Good Weekend To Be A Victorian

...I mean, I don't care about League or anything, but its still good.

'Do You Think Craig Starcevich Will Win The Brownlow Medal?'

The Brownlow is the most bizarre aspect of football. Everyone agrees that umpires know nothing; it is one of the few points upon which Collingwood fans and everyone else concur. And yet, the Brownlow is the highest individual honour in football. Which is insane, I mean, Gerard Healy won one.

Every year its the same. There will be a Brownlow favourite adopted by the Press, usually some kid who has played brilliantly and deserves it. And they will be endlessly interviewed about it. Yesterday, Gary Ablett jr made the front page of The Age with the story that he was favourite - not that any actual thing had happened, but that there were people out there who though, yes, on reflection, he might win. Really? Wasn't there anything else going on in the world that day? And then there are the questions: 'How do you feel about being the Brownlow favourite?', 'Do you think the extra pressure has put you off your finals campaign?', 'What do you think your chances of winning are?'. The only answer to any of these questions is 'Ah geez, I dunno, mate.' Which is usually what they say. Does that discourage the Press? No, not really. And then we come to the actual night and the camera zooms in on whoever it is as in round after round he doesn't get any votes. The zooming becomes more vicious as it goes from a statistical improbability to a mathematical impossibility for him to win, looking for signs of disappointment or bad sportsmanship.

I don't think I remember a favourite ever coming in, which possibly just demonstrates how far the distance between the umpires and everyone else really is.

State of Origin*

I always thought my dad looked like Achilles (above) and he thought his dad looked like Jack Dyer (left), which we agree is more or less the same thing. I was looking up the history of Essendon on Wikipedia to settle an argument about when the club was founded and noticed that wikipedia have disputed the neutrality of the section on Dick Reynolds - love it! - and in part it was this that made me think of my dad. But I'd been thinking about fathers, and sons, anyway.

The two most important Grand Finals of my lifetime have been, for me, 1989 and 1992. The first was the last Grand Final of the VFL before it became the AFL, in which my brother's team, Geeling, was beaten by hated Hawthorn. In the second, Geelong was beaten by the Eagles, an interstate side then less than ten years in the competition wearing a jumper which wasn't in any of the proper football patterns. That side was coached by Mick Malthouse (right), for whom (bizarrely) I have always had a soft spot, even then when he was coaching a side I despised. (I love the way Malthouse never looks less than confident when he's in the box. It means that when something goes wrong and they flash a shot of the coach on the big screen, the young players on the field who are coping lots of talk and having their ribs broken behind the play they don't have to contend with seeing him lose faith in them on top of everything else.) So Friday's match between the Malthouse-coached Collingwood and Geelong had the feeling of being a replay of that contest. It was an intense game. All the more because, at the time, I thought that if Collingwood lost it would be Buckley's (left) last game, but he has since said he'd stay on. Buckley is old-school, honourable on the field and the best all-round player and game-winner, strongest and hardest-working, that I've seen play. I'd even give him the edge over Voss.

But of course the thing which most gave the game the intensity and the feeling of Geelong getting a chance to change the score was that both Ablett's sons were playing.

If you didn't grow up with Footy then its a bit difficult to explain about Ablett (left). He always had the most ungainly and unpromising-looking build; the exact opposite of a player like Buckley who is what my dad would call 'a real good-looking footballer'. Everything about the way Buckley moves and handles the football is dynamic and elegant; he's always got perfect form and he never takes his eyes off the ball, even when he's being tackled, which is not that often. Ablett, on the other hand, was stocky with massive sloping shoulders and always slightly hunched. Yet he was the most miraculous, freaky player. He was said to be the fastest man over five metres in the league, which is the most important distance for anyone playing up front. He usually had three defenders guarding him, not that it made much difference. He was arguably the greatest full forward ever, one of the greatest ever players. His nickname is 'God'. He played for Geelong, which unlike most AFL clubs, is not an inner city suburb of Melbourne, it is a city in its own right: no one in Geelong doesn't barrack for the Cats. But despite all this, he never played in a winning Premiership side. Now both Ablett's sons, recruited under the father/son rule, play for Geelong, which must be a tough gig. Especially for the elder (left), also called Gary and he looks like him. He's built like his father, but more disconcertingly, he moves like his father. And he's a champion, which is amazing in its own right because you would expect that the son would be dwarfed by the father. It is something which so rarely happens in our culture, and yet that we so wish for. It is the thing that Hector wishes for in Book VI of the Iliad:

'"grant that this my child may be even as myself, chief among the Trojans; let him be not less excellent in strength, and let him rule Ilius with his might. Then may one say of him as he comes from battle, 'The son is far better than the father.'

Of course, it didn't happen in the Iliad, but perhaps it will here.

The Cats won on Friday in a great game, against tough opposition - Didak kicked what may be the best goal I've ever seen! - so now both sons are in the position to play in a Premiership side. Port Adelaide won the other final, so this Grand Final is going to have the feeling of a State of Origin match.

*The title is a pune, or play on words, but not a good one. For anyone who knows anything about football it will be particularly irritating in its irrelevance and general inapt-ness.

The Last Word

I don't know what to say about Beazley's resignation. He was, I think, disastrous for Labor because the public liked him but no one really wanted him in power. He's a politician who has disappointed me so often, not least because he seems to suffer from the lesson of Whitlam's defeat (don't let anyone know what you stand for because people won't vote for you) more than anyone in a party seriously afflicted by it. The result of that, of course, is that when it comes to last words, his are good. Good enough to make you curse him for not saying them earlier, all the more so because he seems not to employ spin doctors, or at least, not good ones, so he doesn't say the diplomatic thing, he uses the opportunity to say the thing he wishes he'd said all along.

He set a couple of records straight, particularly about the inconsistency of the conservatives' record on financial management, which was just a joy for a True Believer like me. Today he also said "When you wish to assault democracy, first you attack the unions; when you wish to restore democracy, first you start with the unions." He talked about the ability of solidarity to break dictatorships both Left and Right. And further that 'One of the great things about politics is it extracts you from your natural selfishness; you cannot help it.'

This time, his last words mark the distance between old and new Australia, and old and new Labor. Not surprising, given his history with the party. His father was in Chifley's parliament and went on to be Whitlam's Minister for Education, in which role he put in place one of the most remarkable tertiary education systems in the world, for all that he was very much on the Right of the party. But its Chifley's conception of the party and of politics that marks Beazley jr. even now. For Beazley, Unionism isn't a means to the end of better working conditions; it is an end in itself. A trade union is the basic and most fundamental political unit, the means by which people participate in politics and exercise agency in their own lives and in the means of production (of their income).
I don't know if that's true anymore, and either way, Labor isn't the party of the Unions anymore. I am really sad that the Australia described in Kim Beazley's valedictory speech is passing.

Painting for BlueJ

I'm going back and looking at Whiteley again. Almost all of it perplexes me, though not as much as my reactions to it when I was younger. I can't imagine what I was thinking. I also realize that I've edited some of them in my head. The chaos and destruction of American Dream, for example, resolves much more completely and organically into the beak of a honeyeater hovering in an idyllic and vaguely Asian landscape in my head than outside it. The thing that has remained constant and accurate in my memory is the shade of blue he painted Lavender Bay. His sense of colour is extraordinary and when he misses it, it is a kind of devastation.

He did one called Sensoreno of his dog looking sheepish which I thought BlueJ would like, but apparently the rest of the world (except Bob Dylan who devoted an entire episode of his radio programme to songs about dogs; it was special) don't share the dog thing. So here, instead, is one of his bird pictures. Not my favourite, especially in terms of the colour and then again I think the colour is perfect too. Perhaps that only makes sense in terms of the scope of his palette.

Luciano Pavarotti

1935-2007
Death of a great man.
Many thanks sir.