“A Melbourne based version of Ireland’s Gaelic Football using Australian rules. This game is played on unused cricket ovals during the winter months.”

An American description of Australian Rules.

“For me I think my back is good but the only concern I’ve got is my neck”.

Rugby league prop Kade Snowden attempting to ease concerns his new club has about his fitness.

It’s Time Cadel

* originally published 19/7/11 on the sports website:  theroar.com.au http://www.theroar.com.au/2011/07/19/its-time-cadel/

Lance Armstrong once noted that professional cyclists looked like vampires. Cadel Evans, with his large reptilian eyes and nervous disposition looks more like an exotic lizard.

Evans was born in the Northern Territory, home to a number of reptile species, but he’s not your typical Australian rural type. Married to an Italian classical pianist, he resides in Switzerland, reads Tintin and is an active supporter of Tibetan independence, and animal rights (not including those of the pigs that go into the antipasto at his favourite restaurant in Barwon Heads).

“Physically, I was completely unsuitable for almost all Australian school sports”, he pointed out. Nor does he have the laconic personality of the four other Australians to have held the Tour de France’s yellow jersey: Phil Anderson, Stuart O’Grady, Brad McGee and Robbie McEwen.

The shrill voiced, highly sensitive and difficult-to-interview Evans can alienate some people, including his own teammates. When listening to him talk I can’t help imagining the Mason Verger character from the film Hannibal, the deranged, disfigured and only surviving victim of Dr Lecter, calling out to his doctor, Cordell: “Cooordeeelll!”

As with Lleyton Hewitt, some people want Evans to win because he’s Australian but wish he was someone else.

The French public wouldn’t mind if Evans won either because the rider they despise the most, if the boos and shouts of derision echoing around the Roman ampitheatre during the opening ceremony were anything to go by, is Alberto Contador.

Still seething from the meticulous domination of their race by Lance Armstrong, the French can’t face the prospect of another non French multiple winner. They have also been suspicious of the apparent ease of his victories, his ability to repeatedly attack on climbs and his marked improvement as a time triallist. Riding for the Astana team suspected of doping (and hence not invited to the 2006 and 2008 Tours) and his positive test for clenbuteral at last year’s race have meant the Pyreneeian mist hasn’t been the only cloud hovering above his head.

Contador is not entirely popular with his main rivals either. Evans is constantly pointing out that he is a sly competitor and is not convinced he’s injured, or fatigued from one of the toughest Giros ever.

Last year Contador infamously gained time on Andy Schleck (the exact margin by which he  won the race) when the latter’s chain came loose. After the stage he winked at, and sought a matey hug from, the tall Luxembourger. Later during an interview Schleck, in a frightening Germanic (or was it Luxembourgish?) tone, proclaimed “My stomach is full of anger, and I want to take my revenge… I will take my revenge”.

He didn’t take it then and was quite happy to put his arm around Contador (who had the victory champagne in his hand) during the obselete final stage. I’m sure Schleck is planning to serve his revenge cold – up on the Col du Galibier or Alpe d’ Huez this Friday. Contador is a good winner. Amazingly, he has not lost a Grand Tour as team leader. Until he does we won’t know if he’s also a good loser.
To win the Tour de France you must be a superb climber, an excellent time triallist and the leader of a strong committed team. Evans has never been the latter. Good riders have often appeared unwilling or unable to sacrifice themselves for him. A prominent example was Yaroslav Popovych recruited by Evan’s Silence-Lotto in 2008 from the Discovery Channel team in a failed attempt to inherit some Armstrong magic. Perhaps they should have offered him one of those white lunch bags.

Evan’s most talented team – the German outfit T-Mobile of 2003 and 2004 – didn’t consider him worthy of a Tour place.

Many people think Evans is his own worst enemy; that he gets too stressed to maintain the necessary concentration and lacks the confidence to attack. To lose consecutive Tours by a combined margin of one minute twenty three seconds would be devastating for any of these driven professionals. But for a serious worrywart like Evans it was expected to end his career.

Former cyclists, like five time winner Bernard Hinault and Sean Yates, haven’t rated him, citing his inability or unwillingness to attack during the decisive mountain stages. In a preview of this year’s race Yates proclaimed: “I expect Schleck and Contador to be head and shoulders above the rest”. 

It is widely accepted in the ProTour that Evans isn’t a cheat because he doesn’t look like one. He suffers too much: the permanently tilted head, the chin looking like it’s been cleaved by the elements and a mouth forced open by a body working above its oxygen levels.

He doesn’t have the perfect build for a climber: next to the insect Contador and the skeletal Andy Schleck he looks like a solid man. He isn’t comfortable standing on the pedals; preferring to slug it out as long as possible on the saddle, relying on his larger thighs and upper body for power. But in the last one or two kilometres of the big mountains, where the Tour is won and lost, he has to haul himself out and match the climbing ‘dance’ of the lightweight heavyweights.

In previous Tours, Contador and Schleck would be seen swishing along, smug and sweatless, while over their shoulders was the red eyed, haunted countenance of Evans as he tried desperately to match their surges.

But this year he has looked more assured. For once he has a team that understands his peculiarities (eg  requiring an hour’s solitude after a race), and is fully organised and committed.

Leading the charge and keeping Evans near the front of the peleton on the wet narrow roads (Saxo Bank Sungard’s failure to do the same for their leader may have already cost Contador the race) has been Armstrong’s most famous and now disloyal ex lieutenant George Hincapie, and Marcus Burghardt. He has been expertly chaperoned by Ivan Santaromita and Michael Schar to the front after ‘nature breaks’ and mechanical mishaps.

They have tried hard in the hills but like all the teams have been left for dead by the Leopard Trek train.  Hincapie was looking decidedly haggard early as he was dropped on the Col du Tourmalet and the best performer for Evans in the mountains, Steve Morabito, disappears when the gradient reaches 10%. 

Evan’s big luminous eyes are a window to his pain so to stop his rivals looking in he has kept his sunglasses on. Not even the ever-leering Schleck could have identified a weakness yet. While scrambling in response to repeated attacks his thin wide mouth has remained composed, betraying nothing.

Tonight the final test for Evans begins with the first of four stages in the Alps. The relatively poor time triallist Schleck has to gain a substantial lead here. He has the ability, desire and arrogance to do it: “Once we get to the Alps that’s when we will make a difference.”

Contador’s boss Bjarne Riis told us what we already know: “If Alberto had a bad day yesterday, when the good day comes then I believe the whole Tour will change again”.

Cadel may be hard on the ears, and the eyes, perhaps a little too precious for some, but I like him. It’s easy to forget that he has been the only Australian capable of winning the greatest cycling race.

We should all get behind him.

In 1972 when the Australian Labor Party became fed up with losing it launched the “It’s Time” campaign. Perhaps a television ad could be commissioned for Evans showing celebrities (Eddie McGuire, David Koch and Karl Stefanovic not to be invited) singing:-

“It’s Time for moving Evans,
It’s Time for proving, Yes,
It’s Time to stand up and attack Cadel,
Make them wish they were in Hell!
Get in Contador’s and Andy Schleck’s face,
It’s Time you won this damn race!”.

Sprinkled throughout his Tour diary are examples of his famed negativity (“I don’t want to know how messy that could be”, “twisting dangerous roads…not to mention the wind… would ‘carnage’ be the best description?” etc), and of course some of his fellow countrymen are trying their best to bring him down (McGee is Contador’s directeur sportif and Richie Porte his number one domestique. Stuart O’Grady, in tandem with the honorary Aussie Jens Voigt, has been driving the peleton up the mountains crucifying most of Evan’s teammates in the process.).

But Evans can suffer more than any other rider. For that he deserves, finally, to be Tour Champion.

On July 24, if there is any justice in this brutal sport (and of course there isn’t), Cadel Evans will be standing on the Champs Elysees with the Arc de Triomphe behind him, a rider either side of him, and a fluffy little lion pressed against his lizard-like lips.

Postscript:-

It appears there is some justice in this sport.

 After an audacious but necessary attack by Andy Schleck during the 18th stage Evans was forced to drag the rest of the contenders up the horrendous Col du Galibier. That left him with an overall deficit to Schleck of 57″. The following day he had mechanical difficulties; stopping twice to adjust the gearing. He was given a replacement bike but Contador and Schleck were gone. It looked like Evan’s Tour was gone too – again.

But showing the new composure he made it back to the peleton and was helped early by his team up the north face of the Col du Galibier until he was again driving what was left of the peleton to the summit. Amazingly, just prior to the final climb of the race  up the famed Alpe d’Huez he caught Schleck and Contador and kept pace with the former until the finish.

To achieve the greatest ever victory by an Australian cyclist  Evans last night began the 42.5km time trial around Grenoble knowing he had to outdo Schleck (two riders behind him and knowing the time to beat)  by 58″.

No longer the flighty lizard, Evans showed the ruthless resolve of a Top End crocodile to beat Schleck by 2’31″, mauling the Luxembourger’s Tour aspirations and relegating him to the runners-up position for the third consecutive year (it would be just if he claimed the title next year). 

Assuming there is not a disaster or a not the done thing breakaway by the impressive train of Leopard Trek our little reptile will be kissing the little lion tonight.

It’s Cadel’s time, finally.

The Tour of Pain

The Tour de France is a race for the climbers, and if you’re not the creme de la creme you can forget it.

There are 198 riders in this year’s Tour and 190 of them don’t have a hope in hell of winning it.

And that includes most of the teams’ best riders. Little Thomas Voeckler, Team Europcar’s number one man and the current yellow jersey holder, is little more than a serial breakaway pest. He’ll finish where he usually finishes,  somewhere between 60th and 70th place.

The man he usurped, the 80 kg Norwegian ex-sprinter  Thor Hushovd, is an excellent climber for a big man but  he’ll be shed on the Col du Tourmalet like bark from a ghost gum, and his teammates, already exhausted from driving the peleton into the wind and rain to protect his yellow jersey, will plummet with him.

Hell is usually thought to be underground. Riders of the Tour de France will beg to differ. On Thursday when they enter the Pyrenees and reach the summit of the Col du Tourmalet, the first hors categorie climb of the race, they’ll be praying to get back down among the chateaux and the sunflowers.
Pain has been a constant since the first race in 1903. Those who didn’t cheat in the early years (by cadging a lift in a car or jumping on a train) tried to blot out the pain (in some cases a result of being punched up by spectators supporting another rider) by downing enormous quantities of provincial plonk.

Photographs of the time show these Tour pioneers (spattered with mud, tyre tubes wrapped around their necks) looking as pissed as parrots and mad as March hares.

In the 1950′s the great Italian Fausto Coppi, when asked if he had ever taken  ‘la bomba’ (amphetamines), famously replied: “Yes,whenever it was necessary”. Asked, “When was it necessary?” his even more famous reply was: “Practically all the time”.    

Better roads and better bikes with more gears didn’t alleviate the pain. During the 13th stage of the 1967 Tour the British champion Tom Simpson, seeing stars and drugged up to the eyeballs with amphetamines, carked it on the moonscape of Mont Ventoux.
This year’s 3500 kilometre tour of purgatory involves traversing 23 high mountain passes. The known drug of choice, the performance enhancer EPO, won’t dull the senses. 

Most members of the peleton are just along for the ride. The riders for the teams with the main contenders, however, face a different prospect. This is a team sport in which the team works for the glory of one individual. The slaves of the peleton, the domestiques, will sacrifice their well being on the slopes of the Pyrenees and the Alps, acting as buffers against the elements and as pacesetters for their superiors.

And then we witness what all fans of cycling crave to see: the ruthless stripping of the peleton as, one by one, small groups and then the stronger individuals, are cast off never to be seen again until we’re left with the few madmen capable of winning. 

Let the shedding and the suffering begin.

Postscript:-

Apologies to Thomas Voeckler. He will be 4th , not 60th or 70th.

Genocide At The Women’s World Cup

“Level at the break, the Matildas composed themselves and, helped by the substitute Lisa De Vanna, killed off the Equatoguineans“.

(News report on Australia’s 3-2 win over Equatorial Guinea)

 

Love Thy English Neighbours

It has been twenty-six years and 6000-odd episodes since Danny Ramsay first rode his Malvern Star along Ramsay Street marking the beginning of the soap phenomenon Neighbours.

That first episode, eager to impress, showed Danny experiencing a nightmare, with homoerotic and incestuous overtones, about his brother Shane (in Speedos) diving to his death. Sweaty Danny thrashes around in his bed to the sounds of the decadent bucks’ party next door.

Neighbours would later launch the Hollywood career of Guy Pearce and turn Kylie the talking budgie into a singing one but for me that first instalment has been a rare highlight. 

I have never been a fan of soaps and their replication of ordinary domestic life. Why people would want to watch on TV exactly what was happening around them while they were watching it, is a mystery.

Teenage squabbling and the petty concerns of Harold Bishop, co-owner of the impossibly neat General Store (the place for milky grey flat whites and much of the show’s tedious gravitas), were far too insipid to hold my interest.

There have been villains, of course, to break up all that chit-chat, and the gratifying elimination (by fire, plane crash, or a blow to the head) of those characters who outwore their welcome.

The wobbly cheeked Bishop was one of those characters who  after twelve years had gone well beyond his use-by date. He was disposed of under the pretext of having terminal cancer but the real reason was he had bored the audience and even the actor playing him, Ian Smith, to death.

Smith was also fed up with the late-night hooligans who would stand outside his house shouting obscenities.

The English comic actor Kenneth Williams had a similar experience:-

“About 12 o’clock (midnight) youths shouted outside the building ‘Kenny is a poof!’ and kept that up for quite a bit. To DIE would be a release from people as well as pain!”

Not long after leaving, however, Smith realised he had been typecast into permanent unemployment. He also found out that being anonymous is worse than copping public abuse.

So just when we thought a tumour had done the trick we learn Harold is to return “temporarily” next month. When asked if this will be his last appearance on the show,  Smith replied: “Look, I’d never say never”.

You could try Ian, you could try. 

I should be more fond of Neighbours. My brother worked in its art department for several years and there is a framed photograph in our family home of he and Kimberley Davies nibbling on the same pineapple doughnut.

He would regale us with accounts of the tantrums thrown by cast members and got Clive James to sign my copy of Unreliable Memoirs, that wonderful depiction of an Australian suburban childhood, when James made a brief appearance on the show in 1996.

For the exterior Ramsay Street scenes, shot each Thursday, the real life occupants were paid to disappear. It was on one such Thursday that James arrived, dressed for his cameo as a postman. Les Murray once remarked that he’d never seen a decent poet who looked like one.  James doesn’t look like an intellectual, or even a writer, but he does look like a postman.

I’m sure he would rather have been the dunny man; the one in his memoirs who with a full pan teetering on his shoulder tripped over the bicycle young Clive had left lying in the driveway, emptying the container’s entire contents over himself.

Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood inspired people across the United States to drive hundreds of miles to ogle an old farmhouse on the plains of western Kansas.

Unreliable Memoirs inspired me, on a trip to Sydney many years ago, to visit a plain suburban house at No.6 Margaret Street Kogarah, James’s childhood home. I’m still not sure what I expected to find there although I do remember looking for the unfortunate dunny man’s stain in the driveway. 

Seeing James standing there next to the letterbox brought to mind his essay Approximately In The Vicinity Of Barry Humphries and the reason I can no longer eat liqueur cherries:-

“Every Australian, even if he lives in Sydney’s Point Piper or Melbourne’s Toorak has at some time or other found snails in the letterbox. When you step outside on a dark and dewy night, the snails crunch under your slippered feet like liqueur chocolates“.

It would have been good to see Humphries, the most idiosyncratic peruser of  Australian suburbia, on Neighbours. But he was more suited to Kath and Kim.

And it was no surprise, considering his bizarre obsession with brand names, to hear that during filming of Da Kath and Kim Code he was seen meticulously examining the contents of the kitchen cupboards; listing his discoveries in Sandy Stone’s fragile (crackling, whistling) drone: “Hoadley Violet Crumble… White Crow Tomato Sauce… Kelloggs Rice Bubbles… Snap… Crackle… Pop”.

Ramsay Street’s real name is Pin Oak Court located in the outer eastern Melbourne suburb of Vermont South near the unneighbourly intersection of Springvale Road and Burwood Highway; home to an industrial estate and the lowly Burvale Hotel.

But to the British tourists passing slowly by – their mesmerised faces pressed against the bus window – it’s an antipodean wonderland.

Like Fosters Lager (another bland Melbourne export) Neighbours is more popular in the UK than in its homeland. Each episode is shown in the morning and again in the early evening.

In Bottom, the cult BBC sitcom about two slovenly and demented flatmates, Eddie (Adrian Edmondson) asks Richie (Rik Mayall) the time. Richie turns on the telly and on hearing the Neighbours theme replies: “It could be any time”.

The soap’s popularity in the UK is  due partly to the brick veneers and ghost gums on display, and the bright light their viewers think they’re looking at. I’m not sure they realise the show is based in a city with a climate almost as bad as their own. To me, living only two suburbs away, the light was grey. 

 In Australia when we say “suburbs”, of course, we’re referring, sneeringly, to the outer suburbs. Those remote places that sprang up after the war with the rise of the motor car; places where you don’t  have to see or hear from your neighbours. A good coffee and an imported beer are a long car  journey away and the ‘local’ milk bar is too far on foot.   

But a happy childhood can be had anywhere and I have fond memories as a young child in a far-flung place among the blackberry bushes and FX Holden wrecks.

It was the 1960′s when Melbourne was trying hard to hang on to its Englishness. By the time Neighbours came around England had already become, to the kids watching, the dowdy aunt they hoped wouldn’t be visiting them soon.

But I was pining for my British heritage. I was drawn to repeats of the English suburban comedy series I had first watched as a child suffering from nightmares caused by seeing the film Earthquake - in Sensurround where the seat would vibrate with low-frequency sound during the quake scenes.

To avoid going to sleep I began watching Love Thy Neighbour and Bless This House. The former’s opening shot of the homes beside the enormous gasometer was accompanied by its soothing theme tune which is not unlike Barry Crocker’s more famous one.

The main character was a slob and a ranting bigot but to me, a boy eager to avoid a haunting bedtime, it was funny. The dreadful opinions of Eddie Booth were matched by the invigorating racist retorts of his West Indian neighbour Bill Reynolds. And underneath it all was an English warmth and charm  (immediately lost when the show relocated to Australia).  

The English working class soaps like Coronation Street and Eastenders were, like Neighbours, a reflection of their audiences’ dull lives but the comedies gleefully caricatured suburban life with their whining deadbeat occupants in  cardigans drinking endless pints of beer or cups of tea.

There was Eddie Booth and his worker mates, of course, as well as the freeloading brother-in-law in On The Buses. The self-centred George Roper, torturer of his poor frisky wife Mildred, was the precursor to Homer Simpson with his bulbous head and thinning hair.

The wonderful awfulness of the mainly working class characters was complimented by the all-English smorgasbord of mismatched decor: tatty curtains, Victorian wallpaper, mod orange furniture, and Royal Albert teasets.

Man About The House was intended to be risqué because the English had a problem with a single man and two women sharing a flat but now it just seems sweet and innocent, set in an era when pubs were homely and a cookery student could afford to live in Earls Court.

The English certainly didn’t have a problem with unsubtle sexual suggestion as evidenced by the enormous success of the Carry On gang. The films, relying as they did on incessant innuendo and the comic facial features of the aforementioned Williams, and Charles Hawtrey , were not everyone’s cup of tea but the smut never spoiled the Angloid charm. 

In Carry On Camping Sid Boggle, planning to whisk his unsuspecting girlfriend Esme Crowfoot off to a nudist camp, loads up the car in a street of quaint semi-detached homes. Hawtrey’s Charlie Muggins, pots and pans dangling from his backpack, clattters down country lanes while campers in shorts eat hard-boiled eggs, their breath visible in the frosty English air.  In Carry On Loving the blue mist of London hovers enchantingly in the background.

It really has been an awfully long time since I watched an episode of Neighbours. I hear Toadie is still hanging around. I do wish someone from Lite n’ Easy would slip a dodgy prawn into his Fishermans Pie.

Germaine and Humbert

“I’d like to reclaim for women the right to appreciate the short-lived beauty of boys.”

Germaine Greer, academic.

“At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children.” 

Humbert Humbert, academic and child molester.

Golden Waters, Cock Pond and The Clapham Common

“Watch the sun rise over the crystalline streams and ancient wetlands.  At night, your contemplation is only interrupted by the cry of sea birds as they circle above the reeds and river banks, as you gaze at the twinkle of the city’s lights on the skyline.” (promotion for Metricon’s  Golden Waters estate.)

Set on the urban fringe, regions once deemed unfit for human habitation, are the new and ever-expanding  housing estates or “communities”. Striving to make them appear what they are not (rural paradises), the companies responsible for these stapled chipboard creations give them names that fall into four categories.

There is the aquatic theme, the most apt considering the estates are built on and around reclaimed swampland brimming with mercury from the smelting plants glowing on the horizon:-

Nautical Edge, Varsity Lakes, Sanctuary Lakes, Mawson Lakes, Wyndham Springs, Jordan Springs, Caroline Springs, Riverina, Edgewater,  Golden Waters, and Fallingwater (my favourite).

A garden or wilderness theme: Belle Air Gardens, Cedar View, Sunnybank Grove, Coomera Sanctuary, Sanctuary Gardens, Forest Gardens, Peppercorn Grove, Fernbrooke Ridge, Arcadia Woods, Woodvale, Elmswood, and Oakwood.

There is a mountain theme (Mountview, Nelson’s Ridge, Compass Ridge, The Rise, Stonehill, The Summit) and a gorge theme (Bingara Gorge) but no flatlands (where most of the estates are situated) theme.

The English use names to talk down a location. 

Blackpool , for instance, is not the site of an oil spill but a popular seaside tourist town  in the north west of England.  Although comic actor Kenneth Williams thought the name was appropriate:-

“Blackpool is the ‘end of the line’ It is the English Siberia. It is pure TORTURE. Hateful, tasteless, witless, bleak, boring, dirty, tat – IT HAS NOTHING. I loathe every disgusting minute of it”   

We called a similar place the Gold Coast. 

There is an 89 hectare area of beautiful parkland in South London. It’s name? Clapham Common. It has a  Long Pond, a Cock Pond,  and a Mount Pond.

Serviced by the London Underground the  Common is accessible to all. “You can catch the Clapham anytime“, boasts  the Transport for London.

Precocious Kids With Hyphenated Names

Two Januarys ago The Sunday Age introduced a segment for children’s letters called Summer Kids Your Say. 

The first respondent was a child aged 10 (that would put her in, what, Grade 4 or 5?) commenting on a short story:-

“Creeks and rivers represent ideas, bridges are connections to new horizons, angels are messengers…”.

My thought was that this kid’s brain should be plasticised and mounted in a museum of natural history but then I came across: “My mum thinks…”.  Aah, mummy. An academic-stage mother who can’t resist sticking her scholarly beak into her child’s reading matter. Especially if it proves to the philistines next door how clever and cultured her little Antigone is.

ANTIGONE? Yes, that’s correct. Mum must be a classics professor because Sophocles was the last person to use that name in 442BC.

Antigone’s metaphors were a bit of a mouthful and so was her polysyllabic  hyphenated name.

Another child with a hyphenated name used “suspenseful” in her letter. Is that a bit rich for an unassisted 8 - year - old? Perhaps not.

“Just imagining all the adrenalin running through their heads”, wrote a 12-year-old. Usually only a heroin addict would imagine that reading The Faraway Tree - or a child sporting prodigy who injects her own steroids.

The  final contributor opened with: “I believe in angels. I am not sure if I believe in their esoteric ability to take on the molecular form of beings on earth…” I went to fetch the kerosene but just as I was about to set the newspaper alight, I noticed: “From a very old kid at heart”.

Antigone’s mother finally coming clean? A genius child ghost writing for a stupid parent?

The true geniuses in the troupe would have been grateful for the alternative forum in which to express their ideas. Talking like that in front of less gifted peers would almost certainly have led to a playground lynching:-

Ms Caldecott (PE teacher): “Who is that hanging from the horizontal bars?”
Class (all together): “Oh that’d be Antigone!”

Last summer The Age encouraged children with the demographic bias of Malvern East, Brunswick West and Northcote to review the film Megamind.

I assume its director and screenwriter were immune to the scathing criticism from journalists and idiotic comments from people emerging from cinemas but it would have been interesting to see their reaction after reading this from a 10-year-old Orson Welles:-

“Having a story starting in the middle and reviewing whatever happened 10 years earlier is a good style of scriptwriting BUT NEEDS WORK”.

 

Fighting Cavities

The toothpaste I am currently using claims to ”fight cavities”.

How do you fight a hole?