This blog is on the move

I have been getting quite a few comments from people - old-fashioned, face-to-face ones - about how they aren't sure how they can make a written comment on this site. I gather that this might be a bit of a problem with Blogspot generally so I'm packing up and moving to Wordpress. You can find all this content and more if you follow this link:

http://theinternetatemyblog.wordpress.com/

At least, I hope you can.

Regards

Brendan O'Reilly

In praise of low-speed rail

I caught a bus from Albury to Melbourne last Wednesday. It left Albury station at 4.52 and stopped all stations to Seymour where we waited 24 minutes for a train to take us to the railway station formerly known as Spencer Street. We arrived there at 9.36 pm. All of these times were scheduled. There were no delays. So it took four hours and forty four minutes to get from Albury to Melbourne, a distance of about 327 kilometers.

It has been impossible to get a V-Line train from Albury to Melbourne for about two years. They fixed up the track and this fixing didn’t work and so now they are fixing it again. Nobody has any idea of when it might be fixed.

So buses now run instead and the trip takes nearly five hours.

I for one am sick of hearing about “high-speed rail.” Just get the normal-speed rail working first. Set modest goals. When you’ve shown you can run a normal train service at normal times then maybe we’ll think about letting you play with the more expensive model.

But first things first.

Was Jeanette Howard "under-employed"?

In Wednesday’s Herald Sun Andrew Bolt complains at length about the Prime Minister’s overseas visit. He manages to fit in a lengthy insult of her partner Tim Mathieson and among this man’s crimes are the fact that he isn’t married to the woman he loves, he wore a sports jacket without a tie and he is also “under-employed.”

Now could someone with more time on their hands than I have (and a strong stomach for this sort of thing) please do a bit of checking? How many times during the Reign of the Rodent did Andrew Bolt criticise Jeanette Howard for what she wore?

And how many times did he describe her as “under-employed”?

That’s all I want to know.

He's not a miner, he's a very naughty boy

I keep reading in the paper and hearing on the news that “miners oppose the super-profits tax” or “miners” want this or think that. But when I read on or listen some more I find out that the people they are talking about are not “miners” at all. They are in fact people who own mines, or people who are the Chief Executives or the main shareholders in massive corporations that own mines. They are people who do not go underground or into an open cut each day to earn their crust. They do not dig into the ground with picks and shovels, nor do they drill into rock and pack the gap with explosive.

They are not miners! They are very rich, very powerful people with a vested interest in low taxes, weak unions and a deregulated economy. They ought to be called then, “mine owners,” or “chief executives” or “leading shareholders in mining corporations” because that is what they are.

In fact miners, real miners that is, the ones who risk their lives and get very dirty, are quite particular about who is called a “miner” and who is not. I have a friend who used to be a Health & Safety Officer in the Pilbara and he will say, ironically, “well, as an ex-miner…” and launch into some comment about hard work or dangerous machinery. But you see, he is being ironic. Yes, he used to work in a mine. No, he doesn’t really claim to be a miner. Yet he was much closer to being a miner than Clive Palmer or Twiggy Forrest or Hugh Morgan, all of whom will be described in the mainstream media as “miners.”

I have another friend who was born in Broken Hill as were his parents, all of his grandparents and many of the generation before that. His father worked underground, in the mines, for twenty or thirty years. But if you speak to him he will make a point of saying “I wasn’t a miner though.” You see even though he was deep under the earth for much of his working life, he wasn’t literally at the coalface (well, it being Broken Hill, it wasn’t so much a coalface as a silver or lead face) wielding a pick and shovel or a bloody great drill, so he wasn’t a miner and will make a point of saying so.

Why is that working people have some pride about not claiming to be things they are not? And why is it that super-rich mine owners want to describe themselves as “miners”? God forbid, Twiggy Forrest made himself a multi-billionaire before his company had even sold a shovel-full of ore. Yet he is known as a “miner.”

The reason of course is simple. It sounds better to say “miners oppose the super-profits tax” than to say “mine owners oppose the super-profits tax.” It sounds like hard-working people in hard hats with dirt on their hands are opposing a fair distribution of our common wealth. When in fact it is the super-rich selfishly holding onto the wealth that is not theirs to begin with.

Miners! The likes of Clive Palmer and Twiggy Forrest claiming to be “miners” is like a transport minister claiming to be a bus driver.

The new prison at Inverbrackie

The more I hear and read about asylum seekers the more I come to believe that this government doesn’t have a clue. They don’t have a clue about being humane and they don’t have a clue about politics.

South Australian premier Mike Rann was on PM last night talking about the new prison that is being built in Inverbrackie in the Adelaide Hills. The locals seem to be pretty angry about having several hundred asylum seekers imprisoned in their community. The way the government and the Greens are responding to this is instructive. It is the locals protesting against the new prison who have got it wrong, the line goes. The people imprisoned there are not bad people, the locals are told. Their children won’t overcrowd the local schools. The locals should make them welcome, not protest at their coming.

But why not side with the locals? Why shouldn’t they be upset? It is the government who have gotten it so wrong, who have made this into a problem when it doesn’t have to be one and who have thrust this problem onto the people of Inverbrackie.

I can’t be the only one who can see that this mess is entirely of the government’s own making. If they didn’t imprison asylum-seekers they wouldn’t have to build new prisons to put them in. Then they wouldn’t have a problem with a local community who feel, rightly, that the government’s problem is being landed in their backyard.

And it’s no use telling the locals “the asylum seekers are not a threat to you.” If that’s the case then why are they locked up? Is the government actually admitting then that it spending millions of taxpayer dollars locking up innocent people? Why is it doing that then?

And it might be unfair to the Greens but I heard Senator Hanson-Young speaking on this recently and she seemed to have bought into the logic of the government and was expressing concern that some of the locals were so vociferous in their opposition to the new prison. Some of them even expressed racist sentiments. Gosh golly. But who in their right mind would be in favour of a new prison being built next door to house hundreds of asylum seekers? I wouldn’t be. Would Hanson-Young be thrilled at the idea?

You don’t have to be a racist to oppose an asylum-seeker prison being established in your community. You just have to be a normal human being.

So here’s how the government could make the headache go away. Don’t lock up innocent people in the first place! Then you don’t have to spend hundreds of millions building new prisons. Then you don’t have headlines screaming about overcrowded prisons and hundreds more boat people on the way. People arrive, you lock them up for a few days while they have health and security checks. Then you let them go and they get on with their lives.

There are no longer overcrowded prisons full of people going mad. There are no longer angry local communities wondering why an incompetent government is dumping its problems on them. There is suddenly a hundred million dollars available for the causes of good instead of evil.

But first of all stop calling these prisons “detention centres.” They are prisons, so call them prisons. The people in them are not “detainees” they are prisoners. So you should call them prisoners. You’ll be amazed at how little sense mandatory detention imprisonment makes when you start discussing it in Plain English.

Paul Kelly, Thomas Gray and the trip to my Mum's place.

I drove up to my Mum’s house on Friday night. I didn’t leave Melbourne until 7.15 and the trip can’t be done in much under four hours with no stop at all. And I’m a stopper when it comes to driving so I thought four and a half was about right.

So I stopped once at the Mokoan truck stop. I like to stop in the gardens in Benalla but they did not appeal at nine o’clock at night, so stayed on the highway and pulled over at Mokoan. After I’d eaten my ciabatta with hommus and salad and had two cups of tea and a Monte Carlo or two I was on my way again by ten. I was very tired and I told myself “in Wodonga by eleven, at Mum’s before twelve.”

Indeed it was eleven when I pulled over in the main street of Wodonga. I had listened to Mumford & Sons since Mokoan, the whole disc plus the first three tracks again, and now I took that CD out and put on Post and it was playing as I pulled out and got going again. I had chosen it because I can sing along to every line and I thought that would be good for keeping me awake. And this proved to be the case and the album is the perfect length of course, so that I sang the last line of Little Decisions ten seconds before pulling up at Mum’s front gate.

I love singing along to Post and I noticed last night, for the first time, that there are gentle harmonies on Little Decisions and they are very subtle and very beautiful and I must have heard that album a thousand times and I’ve never noticed them before. And if I sing along to the whole album, in a full-throated fashion, when I get to Little Decisions my voice is sometimes loose enough to reach the high notes on “...big resolutio-o-o-on...” which is incredibly gratifying. It’s the highest note on the album and the one I’ve always struggled with and I noticed a year or so ago as I washed up and sang along that my voice was soaring and I not only held the note but I soared up and down on it just as Kelly does and I felt like the king of the world.

And thinking about those previously un-noticed harmonies I thought of all the great and beautiful things that are done and which go un-remarked by most people. And a few devotees might pick them up and comment as the art becomes known and studied but then again they might not. And it’s quite possible that the singers of these harmonies and the people who thought to arrange them have never, ever, been thanked for the beauty they brought to the world.

So I say to Michael Barclay and Toni Allaylis who seem to have done these harmonies, “Thank you. Thankyou for laying down your tracks for me to discover after listening to your song for the one thousandth time, for making so sweet the last few miles to my Mum’s house late on a moonlit Friday night. And thank you to the geniuses who put this record together.”

When we were children Dad read to us once or twice selected verses from Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. He was most fond of the lines:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

And if he were still alive I would make a point of seating him on the sweet spot on the couch where the CD can be heard perfectly and getting him to hear these harmonies and say to him “Dad I never noticed these harmonies for twenty five years and this is my favourite record of all time. Do you think Gray might have appreciated this moment of my discovery?”

I think he might.

Labor’s bold play to win ‘pink vote.’

This was the headline in Saturday’s Age which I had the pleasure of not reading until last night, as I was at my Mum’s place in the country. Naturally on reading the headline I assumed our brave state government was now in favour of gay marriage. Or rather, was now opposed to the homophobic aspect of the marriage laws which annihilate the love between men and between women. As if.

I am so weary of this sort of hand-wringing cowardice. If you hate gay people, just come out and say so. But if you think it’s okay to be gay then you have to be in favour of gay marriage. You just have to be. Otherwise it’s like saying, “I think black people should be treated the same as white people. Except that black people should not be allowed to get married.” Can you get away with this crap anymore? Well, no if you’re talking about race. But yes if you are talking about sexual preference.

Just come out and do it. You’ll feel so much better and you won’t have to waffle on endlessly anymore about civil unions and registrations of relationships and recognition of overseas marriages (although not as marriages, as such, of course not, but merely as “relationships.”)

Or don’t do it, suit yourselves. But don’t get all sooky and precious when you lose seats to the Greens. Or to the Liberals. Or to any party or grouping or individual who show a sausage-skin’s worth of intestinal fortitude.

Fight for what's right

Many years ago I read about a debate in the UK between a Conservative and a Labour politician. At this time there was a Conservative government and there was no minimum wage. Labour was promising to bring in a minimum wage at some level. The Conservative said that bringing in a minimum wage would create unemployment, and so it was a bad idea. The Labour man said no, it would not create unemployment. Would too, said the Tory. Would not, said the Labour man.

And so this is what the debate became. A minimum wage might or might not cause unemployment. This is exactly the debate the conservatives wanted to have. Because, logically, in some cases at least, a minimum wage will create unemployment. The argument the conservatives don’t want to have is the one that Labour (or Labor) never starts. The argument is a minimum wage is a basic human right. If we don’t have a minimum wage set a level that people can live on then we might as well have slavery.

This is not a factual argument. It is a moral one. It is not an appeal to people’s cold, logical, mathematical side. It is an appeal to decency and compassion and also to self-interest. And it is the sort of argument which, on almost any issue you care to name, the left never, ever make. Lefties are drawn to arguments about detailed facts like moths to a flame. They retreat from the moral high ground with all possible speed. It is horrible to watch and I am sick of it.

I don’t remember the last time I heard a Labor politician argue in favour of Medicare. It’s Labor’s greatest achievement, and it’s universally popular and you’ll never, ever hear a Laborite make a moral case for it. You’ll hear them blather about case-mix funding and schedule-fee-percentages but they will not say “health care is a right not a privilege.”

I am sick of hearing people say that we’ll never have a fairer world or a solution to global warming or an end to poverty and hunger “because most people are selfish.” Or because “the right-wing media will destroy anyone who fights for these causes.” People in positions of influence actually hardly ever fight for these causes. They may well work themselves into an early grave and they may well support these causes, but if you ever hear a union leader or a Labor politician or even a prominent Green actually fight for a moral position I say treasure the moment because it won’t come again soon.

Consider the carbon tax. Now I used to support a rationing system or a cap-and-trade system and all the rest of it but it seems we’ll never have such a system that is worth the trouble. So instead we could have a carbon tax. This would send a clear price signal to consumers and business and would allow people to make serious investments into renewable energy. It could also be used to change the way people live and reward them for saving energy or using renewables. And a carbon tax can even be revenue neutral. The government could actually give all the money back so that there was no net increase in taxation and so that the poor were not disadvantaged.

Now, apparently, the Greens support a carbon tax. But you’ll never hear them argue the case for it. Well, I haven’t yet. And yet the other day an opinion poll showed that almost half the population supported a carbon tax. This is without anyone actually leading on the issue. Imagine if the Greens actually go their act together and got into the ring and landed a few punches.

Lefties would do well to remember a man none of us liked. He was mean, deceitful and small-minded and we are all glad he is gone. But Howard can teach us something. For each of the terrible things he believed in – the Iraq War, locking up toddlers behind razor wire, the GST, destroying the union movement, shovelling money into wealthy schools – he actually had arguments in favour of them. And he used these arguments again and again. God, I heard them so many times they are engraved on my brain for all eternity. They were bad arguments, and illogical, and dishonest and all the rest. But they were arguments nonetheless and he went into bat for his bad ideas day after day after day. He was on the offensive all the time and he made a moral case for his bad ideas. Can you believe that? A moral case! As if Work Choices or invading Iraq were good ideas!

But the point is that Howard believed that they were good ideas! He actually believed in them. And he had comprehensible, straight-forward arguments to support them and he repeated these arguments every bloody day.

We need to be like that. Yes the Australian will be against us. Yes, the Herald-Sun won’t give us a great run. But this is already the case. And there is nobody so easy to mock and rubbish as the prevaricator who sort-of-believes in something but hasn’t the guts to make the argument.

Our arguments are right. They are moral. We need to fight on this turf, on the side of what is ethical and good. I think we’ll be amazed at how well it works.

If you don’t want to fight, get out of the ring

I heard on PM this evening how well Labor is mismanaging two big issues at the same time. It is taking a hammering on the Murray-Darling and on the prosecution of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. And it only has itself to blame.

I don’t claim to understand either of these issues well but it is plain to me that the government understands them even less. Given that I have a job doing things other than running the country and that I don’t have a hundred thousand public servants to help me I think my lack of expertise might be forgiven. But the government’s cannot.

A report has come out and recommended, as we expected it would, drastic cuts to water allocations for irrigators in the Murray-Darling basin. Blind Freddy could see that too much water has been taken out of this system for too long. So much, in fact, that the mouth of the Murray has been closed to the sea until very recently. So much, in fact, that the Coorong, a ninety-mile long coastal lagoon became too saline because too little fresh water was coming into it. The whole lagoon “flipped” from a system teeming with life and great biodiversity to one in which only a handful of species could survive.

Ah well, it’s only the Coorong. Ah well, it’s only the Murray-Darling. I saw on the ABC a year or two ago that Coolabah trees, several centuries old, were dying. Not one or two, but whole stands of them. They’d survived all that this harsh continent could throw at them since the Renaissance, but they couldn’t survive the over-allocation of water from the rivers.

So who is arguing the case stated in the report? Well, none of our elected Labor representatives. All I’ve heard is that public servants are being sent to “consultation meetings” in towns like Deniliquin and Orange. These towns will be hit hard by the cuts to water allocations, unless they are heavily compensated in some other way. So the public servants are being crucified at these meetings by thousands of furious locals who believe, rightly enough, that Canberra is trashing their livelihoods.

And what did I hear from government ministers this evening? Did I hear anyone say “I know farmers are upset but I promise we’ll look after you”? No I did not. Did I hear anyone argue the case for the rivers and for the environment, and say something like “we don’t have a choice. We either take less water out or the rivers will die.”? No, nothing like that. Just pure waffle about “process” and “consultation” and “only the first stage.”

What crap. What’s the point of making so many people feel so threatened if you’re not even prepared to go into bat for the environment when it matters? Why not just give up on the rivers now and let farmers keep their allocations, or cut them by five per cent or something ridiculous? Sure, our grandchildren won’t understand why we let the country’s food bowl become a dustbowl but at least our Labor leaders won’t have to get off their arses and actually fight for something.

And Labor are doing the same conga of cowardice in relation to Afghanistan in general and toward the prosecution of three Australians soldiers in particular. The military prosecutor, Brigadier Lyn McDade, has been the subject of an on-line petition. This has been promoted by, among others, Alan Jones of Sydney radio. The one who changes his mind if the price is right. She has been the subject of some vicious abuse and the federal Opposition has been getting stuck right in. Their angle is pretty clear. “How dare anyone even suggest that Australian soldiers might have done the wrong thing!” How dare they indeed.

Now the Opposition is wrong to get involved in this. The case is being processed, as these things must be. And it’s the job of the Government to stand up for the prosecutor who is doing her job under some strain it would seem. The Government, if it had the slightest bit of fight in it, would be giving it to the opposition. “How dare you make this a political issue! How dare you get involved in a criminal prosecution! This is Australia not some banana republic! Let Brigadier McDade do her job and call off your attack dogs.”

But we don’t hear that. When the minister came onto to speak on PM I didn’t know whether I’d fall asleep or throw up. He had a point to make (and in fairness to him it reads better on the transcript than it sounded) but it took forever to make it.

My point (and I hope I haven’t taken too long to make it) is that I am sick to death of the gutlessness and lack of fight of our side of politics. It’s not just this Labor government, the Greens lack grunt as well. Why do we let the other side have all the good lines? All that crap about “our boys doing a tough job” and all the rest of it. Why do we hear all about the understandably angry farmers and not a word in favour of the rivers?

George Monbiot has written about this problem a bit recently and the other George, Orwell I think his name was, also went on about it in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier, and elsewhere. Our side is gutless and verbose and led far too easily into the quagmire of detail. We need to step back and look at what we really want and remember some good phrases to sum up our cause.

After all, aren’t our causes good ones? And don’t we have some good arguments to support them?

Who picked this Q&A panel?

Did anybody watch Q&A last night? What a complete waste of time. I gave up at ten o’clock because if there is one thing that I don’t want to watch more of it’s five Australians agreeing with each other about how great elite sport is and how it’s worth all the money we throw at it. And someone on the panel actually said that the Delhi Games had given the city (as if the money had fallen from the sky ) “badly-needed infrastructure.”

Was this the best panel that our ABC could assemble to discuss sport? For the record it consisted of Lisa Forrest who used to be swimmer and whom I remember winning gold in Brisbane in ’82, and Geoff Lawson the former test cricketer and now commentator. There was also Roy Masters who writes and commentates about Rugby League, I gather, (we don’t hear a lot of him in the South) and Mark Arbib and Kelly O’Dwyer representing Australian politics.

God what a bore. Couldn’t they have found one person who is appalled at how much money is poured into elite sport? What about one person who doesn’t really like sport that much and has interesting things to say about how our relentless focus on it is damaging to our society and our well-being? Not that I’m saying that, mind you. But if you’re going to have a panel discussion you’ve got to have a bit of conflict, a bit of spark, and I must say my heart sank when this panel was unveiled just after Media Watch.

Ah, well, early to bed with Paul Kelly’s book.

My Paul Kelly joke

I once wrote a joke about Paul Kelly that was used at least once by Sandy Gutman, a.k.a. Austen Tayshus, narrator of the massive-selling Australiana monologue. It was just after Paul Kelly of the Sydney Swans had won the Brownlow Medal and it worked on the hilarious notion that Paul Kelly was quite the man – a great footballer, a famous singer-songwriter and a journalist and author of weighty political tomes as well.

I had dreams, when I fashioned this great bit of humour, that it would take off and I would get to meet the three Pauls, all at once, preferably in the front bar of the Terminus Hotel which, at that stage, was still an Old-Style-Pub with three men in it at busy times. But it didn’t and I didn’t but sometime later there was an exhibition, if memory serves correctly, at the Australian Museum and all three of them were there together to demonstrate something about identity. Or something.

So the three Paul Kellys certainly achieved in their chosen fields. But the one who writes How to Make Gravy is the one we’ll remember and study in schools for generations to come.

The first of many Posts about Paul Kelly

Today I finished reading Bob Ellis’s book The Capitalism Delusion which was great, as you can see in my previous post. I was then free to plunge into Paul Kelly’s memoir How to Make Gravy. I read an extract in The Age a couple of weeks ago and I bought it last week along with the Ellis book with a Readings voucher my generous mother-in-law had given me for my birthday. If there’s one thing in the world better than a book voucher it’s a book voucher you’ve forgotten you’ve had and then remembered when you’re already on your way to Readings to buy a book that you simply must have.

I have much to say about Paul Kelly and this first Post will be brief. I decided a few years ago that Paul Kelly is Australia’s best writer. Note the present tense there. I haven’t read enough old Australian writing to say “best ever.” But stuff it, who has? That does it then. Paul Kelly is Australia’s best ever writer and no, I’m not talking about the “Editor-at-large” of The Australian. I may write about that Paul Kelly another time, but this post is not about him.

So this is Paul Kelly in How to Make Gravy telling us what sort of a writer he is:

The kind of man, who, appalled at his poor memory, throughout his life and in the middle of his life – though who’s to say it’s the middle? – kept putting out a net to catch scraps from the rushing river on its way to the wine-dark sea.[1]

Not bad eh? But this is not exceptional writing for him. It’s nearly all like this. After reading something he wrote in The Monthly a while ago I was struck by how well he wrote prose. This was years after I had decided he was our best-ever writer and still I was surprised how well he strung a sentence together. But after 300 songs he really does know how to write. He writes plainly and with great precision but he’s not afraid of a metaphor and he doesn’t censor himself.

I noticed in about 1993 that there was a point in To Her Door that tears came to my eyes. It was the point at which the man is almost home and is full of trepidation:

Did they have a future?

Would he know his children?[2]

Now as the years have passed tears come to my eyes more readily and Kelly’s book will soon have my face awash. It’s what he says and how he says it that takes my breath away. In his song Adelaide he describes “all the great aunts are either insane or dead.” And he didn’t really mean that his aunts were insane, they were all lovely actually and of sound mind, the un-dead ones anyway. But the line sounded good and he kept it and then found some trouble with his family as he tried to explain why he had done it. He puts it like this:

You shouldn’t trust a songwriter. They distort, they exaggerate, they juggle things around to get what they want…Know that if you get close to them they’ll grab bits of you, too. Out of their mouths true things become lies and lies become true. They’ll rhyme, and murder while they rhyme. They’ll take your precious wine and spill it all over town.[3]

Well maybe he’s right and we shouldn’t trust a songwriter. But if you write as well as Paul Kelly we’ll forgive you and beg for more.

My life is very good right now. The weather is fine and warm, I have a beautiful house and a lovely family and there’s food in the kitchen and wine in the bottle on the bench. I have friends and a cricket team and I’m fit and well.

And I’ve got 496 pages of How to Make Gravy still to read.

---

[1] Paul Kelly, How to Make Gravy, Penguin 2010, p.4.

[2] Paul Kelly, To Her Door, 1987.

[3] Paul Kelly, How to Make Gravy, Penguin 2010, p.14.

Bob Ellis denounces Global Capitalism

The Capitalism Delusion: How Global Economics Wrecked Everything and What to Do About it by Bob Ellis

I love almost every word that Ellis writes and this book is as good as anything I’ve read of his before. You can probably gather from the title what the book is about. He believes that free-market economics has led the world to a very sorry state and it’s time we put a stop to it.

His evidence is compelling and un-surprising. The world is in a sorry state and clearly the free-market and its true believers have some explaining to do. As is usual in an Ellis rant there is much good argument, much emotion and quite a few unsubstantiated charges. Among these is his firm belief that mobile phones definitely do cause cancer. Now I’m not saying they don’t but it’s a big call in a book without footnotes.

A couple of things stand out for me. One is his belief that “there is no such thing as economics, there is only arithmetic.” I like this approach and it has occurred to me before that the likes of Ken Davidson are at their best when they use simple arithmetic to show what a bad deal a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) will be or when they prove how shoddy are the arguments for selling publicly-owned assets.

Another is Ellis’s fury at the high cost of housing. He blames the things that need to be blamed – capital gains tax reductions, first-home-buyers’ grants and tax breaks for investors and landlords and he proposes specific policies to make houses cheaper again.

He knows there will be opposition to such things: “It means that landlords will take a hit, but they can go to buggery.”

I love his style and I can’t recommend his book, or any of his books, too highly.

Why we see animals in the clouds

Very early in my school life I worked out that the classroom could be a bit dull and I began to look out the window and to let my mind wonder. It is good that I did so because I developed a theory of cloud formation of which I am still very proud.

Why were so many clouds in the sky formed into the shape of giant animals? I could see huge cats and elephants and cows and how had this come to pass? Well, I knew enough about natural history to put together a theory. In the distant past giant animals roamed the earth and they were pretty much like animals were now (this was 1971) except they were much, much bigger. So there were giant rabbits and huge elephants and enormous cats and all the rest of it. And when these magnificent creatures died they fell to the ground and if the ground were in any way soft they would form an impression in it in the shape of their body. And after a time their body would be eaten and would rot and disappear and leave a big hole in the ground that matched their shape. And this hole would fill with water when it rained and the sun would shine on the water and cause it to evaporate and hey presto! Up in the sky would be formed a cloud in the shape of one of these animals, now extinct.

This theory has not been subject to peer review. But you’ll have to admit it’s a good one.

Why is there no justice?

It happens every year at the Grand Final that people miss out on tickets and I am really sick of it. I have heard of a pair of devoted Saints supporters who paid three hundred dollars each to see the drawn Grand Final. I gather they had to get their tickets through irregular channels. And then they forked out a similar sum, which they could afford even less, for the replay.

Now as we all know there were a few more than 100 000 people at the drawn Grand Final but only 93 000 at the replay. Chris says you could see the empty seats in the Members Stand. Get that – you could see empty seats at the Grand Final replay for which devoted fans paid sums they could not afford in order to get a ticket.

This is crap and I’m going to keep calling it crap until it ceases to be. Why should Melbourne Cricket Club members, or anyone for that matter, have a right to an empty seat at the Grand Final? Sure they can have a right to go and see the match. They’ve paid all that money and waited fifteen years to join and all the rest of it. But why should anyone have the right, effectively, to keep their seat even if they don’t go? Why should seats be empty in the Members while devoted fans miss out altogether or go into debt to buy a ticket on EBay?

Why not give the Members until an hour before the first bounce and then put all the empty seats up for grabs so that supporters of the actual clubs in the match might have a chance of seeing their team win a flag?

And I can’t let these attendance figures slide either. Back in the bad old days, when we had those substandard grandstands like the Southern and the Olympic and the Ponsford and that terrible old Members Stand that almost nobody wanted to be a be in (well, only enough people to create a fifteen-year waiting list) we used to get well over 100 000 to the Grand Final every year.

So we’ve spent $600 million on the ground in the past twenty years to reduce its capacity. Money well spent.

The Road by Cormack McCarthy

The Road by Cormack McCarthy

I began re-reading this just before the Grand Final Replay and I finished it on Sunday and it was a good thing to read in the wake of that match. It made me truly grateful to be living in a world where the loss of my friends’ team in a Grand Final (not even my team!) could actually count as a terrible event.

I first read this about three years ago. I had tried McCarthy once or twice before, one of his huge epic westerns probably, and I didn’t get it at all. But after George Monbiot described The Road as “the most important environmental book ever written” I gave it a go. (See http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/10/30/the-road-well-travelled/) I don’t remember a book that consumed me like this before. I felt sick in the stomach while I read it and the feeling didn’t go away when I put it down. It was so vivid and the world it described was so real that my actual life at that time seemed fake. I would talk to people in the few days it took me to get through it and it was like talking to people in a dream. “You don’t realise,” I felt like saying, “this isn’t real. In the real world all life except human life has ended, the world is reduced to ashes and murderers lurk behind every corner.”

I cleaned out the garden shed at work at this time and it was a cold day with a chilling wind and poking through the dirt and rags in the shed I felt exactly like the characters in the novel going through the debris of a lost civilization. And one night, maybe my second day of reading, I was so appalled and frightened at the turn of events in the novel that I had to put it down for fear of not being able to sleep were I to read any further. I picked up Bill Bryson’s Notes from a small island as a pre-bedtime antidote but it was weak tea to McCarthy’s moonshine and it didn’t do the job at all. (By this I mean no disrespect to Bryson whom I love greatly.)

So there you have it. If you think things are crook you can read The Road and real life doesn’t seem so bad. A world with sunshine and plentiful food and laughing children appears as paradise. Well, maybe it is.

Their cries heave, herds-long

When Collingwood won their first flag in 2300 B.C. the preacher, who wrote Ecclesiastes, spoke for the times to come:

I have seen all the work that is done under the sun and behold, all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.

And later, much later, after they’d won another flag in the late nineteenth century Gerald Manley Hopkins was prompted to write his poem “No Worst There is None.”

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long…

And it is with great difficulty that I remind myself that it’s only a game and, for God’s sake, I don’t even barrack for the Saints. But pretty much every Grand Final since 1980 has been won by the team that I didn’t want to win. All right, not every one, but most.

But it’s only a game. There is food in the cupboard and a roof over our heads and when we leave the house today nobody will try to blow us up. Not even Collingwood supporters. And Tony Abbott is still not the Prime Minister no matter how many times he sooks and lies about having “won” the election. And despite everything there is every chance that we’ll get a carbon tax out of this cracking parliament.

But the Saints still lost. Again. “Comforter, where is your comforting?”

And they're not even mine

I’ve got to say that I have enjoyed Grand Final Replay Week very much. I am never ready for the football season to start and nor am I ready for it to end. No matter how disinterested I am during the season (and I can be extremely dis-interested, let me tell you) by the time the finals come around I start following more closely and if the Grand Final features a team I care about at all I get right into it. So the end of the season then comes as a shock. How empty that first Saturday afternoon in October seems!

So what a bonus the drawn Grand Final has been. Not only did we get one of the best games of football I’ve ever seen but we get an extra week of footy!

Chris left a voicemail message on Sunday in which he struggled to get the words out through shredded vocal cords. My friend Anne said on Sunday afternoon “I love my team. I love every single one of them. I love Riewoldt and Fisher and Milne and Goddard and most of all I love Lenny Hayes. I am very proud of them, I think they played very well and I think we’ll win next week.”

Well I love them too and they’re not even mine. And I hope to God they win.

Long live the Grand Final Replay

Many people think we should decide drawn Grand Finals with extra time. It’s ridiculous, they say, to have no winner on the day. Replays are inconvenient and exasperating and if we can avoid this week of not-knowing we should. But I disagree. Drawn Grand Finals are as rare as solar eclipses. This is a special event and we should keep it as such.

I know the players are exhausted and it’s asking a lot of them to go through another week of preparation and another Grand Final as well. The supporters are exhausted too and have to go through it all again. It’s very inconvenient for those who were going overseas or getting married or who had organised cycling races and other events for next weekend. My sympathy is with these people but I hope that we always replay a drawn Grand Final.

Firstly we have always done it this way and twice before we’ve had a draw and a replay. And a great part of our game is tradition. If there aren’t great reasons to change things we should keep them the way they are.

But the main reason why we should hold on to the replay is that a drawn match acknowledges the efforts of both teams. In the end there can only be one winner of the Grand Final but if, after 100 minutes of giving it their all there is nothing to separate the teams then so be it. They have played a draw and they deserve to have this marked as such. It would be easier for some if it were decided with extra time. But would the losers then say “Well I’m glad it’s over. We lost but it’s better than having drawn and having to replay next week”? I don’t think so.

And because a draw is so rare it stamps itself on our memory. I barely followed football in 1977 and we didn’t have a television but I can still hear the commentator calling out “It’s a draw! It’s a draw!” And my Dad, a North Melbourne supporter, was laughing with exasperation. And I vividly remember the one drawn game I’ve been to, between Essendon and Richmond at the ‘G in 1995. Which was also the year that Essendon played Collingwood in the first Anzac Day match in front of 90 000 people and they played a memorable draw as well.

And the other great thing about a draw is that it unites us as lovers of the game in a way that no other result can. Everyone feels the same after the siren goes and the scores are level. There is shock and amazement and a deep searching. “How does this feel?” we ask ourselves. “We haven’t won but we haven’t lost. Is our glass half-full or half-empty?”

I loved the look on everyone’s faces after the siren. Like one of those philosophical riddles – what is the sound of one hand clapping? – a drawn Grand Final takes us to an unfamiliar place where nothing is what we expected it to be. Neither up nor down, neither good nor bad. And this unity of feeling among supporters and this Zen-like experience is priceless and we should treasure it.

The push to decide a Grand Final with extra time will be forceful. The momentum of the modern world with its crowded calendar is right behind it. Just as it is in a hospital when a baby is “overdue” and pressure is brought to bear to induce labour or subject the poor woman to a caesarean. But sometimes we just have to wait. Some special events should not be rushed.

And if any game in history deserves this special status of the Drawn Grand Final surely it was last Saturday’s effort. It was so tense that I can’t even say I enjoyed it. I had to leave the house to look for missing children at the start of the last quarter and I was relieved to get away from the maelstrom on the telly. The kids were found but I missed the first two goals of that incredible last quarter. I’ll watch it some other time, no doubt.

So bring on the replay and let’s stick with being old-fashioned. Let’s continue to respect both teams who slog it out and can’t be separated. It’s the least we can do. But maybe we could do a little more with the draw than we do. We could start with a Drawn Theme Song. Any suggestions?