Australia’s Game: Football as Art and Culture

Barry Oakley well known Australian author, lecturer and former literary editor of The Australian has published numerous books and plays including A Wild Ass of a Man, and Let’s Hear it for Prendergast, for which he was the joint winner of the Captain Cook Bicentenary Literary Award. His early plays were performed at La Mama Theatre in Carlton and his play The Feet of Daniel Mannix remains an Australian icon. On Tuesday 6 August, Barry Oakley joined Peter Corris and Ross Fitzgerald for a discussion of Australian Rules Football in connection with the anthology Australia’s Game.

AUSTRALIA’S GAME: FOOTBALL AS ART AND CULTURE

BARRY OAKLEY

Australian Football began in the late 1850s in the parklands between the Melbourne and Richmond Cricket grounds. Football was becoming popular at the time in English private schools. There was Eton football, Harrow football and Rugby football. Some preferred handling and passing the ball, others kicking. These variants came out to Melbourne in the gold rushes when young men tried to get fit between cricket seasons some went for passing, others kicking, the old Irishmen typically jumped out and caught the ball.

So in the beginning, Australian Rules had no rules. A game consisted of packs of players in tucked-in trousers and bright caps, tackling, pushing, dodging and kicking. The fact that this unruly activity wasn’t allowed in either the Melbourne or Richmond cricket grounds was important. There was more space in the parkland and this spaciousness is still a feature of the code.

It soon became obvious that some rules were needed. A committee was formed and in 1858 they were drawn up, but not many – they took up no more than a single page. Gradually what started as a rough and tumble contest between gentlemen spread down to the lower orders and by the 1870s there was a fully fledged competition. At the top, in a class sense, was Melbourne and at the bottom just across the park was largely working class Richmond.

And there was room in all these open spaces for men to take a running jump at the ball but it took a while to catch on. By the 1880s, the more daring players were jumping higher and higher, led by Charles “Commotion” Pearson of Essendon. “At East Melbourne on Saturday,” wrote the Argus, “Mr Pearson gave spectators many thrilling moments with his phenomenal leaps skyward. Ladies in the pavilion screamed for fear that Mr Pearson would cause himself serious injury. Who knows, but this may might be a revolution in high marking. Perhaps in years to come we will see players all over the field, sailing into the air in this fashion. What a thrill the game would become if all players tried out this new idea.”

And what a thrill the game did become. By the end of the nineteenth century, crowds numbered thousands and a passion for Australian football spread like a benign virus through the city of Melbourne.

By the 1940s, as a small boy, I succumbed to the miasma – “Who do you barrack for?” was always the introductory question. It was the Melbourne boy’s equivalent of a dog sniffing at the hindquarters of another. It gave you an identity, it covered you internally as well as externally. A Richmond supporter’s yellow and black or a Melbourne supporter’s red and blue were qualitatively different, they were tribal markings.

It was my misfortune to be taken by a kindly neighbour to watch Melbourne matches, which they invariably won in those far-off days. There, safe in the genteel Members Stand, support for the Demons sank into my being, leaving a red and blue stain that neither age nor intelligence would expunge.

Melbourne Football Club supporters would barrack – but since we were middle class it would be done respectably, unlike the lower orders across in the outer that would do so raucously, because they – Collingwood, Footscray, Richmond – were working class and knew no better.

Melbourne supporters would only rarely be roused from their tartan rug and thermos of tea respectability – unless the team won a premiership which they did, often. I can remember them abandoning all restraint and turning into a howling mob only once and that was Jack Dyer’s doing. Dyer was Richmond’s hard man, adept at the shirt front and elbows, for which he’d, earned the nickname “Captain Blood”.

One Saturday in the late 1940s, Melbourne were playing Richmond at home, and halfway through the second quarter they were well in front. In desperation, the Richmond coach summoned Captain Blood from the backline. Something had to be done and Jack Dyer did it. As he lumbered towards the Melbourne forward line, he dealt a tremendous hip and shoulder behind play to an inoffensive Melbourne ruckman called Frank Hanna.

Hanna didn’t just fall – he collapsed and lay apparently lifeless on the turf. There was a moment’s stunned silence, tumultuous roaring and booing as Hanna, his collarbone broken, unconscious, maybe dead was stretchered from the field. It simmered down, until halftime when the players came off for a break. Then, as Dyer approached the rail, with a policeman on either side, it rose again. Even as he walked into that tsunami of loathing, he was calm and seemed to give off a quiet satisfaction – as if Richmond’s plebeian underdogness had been redeemed.

By then, Dyer had bandages on both knees and was close to retirement. He had an unusual build – skinny white legs and narrow hips which made the breadth of his shoulders even more marked. He had lost his speed and couldn’t turn so he simply ran through a player or a pack.

Norman Smith, then a Melbourne forward – had later to become the greatest of all coaches – once described what happened if you got in Dyer’s way: “There was a floating sensation of unreality as I crashed head first into the turf. A yellow light flashed across my eyes. No human could hit that hard, but then I often wondered if Jack Dyer was human.”

At 35, after 312 games, he hung up his No 17 black and yellow guernsey. He went into radio and then, when TV arrived, in the late 1950s he became one of the first player celebrities in a show called “World of Sport”. Now the jug ears and concrete chin could be seen in close-up. It was an archetypal, proletarian face, one that Albert Tucker could have created.

Fellow champions Lou Richard and Bob Davis did most of the jokes while Dyer’s humour, like his old football opponents, was generally unconscious. He malapropped he spoonered, he gaffed, as he shirt-fronted his way through the English language. Fitzroy he once claimed had copulated to the opposition. Then, describing a Hawthorn game, “He’s tackled strongly by Tack.” Later, “Mark Lees’ long arms reaching up like giant testicles…” Of an overweight player not doing his best: “He spent too much time on the French Riverina.”

Every week, Dyer fought running battles with difficult surnames, especially Italian ones. His attempts at Robert Dippierdomenico were a delight: “Doppadiddico… Doppadiddlico… Old bloke Dipper.” Mathematics too could be a problem: “They’ve got a couple of good players in Harvey”… “Chris Daniher – he’s got three brothers who have both played for Essendon.”

Eventually, the stories and the solecisms ran out and Dyer returned to private life. When we ourselves moved to Richmond, (while still barracking for Melbourne), one of our children saw him labouring up Richmond Hill, stooped and frail, heading for St Ignatius, the great Gothic pile that sits at the top of it, where Dyer had once served as an altar boy.

On 23 August 2003, at 89, Jack Dyer made his final trip to the top of the hill, to his own requiem mass. The church was packed, and the sacred and the secular melded. Richmond players formed a guard of honour as the club song rang out over the loudspeakers. Later, at the Punt Rd oval, mourners gathered around an image of his No 17 guernsey, painted on the grass, and 312 yellow and black balloons were released one for each game he played.

Twenty-five years earlier, in September 1974, when we’d moved to Richmond and brought claret and corduroy trousers to beer and blue singlet territory, I walked up to some St Ignatius around 5 o’clock one Saturday afternoon to see what would happen if Richmond beat North Melbourne in the grand final, which was nearing its climax at the MCG, a kilometre away below me. There was a sudden erupting roar. It was taken up by car horns and then in the narrow streets on the slopes people came out of their houses cheering and shaking hands. Father Flynn, the parish priest, rushed to the ropes under the great spire and the bells pealed out over the city. The Tigers, by the grace of God, were premiers.

I knew then that Richmond was tribal in a way Melbourne, my team, could never be. And a quarter of a century after that premiership triumph its presiding deity had gone, assumed in the firmament in a cloud of firmament and clichés in a cloud of liniment. A deprived suburb had been redeemed. Winning, Dyer had shown, was possible and the gap across the parkland between Richmond and Melbourne clubs, where the game first began, could be closed.

the parish priest, rushed to the ropes under the great spire and the bells pealed out over the city. The Tigers, by the grace of God, were premiers.

Jack was not immortal but some of his solecisms deserved to be. In one of the many on-camera arguments he had with Lou Richards, Lou put a question to him that Jack was unable to answer: “Who do you think I am?” Jack retorted, “Norman Einstein?” On another occasion, the two pundits were discussing a player whose nickname was Duck: “He was called Duck,” said Lou, “because of his gait.” “Nothing of the sort,” snorted Dyer, “it was the way he walked.”