War, Art, Sport

I arrived in Subiaco obscenely early. It had been a long day - a dawn service, a big breakfast, a train trip to Mandurah for an Italian family lunch – and I was tired. I had waved goodbye to my girlfriend at Perth station: “I’ll sleep in the park for a few hours”.

An early, deserted football special delivered me at 4.00 pm. At the second-hand bookshop I searched the Australian section for something to read on the grass, or to at least serve as a rudimentary pillow. Right down the bottom of the shelf, an outward facing recent edition of Patrick White’s ‘Voss’ was prominent. Yeah maybe - I’d wanted to give him a go for a while - but what was behind it?

Not only spine out – for he of the supple neck and keen eye – but also covered by its shinier yet poorer clone, was a second edition hardback. ‘Voss’ – the only word on the disintegrating paper outer, scrawled in some crude freehand graffiti, and accompanied only by a wobbly line-drawing of the absurdly bespectacled, fictional German explorer of the Australian interior. The deal was done.

Inside the ground – I had foregone the sleep on the grass, too excited by the game and my $8.80 jewel – I searched for a common feature between me and the other early arrivals, at this stage numbering about three or four per block. They were young and old, grouped and alone, purple and plain and horizontally-striped.

Out on the ground there were cords and cameras, fingers pressed in ears and a bunch of misfits training. The Docker-for-a-day boy was ushered here and there by his smiling hostess. Every so often a player would wander out, still in his suit, for a chip kick and a cheap laugh. Mark Harvey appeared at the top of the race and stood alone and contemplative for a full five minutes. Shouldn’t he be doing something, I thought. Maybe he was.

I only got a few pages into Voss. There was too much fascinating build-up going on. But I think I already understood that, like any Australian masterpiece – of war, of art, of sport - it was going to end in tragedy. That German, he was gonna fry in the desert.

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On the way out of the ground, a Geelong supporter told his mate, quite without condescension, that Fremantle had played the better football. Never have I felt so deeply just how little that means. It means zero. I calculated to the 375th decimal place before giving up, and it was still all zeros.

The train home was dominated by quivering purse-lipped smiles. A lot of people seemed to have something lodged in their eyes. Barely a word was spoken: even the Geelong fans understood that any mention of the game would precipitate a volatile outburst of emotion, swinging wildly between tears and violence, or perhaps some comic-tragic fusion of the two.

When I got home I was locked out. I sat in the cold and dark, and the now-shredded cover of Voss flicked up in the wind like a viper. I was very close but oh-so-far from the television – the one thing that could, like a surgical laser, have numbed and killed the memory of Fremantle vs Geelong, ANZAC day 2008. I’d have peeled my skull back if I could’ve, and removed the offending three-by-one-by-one centimetre piece of brain-tube. And I’d have cast it out onto the footpath, beside the honeyeater chick that fell from its nest, and let the ants eat it alive. But, instead, I sat there and it spread.

That’s the problem with getting to the ground early: you invest too much. It’s far easier to turn up later and drunker. I took down my defences yesterday. I exposed myself. I stepped up, knowing fully but faintly what the outcome was going to be. And down I went, just shy of the oasis.