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Belle and Sebastian: Dress Up In You

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model

 

Belle and Sebastian is a Glaswegian indie band formed in 1996. Named after a French children’s television series, their nine albums have received critical acclaim, and are known for their literate and wistful lyrics. I enjoy how characters and narratives feature in their songs so decided to investigate the ways language is used.

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“Dress Up In You” comes from their 2006 album The Life Pursuit. Characterisation is a key element in this song. Establishing who the people in the song are is our first problem as the identities of the singer (the narrator) and the person they’re singing for (the addresse) present challenges for the listener.

The song is sung in first person, with lead singer Stuart Murdoch beginning,

I’m the singer, I’m the singer in the band

You’re the loser, I won’t dismiss you out of hand

This appears straightforward and autobiographical, and an obvious interpretation is that he’s (assuming Murdoch is singing as a male character) addressing a fan or groupie. “You’re the loser” is brutal, but suddenly softened in the next line.

As quickly as Murdoch presents this relationship he changes it, with a simple couplet that is striking

Cos you’ve got a beautiful face

It will take you places

He has rapidly moved from calling the addressee a “loser” to “beautiful.” Either way the relationship seems to only exist in the present tense, and might be temporary. However, in the second verse he again surprises us by revealing more about the two characters and the progression of their relationship.

You kept running

You’ve got money, you’ve got fame

Every morning I see your picture from the train

Now you’re an actress!

Typically for Belle and Sebastian, humour and sarcasm are employed to good effect, and here these help to establish both the narrator and the model who was once a friend and then a rival. Interestingly, the last line is also a cliché which softens the impact of the observation

Now you’re an actress!

So says your resume?

You’re made of card

You couldn’t act your way out of a paper bag

The great American writer, Norman Mailer, said that writing ultimately concerns the nature of power, and this is true here for in six lines we move from the narrator calling the other a “loser” to now confessing that he/she can “see your picture from the train.” This implies that the narrator has a regular job and sees this other person, a model, on a billboard, presumably in an advertisement. With sparse lyrics Murdoch conveys vivid characters and an intriguing relationship. This continues with the accusatory

You got lucky, you ain’t talking to me now

Many listeners might’ve realistically presumed their relationship was romantic, but yet again the lyricist changes our view by gradually disseminating information: it was platonic and sisterly. Murdoch leaves the precise nature of their connection unspoken with use of what Keats called Negative Capacity

We had a deal there

We nearly signed it with our blood

Antithesis is used by the lyricist to suggest the complexity of the relationship, and show that the narrator and the model were once close, possibly when they were at school. Their relationship has changed over the years, and this drives the narrative behind the song

You give me stomach pain

I wish that you were here

This sudden and dramatic revelation keeps the listener engaged, and its twin emotions of revulsion and longing evoke a relationship dynamic with which many would associate. Belle and Sebastian is perceived as bookish, and literate, but the diction within this song is plain, and casual: suitable for a personal monologue.

As the narrator’s anger lessens, he becomes confessional, with an accolade that’s metaphorical and striking

If I could have a second skin

I’d probably dress up in you

This couplet is telling for the use of the pronoun “We” which confirms the strong connection the two characters once shared. In a surprisingly minimal number of words the lyricist has depicted a complex relationship between two contrasting people. Given the song’s initial representation of the relationship, the title is startling, as it is most complimentary metaphor

The divergent paths the lives of the two characters have taken are symbolised by the crisp imagery of

You’re a star now

I am fixing people’s nails

with the former evocative of glamour and travel, and the second connoting a mundanity and suburban imprisonment. This song uses language with deceptive simplicity in creating haunted and wistful creatures.

In the final verse, the full extent of the truth; the gritty reality is laid bare for us, and we see just how mislead we were in the song’s opening, only a few minutes previously

You’re a star now, I am fixing people’s nails

I’m knitting jumpers,

I’m working after hours

I’ve got a boyfriend, I’ve got a feeling that he’s seeing someone else

girls

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Jazz and me

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trumpet

My own musical career was fleeting. When I was eight I learnt guitar until the teacher moved, and Kapunda being a country town, that was it. I remember strumming in that measured, funereal way to “Banks of the Ohio” and being uneasy at having to sing

 I plunged a knife into her breast

 And told her she was going to rest

 She cried “Oh Willy, don’t murder me

 I’m not prepared for eternity.”

*

While at university I discovered Vince Jones, jazz vocalist and trumpeter and his album For All Colours. Its sophistication reminds me of Frank Sinatra, and “Straighten Up and Fly Right” stars a rowdy Wilbur Wilde sax solo. I then knew that the saxophone could be as cool as a guitar.

The first concert I attended was Midnight Oil at Memorial Drive (Julia) and Vince Jones at Le Rox in Light Square was the second. Standing with other students in the airless dark I note that Vince wears a suit and tie, and in contrast to Peter Garrett’s frenzied jumping the jazz ensemble appears uninterested.

But, I was in. Jones himself once said, “I want to be inside every atom of every note.” Over the next decade I saw him often, usually in the Piano Bar of the Festival Theatre. And then, I don’t know why, he stopped regularly touring Adelaide.

*

One wet Saturday in England I heard a BBC Radio 4 documentary on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, so immediately jogged up the high street to a HMV and bought it for ten quid. And as rain and sleet lashed our windows, its saxophonic hymn brightened the crushing winter sky.

The storms of Coltrane’s personal life thundered in counterpoint to the spiritual still of A Love Supreme, and within two years of its 1965 release he would be dead.

*

One distant summer some Kapunda boys and I drove across the Hay Plains to spend a fortnight in Sydney with an air-traffic controller mate. He was among rude privilege in a Drummoyne apartment. We parked Woodsy’s Datsun 180B on the street. As we’d daily exit the Western Distributor there was a looming billboard with a huge fanged spider warning us to watch out for funnel-webs. We did. I still do.

Besides playing cricket by the Parramatta River, and body-surfing at Bondi and Curl Curl I hauled everyone to The Basement in Circular Quay. I was a fan of Live at the Basement on ABC Saturday evenings, and Galapagos Duck was the house band, and Don Burrows and James Morrison were often guests. I can’t tell you who played that sultry evening, but I liked it. The wooden tables, the ambiance, the enveloping melodies.

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Among the more brilliant things about living in England is chucking a sickie, and knicking off at dawn on a Friday to another country. Easyjet flew us from Luton to Cologne so we could explore their Christmas markets.

The city is largely unremarkable save for its compelling cathedral; the Dom. With twin spires ascending to 515 feet, it was the world’s tallest building until the Washington Monument. Similarly astonishing is that in 1162 Emperor Barbarossa secured for the Dom the authenticated remains of the Three Magi. We drifted about its vast interior and leaving, presented some Euros to a nodding priest.

Papa Joe’s En Streckstrump is Cologne’s premier jazz venue so we find our seats early for Sun Lane Ltd, an ensemble from nearby Aachen. Slender waitresses disperse wine and beer. We can scarcely see through the stinging blue smoke. The punters surge in. Bespectacled, ample musicians squash timorously onto the picnic-rug stage. The pianist looks like a sheet has been stretched about a lumpy, wobbling refrigerator.

Standing unnaturally close, an energetic type suddenly clambers up and straddles a nearby stair- and me, as if he and I are posing for a gay fire-fighters’ calendar. I am startled. Forgetting that Europeans are often bilingual I blurt, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

As the gentleman dismounts the step, and my groin, I mutter, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome!” my intimate twitters.

“Say what you really want!” adds his friend. We don’t see them again.

The traditional jazz is brisk and zestful, and spilling out onto the Rhine’s bank Nina’s “99 Red Balloons” bursts from a heaving club. Lingering at the chilly Alter Markt, the wife sips a concluding gluhwein; the spiced, red wine and we confirm that Cologne jazz goes pretty well.

*

It was nearly an hour commute across Adelaide’s most miserable suburbs; Snowtown territory. After many months afternoon radio had become tiresome; especially when the old-age surrender of organising life around news bulletins, those ridiculous frissons began, so I fought this inevitability, by committing to Miles Davis. I submerged myself in Bitches Brew.

Menacing and swirling about you like a phantasm, the music is a sexual maelstrom, and its recording began within hours of Hendrix and his pyrotechnics at Woodstock. Was it jazz? Was it rock? Was it funk? I wasn’t sure, but I again knew that the trumpet could be as cool as a guitar.

Despite its ominous cadences and rhythms, I found it transportive and therapeutic as I’d make my way home to the beach. Bitches Brew is vital to jazz-fusion, and while the opening two tracks are rightly celebrated, “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” on side four is the standout. I still love getting lost in this 94-minute ocean.

*

This story begins with Mum and Dad’s record collection. Don’t they all? In among the usual 1970’s fodder of Ripper ’76 and the Best of Abba there’s some curios, and in the not on 5AD or 5KA and certainly not on Countdown section are some jazz albums, one a Dixieland compilation. I don’t especially recall any of the tracks, but these made significant impacts upon my psychology and vocabulary.

The jazz evoked widescreen travel and the speaking of strange tongues and moving about in dazzling metropolises that one day I might be permitted to visit. It was New York and Chicago and New Orleans. It wasn’t that I was trapped in dusty little Kapunda, it was that a planet was out there, and Mum and Dad’s jazz records captured these teeming, thrilling possibilities.

They still do.

BB

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global revolutions

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globe

 

I love a globe. There’s simple joy in being hypnotised by the cascading sweep of the Americas, contemplating the distant familiarity of England, and contending with innumerable Stans where once was the muscular bulk of the USSR.

Ah, seduced by a sphere.

For my birthday Mum and Dad bought me a standing floor globe, and Sunday morning Max and I assembled its dark wooden frame before slotting in the tilted ball. Max gave it a spin.

Ocean. Land. Giddy revolutions. Ocean. Land.

Like the best gifts it’s made me reflect.

Alex and Max often chat about the wider world, and as they engage with the possibilities, their curiosity is comforting. Globes encourage this.

“Alex, how deep is the Marianas Trench?”

“Really deep. You couldn’t even touch the bottom.”

And last year, walking by the Singapore River-

“Max, when we’re older, like probably thirteen, Joseph and I are climbing Mt Everest. We won’t even need any oxygen tanks.”

“No oxygen tanks! Really?”

As a kid I had enchanted possessions. The tape recorder and accompanying best of Little River Band cassette I received one Christmas; my first cricket bat- Polyarmoured, and now resting in a cupboard at Mum and Dad’s, and a yellow, wooden skateboard. But, in our house in Kapunda the globe of my childhood held quiet and enduring power over me, like a mystic. Globes conjure memories, and are gateways into our future.

From his Nanna and Poppa Alex also got one for his eighth birthday. With eyes widening he ripped the wrapping paper from the box then hopped about the room with delight. His globe came with a touch-activated light, and when the boys are in bed, it cloaks their room with a snug glow. Living in a corner, it watches over them, a silent sentry as they sleep.

As an adult how did I survive so long without a globe? For too many years my homes were without one; emptier dwellings surely dulled by their absence, and now we’ve three, offering buzzing invitations to our planet’s mysteries and marvels, and voyages and stories. Our imaginative power is enhanced. They’re as essential as milk and I love turning them gently like a monk, fingers on the thermoplastic joy, meditating on unknown places, and the promise of drenching wonder.

Globes urge consideration of yourself, and the bustling world, waiting for you, just outside.

For our boys, I hope as much.

Thanks to Mum and Dad for their gifts of globes, over many decades.

 

tape recorder

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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

0

Round 14 – Adelaide v North Melbourne: Thursday

|

greyhounds

In the truly tremendous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy the central character Arthur Dent laments, “This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” Shortly after, and with effervescent style, the planet Earth is destroyed.

Thirsty university students refer to Thursday as the new Friday. If American paint-by-numbers rockers The Knack was the new Beatles, and sauvignon blanc is the new chardonnay (or is it the other way round?) and burger joints are the new burger joints, then let’s agree that Thursday can imitate Friday.

With light snow forecast for our state’s upper ranges the fixture begins, and following a few scrappy minutes Rory Atkins kicks a cracker which is reviewed, extraterrestrially, to a behind. However, soon after, like Arnor Ingvi Traustason in Iceland v Austria, the good Tom Lynch soccers it through.

The Crows padlock it in and Dick Douglas (did he star in a 1940’s Hollywood musical?) snaps accurately. North move the ball without method or fluency, and this increases the spectacular early lack of spectacle.

My Barossa shiraz is jovial in a rumbling, earthy, Thursday way, and it shields me against Ziebell’s goal. Still, it’s the first opposition score in nearly a fortnight. Yet another Crows’ goal review degenerates into circus with the process seemingly being timed-out. As my first-ever boss might say, “The AFL couldn’t organise a root in a wood yard.”

Good Eddie jags a point, and with five consecutive minor scores Adelaide lurches into wastefulness. It reminds me that once there were two British parliamentary committees simultaneously investigating pointless governmental duplication.

The Kangaroos can’t twine together possessions, while the Crows are better in close, especially by hand. Of course, I’d just confidently completed that previous sentence when North get two goals in a minute, and my keyboard is abruptly stricken.

*

A shiraz-aided recovery allows me to now type that Tex ghosts unaccountably to the front of the pack. He grabs it, and slots it to shove the lead to a couple goals.

Lindsay Thomas drops the ball as if it’s an allergen, and to the crowd’s predictable umbrage, he attracts a free. Shortly after there’s a goal by Mason Wood- didn’t this golf stick debut at Troon in 1926 along with the Mashie niblick?

Half way through the second quarter the Kangaroos have impetus and the lead, and then when kicking at goal Adelaide is Ernie Els on the first green at Augusta, tapping it everywhere and really often, but never fecking straight.

After the main break Crouch crashes through a hasty torpedo punt and we’re away. Good Eddie follows within a minute. It’s a frenetic start and typing maniacally requires my shiraz to sit abandoned. Tex tyrannosauruses one from sixty and my glass and I reunite. Just now.

With the wife and boys abed I scramble back into my chair and Thomas sneaks the opposition in front again. Our sixteenth behind. No, make that the seventeen. Spare me. Then, good Eddie triangulates it through, and we’re just up.

Following more frisson from Charlie Cameron in which he’s has moved the ball with scintillating pace, but crude disposal a video review goes against Tex, and as an eye laser surgery beneficiary glaring at a big TV, I’m sure the stinking camera is lying. Why am I watching this atrocious Australian farce? I turn over to ABC 1 for Rake and its superior Australian farce. Cleaver, Barney and company are at their ridiculous best.

No, I don’t. How could I?

A furious scoreless epoch ensues. Buck Roo Ben Brown continues to display deliberately maddening hair. To use a cliché, which is itself a cliché, the next goal is crucial. And the digital ink isn’t dry when it goes to Adelaide, right now.

Suddenly, the Kangaroos are twenty-eight points, and eighty grand down. It’s peculiar to think that these two haven’t played a final since the 1998 decider. September may see these two again clash, and it would be ripping.

*

My wife and I didn’t meet, nor were either of our boys born on a Thursday. However, these happened on Thursdays: as a United Kingdom resident I voted in their 2005 general election (sadly just once); at Thebby we saw a raucous Violent Femmes; and one summer’s evening at the Tower hotel I had a tidy earn with a Hobart greyhounds trifecta.

You see, Thursday goes alright.

burger joint

 

0

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

 

3

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

0

Round 7 – Western Bulldogs v Adelaide: Bill Hunter and Your Mum’s Betamax

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bill

When I was home looking after our second son ABC News 24 began. Two events of note occurred during those months. Osama bin Laden was killed in his Pakistani compound, and the actor Bill Hunter passed away.

One day just after lunch as Max slept I watched Bill’s memorial service on the television. Mick Molloy worked with Bill, most impressively on Crackerjack, and as a touring double-act across many inner-suburban pubs.

In his eulogy at the Princess Theatre, Mick recalled Bill’s favourite sayings.  Operating within a narrow theme, the first was, “I’m just two schooners short of the horrors” and often used in response to a cheery salutation, the second was, “Get fcuked.”

At the Footy Almanac lunch, and in conversation with our Kapunda crew, John Harms observed that every Melbournian has a Bill Hunter story. And key to these fabled tales was Bill’s seeming ability to be relaxing with a lager at multiple pubs. Simultaneously. He defied quantum physics for Bill could teleport himself, when thirsty. Forget arc-welding, here’s an enviable life-skill.

In town for the weekend with five mates to celebrate my looming birthday, I was keen to pay homage to Bill.

It had begun well.

*

How do you build a publican?

As there is no instructive literature, I suggest the following. Make him slow of gait, even lumbering; commanding yet enigmatic; an employer of understatement as his primary method of communicating, and drench his back-story with equal measures of hyperbolic myth and striking reality.

In short, you make him Percy Jones: proud Tasmanian, Carlton royalty, and mine host at the North Fitzroy Arms.

In this pub bursting with memorabilia, the best example is a photo in the back corner of Percy, standing shoulder to shoulder with another hulking 1970’s icon, Gough Whitlam. It’s invested with historical context, colossal vitality, and fun.

Happily, we now have our own photo with Percy, taken at a front bar table, as he worked unhurriedly through his steak, hands like dinner plates, further enlarged by long seasons of ruck-work. Somehow, reminiscent of Bill Hunter’s corporeal talent he sat with, around, and over us by the window as twilight stole the day. Increasingly, Percy appeared to have descended a North Fitzroy beanstalk, with the scent of an Englishman (Collingwood pest) twitching in his nostrils.

Having concluded the luncheon we repair to our Elizabeth Street digs. A bunk bed sets an appropriate tone and function, for our trip is merrily reminiscent of a school camp. We lie there giggling at, well, nothing in particular, each with a brown paper-bagged Coopers Sparkling Ale to close our proceedings, as against the Tigers, the Hawks predictably close theirs.

*

The top deck at the MCG for the Magpies and the Blues. Footy can be of heightened appeal, especially when you’re disinterested in the result. The man-bun count is dangerously high, and incurable offender Bryce Gibbs is doing well. He’s a Glenelg boy.

Soon, we locate a narrative in Levi Casboult’s afternoon. He’s a great mark, but his kicking is a curious tribute to James Manson: former Magpie and according to the Coodabeens, a “rock and roll Tasmanian.” Still, his inelegant disposal wins me ten bucks from one of the old muckers. Collingwood present as fragile, listless, and impotent. Is this uncharitable?

As the Carlton song booms about the Olympic Stand, our ears detect Percy and Bill Hunter, adding their baritones to the celebration.

*

Pausing involuntarily at Young and Jackson for a head-count and pot of tea we then move to the Docklands for the Crows and Dogs. This could now be the competition’s finest rivalry. Anecdotal evidence suggests that on that September day in 1997 over quarter of a million Dogs supporters were behind those goals for Libba’s notorious point.

Earlier in the day, and fittingly around lunchtime, we were enjoying boys’ church at the All Nations Hotel in Richmond when above the fetching old bar, Bill Hunter’s apparition appeared, declaring, “Trust me Mickey. I was there. Don’t listen to ‘em. It was a fcuking behind.”

Tonight, though, the Crows are walloped in the middle, and have to launch too many attacks from deep in defence. This makes it tough, especially as the Dogs are on. Jenkins kicks a career-best eight, and while the free kick count is lopsided, it’s an excuse, and we lose a thriller.

Bontempelli shows poise and creativity in becoming tonight’s difference. He’s only just concluded being a teenager. When I was his age I could almost speak in sentences, and keep my Kingswood on the left.

After the siren, and walking along the swirling concourse a Dogs fan barks, “Crows supporters are two-headed at birth, and they’ve cut off the rong (sic) one.” This, of course, required appropriate rebuttal, and with volume one of our group replied, “Hey mate! You best get home and watch the ’97 prelim on your Mum’s Betamax.”

Twenty years in, this rivalry is escalating. It’s a ripper.

*

Because it’s the best method of dealing with our (temporary) Crows grief, we each purchase another Coopers Sparkling Ale and return to the school camp confines of our hotel room.

Safely snoring in the tiny space, we’re again visited by Bill Hunter who nods, just like he so often did in Muriel’s Wedding, and remarks, “You boys have had a bloody good weekend. Now go home tomorrow to your wives and families. If you behave, you can come back next year.”

Thanks Bill, we murmur from our bunks.

NFA

 

4

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

 

1

Welcome to Bundaberg

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The following essay is a discussion of what makes Queensland a unique state, as observed by an outsider, and using a recent Bundy rum TV advertisement. Here’s a link to the clip-

 

I took a sip.

“He’s trying to kill me,” I thought (politely) to myself.

I took another sip.

“Yep, he is.”

Late Brisbane afternoon with my wife’s extended family. Uncle Fred had poured me a homebrew beer. “It works out at eighty cents a bottle.”

Fred’s a businessman, and his millinery company sells hats to southerners for the Melbourne Cup Carnival. He also travels overseas. He’s been around.

“New York. Shanghai. London,” he scoffed as I stared at my muddy glass.

“Between the Gold Coast and Rockhampton, the Queensland coast’s the best place in the world. Why would you wanna live anywhere else?”

Raising my beer I thought, this bloke’s serious. I stifled a laugh and looked at him.

For Uncle Fred, Queenslander, this is no joking matter.

*

In the colourful history of Australian booze marketing, the iconic VB campaign is king. It features a gallant orchestral score, and John Meillon’s distinctive voice:

You can get it liftin’

You can get it shiftin’

You can get it working a plough

You can get it any old how

Matter of fact, I got it now.

Nodding to Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson, these poems continue to charm.

Meillon was vocally perfect. His recitations were not of the people, but to and for the people. Warm like a sunset and eager, he continued to promote the beer long after he’d downed his last lager; a ghostly advocate; the spirit of beer-drinking and of Australian life.

Yet VB ads often present a work ethic, the idea that clocking off after the day’s duties, a drink awaits: “For a hard-earned thirst, you need a big cold beer and the best cold beer is Vic.”

It’s what you deserve.

This contrasts with the Queensland dynamic. In this we’re often sold the notion that drudgery’s irrelevant. But, you’ve got to have the sense to live there.

Back when it called itself Castlemaine an advertisement in the “I can feel a XXXX comin’ on” series captured that thinking. Allan Border’s on a Great Keppell beach, and lying back in a deck chair, with a few tinnies while Jeff Thomson, Greg Ritchie and Ray Phillips are fishing. That work’s unwelcome in paradise comes through as James Blundell sings

I wish this lazy Sunday would never disappear

And I could hold back Monday for the rest of the year

As captain and saviour, AB’s exempt from dangling a line. Historically, it’s 1987 and he required all his energy to repeatedly resuscitate Australia’s miserable batting. It matters not that AB and Thommo are native Sydneysiders, Queensland is welcoming. Both had become as local as mangoes.

After a curious, homoerotic conga line across the sand, the batsman, bowler and wicketkeeper join the captain for a XXXX. Then like synchronised swimmers, the three fishing rods double over at once, dinner hooked. However, our sporting legends ignore them because, as we know, the beers won’t drink themselves.

The rest of Australia seemingly needs its collective thirst to be won, toil first, to legitimise the rEward of beer. But in Queensland relaxation is king. That’s the promise; life is better. You can forget work.

Things’ll take care of themselves.

*

What does the recent Bundy Rum campaign show us of the Sunshine State?

“Men Like Us Like Bundaberg Rum” delivers many ideas. It’s 2015, but we’re not talking to women.

The second concept is found in the title’s assertion, “Men Like Us.” Meaning, we the blokes from Up North. Not just geographically, but attitudinally. You’re either a Queenslander or should wish you were. The delicious dichotomy.

A beach. Some fellows (one wearing a fez) are cluelessly building a Viking boat. Its anchor’s blacksmithed from cheese graters and saucepans. Upon premature ejection it sinks; all head to the pub, and toast with swirling mugs of Bundy.

There’s rustic defiance in this. An outlook which (again) decries work. Over-achievement? Not us. Technology and modernity? How would these help up here in God’s own?

As a South Australian I envy the confidence, the sense of self-containment. The advertisement’s moderately mocking, but underpinned by a subtextual boast: This is Queensland, this is Queensland, this is Queensland.

Another link to the past is the ship’s Bundy Bear figurehead. Now pretty much absent (where has he gone?), the Bear was Bundy rum. He was everyone’s mate. He had a deep voice. He was the smartest bear (bloke?) in the room.

In one vignette Bundy Bear takes a pre-party bath, into which a housemate deviously drops a red sock. Modishly late, the now pink bear arrives at the gathering, and is ribbed by the boys.

A gorgeous girl admires that he’s, “brave enough to wear pink” and invites him over to meet her girlfriends. Bundy’s more attractive to women than his forlorn, human mates. He’s outplayed them; for he is Bundy, hear him roar!

*

The Bundy ad imagines us as sea explorers. Save for draft ineligibility, we’d surely have got up in a shoot-out with the Portuguese! But, here we are with only imported South Australian half-back flanker Dougie Mawson getting umpires’ votes. Rather than heroically sending boats out; we’re now infamous as a nation, for not letting boats in.

Borrowing from a pirate narrative tradition, we’re also invited us to see ourselves as buccaneers. Again, here’s a scorning of traditional work. Caribbean swashbucklers? No, less glamorously, we’re the world’s best video pirates.

*

My encounter with Bundy was brief. Advertiser drinks columnist Philip White once considered Nelson’s Blood, and I was idiotically inspired. It was first made with rum from the very barrel which stored Lord Nelson’s body following his death on the Victory, at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Modern interpretations of Nelson’s Blood exist, but White reckons the Adelaide variety’s a tankard of Coopers Best Extra Stout, drowned by an unholy baptism of Bundy. No, it doesn’t taste nearly as good as it sounds.

Like the witches around their bubbling cauldron in Macbeth, a friend and I made some at a party. He’s from Wales. The next morning he was driving six hundred kilometres, across the desert. It was truly, ferociously, colossally grog.

*

Itself a type of work song, the sea shanty’s used ironically, with geographical alertness rewarded by

We sail from here to Bogota.

It’s a fun line given the Columbian capital’s landlocked position up on an Andean plateau.

Having launched, the good ship Bundy sinks like a delightfully feeble entry in a 1970’s birdman rally.

Our sails are filled with wind and pride,

Explore the world – well at least we tried.

The pirates survive, and rush to the pub. Their shoddy shipbuilding reinforces the low status of work. Not landing in Bogota? The outside world’s cruel, and treacherous. Stay in Queensland, and get on the rum.

The shanty’s sustained last note reminds me of the opening page (I’ve got no further) of Finnegans Wake on which Joyce included a 101-letter word, evoking the fall of Adam and Eve

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!

Our sailors are euphoric. But caution. A bar full of men full of hijinks full of Bundy? Fast forward a fierce hour. We’ve all seen how this film finishes. You’d usher gran out to the Cortina before she’d finished her shandy. Just relax. This is Queensland, nothing nasty’ll happen.

*

The slogan is Welcome to Bundaberg. So, it’s not only a city in regional Queensland, but an aspiration, a sultry nirvana, especially alluring to those of the cold wowserish south.

What can you expect upon arrival? A place in which you’d don a fez, and sink Viking ships. An idyll of cattle and cane, where the living is easy-going. A parish in which work is enthusiastically ignored.

The Lone Star and Sunshine states share much. Tellingly, for his 1940 recording, “Beautiful Queensland” country music pioneer Tex Morton adapted, “Beautiful Texas.” On airless Brisbane evenings Uncle Fred puts the needle on the vinyl, nods at the prudence of his life choices, and sings along

There are some folk who still like to travel

To see what they have over there

But when they go look, it’s not like the book

And they find there is none to compare

This may go some way to explaining the passion for Queensland in State of Origin football.

This essay was originally commissioned for  Long Bombs To Snake, the magazine of the Footy Almanac community. It is 68 pages of quality feature-length writing on numerous sports by twelve of the talented Footy Almanac contributors. My thanks to John Harms for the opportunity. Long Bombs To Snake is available for purchase here-

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