This is a cultured and tame exposition of something a little less...ehm...cultured or tame
The game in itself is unusual and parochial. You can tell by the name – Australian Rules. You just know its not going to have an international following and we aren’t as self-absorbed as the Americans as to concoct a World Series when it could only ever be us Vs the world and the world can’t, and wouldn’t, want to play.
We play the Irish though. But they don’t play Australian Rules (or Aussie rules as we call it, in our nasal and kinda breathless way), they play Gaelic Football.
We shift for them, like a jilted lover that knows she’s being cheated on but she plays the game of love anyway, because there is still some part of Australia that still wants to be Ireland or at the very least, the British Isles.
Most of our country burns in the sun and it could be some indication of guilt, as if nature doesn’t like the genes of the British or the Irish and the IRA and Orange Order be damned, because here they both burn, but we play Gaelic Football because we need someone to play with and we don’t want to be the petulant child playing in the backyard, all alone, kicking a ball forlornly against the wood paling fence.
So the game is unusual and unusually graceful, like soccer being played two feet off the ground, players floating on their own momentum, brutal ballerinas that call men that don’t drink poofters but tap each other on the arse nonetheless and pirouette in specially made boots and short shorts and say its all for the women but we can all see, that just like soldiers, it’s only for each others and they only ever really exist when they are caught in a moment – a knee in someone’s back, arms outstretched like a young god, and they hope they never have to return to earth, to the mere running of mortals, because why would you run when you can fly with the winged heels of Hermes.
And we all watch as we were watching on this Saturday afternoon – wrapt and placing food on the outstretched tips of our tongue because we didn’t want to look down, not for a moment, at least not until the whistle blew for quarter or half time or the ball was being kicked back to the centre for the ruck and then we could shove our faces full of offal and the nectar of hops and barely and not of honey for the lack of bees and Nordic fortitude, but we might of well have and then the whistle sounded again and the ball was up in the air and for a moment it reached its apex and it was perfect and perfectly still and a strong hand came along and swatted it like a fly, towards a player in full flight and he caught it running and kicked it running and he smiled because he was young and fit and he knew a woman was waiting for him when he left this field of glory, many women if he wanted them, but all he wanted was for the kick to translate his intention into something real, into a graceful arc, into six points or one, but six was always better, dead through the centre, two tall posts in the centre flanked by a shorter post on either side – six if you got it through the two, taller, central posts. One of you got it through in between one of the tall posts and the shorter post to its side.
No one else knows of our game, but we always wish they did. We’re like the special-ed kid that guards a pebble like it’s a Sumerian tablet, convinced other kids are conniving towards its theft, not realising that no one’s listening, let alone watching; caring much less conspiring.
I suspect I write this for no reason. The Americans have their baseball and NFL and the Australians and Irish already know and love this quirky little game and we wouldn’t want to impose our quirkiness on the world because we do not need or wish for another Boomerang, and the Kangaroo and Koala have already made our nation seem like the home of naturally selected freakishness.
Like I said I write this for no reason, I am another export with no discernable use.