps prog-rock had already pinched his conceptual clarity. It was a behind. To the Tanunda Magpies.

He’d kicked it the wrong way.

But, gee, it was impressive. I’ve never seen a better point.

*

Meet me down by the jetty landing
Where the pontoons bump and sway
I see the others reading, standing
As the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay

“Reckless” by Australian Crawl takes me back. With a funereal bass line, and a snare drum like gunshot, it’s prominent in the soundtrack to my final year at school, 1983. At the Kapunda Swimming Pool it got a workout, in between us sneakily bombing the canteen, and poor Mrs Chappell. This was also the year I fractured my arm playing senior colts. June and my season, wrecked.

As the locum had not aligned it a fortnight later my arm was to be re-broken. Six more weeks in a cast. Look! There I am on a hospital bed as the doctor looms and mumbles.

“Ouch! It’s hurting!” I sense the subterranean crunching. Doc is an absorbed professional, and continues his medical manipulation of me. “Be quiet please!” I am in distress. “No, it’s really hurting!” Not just Masters bakery is out of sausage rolls distress. Or even Skyhooks have split distress. It is monolithic pain.

Minutes later the doctor squints at the drip. He realises. His tone transforms. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I’m very sorry!” There he was, fracturing my arm with feverish enthusiasm, but somehow, he forgot to turn on the anaesthetic.

After, the local veterinarian gave me artificial insemination gloves to slide over my cast when showering. Happily, for the district’s young and old bulls and me, these were not pre-loved.

*

Mini-League training was Wednesdays at Dutton Park. Former stationmaster and beloved club servant Bruce Dermody was our coach. He was patient and grandfatherly. At least twice a week Bruce would holler, “Hold that ball straight lad when you kick!”

With goalposts across the ground we’d have scratch matches down the trotting track end. It was the best fun of the week. It was our innocent island. It was our world. Only stopping because of the gathering gloom, we’d then cycle home to chops and three veg (mashed spud, carrots and peas), Dukes of Hazzard and bed. Even now when I dob the Sherrin with my boys I can still hear Bruce’s urgings, “Hold that ball straight, lad!”

Bruce met his wife Melva at Bowmans, a railway siding between Balaklava and Port Wakefield. It’s long gone. They lived for the club, and it was their family. We remember them well.

*

When I was at Kapunda High Former Port Magpie Rod Burton became senior coach of the Bombers. He was menacing. He had mad eyes. He could seem unhinged. Even for a Port player.

As a boy listening to one of his particularly ferocious pre-match speeches in Angaston’s claustrophobic change rooms I came within a wobbly gasp of wetting myself. I’m reminded of him whenever I watch Jaws and Quint, the great shark-hunter and his Indianapolis speech

Sometimes that shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about a shark, he’s got… lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eye. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’

Paul “Crackshot” Masters, Rod “Rocket” Ellis and I sitting on the western wing by Dutton Park’s timekeepers’ box when Burton had a boundary kick in. The box also housed the public address system, and across the day Bruce Dermody made regular catering announcements. These are as burned into my memory as Father Moore’s lilting sermons from St Rose’s pulpit

Ladies and gentleman, the canteen is selling pies, pasties and sausage rolls. There’s lollies for the kids. And the liquor bar will open at 2.30 for all your refreshment needs.

We were behind Burton. Deliberately, he pushed off the fence, and launched a colossal screw punt. Spiralling instantly above the gum trees, the Ross Faulkner footy bisected the posts, and below the mound, way down near the trotting track, on the service road, it landed like a depth-charge in a submarine movie.

Blighty’s after the siren goal for North Melbourne was but a stab pass.

As the Holden Commodores honked in praise, and duffel-coated kids including us shrieked, Burton smiled.

Just briefly.

KFC2

 

2

Round 3- Adelaide v Richmond: Now, I know why Tigers eat their young

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rodney

In Caddyshack one of Rodney Dangerfield’s much-loved lines is, “Now, I know why tigers eat their young.” He’s speaking of Judge Smails’ disagreeable grandson Spalding (I want a hamburger. No, cheeseburger. I want a hot dog. I want a milkshake. I want potato chips.) but could be referring to the Richmond Football Club, for this club has a tradition of enthusiastically self-devouring.

Regardless, there’s still universal affection for them. Who can hate the Tigers? Hands up if you’ve had or heard the following conversation:

“So who’s your second team?”

“Richmond.”

“Me too!”

“They’re just a likable team, and never cause anyone harm.”

“Yeah, exactly. And how great was Richo?”

“Yep. And they’ve got the best song.”

“Oh, mate. Easily the best song.”

*

Adelaide’s Tom Lynch is a late withdrawal because he didn’t complete a late withdrawal, and he’s flown home to attend the birth of his child. Richmond’s Griggs gets the first goal, but it’s reviewed to generate some theatrical tension for the assembled unwashed, but quickly confirmed.

It’s frantic, but like the front bar of a sailors’ pub in the last hour of shore leave, it’s untidy. Adelaide’s early skill is awful. Finally, we string some disposals together. Sloane receives it wide, settles and goals. Milera impresses with his efficiency. He moves well, has excellent awareness, and dare I say it, shows the poise of a young Andrew McLeod.

With their long kicking indoor footy should suit the Crows, and we witness this when Sloane and Walker transport it the length of the ground with two huge dobs. Adelaide’s now applying pressure and Betts claims Houli in the pocket. He goes back and sets up. Has there been a better shot at goal from a pocket? He slots it. Eddie’s kicking is now so widely celebrated that a footwear retailer should be named in his honour. Twice.

Jarrod Lyons get one for us late, and resolves the age-old dilemma. Despite the inter-continental impossibility, a Lyon indeed, defeats a tiger. New Crow McGovern shows composure to also goal. I’m starting to relax.

Adelaide are direct like a Mt Isa publican, and gaining confidence. Douglas gets his second. Following a corridor turnover, Sam Lloyd records a goal, but almost immediately after a Tiger disaster allows Lyons to get Adelaide’s seventh from turnovers. Richmond deals with the pressure like a drummer auditioning for Spinal Tap.

Seedsman’s proving to be the best thing Collingwood has given the Crows. Ever. Or at least, since the Magpies guaranteed the Crows a 2015 finals campaign by beating Geelong in the penultimate round.

Vickery gets one to give the home side consecutive majors. Then, suddenly the Tigers control everything, and like the William Blake poem, are burning bright within the Dockland’s forests. Against the Tiger-ish mood, the Crows force a midfield error and gift Jenkins a late goal. After a mammoth thirty-four minute, twelve goal quarter, it’s half time.

*

Today the Barossa and Light Bowls Association First Division grand final is between Eudunda and my Dad’s team, the Nuriootpa Tigers. Like Hawthorn Nuriootpa’s after four flags in a row. Unlike Hawthorn, most of the planet is not hoping for Nuriootpa to fail fabulously.

To open the second half Seedsman takes an excellent defensive mark, and Adelaide quickly moves it the length. In time when he gets the ball I hope the crowd yells, “Seeeeed” to belatedly continue the Wayne Weidemann of Fish Creek tradition.

Richmond persist, but unmethodically. Talia and Reiwoldt are having a tussle. The ill-fated Vickery takes another solid grab, but like an angry lumberjack, bangs it into the woodwork. Rory “Bruce” Laird is cultivating productively, and streaming forward, Ed and Tex (coming soon to your local RSL) again combine.

Sam Lloyd takes a screamer and converts to keep the Tigers within five goals, which history tells us, is not nearly enough for the tricolours. Briskly developing Crow Milera weaves exquisitely around some seemingly extinct Tigers and finds Walker.

Tex looks about uninterestedly, ignores all, saunters back, and bombs it straight into the stand from sixty-five out. Despite the doom merchants this, and other cracking moments, speak to me of the robust and enduring health of our great game.

Now, the Tigers game plan appears less certain than Tony Abbott becoming honorary President of the Onion Farmers’ Association (OFA). But like Tony, Richmond don’t disappear as they should, and with another burst, get three rapid goals.

However, Adelaide asserts itself during the final term to keep the Tigers caged. Shane Edwards gets one after the final hooter, but it’s ninth prize in a chook raffle.

*

Tigers, if you think about it, are everywhere. On their terrific album Daisies of the Galaxy American band Eels have a wonderfully upbeat song about imminent doom, which I delicately suggest, is most appropriate for Richmond. The Esso petrol-inspired “Tiger in my Tank” could be sung by any of the Punt Road faithful

 

I bought some rock star ashes

From the back of Rolling Stone

I guess he wouldn’t mind it

They couldn’t sell his soul

The tiger in my tank

Is going to go extinct

And I’m not feelin’ so good myself

I think I’m on the brink of disaster

Well done to my Dad who played in his umpteenth decider, but fell just short of winning his twelfth bowls pennant. So, enjoy your evening. Whatever you do to celebrate or commiserate, can I advise you, on the back of three years in Singapore, to not have any Tiger beer? You’ll be pleased you did. And it’s goodnight from my lounge room.

tiger

2

Now You Are Eight

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Koh lanta

Suddenly and incredibly, you are eight! Alex, how our world changed when you were born on that bright Saturday afternoon, eight years ago.

Among my favourite things is spying on you. Isn’t this funny? You and Max love spy games, but Dad loves spying on you. What do I see when you’re not looking, but I am?

I see so much that makes me, and Mum proud. You’re funny and alert. Like a puppy, you play with creative energy. You love your friends, and they love you too. You like sharing stories, but listen when people tell you stuff too. For you, games and fun must be fair. You don’t like it if others are unkind to you, or those you care about. Because it’s important, you take a stand. This makes you a leader, and we love this about you.

I’ve so many memories.

We’re on Koh Lanta. It’s a fresh, clean morning and the sky’s holiday blue. I’m on a sun lounge out the front of the resort, looking across the sparkling sea towards the Strait of Malacca. You and Max are on the flawless, golden sand. Buckets, spades, toys. Boys and brothers. Do you remember this? I watched you; long-limbed like a giraffe, and miraculous, as if born of the tropical sun itself.

And later, on the same trip- our last while living in Singapore, we do a boat tour to five islands! In the marine warmth, snorkelling above the coral, Mum and Max are bobbing about on the azure ocean, while off on our own, and peering down through our masks, we see it. Silently, and like a whip cracking in slow-motion, is a sea-snake! It’s there for mere seconds, and only we saw it, together, in our private universe. Instantly we sit up, beaming

Did you see it Dad?

Sure did. What’d you think?

So cool.

A momentary sight, but for us, stronger than two electrons in perpetual orbit. For someone as curious about nature and dangerous creatures as you, it’s a thrilling highlight of our three years in Asia.

Last Friday, in the afternoon sunshine, you’re in your blue Strikers shirt and cricket cap. We’re at Glenelg Oval, and there’s plastic yellow stumps and kids, learning and playing, learning and playing. You’re batting. I’m on a bench by the boundary, spying on you. Again!

The bowler pitches it on a good length, but outside the wicket. In a fluid, looping motion, you step into it, and swing the bat. It’s an on-drive, and possibly having seen an Australian cricketer like David Warner do this, you go down onto one knee. It’s cute, but also shows me how carefully you take in the details of your world, how keen you are to do your best and display some robust mastery. You stay low and hold your position, watching until, just in front of me, the ball jumps the rope. Your first boundary! Certainly a treasured event in many years of loving cricket.

Now finally, back we travel, to 2008 when you’re only three months old. It’s May, Mothers’ Day; fetching and warm like a hug. We’re at Wattle Reserve, by the beach, with a picnic of olives, breads and dips, dolmades; unhurried food for a late autumn lunch. You’re there on the rug, in the breezy, timelessness. Smiling, blue eyes alert, enchanted. It’s a movie, a love song, our lifetime distilled. It’s a dreamlike afternoon.

So, as you begin your ninth year, I wanted to find a few moments among the guitars and the bikes, the barbeques and the blur of the cruelly rushing weeks to reminisce on how astonishing our world became on that bright Saturday. The day you arrived; the gorgeous, clever, amazing gift of you, arrived.

glenelg oval

0

Monster Trucks: A Love Story

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trucks

We’re at the Adelaide Showgrounds. For me these are Sunday mornings and the hipster cool of the Farmers’ Market with organic kale and homemade sausage rolls and artisan bread. I can also hear the rhythmic thud, thud, thud of the Royal Show’s wood chopping. Look! It’s Tasmanian axeman David Foster. Walking in tonight we saw my new favourite sign

No tethering of cattle along sheep pavilion wall after 8.30 am

My previous number one resides in Cornwall, neatly capturing the British beach holiday experience

Please do not bury soiled nappies in the sand

Our boys Alex and Max love watching Monster Jam and its crazed wrecking yard of gigantic trucks. So we’re here to celebrate their birthdays. Monster trucks are undoubtedly symbolic of American hegemony and excess, and yes, the boys should probably instead be attending a Shakespearean Sonnets for Primary Kids workshop, but we’re pit-side.

Because it’ll be raucous, ridiculous fun.

Two decades after his final race Waikikamukau remains the best racehorse name, but Grave Digger is our favourite truck. Monster Jam features dozens of trucks, each with its own cult following. There’s Captain’s Curse, but mercifully no Captain’s Call. I’ve some affection for the truck called Cleatus and its driver Frank Krme whose last name seems to have been heartlessly robbed of a vowel.

None of these are here as they’re in Albuquerque or Biloxi or Chattanooga. However, the local monster trucks are Revenge, The Convict, Wicked, the oddly plural Raptors, Extreme, Monster Patrol, Scooby Doo, Freak, and of course, the Triple M Truck. Look, Triple M footy commentator Brian Taylor is at the wheel. No wait! The truck’s veering about violently. He’s outta control. And now the monster truck is combusting. Wowee!

The pit party’s complete and the trucks start up with the sonic impact of a guitar’s first notes at a heavy metal festival. The crowd bellows. I note the local ice coffee advertising hoardings to the arena’s south, looming like Adelaidean versions of the eyes of Dr TJ Eckleberg. To our east are the hyperbolically named Lofty Ranges. They appear low and brown.

“Are you ready?” asks our host, a cross between Akmal Saleh and Dave Hughes. Located atop a flatbed truck a singer performs, “Star-Spangled Banner.” There may have been a wardrobe malfunction, but Row O of the Southern Stand is too distant to tell. I appreciate how many a NASCAR fan thinks that, “Gentleman, start your engines!” is the final, rousing line of their anthem.

And then the monster trucks are roaring about, impossibly huge as they motor by the jumps and props; largely assembled with old Commodores, and flat Camiras, which have finally made an earthly contribution. It’s a graveyard just as the Holden factory at Elizabeth will soon be.

Max asks, “When are they going to do some big air?” Then the monster truck called The Convict obliges. Suitably in the free colony of South Australia its driver is from the penal settlement of Sydney. “TNT” by AC/DC is our soundtrack. Whew! I couldn’t believe we’d been underway for an entire minute without accompaniment from the brothers Young and co.

I’m reminded of walking between Rome’s Aventine and Palatine hills on the site of the Circus Maximus. I reckon Caligula would have liked his monster trucks. There’s much about the night which is categorically Classical. But it’s also prehistorical, although these metallic dinosaurs aren’t herbivores.

Mountaineering cruelly over a row of car carcasses, Wicked stands up on his rear wheels like something reptilian in a Japanese horror flick. Exotic-looking Monster Patrol does a hot lap, barking past us, and our eldest Alex says, “Dad, I can feel the vibrations on me!” As this is theatre, and not motorsport the dramatic symbolism continues with an intermission, as if scripted by Andronicus.

Like Bear Grylls’ cameraman in Man vs. Wild the nameless star is the forklift driver who reorders the car wrecks and dirt mounds. There’s much lonely precision in staging chaos and commotion for the masses. The anthem singer returns and offers a version of Vance Joy’s “Riptide,” whose opening verse contrasts with the mechanical machismo we’ve seen so far

I was scared of dentists and the dark

I was scared of pretty girls and starting conversations

Oh, all my friends are turning green

You’re the magician’s assistant in their dreams

At the resumption there’s monster trucks contesting in pairs around a tight circuit. It’s announced by the host as “Side by side racing!” Of course, if this were held in the Germanic Barossa Valley he’d have declared it, “Side by each racing. Already.”

Crowd favourite Scooby Doo provides some faux canine fun by jumping, teetering and rolling over! Well, he is a dog! With a busted nose he’s dragged away. His evening seems over. We’re disappointed. It’s like being at a Rolling Stones concert and hearing the announcement that for tonight only Mick’s been replaced by Peter Andre.

Now in the final act there’s trucks going guts-up every minute. That’s what we want! Danger replacing grace. Bolts of frisson. Metaphorical deaths. But more than this we know from the original American TV series that the lyrical climax is the sequence when a truck charges at a dirt cliff, ascends its face, somersaults back over itself, and bounces onto its sixty-six inch tyres. A backflip! In the world of monster trucks, it’s the Triple Lindy.

Here we go! After two deliberate false starts, the truck bursts at the mound, and climbs steadily, vertically. Now airborne high above the grass and dirt, his rear wheels are at their zenith, but gravity’s silent terror begins. The flat earth rushes up at the truck’s flimsy roof. Then soil and metal skin meet. We groan. We’re denied by an uncaring Nero. Like a bosomy matron the forklift patiently attends its duty and rights the truck. The event announcer cries, “He’s back on his heels!” Another roar.

There’s fireworks and these pound our ears and blink our eyes. The monster trucks are done. In the tranquil morning of tomorrow, the Adelaide Showgrounds will open for the Sunday Farmers’ Market. The stalls will again offer organic kale and homemade sausage rolls and artisan bread.

grave digger

2

NYE in Adelaide Oval’s Bay 127

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th3AJK36NQ

Late December 31, 2014 we watched Thunderball in our St Mary at Hill hotel room by the Thames. Outside, in the brisk, cider-drenched London night several million folk pressed onto the riverbanks to enjoy the fireworks while we slept. Twelve months on, having taken our boys to Europe, seen some more of Asia, and farewelled Singapore, we’re back in flat, kindly, unhurried Glenelg.

Tonight contrasts with the previous NYE: it’s hot, we’re in a public place, and we’re more likely to see Troy Bond than 007. We’re at Adelaide Oval. It’s the first time our boys have been to a cricket game of any sort.

I’m not sure why our local Twenty20 franchise is called the Strikers. Is Adelaide a particular focus for industrial discontent? If so, then what would The Don think? Would the Piping Shrikers be better?

We’re up against the Sydney Sixers, and I can’t uncover any deep etymology concerning their name either. To paraphrase Butch Coolidge from Pulp Fiction: “We’re an Australian cricket franchise. Our names don’t mean s**t.” Others under consideration were the Sydney Edge and the Sydney Rocks. I’m trying to locate meaning or symbolism where there is none. I need to adjust my headset.

We’re with some dear old friends in Bay 127 at the bottom of the Riverside Stand, so-named because it’s adjacent to the Torrens Lake.

This contemporary form of our game has many critics who suggest it cheapens the skills, offers no narrative arc, and is shamelessly disposable. But I prefer to celebrate the unique situation of there being three distinct versions of our sport. I’m not sure they’re cannibalising each other.

Whilst it’s now only an oval in name my memories dart about the towering arena like friendly, swooping phantasms: the astonishing Day 5 victory in the 2006 Ashes, Mark Waugh’s century on debut, and Australia’s one-run defeat when Curtly Ambrose dismissed Craig McDermott in 1993.

I hope tonight becomes the first in a lifelong succession of cricketing reminiscences for our boys.

*

Juggling the obligatory clappers, pirate hats, battery-powered sunglasses, Kentucky-fried poultry buckets, four and six cardboard signs we take our seats. I doubt this event will be carbon neutral. Following various drills, the Strikers warm up with a few dobs of the Sherrin, and I’m surprised that the Glenn McGrath tripping on a footy at Edgbaston in the 2005 Ashes catastrophe still hasn’t resulted in a Cricket Australia ban. Dizzy should lock the footy in his cupboard.

Since arriving we’d been blitzed by hip-hop music, pyrotechnics, peppy dance crews and other hyperventilating stimuli, and when the Sixers’ innings finally commences, I like that it’s with the placid spin of Travis Head. This is an old-fashioned island in an ocean of now, and I exhale. Three hours later Head would conclude the contest in superbly volcanic style.

Michael Lumb and Ed Cowan use the field restrictions well, and accumulate runs steadily. An early wicket seems as remote as former PMs Rudd and Gillard eloping. Alex Ross takes a great catch at deep extra cover which is reminiscent of Glenn McGrath’s 2002 classic against England. Nic Maddison strides to the wicket, but completes a sharpish U-turn courtesy of a golden duck.

Every delivery is punctuated with a stab of music ranging from “YMCA” to The Black Keys’ “Lonely Boy.” Fortunately, we passed peak- “Eye of the Tiger” a few years back, and are spared. But the administrators might soon realise that our spectator experience is deficient in olfactory spurs, and install clandestine devices which at frequent market-researched points release perfumes called “Sweaty Protector,” “Freshly Mown Outfield” or, for the ladies, “Joe the Cameraman.”

Jon Holland comes on from the Cathedral end, and I’m terrified to check his player profile in case his nickname isn’t Dutchy. Adil Rashid bowls well in taking three wickets, and we stifle the Sixers’ scoring during the middle period of the innings before superannuant Brad Haddin hits out productively at the finish.

*

During the break I focus on the wonderful old scoreboard, and the Sixers’ team. I then amuse myself by constructing various adult-themed, 1960’s-styled sentences using the names Bird, Silk and Bollinger. I’d mentally written half a Carry On movie/ Warney biography when our eldest and I are sent to refill the water bottles.

We make our way to the Gary McIntosh Bar, where, hideously, the line for free water is longer than the queues for beer. As if this weren’t sufficiently cruel, we miss the Strikers’ opening two overs in which Craig Simmons and Tim Ludeman get us away smartly. A crowd highlight is former Redback skipper Johan Botha gifting us four overthrows off own bowling from a delinquent return to the keeper.

Strikers captain Brad Hodge and Travis Head now come together. They’re circumspect, like a Cup jockey not going too early. Doug Bollinger’s bowling is more Cold Duck but still economical, and like Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation, the run-rate is climbing.

At the fifteenth over, they push the button. The chase is on. Sean Abbott takes a great catch at mid-wicket to dismiss Hodge, in the best public display of 2015 by any Abbott (onion-eating aside).

Alex Ross departs, and suddenly the run-rate is a call-the-fire-brigade seventeen. Rashid comes in with the Strikers requiring fifty-four. He faces a solitary delivery for two runs. Head then creates his narrative, a thrilling narrative which is action flick, boys’ own adventure and bed-time story.

As he clubbed the Sixers to and over the fence it became quickly clear that we were seeing something folkloric. Such was his energetic precision that each shot travelled exactly where he wished, as if guided by military software. There was a happy inevitability in the fluency with which he struck Abbott for three successive sixes, the last of which not only won the match, but also brought up his century, while closing the cricketing year.

He’d scored fifty runs in ten minutes. It was blistering punk-rock, but delivered with an elegance that Lords denizen Sir Mick Jagger would have appreciated.

Our boys smiled and waved their cardboard six signs and jumped up and down in their Bay 127 seats. They’d seen something remarkable, something rare.

I reckon they’d just had their first cricket memory.

Adelaide_Oval.jpg

 

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Volleys, Blundstones and Thongs: Life in the Shoe-Wearing States

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blunnies

They’re beyond dreadful. Flat and offering less support than Chad Morgan opening for Metallica. The Dunlop Volley is a cultural icon, but podiatric nightmare, and I often wonder how Ken Rosewell wore them and still won all those tennis matches?

But spotting them about, they’re like the rarely seen old mate banging on your door with a six pack of Coopers. House painters love them. The herringbone tread must be superb if your day involves leaping up and down ladders, and cutting in around annoyingly ornate ceiling features.

I wore them at uni. A fine library shoe, they also performed exquisitely in the bar, especially on Friday nights when fifty cent schooners were on. The Volley was exceedingly valuable for sitting in the uni quadrangle as the morning sun streamed onto our youthful dials. About three times a semester and with eyes stricken with terror, my friend David would shriek, “Essay? What essay? Due at four today?”

They were also great as we plodded off to fourth year English, cruelly scheduled on Mondays from 4 – 8pm. At 8.01pm I’d point my HQ Holden southward, and with my old friend Jonesy co-piloting, navigate speedily if not unlawfully to the Botanic Hotel where we’d review the lecture’s major themes, or not.

But I couldn’t wear Volleys for sport. On the cricket oval I was a Puma Barbados man, and everything else apart from footy was handled by my Adidas Romes.

To my curious comfort I later met someone who actually wore them on the sporting field. For three seasons Peter and I played cricket together at Wudinna. A handy bat, and lively fieldsman, he was an accomplished first slip and stealthy patroller of the covers. One Saturday he arrived in a new pair, and I asked

“New Volleys? Where did ya get ‘em?”

“Town.” Adelaide was rarely called Adelaide.

“How much?”

“Fifteen bucks.”

I was surprised. “That’s a really good price.”

“They did me a deal. Because I bought six pairs.”

“Really? Why did ya get six pairs?”

“I reckon that should see me through to the end of my career.”

And I’m sure it did. Over the decades I’d imagine Peter in his shed, pulling down a box of new but peculiarly aged Volleys, brushing aside any resident Daddy Long Legs spiders, and with impish delight, sliding on the Dunlops for spring’s first cricket training.

But six pairs! What a visionary. Succession planning of the utmost order. Cricket Australia: phone this fella now.

I had mine on last Friday when the boys and I were at the park kicking their new Sherrin. They (the shoes, not the boys) are still terrible for this. However, as I later sizzled some sausages on the park’s free barbeque they became magnificent. My tong work was sublime, and I’ve rarely squirted sauce with such crisp authority. I thank my Volleys. They were always more Dean Martin than Dusty Martin.

*

They’d doubled in price. This was much better than anticipated, but I did purchase my first pair of Blundstones from a rural supplies store in Kimba during 1993 for fifty bucks. Since then we’ve moved nine times across three countries, and they’re still travelling superbly, and remain as utilitarian as Mark Ricciuto, but with a mellifluous special comments voice.

A new job meant I had to buy some new footwear so I jumped on the tram to revitalised Adelaide menswear retailer, Trims. Where previously I had no choice there are now multiple styles of Blundstones, catering from bushie to micro-brewing hipster. It was like buying a newspaper in London. You glance at the dozen or so front pages. The Times. The Daily Express. The Independent. And then, having scanned the alternatives, you buy the one you always get.

On the tram home I thought about my new boots and me. What might the next twenty-two years bring?

*

I know it’s feeble, but sometimes you just surrender. To make life easier. In Singapore, and surrounded by Americans, Canadians and Brits I started calling them flip-flops. It was just simpler. And now back home among the throng, and with spring making a few tentative squeaks, I’m reclaiming the word thong.

In various equatorial bars I’d try to explain for my global friends. But never with much success. “So it’s wrong to buy your mum a thong, but perfectly acceptable (if a little cheap) to buy her a pair of thongs.”

*

Late Saturday evening my wife’s Grandpop passed away. He was ninety. Not knowing either of my grandfathers contributed to him becoming a significant figure. For most of the twenty years I knew him he and grandma lived in Gympie on the highest hill in town.

We’d sit on their front veranda in the thick air, noisy with eccentric tropical bugs and their assorted clickings and whirrings. Geckos would scamper up and down the walls, while I’d gaze down across the houses on stilts and valleys so different from my dusty home town thousands of kilometres to the empty south.

With the exception of our wedding I only ever saw Grandpop’s gnarly hooves in slippers. Or barefoot.

A magazine columnist once described the non-Queensland parts of our nation as being, “the shoe-wearing states.” Grandpop reinforced this. His slippers were comfortable, but he also went shoeless partly because he didn’t care what those, “bloody wombats” thought. He’d always pronounce wombats with a deliberately long vowel and make it woombats. In the extended family it’s a term of fun and gentle mocking. Mostly.

And now he’s gone. He lived long, but it’s still sad.

*

The boys and I will continue to be bedazzled by Patrick Dangerfield’s seemingly irradiated footy boots. Before the season’s first lawn-mowing I’ll buy a pair of thongs, some double-pluggers. For extra comfort and backyard safety.

Like a feisty yearling my new Blundstones will finally be broken in, and the Volleys, as always, will push me on into that bright, windy spring.

thongs

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Ringo Appointed Caddy to Tiger Woods: Adventures in Morroco and Portugal

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marrakesh

‘How do you like my new Fes?’ asks Jerry patting the hat on his melon. Only forty Dirham and he’s grinning like a shot fox. A dozen of us collect closely. We’re in the Medina or old city and New Jersey Jerry; ever-blaring, ever-egotistic and forty-something is taking pleasure from the tasselled headdress- and his own voice. ‘Yes, Jerry it’s great,’ we chorus. Absalom is our guide. Wearing his Muslim robes elegantly, and with snowy hair and trimmed beard he looks alarmingly like Kenny Rogers. He silences the Gatlin boy with, ‘Yes Jerry, it suits you perfectly.’ Through the dust and noise we lean nearer. ‘You are wearing the Fes of a young boy. Recently circumcised.’

With 350,000 people, 10,000 indistinguishable streets and 320 Mosques, the Medina is astonishing. Reaching its zenith in the 13th–14th centuries, the medieval monuments, madrasas (schools), fondouks (hotels), palaces, markets, residences and fountains are utterly engaging. About half the size of an Australian suburb, UNESCO declared it a World Monument in 1981. By morning’s end I am drained by the unbroken attack on my eyes and nose, ears and brain.

Attempting to engage me, one impish boy chirped, ‘Hello mister.’ I ignored him. ‘Hola. Bonjour,’ he continued. ‘Ciao. GutenTag. Aloha. Konnichiwa.’ I laughed. Konnichiwa. In a particular light I guess I appear Japanese. He reminded me of the carpet-seller in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar who, sensing I’d rejected every rug- buying opportunity, edged up to me and smirked, ‘Is it now time to talk about carpet?’

In Marrakech we’re steered into an apothecaries’ souk or pharmaceutical market. Spices, roots and aromatic plants for cooking, magic and pills cram the shelving in kaleidoscopic chains of little jars. The apothecary talks about the local herbs and their various uses. We enjoy listening but of course should have known what was coming. The lecture concludes, a corps of zipping assistants gives everyone a plastic bag and the Big Sell begins.

The apothecary repeats his catalogue whilst the helpers briskly dispense the concoctions. Our entourage includes Americans, Dutch and New Zealanders of every age and attitude and twenty minutes later not a medical secret remains amongst us. ‘These jars contain a potion to combat abdominal dryness,’ he announces and up fly some hands, their owners eager to spend and lubricate. Enchanted containers are urgently thrust at the grateful. He hollers, ‘Next is the haemorrhoid relief cream!’ More hands. ‘Who’d like the Moroccan herbal Viagra?’ I sit tighter on my palms. Never have I become so unintentionally informed about the private rashes, oozings and inflammations of strangers. It was like a nutrimetics party but without the collapsing paper plates of sausage rolls.

Beasts current and cooked, domesticated and dangerous were a mesmerizing aspect of our trip. The Jemaa el Fna or Place of the Dead is the gigantic square in Marrakech which functions as an al fresco circus. Street performers compete for our coins with yelling shoe-shiners and insistent henna tattooists whilst loops of snake charmers rhythmically sway with their hooded cobras. Given that she’s a biology teacher I selflessly sent Kerry among the reptiles as I captured photos and videos from an artistic distance.

And suddenly a snake was writhing around my neck and a lithe wrangler rubbed its anaconda-like girth against my forehead. ‘It is good for fertility,’ he declared. I squeaked, ‘Mine or the snake’s?’

Monkeys (few self-pleasuring!) sprung about the teeming square too whilst stalls groaned with meats and dishes of arresting aromas. Curiously wry rows of boiled camel-heads were Plat du jour but disappointingly we’ve been off them lately. Rooster idolatry is popular on Portuguese china, shirts, towels, hats; indeed everything! Heading along the Atlantic coast road from Tangiers I glanced down to the sundrenched shore and what did I spy? A jaunty row of trotting chickens! Have you ever seen wild hens pushing into the breeze, bouncing along the sand? It was so unexpected yet so childishly familiar and funny that it became an African highlight. Beach chooks! Even now I can see my documentary advertised in the TV guide-

BBC 2- Sunday 8pm

Moroccan Odyssey

Tonight Mikey Randall goes in search

of Tangier’s mystical beach chickens.

(50 minutes)

Despite the coach being guarded whilst we slept in our Tangier hotel (up the esplanade from Celine Dion Café; your heartburn will go on) it occurs at midnight. We are oblivious. From our giant ferry we witness customs police beating and kicking would-be illegal immigrants. They hide down by the waterline- frantic to flee Africa’s poverty for the nirvana that is Europe.

A rolling Atlantic swell surrenders to Gibraltar’s gentler waters. Then in Spain we drive a hundred Andalucian miles and alight at a restaurant whilst Juao, our Portuguese driver, re-fuels. He hears a noise from under the bus. Two continents and an ocean later, a small stowaway escapes; having clung perilously to the undercarriage for fourteen dark hours. He slides into the countryside like a phantom.

The jagged rush of surprises makes travelling addictive. Toledo, indeed, is quite holy and El Greco’s 1586 masterpiece, The Burial of the Count Orgaz adorns a wall within the modest Church of San Tomé. The painting is marvellous but it is also startling that we could saunter in and admire a magnum opus without a wardrobe-sized guard pointing his Uzi at us. If it were displayed in a London or Paris gallery I’d probably shave three times getting to the ticket window.

It was curious to feel homesick in Morocco with its mosques and confronting hardship and intoxicating town markets. Introduced from Australia last century, Eucalyptus trees appeared like old friends and combined with the sparse terrain to suggest the River Murray landscape back in South Australia. I love being amazed when travelling.

I had few expectations for the Portuguese capital but found it wonderful. Prior to visiting Europe my favourite world city was San Francisco and Lisbon often reminded me of its hilly charms and marine vistas. Two colossal structures cross the glimmering Tagus River; the Ponte 25 de Abril commemorates the 1974 Revolution and is strikingly like the Golden Gate; the planet’s most fetching suspension bridge. At over seventeen kilometres; we entered Lisbon on Ponte Vasco da Gama, Europe’s largest and probably the biggest bastard of a bridge that I’ll experience.

In an age when Barcelona, Kuala Lumpur and Florence are serviced by airports hours from their CBD it is remarkable that Lisbon’s is downtown; reflecting that last century the metropolis grew exponentially. The equivalent of Heathrow being in Hyde Park; it was compelling and somewhat menacing- post 9/11 to watch planes climbing and landing near skyscrapers. We loved wandering about historic Alfama and seeing the mighty Monument to the Discoveries before learning that although the world is a village chip-shop one should never order Italian dishes in a Portuguese Indian restaurant.

Seville burst into my Top Ten with a bullet and is illustrious for much; orange-trees lining the charming boulevards, the resting place of Columbus and of course, bullfighting. During summer the Sevillians stroll past the cigar factory immortalised in Carmen to the Plaza del Toros de la Real Maestranza and given that it nudged 54 degrees in August 2003 some sip Cruzcampo beer!

Many stories are relayed of brave bulls. An ancient matador told me the obscure tale of an old bull and a young bull. One lazy afternoon they were gazing down at a field of attractive heifers. The young bull shouts, ‘Let’s run down and shag a few cows!’ The old bull quietly replies, ‘No. Let’s walk down and do the lot.’

True.

Michael and Kerry

January 2005

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