Learning to lead

AFTER THE MAROONS won the first game of the 2016 State of Origin series it was time for another ritual – the breathless post-game interviews as the elated winners left the field. You could predict what would be said as the visibly tired, but...

See how they run

A formal committee table surrounded by chairs is seen towards the back of the stage. Lounge chairs and a coffee table dominate the downstage area. It is in this area that most of the action takes place. Large, framed head shots of former club...

Their body politics

IN LATE SEPTEMBER 2015, Malcolm Turnbull made his first sporting appearance as Prime Minister at the Dally M Awards, the black-tie night for the working-class game. It should have been home turf. Turnbull is a long-time supporter of the Sydney Roosters – the closest to...

More than fun

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY has already seen a stream of premature epitaphs written for many long-standing social phenomena, not least social capital – often referred to as the ‘glue’ that binds us together. I eagerly jumped on that bandwagon at the turn of the century, worried...

Suspended reality

WHY WOULD A country whose greatest export is a bikini wax be awarded the Olympic games? Brazil – where every night promises to be Carnivale, where every girl is apparently from Ipanema, and ‘the Brazilian’ is what lies behind the thin strip of lycra that...

Back to the future

TASMANIA’S NORTH-WEST COAST city of Burnie has long suffered high unemployment. In 2015, however, residents were shocked to find that unemployment among young people in Burnie had topped the nation. Twenty-one per cent of young men aged between fifteen and twenty-five were neither employed...

Time for spart: sport + art

I LIVE AND work in the poorest electorate in the poorest state in the country, on the north-west coast of Tasmania. It may be beautiful, with the cleanest air in the world – Cape Grim beef chew the cud peacefully up the road, abalone...

The Aboriginal football ethic

IN HIS HIGHLY influential history of Australian rules football, Geoffrey Blainey promoted the idea that the sport constituted a ‘game of our own’. In making this claim, Blainey suggested the sport was the outcome of Anglo-Australian cultural innovations. In raising the prospect of an...

The land we play on

THE BEGUILING PROMISE of sport is that everyone is treated equally: that it transcends politics through meritocracy. Fair play and a level playing field remain catchwords. Yet who determines whether the play is fair? Is the playing field really fair? And on whose land...

Transient triumphalism

MUCH OF MY life is spent writing about race politics, suicide and genocide. For relief, I write about sport – but that doesn’t always work. The love affair with sport has been a long one, from mediocre junior athletic days to some later competence as...

Muscular Judaism on the frontier

THERE IS NO doubt that soccer began to be associated with European ethnic groups in Australia after the Chifley government’s intake of ‘New Australians’ from non-Anglo-Irish European countries. This began the erosion of the White Australia Policy after 1947 and, essentially overnight, converted the...

When the park comes alive

THERE’S A SPECIAL moment in mid-February when the grass at our local park is so smooth, tended so carefully, that it’s almost like a skating rink. Well watered, well fed, well mown. The park has been empty most of the summer, but that day,...

Full credit to the boys girls

@FletaTheTweeter: I was sent to interview Chris Gayle a couple of years ago. He said no to the interview before hitting on me. Dickhead is his default mode.IN JANUARY 2016, Chris Gayle made a highly inappropriate pass at Mel McLaughlin, cricket’s Big Bash League sideline reporter,...

Matchbox memories

IT SOMEHOW SEEMED right, one golf day, that we ended up banging on about the Brisbane Rugby League competition of the 1970s, because the round of golf that my old friend PB, my son and I were engaged in was a form of time...

Polishing tarnished ideals

IN 1976 MY Aunty Pam, who had returned from her job as a nurse on the volcanic island of Karkar just off Madang in Papua New Guinea and was by then matron of the health centre in the Aboriginal settlement of Cherbourg in southern...

Bully’s sporting chance

ONLY A GENEROUS observer would have said I was dancing around the ring. A less generous one, the one I’d become after watching my filmed efforts on my boxing trainer’s iPhone, said I was ‘frankensteining’ the ring. My lumbering, T-shirt-tanned frame was swatting at...

Race plans

IT’S EARLY MORNING and I’m waiting with ten thousand other people in the four lanes of road that separate Sydney’s Hyde Park from St Mary’s Cathedral. A man is talking to us through a megaphone but it’s hard to hear him against the vigorous...

Personal score

SeasonBY QUEERTIME SHE grew restless and could not see what was in front of her. She felt rootless and lived alone; her friends were not family. Through this depression, she bought a new duck-feather pillow and ten-kilogram weights, and did what she had done...

Dragon mother

My China-born wife, Susan, dreamt that one day our son Max would become the Number 1 golf player in the world; in other words, rich and famous. When Susan came across a book, In Every Kid There Lurks a Tiger (Hyperion, 2002) by Rudy...

Pacific games

WILL GENIA, RATED by many as one of the best halfbacks in world rugby over recent years, is one of the few Papua New Guinean sportspeople to have made it to the top in Australia. He is now playing in France but is still...

Golden girls

Who would have thought it possible a generation ago – young women spending the day, every day, wrestling? Who could have imagined that a gate at the entrance of Balali would welcome all visitors in the name of these girls who have brought glory to the village? That this would be possible in a state that has been in the news for all the wrong reasons – including female foeticide, honour killings and rape?

A great leap forward

As tens of thousands of refugees continued to pour south across the border and into shantytown settlements like the one he called home in Shau Kei Wan, Rong Guotuan went the other way – he went north. Ludicrous though it sounds today, Rong thought he had a better chance of achieving table tennis success on the mainland. And he wasn’t the first: a few years earlier, two other accomplished Hong Kong table tennis players, Fu Qifang and Jiang Yongning, had also crossed north…

Green and pleasant memories

‘CAN WE MEET later?’ reads the text message. ‘I’ve got to support someone in court.’ I had arrived at the shopping centre in the Melbourne suburb of West Heidelberg, the site of the 1956 Olympic village, hoping to join a tour along with some...

Ferocious animals

MY DAD WOKE me early to go down town and buy streamers. It was 1989 and our team was in the grand final for the second year running. I was eight. The year before we’d been in the grand final against the Bulldogs and...

Icarus: Bot

@goddess: You tweeted the words sink and lower. You sound depressed@iceBorg: Goddess, I’m falling, tweeting free, from a public library @goddess: Describe your body in motion, god WHEN SHE BRAKED at the traffic lights, what did she see? A homeless man…me? Hunched over, cross-legged, red...

Unfurling

EVA HAD LOVED the first slap of cold water on her face when she dived into the pool, then the bubbles peeling away from her hands like pearls. A shoal of parrotfish passed on her right, creating a golden wall that reflected the afternoon...

Match point

the opening serve, so to speak, goes to Rosie– she pushes another empty wheelchairward to ward and our heads follow…she was my father’s tennis partner(a soft server, Mum whispers)Cue the slow-mo, forty love, the social night compof the Lower Bucca Tennis Club, somewhere up...

Sport: New Zealand Herald, Wednesday May 4, 2016

The stands

Waverley. You were my Saturday crèche when I was too young to see over the fence on the wing. My Tuesday night series teen hangout. Hosting brusque vowel fights between strangers who cared too much and those who thought you merely incidental. Waverley, you...

Outback rules