The other day, I put out a note on the book The Cruel Sea.  Last night I watched the movie again – for the first time in half a century.  It is a superb adaptation of a great book – about something we must never forget.  It is very moving – often painfully so – and delivered by a cast that included those who would go on to great careers on the stage doing Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov.

But from the very first shot, and the voice over of Jack Hawkins, I was seized by a sense of déjà vu.  This seventy-year-old movie was all about our lost innocence.  Unerringly so.  Back to 1953 and 24 Rosedale Road and Glen Iris State School.  No television.  Up to the Civic in Ashburton for the flicks.  And the newsreel and Hopalong Cassidy.  You could walk to school and play cricket in the middle of the road from a very young age.  Mac and Norma did not even have a car when we moved in.  I can distinctly recall seeing Mac turn the little pale grey Ford Anglia into our street for the first time.

And we had our heroes.  This film shows just how England – I should say Great Britain – won the war.  By spellbinding courage and determination of all the people, all classes of which are so movingly displayed in this wonderfully edited film.  And in other movies like The Dambusters – which Grandfather Les took me to see at Hampton – three times.  (Why not?  Three Australians hit their targets – and one got to say ‘bloody’ on the big screen!)

Then over time, the place of these heroes of a just war we had not sought but could not lose was taken by sports heroes.  War was tainted by the lies and crimes of Vietnam, and later Iraq and Afghanistan.  And no government can commit a worse crime than to send its young men to die in a war entered into on a lie.  (And that comes from someone who was balloted out of the Vietnam draft.  Our government used a lottery to select our young men to be killed in war.)

Then those who had survived the war of those great movies got snaky with those who came back from Vietnam – and I am told that some of those now get snaky with those coming back from the Middle East.  The logic is as appalling as the simple want of human decency.  Our treatment of those who come back from wars not covered in vine leaves is a massive stain on this immature nation’s short history among white people.

My namesake got the VC for the raid on the dams, and I went to Holland to mourn at his grave.  Now our VC winner has been bankrolled by a deluded mogul to show himself as a murderous fraud in the cesspit of a Federal Court libel action.

And for some time now, our major sports have had to live as part of the entertainment industry that depends on television ratings – so that we have to fight to keep sacred the ritual of the AFL Grand Final being played at the time it has always been played at – in the bloody afternoon.  (The shift to evenings during the season put me off.  We Demons went to the MCG after lunch at the Prince Alfred – later saying that our only mistake was to leave the pub, because we usually got bashed up at the footy.)

And now we are choking under the evil of gaming and the dreadful cowardice of our governments and complicity of the screamingly well-paid sports administrators, who amble happily between the nation’s finest and the gutter.

Where, then, does that leave those who were my age when The Cruel Sea came out when they look to find their heroes?  Tina Turner notwithstanding, we need all the heroes we can find.  But, I gather, the first thing we must try to do is to save these children from the curse of their own reclusive virtual unreality.  That is a trap and vice my generation never had to face, and my mind misgives about what may happen next.  People who are clever are so often so dangerous.

But the Grand Final is at hand, and that is as close as you can get to a sacred day in Melbourne.  It is one of those big days – journées – of this city – which happens to be my home.  We have not yet lost our battle for sport, and I am fairly confident that we will overcome the forces of darkness.  What follows is a celebration of our Australian sports that you may have seen before, and which is part of a book I shall shortly submit for publication

Carpe diem!

We that are old had the best of it.

Extract from The Pursuit of Happiness.

For the rest – for those of us who are left to grow old – we have the memory of those afternoons when the autumn leaves were falling and being burnt in the gutters, and this of itself brought out the smell of eucalypt and liniment – and the smell of white paint on freshly cut grass – and the sight of those stocky fifties’ men breaking through the streamers, spitting on their hands, and waiting to play their part in this great celebration of ritual at this peculiar and monstrous temple of theirs that some call the Shrine.  Real Anzacs – Brylcream, basin-cuts, jock-straps, and all – but less tats back then. 

You could just about smell the bloody game – and the Foster’s, and the Four ‘n Twenties, and the Rosella tomato sauce.  (You got the full whack of Rosella on the train into the MCG between South Yarra and Richmond.)  You wore black nicks at home and white away; both had buckles, and the boots had stops and ankle covers (what a thrill for a boy to get his first pair); anyone who suggested that you could change the colours of the jumper was a dangerous lunatic and possibly a communist, or otherwise most dubiously pink.  All men and boys on both sides of the fence were equal for the cherished time allowed to them in that heaving, manly bubble.  The boys would grow to manhood in the shadow of their heroes, a Saturday arvo rite of passage.

It was a time when every second kid at the Glen Iris State School wore an Essendon jumper with number 10 on his back, and when enlightened parents took their kids to the Lightning Premiership so that they could tell their grandchildren that they had seen the great John Coleman.  (He is not now celebrated enough – he kicked twelve goals on debut.)  My folks took me one year – about 1953, I suppose – and Coleman marked about forty yards from me.  Kids don’t forget that kind of thing.  Coleman was up there with Phar Lap.

It was a time – 1956? – when a ten-year-old kid at a Grand Final with more than 100,000 there at the MCG would be terrified by being carried off his feet under the parapet at the old scoreboard, and a big, kind man would lean over, and reach down, and just reef the poor little bugger (me) out of the heaving mob. 

It was a time when you got used to being hoarse after the first couple of matches, but when number 31 for the Redlegs (Barassi) obviously sat on the right-hand side of God, or at least was proof positive that God exists.  And even the down sides had champions – like Peter Box at Footscray or Freddie Goldsmith at South (both won Brownlow Medals).

You kicked a paper footy where immortal giants had just been, and you went home knowing that God was in his heaven to listen to Chicken, Butch and the Baron on the Pelaco Inquest and the London Stores show.  And if you had won, you might just shout yourself a Pink Comic (the Sporting Globe) to celebrate.  And on the Monday, you could start getting ready for the next round. 

And then there was TV and then there was World of Sport – and the Sunday roast after the lawns were mowed.  Bliss, pure bliss.  And then there was the VFA of the day, and you would ring up at half time demanding to know when the fights would start.  (And on a bad day, the Channel 7 switchboard lady might query your sobriety.)

And in spring, you would climb those same stairs in the old Southern Stand at the MCG , and gaze on a completely different arena – a vast see of green peopled only by thirteen men in cream.  A different crowd in a different ground – but Boxing Day would bring the grudge match against the convicts (New South Wales) – and when Gordon Rorke bowled the first ball, the bloke who had brought you, a mate of your old man, stood up and informed the whole bloody crowd: ‘That bloody Irish bastard throws the bloody ball.’  (For a lay preacher and a judge’s associate, his language was a bit rough.  I just wanted to hide.)

And could anything ever compete with Lillee and Thompson serving it right up to the Poms at Melbourne’s other shrine?

All these vast public displays of fervid history form part of the character – the fibre if you like – of the City of Melbourne.

And outside of cricket and footy, you had Laver, Landy, Thompson, Rose, Brabham, and Carruthers.  You took it for granted that God’s country would give the world the best – and you felt desperately sorry for all those poor bastards overseas who would never even get to see the great Ronald Dale Barassi.

And what about those dreary days at Kardinia Park with the flat hats; and those days at Arden Street or the Junction Oval, when you bent your heads backwards all day to watch bombs from Glendinning or Super-boot fly over?  Or that day at Coburg – Coburg! – the end of the world was nigh! – when Phil Gibbs asked you on camera about the sacking of Norm Smith – and you were still getting over the Grand Final and the Frog’s response to Gabo’s two goals that had nearly landed in your lap?  And even the Zog – my mum, Norma – was stressed, although more decent than you or Wally Burns had been in the standing area leading up the 1964 Grand Final.

Or that day in the fifties when you went to Windy Hill – that thrice blasted heath – with a mate, whose eye will no longer fall on this note, and his dad.  Close game.  Beckwith, as was his wont, kicked the ball out all day with impunity.  Right on the bell, a Bomber does the same – probably by accident.  Brrrrrring!  A portly little Hitler-bludger scurries in bumptiously and points to the spot in an imperious Baptist kind of way.  Athol Webb, number 15 – decoy full forward – goes back and coolly slots it from the boundary line about 55 yards out.  Demons home by two points.  Dies irae.  Dies bloody irae!  ‘Stow that bloody Demon scarf, Son, keep your eyes to the front, don’t make eye-contact – this could get very bloody ugly’.  I still recall the train trip south.  Fraught.  Tricky.  Tense.

Or that day about thirty years later at Windy Hill with another mate, whose eye will not now fall on this note either, when it was so cold out there that you could only survive death from exposure by drinking more beer, and when you are querying your sanity for even turning up for this Arctic agony, and the Bombers have a player whose name causes an underground Hottentot rumble whenever he goes near the ball, and you know that you are mad, stark raving crackers.  And you go home and turn on Churchill, or music for great things beaten – Jussi Björling and another in the duet Au fond du temple saint – and your mate – your Anglo-Saxon mate, who was a rower – is just bawling his bloody eyes out! 

Or that sacred day of days at the Western Oval.  1987.  Oh, blessed time!  Hawthorn has to beat Geelong and the Dees have to beat the Doggies in the last game for us to be in the finals for the first time in 23 years.  We are losing both, and we are begging the Dogs to end it quickly – like a vet giving a dog the green dream.  Then number 2 (Flower) rose again; Dunstall put the Hawks up, and after an agony we are crying in our beer at Young and Jackson’s.  You take your girls to the Demons’ training, and they ask why are you crying again?  It has been a bloody long time between drinks, Girls, a bloody long time. 

And then we hand out lacings to North and South.  And then nemesis strikes!  We have beaten Hawthorn in a brutally tough Prelim at that human graveyard near Woop Woop.  Then the late Jim Stynes walks over the mark, and one of those inane crypto-fascist clowns commits the greatest war crime of all, and he hands the cherry to the only bastard on the planet who could slot it from there.  Condign revenge for that sausage roll so long ago by Athol Webb, the decoy full forward, out there on the blasted heath occupied by the flying Baptists.

Ah, yes – what was the word for it all?  Innocence, the lost innocence of a found boyhood, a little mirror of life held up before our shining schoolboy faces.

And then at last came the final series in 2021.  A mate from school, Ross, and a mate from the Bar, Chris, had shared with me various parts of the agony since 1964.  We had seen Melbourne lose more games than some people have had hot dinners.  Chris was Christopher Dane, QC – the rower who had bawled over Jussi Björling.  He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  This was going to be his last Grand Final – if we made it.  The pandemic meant that the finals, including the Grand Final, were not played at the MCG.  Chris could have made it there – but not to Perth for the Grand Final.  Ross and I would have attended all finals here, but we could not bring ourselves to watch the games live on TV – if someone else emailed a score, we could discuss it by that medium, and return to our Trappist cells to suffer alone and in silence.  We knew Dane watched it live.  The three of us watched the Grand Final live on TV and kept in touch through the ether.  Chris Dane died not long afterwards.

Well, Mate, they did it for you – and you made it to see them do it.  This one is for you, Chris, and all our unshed tears. 

Your testament might be in the email you sent Ross and me during the second semi-final – ‘You may be safe to turn the TV on now – they’re ten goals up in the last bloody quarter.’

And since I wrote this, the guy who as a young boy was there at Essendon with his dad and me in the 50s has also left us.  You were a bloody good footballer, yourself, Alan.

There is one more thing to say about sport.  Most of it involves teams – people coming together to achieve a shared goal.  It requires teamwork – people playing not so much for themselves as the team.  That is precisely what we see so little of in public life now – in politics or business.  The best teams are those whose members enjoy playing in the team the members of which share confidence in each other.  And the result helps fill the void of ritual left after the departure of God.  Money is poisonous in so much of sport, but its role in our community gets larger over time.   That is certainly the case in my life.

Australians romance about the role of sport in their lives.  For me, sport can resemble litigation – the contest contains the drama.  But sport is more than drama.  It is a catharsis, and we get the thrill of the contest, the succour of a secular liturgy, a feeling of release, and, above all, that sense of community and belonging.  Communion.  And when we look back  on the decline in religion, the lapse in education, and the rape of technology, we need all the relief we can get.  And we must do all we can to rid it of the curse of gaming.  Obscene wealth is one thing.  Orchestrated and murderous predation is another.  We are guilty of a national failure from which many are dying.

PS

It might be said that Donald Sinden launched his great career by getting second billing in The Cruel Sea (although even I recall the name Mogambo).  When young, he had Cary Grant good looks.  You can catch an interview with him about this movie at an advanced age.  He had what was called negative buoyancy .  That was interesting – the whole movie involving the ship was shot at sea.  They even had people who had sailed in it serving as extras in the engine room. 

Sinden was wonderful in Shakespeare.  He was a natural.  He was happily married, but that did not preclude him from befriending Bosie.  Those English people from the West End have that boulevard savoir faire.  And they bat so deep.  It’s just as well the buggers never managed that in cricket.