Born to run
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Hamish Townsend
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Most big cities have a smaller, poorer offspring that never manages to wear its pants quite right. London has Essex, Manchester has Bolton, Sydney has Wollongong, Adelaide has Elizabeth, New York has Newark and Melbourne has Geelong.
Geelong is where I'm from.
Geelong has its own identities. The condescending call it Struggletown or Sleepy Hollow, the romantic call it Motor City, and the historians refer to it as Pivot City. Some of us used to call it Sphincterville and longed for a place far, far away.
Most know it for the Cats, a quixotic Aussie Rules football team that before 2007 hadn't won anything significant for nearly fifty years. The Cats retain one of the most unique identities in the professional sporting landscape of franchises, brand-building, footy shows and toothpaste. Geelong is the only regional town team in the AFL; many of its current players are local or come from the surrounding region. The club culture embraces wayward, freakish and undisciplined talent (the type no one else can handle), and any form of play that is fast, exciting and beautiful. Geelong, the second-oldest football club in Australia – it was formed in 1858 – has made an art form of coming second ever since.
Australian Rules Football (AFL) was invented by Tom Wills in collaboration with the Indigenous people of north and western Victoria with whom he was intimate. Their game of marn grook is believed to have contained many of the skills required to play the new code. Tom Wills was a sportsman of freakish natural talent and an enigmatic drunk who formed the Geelong (as well as the Melbourne) Football Club and was its champion player in the early years until his fondness for the booze and hanging out with Aborigines got him kicked out of his own game. He then formed Australia's first cricket team to tour England, all of whom were Aboriginal. He died by his own hand – a pair of scissors through the heart.
Some believe Geelong's community focus, regular finals appearances and traditionally fast, exciting style of play make it one of the most successful clubs in Australia, but that depends on what you want from your sport. Geelong provides the only real old-fashioned community connection the AFL has left. The traditional myth (and it is a myth) says the town follows the fortunes of the team – I'd say it's the other way around.
When you grow up in Geelong and like football, you either barrack for Geelong, or anyone but Geelong. My father fell into the latter category. He was a Fitzroy-supporting socialist who'd take his three toddlers to games after three-quarter time when it was free. In the mud of the outer, he'd try to keep control of us while yelling abuse at a team and town he hated. He kept this up until a drunken old man pissed on my sister one afternoon. We moved to the new R.J. Hickey stand at the southern end of the ground until a blue-coated official tried to kick us out. Dad couldn't afford tickets for four seats and thought it reasonable that, in a time before dry zones, a man with three small kids could stand on the concrete causeway; the blue coat disagreed. Dad launched into a class war tirade and we were escorted from the ground and banned for ‘life'.
GEELONG, A TOWN IN Victoria's south-west, is bigger than some of Australia's capital cities. Its positioning as the gateway to the goldfields, and as a hub for a rural squattocracy that capitalised on Europe's desire for wool and wheat, made it rich. A sandbar across the harbour stopped it being a capital and Geelong evolved into an industrial belt centred on a highly subsidised car trade, oil refining, phosphate and aluminium smelting. The city pumped for over a hundred years as a perfect organ. In 1932, the lone auto designer in Geelong's Ford plant, Lew Bandt, invented one of Australia's greatest icons: the ute. Since then, Ford and the Geelong Football Club have been linked in the world's oldest continuous sponsorship deal: eighty-two years.
Like a sphincter, the government schools would close their gates behind the local kids to let the factories and farms open theirs and suck them in. This working-class paradise was also home to some of Australia's most elite private schools. The British aristocracy sent their nancy-boys to be toughened up and rub oars with the Western District's broad-shouldered kin. On the land, the post-World War II years were really great years. ‘More Rolls Royces per head than anywhere else in the world' was the boast from boomtowns like Hamilton, Horsham and Casterton. Both Malcolm Fraser and Bob Menzies came from this stock and led the nation accordingly, just like the Carlton supporters they were.
At the start of the 1970s, when Britain joined the European common market and stopped needing Western District wool, everything started to change. Not long after, the Whitlam Government came to power and removed many of the subsidies that kept the town's manufacturing base alive. Geelong had long been a conservative Labor-voting town, and the wish finally granted must have felt like a bitter prayer answered. The industrial belt was becoming a rust belt like so many others around the world.