Speaking a Second Language

On 20 September 1958 a huge crowd turned up to the grand final at the MCG to see two powerhouse clubs compete for the honours. Collingwood won, against the odds; flag favourite Melbourne was hoping to clinch four in a row and break Collingwood’s record for consecutive premierships, from the 1920s. It should have been a crowd of 97,957 people but it was one short of that: my mother stayed home in suburban Melbourne and listened to the game on the radio. I was born eight weeks later, and it was all my fault she wasn’t at the ’G.

Still, plenty more to come, she might have thought; after all, Collingwood already had twelve cups in the silverware cabinet and there was no reason to doubt the powerful club’s ability to win many more. Little did she know that it would be a 32-year wait, with nine grand-final appearances yielding only bridesmaid honours before pulling off another big one in 1990. I was thirty-two by then. That time, my mother was at the ’G, and I listened on the radio.

I googled to check the attendance that day in September fifty years ago, but otherwise I don’t need to look up any history books to tell this story. It’s part of my family history. In fact, it’s the only family history I know, apart from the basics of who my ancestors were—well, there’s some doubt about one great-grandparent but, so far no-one can be bothered with the exhumation of information. I know that my maternal grandfather, born in 1901, left school after grade 7 and did a plumber’s apprenticeship at the Flinders Naval Base. He worked with men who caught the train to Melbourne from Bittern on the Mornington Peninsula to go to the footy. The games were probably mostly played in the paddock that is now part of Yarra Park, next to the MCG. Those men barracked for Collingwood, and, when he was old enough, my grandfather came up to town for matches too. When he moved to Melbourne for work, football became part of life and the rest is my history. Grandad’s younger sister, Mary Unthank, my great-aunt, can verify the black-and-white legacy—she’s alive and kicking at 102, still barracking for the Magpies.

*

They say that a baby’s temperament and intelligence are influenced by what they hear in the womb and that classical music in particular can stimulate the unborn baby’s alpha waves. Babies can hear clearly from about twenty weeks; this means I started hearing things around the time of round one, 1958. I would have been lolling about in amniotic fluid with a soundtrack of football in the background for about five months of the pregnancy. I would have heard the teams announced on the radio late on Thursday night, and the match played on Saturday afternoon. No opera, no lullabies, just ‘Good Old Collingwood Forever’.

In the winter months, the weeks of my unremarkable Melbourne childhood were bookended by mass on Sundays and footy on Saturday afternoons. In summer, cricket was background noise, along with the lawn mower. We lived in the leafy-green eastern suburbs. My dad was a primary school teacher (he barracked for Richmond) and my mum did clothing alterations to help pay for our good education. I was the eldest of four girls; we went to Catholic schools. We were like a whole lot of other families, nice and ordinary.

But when we went to the footy at Victoria Park, we entered another world. Usually our group was some variation on Grandad, Grandma, Mum, a sister and my uncle, Johnny, and we parked the Holden at Campo’s place—he was a mate of Johnny’s who lived a few blocks from the ground. I remember this quite clearly because the back streets of Abbotsford were so different to our Californian bungalow, set in the middle of a block on a wide street. Campo’s single-fronted house seemed to be almost falling down, and there was no backyard, just a small space out the back off a lane, where a car could just fit. After the game, we’d often have to sit in our car while Grandad and Johnny had a few beers with Campo. This was the other side of Melbourne; it was like seeing the city’s underbelly—before the word was a TV series. It was semi-industrial, cramped, inner city, grubby, gritty and it reeked of football.

I look back on Victoria Park with a kind of beer-infused nostalgia. I remember standing on cans or maybe an esky, craning to see, or sitting on hard narrow benches—like church pews without backs—and being embarrassed by my mother barracking too loudly. Filling in the scores obsessively in the Footy Record and loving every minute of the game. Learning the language of barracking: ‘Baaaaaalll!’ and ‘Holding the maaan!’ Knowing the players’ numbers off by heart. If I look at photos of One Eye Hill from the 1960s and 1970s and put them up against family shots taken in our backyard, it’s hard to believe Victoria Park was part of our otherwise squeaky-clean life.

*

Fast forward to 1990. I’d become less interested in footy in the late eighties as it had gone national and become big business. I was part of an arts scene, and I still hadn’t worked out that art and sport were not incompatible. This was partly a hangover from school, where I chose art over sport. Not that it was exactly a choice. I was always picked last for any team, stuck in goal defence in netball because I was bigger than everyone else. To quote Dennis Cometti, I had the mobility of a traffic cone. And it was partly because in the 1980s I was a bit up myself.

So, in July 1990 I was working in the Cook Islands, on Rarotonga, for a couple of weeks as part of the AESOP (Australian Executive Services Overseas Program). Although the program was usually the domain of retired professionals, my then business partner, Matthew Flinn, and I had been asked to volunteer our services to assist a struggling T-shirt printing company to improve the quality and quantity of their output. Within the first couple of days, we were invited to a barbecue with all the other vollies. The average age was around sixty. Matthew and I were standing awkwardly with a group of nice ladies and gents when I spotted a familiar face across the way.

‘Is that Brian Dixon?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said one of the nice ladies. ‘He’s a volunteer in sport administration. Do you know Brian?’

Not personally, I didn’t. But he was an ex-footballer who had coached North Melbourne in the seventies and he’d been a minister in parliament for a time so he seemed familiar.

‘So you’re from Melbourne?’ she asked. ‘Who do you barrack for?’

Well, one thing led to another and suddenly I was having a conversation. Brian eventually came over and we talked about what it was like to play in five winning grand finals for Melbourne in the fifties. We talked about Thorold Merrett, Ray Gabelich, Ron Barassi and what it was like to lose to Collingwood, in the year I was born.

Hours later, we left. Matthew had been mostly an observer, looking on with cultural bemusement. To him, we might as well have been speaking in tongues. There we were in a tropical paradise, at an Aussie-style barbecue—we were thousands of miles from Melbourne’s winter and he’d had to listen to footy talk for hours. And it was clear that I had unexpectedly enjoyed myself.

‘Since when did you speak football so fluently?’ he asked. Since Brian Dixon was winning grand finals.

Probably because of the Brian Dixon connection, I paid a bit more attention to the footy for the rest of that season. On Grand Final day, 6 October 1990, my parents were at the ’G. I spoke to my mum in the morning, wishing her well. I listened to the game on the radio, with increasing interest as victory seemed possible. I felt the tingles up my spine when Darren Millane held the ball high as the siren sounded.You’d think I had barracked for good old Collingwood for a hundred years. When I spoke to my mother that evening we joked about closure. The next day, I drove over to Victoria Park; I wanted a sniff of the delirium and to revisit that other side of Melbourne, the bit that was part of my history. I didn’t actually go in, but it wasn’t because I was too up myself; in fact, I felt like I’d come back down to earth. I knew what my one-eyed, colour-blind, hungover bretheren were experiencing and it wouldn’t be long before I was back in the outer.

*

In 1996 I spent a couple of weeks working at Tiwi Design on Bathurst Island, north of Darwin. I’d never been to black Australia and I felt very naive and extremely white when I arrived at their workshop to start developing some new textile prints. On day one, on the short drive through Nguiu, I was taken aback by the poverty and crude living conditions. I had no idea where to start with the program I was supposed to run—I felt like I’d need a year to acclimatise and adjust my expectations. After a clumsy introduction to the artists, I retreated to the security of the office to type up a list of things we’d need to order from Darwin.

Tim the bookkeeper, a silent type, was in the other corner.

‘You from Melbourne?’ he asked, after a while.

‘Yep.’ Wanting to add, ‘That’s why I’m so out of my depth here,’ but I figured that was obvious.

‘Who d’ya barrack for?’

‘Collingwood,’ I said without hesitation.

‘I went to school with Billy Picken,’ Tim told me.

‘I loved him!’ I said. ‘Number 25,’ I added, almost to myself.

I could tell Tim was still proud of this connection with the high-flying idiosyncratic champion who had retired from Collingwood in 1983. Tim went on to explain he’d won a scholarship to Assumption College, Kilmore (once known as ‘the football factory’) and so had Billy. They were there for different reasons, but their friendship was forged forever, through footy. It turned out there was a big black-and-white following up north.

Needless to say, the ice was broken and we were off and running. And once more, I loved footy for being my second language. When one of my visits coincided with their footy season (which runs in the ‘off-season’ of the AFL comp) the spectacle was amazing. Kids, dogs and chaos everywhere but such good fun. It’s just possible that football might one day be the language that brings black and white Australians together.

*

At the end of 2006, Melbourne was pronounced overall winner in the search for the world’s top city for sports events. The survey was conducted by London-based research firm ArkSports, and Melbourne rated particularly highly for the level of public interest in sport—apparently it was ‘never far from prominence in a city that boasts an impressive and broad cultural calendar’.

If you’ve lived in a place all your life it’s hard to know what defines it. Many of my friends left to go overseas as soon as we finished university in the late 1970s, looking for something they couldn’t find in Melbourne or even Australia, but I liked it here. I didn’t think much about what I liked thirty years ago, but it certainly wouldn’t have been sport that came to mind if I’d been put on the spot. If I think about it now, though, I would say that Melbourne is defined by its cultural mix, and the mix is determined by having a huge sporting precinct so close to the CBD, yet it doesn’t seem to be dominated by it in an ugly way. Sport has never been seen by this city’s architects as something to be ashamed of.

For many Australians, the MCG, the ‘people’s ground’, is the epicentre of sport in this country; it’s the home of cricket, football, the occasional sell-out soccer friendly, host of the 1956 Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games. It’s a couple of long bombs from a sophisticated city centre, where there is a plethora of amazing bars and restaurants, and great shopping. It’s a city that has embraced sport to such an extent that a second stadium was purpose-built at the other end of the city, and a third one is to be constructed on the other side of the ’G. The sports precinct is completed by the National Tennis Centre, and the whole thing is linked to the city by Birrarung Marr, a new park that has just slipped into our language as if it’s always been there. The thing is, if you hated sport, you’d still like the parklands that surround the city.

The MCG is an icon. It’s what makes people ask you who you barrack for when you say you’re from Melbourne. It’s a password to conversations that you might not otherwise have, where you find a common language in the most surprising places.

*

In August 2005 Allen & Unwin hosted a ‘meet the authors’ night for international guests Harlen Coben and Michael Connolly. Making conversation, I asked Coben what he wanted to do while he was in Melbourne. ‘I want to see what makes this place tick. Where do you suggest I go?’ He’d put me on the spot, and before I realised what I’d done, I was taking him to the football, at the ’G, outside, on a winter’s night.

Suffice to say that, much to his surprise and that of his Sydney-based publicist, Coben shared a cab to the ’G with several other people who were also leaving the Melbourne Writers Festival cocktail party early to go to the footy. I was already there so I could get us a possie near the Collingwood cheer squad—far enough away not to be part of it, close enough to get a good eyeful. The game was between Collingwood and Port Adelaide, and I explained the intense rivalry between these two clubs, one of which believed it had the God-given right to the black and white stripes and the other who believed they'd been denied those colours at elite level, despite their longer club history - in South Australia - as the Magpies. Coben was intrigued that the supporters were all allowed to sit together. He commented on the number of well-dressed and underdressed people in the same area, the mix of men, women and kids. It was a night of great hilarity—try explaining the rules of a game you’ve been watching from birth and for which you have accepted every idiosyncrasy, to an American sports nut who wants to understand everything.

We walked back through the gardens and had a late drink and bite to eat at the Supper Club, as far removed stylistically as it could be from the MCG Southern Stand. There were footy scarves there though—if you’re in the know, you see them. As we walked him back to his hotel, Coben commented, ‘I like this city, it’s hard to pigeon hole. I’d love to come back.’ And his assessment of the game? ‘It’s brutal and beautiful. And what a venue.’ At the time, the ’G was undergoing major reconstruction but it still exuded an eerie power. And I remember thinking that next time I’m in an unfamiliar place, I’ll make sure I go to a sporting event, even if I don’t know the rules. A sporting crowd is a great measure of a city’s ticker.

*

In 2005, another sport was embraced wholeheartedly by Melburnians with the arrival of the A-League. Not that soccer was new to Melbourne, but it hadn’t exactly been accessible to the masses. It must have been a successful marketing campaign because after just one season I jumped on the Melbourne Victory bandwagon. I liked the idea that it was about barracking for Melbourne as a team and that the season ran in the AFL’s off-season. And I was curious as to whether I could pick up the rules of another ball sport. By the time John Aloisi sent Australia to the World Cup on my birthday in 2005 I’d been to several Melbourne Victory games and was starting to appreciate that it was all about nuances and strategies, so different to Australian Rules where it’s all in-your-face. But I liked the way the crowd was integral to the entertainment. I was ready to learn the language of the round-ball game, the beautiful game—but I stopped short of calling it ‘football’.

When Melbourne Victory won the premiership in the second A-League season, I was there. I really don’t like missing grand finals. The losing ones supposedly make you stronger. Look at Aunty Mary—she’s survived more losing grand finals in her lifetime than it should be humanly possible to endure: twenty-three at last count. But being there when your team wins is the best feeling and great fun. Watching Archie Thompson’s five goals, I was sold. I loved the chanting and being part of a crowd with a common purpose.

If you know the words to one sport, you can easily learn the words to others but I’ll always barrack for Melbourne, whatever the competition. But walking across the bridge over the rail yards at Telstra Dome on my way home from a soccer match is not the same as walking home across the land that my grandfather stood on to watch the team I still support, some ninety years later.