The Slow Death of Victorian Football

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

A mate who has suffered under the curse of the Demons told me a gag the other day. Another supporter said that when he died, he wanted the Melbourne Football Club to provide the pallbearers – so that they could let him down one last time.

That bloke could have got a big hit of masochism yesterday. I flicked the screen on when the D’s were leading 45 points to 18. I did some work and we had only gone on to 49 points. The other side, the newest kid on the block and wet behind the ears, had gone on to 98. About 14 unanswered goals. I doubt whether the players can recover – the supporters cannot.

God only knows why as a kid I settled on Melbourne. Neither Mac nor Norma had any interest. While I was at Glen Iris State School, the then secretary of the Melbourne Football Club, Jim Cardwell, singled me and a few others out for season’s tickets for Melbourne (the Football Club) because we were wearing Melbourne jumpers. That was in about 1953. Although Melbourne had been extremely successful in the 1950s, including a hat trick, I had either been too young or too busy to go to see them much. In 1964 I saw almost every match. I was there for the Grand Final. They had given Collingwood a dreadful hiding in the second semi-final or preliminary final but I had an ugly premonition about the Final. I got to the ground early with a mate of mine. We drank beer to settle ourselves. I then had to meet my mother. We must have been able to buy seats although my recollection from those days is of people sleeping out for a very long time in order to get them. We were at the Punt Road end quite close to the goals on an angle looking toward the Members – right in line for each of the famous goals of Gabbo, including the one on the run. I can remember seeing the Melbourne back pocket player, Neil Crompton, called the Frog, pick up the ball and I can remember very clearly seeing it go through for the winning goal. (I met the Frog once or twice in later years – he was a gifted cricketer as well as footballer, but everyone could only ever remember the Frog’s goal in the 1964 Grand Final.)

The next year, I think, Melbourne sacked the legendary coach Norm Smith. I felt sick to the stomach. I can remember being interviewed on television by Phil Gibbs as I got to Brunswick Street wondering who on earth was going to coach the team that day. It has proved to be like the Red Sox letting Babe Ruth go. Melbourne has not won a Premiership since. I do not regard this jinx as an extravagant exercise by nemesis because the hubris of those involved must have been enormous.

I was not to know this at the time. I was not to know that it would not be until 1999 that I got nearly hysterical when Melbourne won a Premiership and that this time it would not be Australian Rules but Rugby League and Melbourne Storm. Ronald Barassi had become Robbie Kearns. Had I been told this in 1965, I would have taken it as conclusive evidence first that God was in truth dead and secondly that Australia would fall to Communist China.

I suppose that I saw about half the matches played by Melbourne between 1964 and say 1999, when I gave up. We lost most of them comfortably, and on the two occasions that we made the Grand Final by accident, we were thrashed. Two of the wisest decisions of my life led to my being at Iguazzu for the first and Gallipoli for the second – a choice shot through with irony.

I gave up in about 1999 not because we always lost, but because we were just not in the race, and the results were as unattractive as they were unbecoming. Then they made it a TV entertainment and we lost the Saturday lunch which was the only reason that we went. Now I do not like the way game is played, and I spend more time watching the other three codes. Many of my age are happier to watch the amateurs.

The problem for the VFL is that Melbourne is not the only side to have proved to be uncompetitive. The most popular side in Victoria is Collingwood. It is to the AFL what Ferrari is to Formula I. It has to do well for the sake of the competition. It has won two flags since 1958, one less than Melbourne. Footscray and St Kilda have only one won each, 1954 and 1966, in their entire history. It will be 50 years next year since either has won a flag. Flags were last won by four other sides as follows: Richmond, 1980; Carlton, 1995; North Melbourne, 1999; and Essendon, 2000.

From 1967 to 1989 the premiership was shared between Carlton, Essendon, Hawthorn, Richmond and North Melbourne. Two Melbourne sides have been sent out of Victoria (South Melbourne and Fitzroy). Of the 24 flags won from 1991 to 2014, 13 have been won by Victorian clubs and 11 by non-Victorian clubs. The thirteen flags won by Victorian clubs were Carlton (1), Collingwood (1), Essendon (2), Geelong (3), Hawthorn (4), and North Melbourne (2). Since the ratio of Victorian to non-Victorian clubs has only recently reached 10: 8, the boys from out of town have been kicking with a stiff breeze – or they have been playing with loaded dice.

The supporters of South Melbourne and Fitzroy who followed them to Sydney and Brisbane have been rewarded with 5 flags between them – one more than the four that have been earned by a rump of seven VFL clubs during that time – Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Footscray, Melbourne, Richmond and St Kilda.

You can assess the impact of nationalisation this way: the power-houses of what was called the VFL, Carlton (16), Collingwood (15), Essendon (16), Melbourne (12) and Richmond (10) have won a total of 69 flags in all. In the 22 years since West Coast became the first non-Victorian side to win a flag in 1992, those five Melbourne clubs have won only four flags between them. On a cold day in Melbourne, a warm person might say that the guts have been ripped out of Melbourne football,

Three things seem clear.

The business of the AFL is to provide entertainment. If that means that the fans should have a roughly equal chance of seeing their side win, the AFL has failed badly.

The people of Victoria have paid a fearful price for the extension of the game that they invented across the nation. The expressions of gratitude are less than overwhelming.

The consistent failure of the Victorian clubs, including those with the best and oldest names, suggests that the market cannot sustain the present number (ten). In about 1982, the late Jack Hamilton, who knew more about this code than anyone ever, told me that he thought four clubs would go to the wall. Two have. It looks like two more should. This could best be done by mergers within four clubs who have the least capacity to resist it – Footscray, Melbourne, North Melbourne, and St Kilda.

Whatever else happens, can some bastard please put Melbourne, if not Victoria, out of its misery?

Richie

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Three things came to mind when I heard of the death of Richie Benaud.

The first was the tied test in, I think, 1961. That was up there with Hoad and Rosewall winning the Davis Cup, the Ali v Foreman fight in Kinshasa, and our winning the America’s Cup. I listened to the end of it in the backyard at Glencairn Avenue, East Brighton. We had fed my Astor radio – possibly then called a wireless – out the back window and hooked an aerial up to the top of a metal window to get a better reception from Brisbane. These were about the times when I would jump off the garage roof to practise parachute landings for the Commandoes and on a very desperate day try to play a golf-ball off the garage wall with a stump – after you know whom. (We hardly ever made contact, but the game got nasty if the golf ball ricocheted back off a paving stone.) The test match had been set up by the batting of Benaud and Davidson, when other teams might have gone for a draw*. My mate – his name was Kim Eason, and he was trying to be a wrist spinner – and I could hardly contain ourselves. The game was so up and down. We could not believe that it was a tie! As I recall it, Michael Charlton even lost his cool. This was when our cricket came out of a very boring period of a kind of sectarian disgust with the Poms. Cricket got to a level of popularity – as a game – that it has not got to again. This was all down to the West Indies and Richie Benaud. It was ticker-tape parade stuff, a fantastic achievement. We were witnessing attacking cricket but played as a game – at a very high altitude.

The second was a World Cup final. The West Indies were batting, I think second. The game was open. Richards was in with, I think, Colin Croft. Some trundler was trying to hold his own. Then Richards stepped right away to expose all his stumps and smote – not struck, but smote, or more modernly, smoked – the ball that crashed into the pickets at point, and bounced back a third of the way to the pitch. All the coloured dudes were whooping and hollering and giving high fives. Richards was leaning back on his bat chewing his gum and giving tout le monde a cool, icy stare, capless. Raw, black muscled power. Then Benaud said, sotto voce: ‘There was an element of contempt in that stroke.’ That, ladies and gentlemen, was Sir Vivian Richards in action, performing an execution.

The third was the shirt. This was not a fashion statement. This was a bloody rite of passage, mate. For about the whole of the seventies, when I was supposed to be turning sane, the Smiler and I spent most of every summer in a cricket shirt – we called it the Richie Benaud – that was cut like a blowsy golf shirt, with no buttons done up in the V-neck, collar turned up, and sleeves ever so artlessly gathered between the elbow and the wrist. The Smiler could play and I couldn’t, but I was buggered if I was going to let an aberrant historical anecdote like that stand between me and my bronzed Anzac uniform. On a bad day, we might even sport a chain, like a dude called Lillee. I only relented when the truth was brought home to me that I while I may have qualified in some way an Anzac, I was anything but handsome or bronzed. This may have been my first serious intimation of mortality.

Benaud would be criticised by some, including me, for trashing the game with one day cricket and being too close to the money crowd like Packer and Murdoch. I am of that generation that saw the empowerment – that is, the enrichment – of the players as being bad for the game and its real players and fans. On reflection, I think that blaming Benaud or Packer for what has happened in cricket is like blaming Charles Darwin for evolution or Martin Luther for the Reformation.

Australian sports administrators were notoriously small minded and enclosed twerps without either grace or imagination. They were cordially loathed, and they deserved to be. (It is why a lot of people are cool on Bradman and Michael Clarke – they were seen to be too close to management.) The administrators in the old days treated the players – in both cricket and football – as rightless and mindless serfs. Like all inadequate people corrupted by power, they were supremely – sublimely – blind to the revolution that they were so sternly stoking. They deserved everything they bloodywell got, and we just have to live with the consequences and salvage what we can. Benaud was not scared to stand up to the Establishment, and in this country, that is no bad thing.

It was the place of Richie Benaud, a man of French descent, to show that even after the revolution, the game of cricket could be attended with some degree of professional grace and charm. That was a large job. It is not hard to imagine what other motor-mouthed spruikers who are fond of the mob might have done to us. We also tend to forget that his record for wickets taken in tests would only be broken by Lillee. For reasons that I cannot put my finger on, I think I might have Ian Chapple in as the captain of our all-stars – perhaps I feel more raw aggression in Chapple simply because I saw him more in action – but it was Benaud who put his stamp on that form of captaincy and cricket – as he did on cricket commentary.

But if you want to know what a game of cricket was like in the days of its glory, get a film of the tied test, and watch one of the greatest sporting contests you will ever see. Just watch the dead pan reaction of most players when a wicket falls – except for the last over, which is unconfined hysteria; look at Benaud lead his team, and look at the frightening explosive power of Gary Sobers, whose execution of a bowler could be more flamboyant even than that of Richards; and then get hold of the famous after-dinner address by Wes Hall in which he describes the last over of that match. (‘I’m watching you, Winfield.’) Then you might know what drove John Milton to write Paradise Lost.

As for me, I will try to find a shirt that I can flash before the Wolf in front of the fire, and then raise a glass to a great dead cricketer and, thank heaven, a very decent Australian.

 

*According to this morning’s press, they were 6 for 92 chasing 232. Any team I was in would have adjourned to the bar.

The Leviathan

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

It was extraordinary how so many intelligent English people became Communists and whose faith survived a visit to Russia. The distinguished historian Dr Christopher Hill, of whom I am very fond, is an example. He reminds me of the remark of Chesterton that the ultimate test of a Catholic was to keep the faith after a visit to Rome. Well, the film The Leviathan will extinguish any faith or hope that anyone may have had in Russia.

It is hell on earth – drab, lawless, and soulless, and above all, a land that will not tolerate any hope at all. Every shot shows that lifeless, unfinished and motiveless emptiness that you see all over suburban Russia and Turkey. The State runs on corruption; people run on vodka; and the Orthodox Church leers over all. The survivors of the serfs, the Cossacks, and Tsars have never learned the meaning of freedom, much less how to govern themselves. The State operates like a totalitarian state – it just grinds down any person or decency or life that gets in its way – and there is not an oligarch or KGB hood in sight. The Leviathan consumes all, and a sense of hopelessness oozes out of the screen like the vodka that so many pull from the bottle or take straight like medicine. No part of life is left undenied.

The plot is that of The Castle but without the happy ending, and with a lawyer who is not quite so flawless. There is a complication involving the lawyer and the wife of the hero. She is wonderfully played by a woman who invests the part with haunting elements of Anna Karenin and the wife of The Doll’s House. The bad guy is also flawless. (Remember T P McKenna as Richmond in Callan?) The film does not move fast, but the pressure never drops. It is inevitable and unrelenting, and with more meaning and purpose than a Wagner opera.

This is the strongest film I have seen since Mystic River. I went back to see that film again the next day, as I did, for very different reasons, The Castle. The Leviathan is like the former. It has something like a Shakespearian intensity that leaves you drained and unsettled, but somehow purged. If the cinema were closer I would go back to it tomorrow. This is a movie that calls for a serious liquid debrief.

I spent a lot the Easter break writing a long note on 800 years of Magna Carta. Its most famous clauses say that we (the State) will not move or send against you except under a judgment of your peers, and to none will we sell, delay, or deny justice. If you want to know what life might be like without those rights written into the fabric of our law, go and see this mighty film. If you asked me to say how far Mr Putin’s Russia is behind the West, I would say not less than 800 years.

The Passion

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

We know next to nothing of Jesus until he began his public ministry when he was about thirty. He then came down from Galilee and Capernaum (under the Golan Heights). This rich country then produced fishermen and activists – and religious leaders, holy men (hasidim), healers, wonderworkers, miracle-workers – what would now be called shamans. The politically inclined of these young tearaways might have been freedom fighters or liberators – the Romans would have seen them just as terrorists to be killed as quickly as possible. Galilee may have been a place for the Romans to visit, but hardly a good place to live in.

Jesus began by identifying with another ragged preacher called John the Baptist (later beheaded by an inbred Quisling dictator called Herod). Jesus collected twelve disciples to represent the twelve patriarchs of the twelve tribes for the new Israel. He said that he kept the law, but that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. For Jesus, being true to God meant loving God and loving your neighbour. He preached that the Kingdom of God was at hand and he told his listeners that they should repent. He preached by parables and sermons and sayings. He healed the sick and followers said that he performed miracles. He had what we call charisma and he was getting a following. The problem with the miracles – and it is a problem with all miracles – is that there are never enough witnesses for their reports of the miracles to carry conviction to the world at large.

Jesus was bound therefore to make enemies with either the religious establishment or the secular establishment (the Romans). He was new. He was different. He was a change. He was popular. He was therefore a threat. But above all, he was good. Many people have trouble adjusting to real goodness. It makes the rest of us look terrible, and it can make most of us feel awful. There will always be some who felt like Satan in Paradise Lost when he ‘felt how awful goodness is’. When Milton wrote that Satan ‘thought himself impaired,’ he may have had in mind that chilling remark about Cassio made by Iago, that most evil predator on another’s honour:

He has a kind of beauty in his life

That makes me ugly.

It was inevitable that the religious status quo had to see Jesus as a threat. He was not sent to give them comfort. His mission was to institute a change of management. And if he came to the notice of the Romans, they too might take an adverse interest. You only have to look at the threat to world peace, not just regional stability, from the religious feuds in the Middle East today, not to mention the scary attraction that serial murderers hold for disaffected people of faith in what they see as occupied territories.

That is how things stood when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. He was to tell his disciples that he foresaw that he would die in the way he did and at a supper he in substance took his leave from them. He did so with words that have led to the deaths of so many people. He took to the money changers in the temple amid suggestions that he had talked of the destruction of the temple. It would be difficult to imagine a greater assault on the Jewish religion than talking of the destruction of its temple, and his action in clearing it would very likely have got him a conviction for sacrilege and a death sentence if he had done it to a Roman temple. He had in truth signed his own death warrant.

Spinoza described the impact of Jesus in a way that shows that he – Spinoza – would have been too hot to handle in some quarters.

His sole care was to teach moral doctrines and distinguish them from the laws of the state; for the Pharisees, in their ignorance, thought that the observance of the state law and the Mosaic law was the sum total of morality; whereas such laws merely had reference to the public welfare, and aimed not so much at instructing the Jews as keeping them under constraint.

Spinoza too was cast out. He was excommunicated from the Jewish community. Kant had an almost conscientious objection to ritual in any form – he always had something else to do when his university required him to attend at some religious function on an official basis. But Kant never lost faith in the man he referred to as ‘the Teacher’. Kant described Jesus as ‘the ideal of humanity well pleasing to God’. Einstein said that it was impossible not to be moved by ‘the luminous Nazarene.’ The young tearaway Hasid executed as a common criminal has never lacked followers of genius.

The ‘passion’ is the phrase for the suffering of Jesus from his last meal to his death on the cross. This is the sacred heart of the religion founded on his life and teaching. It has been celebrated in words and music. The most notable is Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion. Put religion to one side, and this work is one of those Himalayan peaks of Western civilization, like El Greco’s paintings of the Cleansing of the Temple, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Michelangelo’s Pieta, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, or Mozart’s Requiem.

The painting of El Greco at the National Gallery is amazing. (The Frick has a version, too.) Almost all the figures are distorted in the way that became the trade mark of this great artist. The Christ figure is a man on a mission and flowing with energy to that end. The whole thing has the movement of Mozart, but it is movement charged with colour, and behind the head of Christ is an Italian Renaissance background. This is what one scholar says. ‘The money-changers, panic-stricken more by the sudden revelation of power in the suave Christ than by the punishment itself, try to escape, but they cannot. Brilliant is the planned confusion of the detail. The upward-catapulted figures…make a frantic explosive series, away from the Christ and diagonally back into the picture space.’ It is very rare for a picture to be charged with so much energy and movement and rhythm.

Bach, ‘the supreme musical genius of the late Baroque period’, some say of all time, came ‘from the most gifted family in musical history.’ He was born in Saxony. He lost both his parents at the age of nine. He was twice married, and he had twenty children. He moved from town to town in Saxony and spent a large part of his time at Leipzig. He held court or church appointed posts. He was often wrangling with government or his employer. Most work was generated for his employer, and most of it was religious.

He was most famous during his life for his Cantatas (‘something to be sung’) which were sung during the service in church in the ordinary course of that service. He is best known now for the two passions – of Saint Matthew and Saint John – the drama of the passion of Christ according to either gospel and performed with a baroque orchestra and choir and soloists, and the music for piano called The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations, and much other incidental baroque music. People of sense are not deflected from enjoying some of the most beautiful music ever written by the fact that they do not share Bach’s faith, or any other faith. It is the same with the other great artists I have mentioned.

At that time you could see artists trying to break clear of a monopoly by the church on commissions for new art. With Bach, it is very necessary to bear in mind that music then was supposed to serve a purpose. As John Eliot Gardiner says in his recent and marvellous biography of Bach:

In Bach’s day the arts were still expected to impart some explicit moral, religious or rational meaning. It was not until the second half of the century that aesthetic concepts such as ‘the Beautiful’ and ‘the Sublime’ began to uncouple the artistic from the scientific and the moral.

Then we have to see that Bach was not just the product of a musical family, but a religious family, and one that followed Luther at that. Luther had not just wanted to bring the bible to people in their language – he wanted to bring them their religion in words and music that were at once of the people and lyrical. One of his best known hymns – Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott (‘A Mighty Fortress is our God’) – has both music and words by Luther, and expresses his sense of swelling security within God’s many mansions. This is one of the themes of the St Matthew’s Passion. The Bach family sang at meals – as did Gardiner’s – and this vocal participation was easily carried over into the congregation and communion within the church.

Gardiner himself witnessed the survival of old traditions in the region of Thuringia – in the middle of the service, he and his choir were suddenly joined in the organ gallery by a group of local farmers who sang a short litany in Thuringian dialect and departed. That must have been quite a show. The German philosopher Herder said that the chorales sung in church retained the moral effectiveness (‘the treasury of life’) that German folk-poetry and folksong had once had. Herder also said that the moment the poet writes slowly in order to be read, art may be the winner, but there is a loss of magic, of ‘miraculous power.’ Isaiah Berlin had said that ‘Language alone makes experience possible, but it also freezes it.’

Luther held that ‘the notes make the words live’ and that without music, man is little more than a stone. He also wanted to know why the Devil should have all of the good tunes.

Yet, notwithstanding this close tie for Bach between God and his music, all of that music, including the two great Passions – especially the two great Passions – is open to all of us. Gardiner quotes William James as saying that ‘religion like love, like wrath, like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness and impulse…adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else.’ Gardiner then goes on to refer to some observations of a contemporary European composer, Gyorgy Kurtag, that are at once both sane and mystical.

Consciously, I am certainly an atheist, but I do not say it out loud, because if I look at Bach, I cannot be an atheist. Then I have to accept the way he believed. His music never stops praying. And how can I get closer if I look at him from the outside? I do not believe in the Gospels in a literal fashion, but a Bach fugue has the Crucifixion in it – as the nails are being driven in. In music, I am always looking for the hammering of the nails… That is a dual vision. My brain rejects it all. But my brain isn’t worth much.

I first heard the St Matthew’s Passion of Bach about ten years ago at the church opposite the Astor which I gather is famous for its acoustics and choral work. The drama alone overwhelmed me – it is the drama and the music and a sense of ritual that is still overwhelming as I listen to any of the three recordings that I have of it. The first time you hear it, or, better, see it, you think at times that you might be listening to Negro spirituals with commentary from Joel Grey as the M C from Cabaret. The ending is signalled by a colloquy within the choir one part of which is Mein Jesu gutte nacht (Good night, my Jesus). Life cannot offer much else that is so fine.

My first recording was by Gardiner with his Monteverdi ensemble. The second is a large boxed set by the Collegium Vocale Gent that features Ian Bostridge as the Evangelist. The third, which I have listened to over the last two nights, is a recording with Karajan and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra made not long after the war in Vienna. That morally stained city was a husk and Karajan had joined the party – twice. Yet the sound of this choir is almost unbearably ethereal. So are the tempi of the choruses and the recording techniques then serve to put distance into the choirs. The effect is remarkable.

John Eliot Gardiner concludes what is in truth a frank and dry-eyed biography with these words.

Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human passions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows us the kind of music we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God – in human form. He is the one who blazes a trail, showing us how to overcome our imperfections through the perfections of his music: to make divine things human, and human things divine.

People who shuffle off this mortal coil without getting up very close to Bach’s St Matthew Passion are short changing themselves very badly. This is not a spiritual or Godly age; we have lost our taste for ritual and communion; and those who suffer under the emptiness and vulgarity of what passes for sport in Australia should not pass up a chance as good as this to at least glimpse the mystical.

(This piece draws heavily on two books that are available on Amazon and Apple, Parallel Trials (Socrates and Jesus) and The West Awakes, the third volume of a history of the West.)

OVERPAID LARRIKINS AND BAD SPORTS

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

In a famous moment of cricket history, an Australian blasted the English by saying something to the effect that there were two teams out there and only one of them was playing cricket. There is a wide consensus that something similar occurred on Sunday in the World Cup Final. There were two teams out there, but only one side was playing like sportsmen.

The New Zealand team had a great cup and were worthy finalists. They were brilliantly led by Brendan McCullum, and Danny Vettori has about the most respected name in world cricket. These were just two of the champions that we abused in a shameful manner. Sadly, the worst offender was not the pin-up suburban lout David Warner, but Brad Haddin – who is old enough to know better. He was rocketing around in the face of the Blackcaps like an ourangatang with terminal piles. It was disgraceful behaviour that was saddening for Australians to watch – and not least because it was so unnecessary.

Brendan McCullum took out his grief at the death of Phillip Hughes with his bat. It was as if he had been inspired. He and Phillip Hughes showed the good side of cricket. We have now painted the textbook image of the bad side.

The poison of Indian money is now finding its triumph in crass Australian vulgarity. It is awful to behold and God only knows what effects all this will have on the nation’s children. These overpaid entertainers are not sportsmen at all. This is what we have to teach our children. These people are gladiators made and trained and kept for TV. They sit in their multimillion dollar harbourside residences and forget what it is like to be Australians much less sportsmen. Cricket Australia should be told that too many of us want nothing to do with them. If this is what it takes to win   a World Cup, I want none of it. They might well start with Boofhead whose tolerance of the boorish David Warner gives no reason for confidence.

There is in our argot a term for overpaid larrikins. It is Cashed Up Bogans. That is all that these twerps are, and we should send a note of apology across the Tasman. They do things better there – in both rugby and in cricket.

Speaking of bad sports, spare a thought for Ben McDevitt of ASADA. Having fought and lost a contest that has become another national disgrace, but made every day Christmas Day for the lawyers, Mr McDevitt spat the dummy once again and committed an act of murder on the English language. ‘What happened in Essendon in 2012 was, in my opinion, absolutely and utterly disgraceful.’ Why is that we pay a fortune to some public servants to spend a fortune of our money and transfer another fortune to the lawyers so that they can lose their wars and make fools of themselves, and then moralise at our expense?

And, yes, the date was 2012. I wrote the note underneath a year or two ago about that dreadful bullshit about a black day for Australian sport. It looks like the note was written before the last federal election. Since then, it looks like ASADA’s decline has matched that of our cricketers.

 

HOW MUCH VEGEMITE DID THEY PUT ON THEIR WEETIES?

In the ‘Circumlocution Office,’ Charles Dickens savagely lampooned bureaucrats. Its sublime function was to show HOW NOT TO DO IT. Now we have the tragic Dickensian farce executed upon us by the AFL and ASADA in the sterile months following their stagey revelation of ‘the blackest day in Australian sport.’

Journalists just love ‘the AFL drugs scandal.’ What scandal?   No one has been charged with breaking the law. No one has even been charged with breaking a rule. There is no charge, and, we infer, no evidence, that any team cheated by obtaining an unfair advantage. There is no evidence that any player suffered harm. There is therefore no scandal – except the Great Vegemite Scandal – how much Vegemite did those flighty Bombers put on their WeetBix?

The only scandal is that confected by the AFL and ASADA by childlike mismanagement and flood-level leakage through tame conduits. They, not Essendon, have trashed all Australian sport. They have harmed sport more than dirty money, botched television interference, the ridiculing of umpires, and screechingly vulgar and corrupting bookies.

The AFL’s first mistake was to get into bed with ASADA. Can you imagine BHP ‘outsourcing’ its ‘governance’, fancy talk for management, on corruption to ASIC? This will remain a classic MBA study in corporate balls-ups for generations.

ASADA take too long. They proceed in secret. They follow the path of the Inquisition. They do not announce their results but clothe them in dark secrecy. Then, when they fail – miserably – to live up to their own political grandstanding, they refuse to take their medicine. They just sulk. They resemble philosophers – blind men in a dark room looking for an absent black cat. Can you think of a better recipe to bring the house down? No one I know has any faith left in either the AFL or ASADA. No one.

ASADA is not made of real coppers. Imagine this. The Fraud Squad gets headlines internationally by saying that there is rampant dishonesty in, say, Myers. After six months’ agony for Myers, the Police say: ‘No one will be charged under the law, but you cannot say that we drew a blank, because this report is just interim, Mate: we could be here for bloody years – and we are handing over a huge dossier of secret nothings so that Myers can nail its own for breaching its Code of Conduct. So, there!’

It is beyond argument that the AFL and ASADA have brought AFL football into disrepute – they jointly blacked football and now they cannot back it up. The AFL blacked itself. They are paradigm scandal-mongers, little boys playing with matches, and caught calling Wolf. AFL, this is your scandal. Will they, then, apologise to Essendon – and to us? Not on your Nelly, Mate.

Now, when Essendon and its people are cleared by ASADA, the AFL charges them with the crime of which they, the AFL, stand guilty. This is Monty Python but it is not funny – real people are getting badly hurt by this arrogant exercise in revenge driven by hellish pride.

James Hird is one of best footballers we have seen. He had silky grace and frightening courage. He is also a gentleman. If the AFL were international, Hird would have captained our colours with the full faith and credit of the entire nation. Hird towers above the gnats who now nag him. Who has a good memory of Fitzpatrick or Demetriou in football?

What, then, have we done for James Hird? We have trashed him and bashed him for month after bloody month in a witch-hunt that has become a pogrom. As ever, in this country, mediocrity lashes back.

I am as an Australian appalled and ashamed at what we have done. It just makes it so much worse that the ‘offence’ of which the AFL is guilty and with which James Hird is now charged – ‘bringing disrepute’ or ‘conduct prejudicial’ – is the last resort of the military and the first resort of the fascist.

‘To none will we sell, to none will we deny or delay right or justice.’ Can you imagine a worse denial of due process? ‘No free man is to be taken except by a lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land….nor will we go or send against him.’ The AFL and ASADA and their Myrmidons have gone and sent against the people of Essendon like bad losers intent on giving us all a frightening reminder that all power corrupts. They have done so with all the charm of feudal barons or Mafia dons. The dooms that they have been leaking out remind us that Shostakovich once picked up Pravda and read that ‘this affair could end badly’ – he knew it was written by Stalin

Well, there is nothing new in the bureaucracy being stupid or in the AFL being a bully. Our Circumlocution Office has given taxpayers 404 pages of secret zeroes – HOW NOT TO DO IT. The AFL is tearing itself apart. We Australians have been badly let down and affronted by people who should know better.

This squalid little vendetta should come before somebody who understands due process. The notion that the AFL might sit in judgment on itself is plain silly. They are not just an eminence grise – they are the instigating Inquisitor, prosecutor, star witness, and prime suspect. Neither they, nor Egypt’s army, can just wish away a state of war. And how can footy be good for kids if those running it cannot comprehend a ‘fair go’?

Everyone – everyone – is just sick of all this dark nastiness. The AFL is plainly too big for its boots. The Commission has trashed its own brand and lost the confidence of the community. It should therefore resign. Australians need a Commission untainted by this circus. ASADA should be abolished by statute. The next government could then seek to resurrect Australian sport.

Clarity in politics

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

What people miss in our politics is decisiveness – people who are prepared to take a position.

A cartel occurs when corporations collude to control supply to drive up prices.  Cartels are illegal, and the illegality derives from laws made in the bastion of capitalism, the U S, called anti-trust laws.  When, therefore, a leading Oz miner, Twiggy Forrest, proposed setting up a cartel, the Feds pricked up their ears.  It was therefore surprising that when our Foreign Minister, Rubber Lips, heard of the idea, she said it was ‘worth considering.’  Someone had a word in her ear, and the Foreign Minister backed off.  She was not, after all, an expert on iron ore.  That does beg a few questions, but she said: ‘I do not know the detail of Andrew Forrest’s proposal, but I have since been discussing the matter with the Treasurer, and the Treasurer thinks the specifics of Mr Forrest’s proposal would not be acceptable.’  Now, there you have it – the problem is the specifics – possibly, specifically iron ore. Might it be different with specifically gold or diamonds – God knows, diamonds are cartel heaven.  Is the suggestion generally acceptable?  Perhaps the Foreign Minister should have consulted a lawyer.

What then of the Treasurer, the lip curling champion of razor gangs of days past?  ‘We’re not very supportive of cartels at all’.  Nor are we very  supportive of rape and murder.  The Treasurer could see revenue for the government but there was an ideological issue.  ‘It’s important that we continue to believe, as we always have with liberals, in free markets.’

Nonsense, bromides, evasion, inanity, and motherhood – the bullshit that is OZ politics.

Let us then compare this bullshit to someone who is prepared to take a position – Ted Cruz.  Ted knows how to take a position. He took one speaking non-stop for 21 hours in the Senate on the evils of his President’s views on health care.  Ted is no moderate on God, guns, money, or anything else.  He will really shake up the race for the next President, and this is good.  The prospect of a Bush v Clinton contest is, at its lowest, unappetising.  ‘We need to run a populist campaign standing for the hardworking people of America’, and abolish the IRS.  Ted opened his campaign at Liberty University founded by that Godly populist Jerry Falwell.  His wife Heidi spent time living in Kenya and Nigeria as the daughter of missionaries.  ‘She and her brother compete baking bread.  They bake thousands of loaves of bread to go to the local apple orchard where they sell the bread to people coming to pick apples.’  It sounds like a Nordic idyll.  ‘She goes on to a career in business, excelling and rising to the highest pinnacles, and then Heidi becomes my wife and my very best friend in the world’.

This was not Ted at his plainest.  Heidi has God – big time.  But she also has money big time.  Ted omitted to mention that Heidi is a managing director of Goldman Sachs.  She is the regional head of private wealth management at Houston.  You need more than $40 million to walk through her door.  Goldman Sachs represents different things to different people.  One of its greatest sins is to run a health insurance plan for staff, thus infecting the pinnacle of capitalism with the dross of socialism.  Still, since Heidi doubtless earns seven figures, we need not ask whether Ted is covered by Heidi’s plan.

Finally, I congratulate the BBC for sacking Clarkson and showing that money is not everything.  If they had not sacked him, I would have sacked them.  One of his vastly over-rated mates said that he was gutted to hear of the sacking – straight to the Blacklist.

The Last Oz Tory

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

When Malcolm Fraser gave his concession speech after losing the 1983 election, his bottom lip trembled. Straight away, my mate Jim Kennon was on the blower saying that he had not noticed anything like that on 11 November 1975. Fraser was all very stiff upper lip back then.

Jim was a member of the ALP, and he would later be in government in that party in Victoria. I have never been a member or supporter of that or any other political party, but Jim knew that I admired Gough, and that I was outraged by his dismissal. It may have been the daylight between us politically that led Jim to being so close with me, but I did feel a kind of mordant relief when Fraser got voted out. I did not however take to his successor, and I would not feel the same kind of satisfaction again until Keating removed Hawke.

The stiff upper lip of Fraser stood then for a lot of what I did not like about him or the way that he came to power. Old money, Western District, Oxford University – each tolerable in itself, but not with that born to rule attitude of the Establishment back then. It was beautifully caught by a Tandberg cartoon. When Kerr, the man Gough called the last of the Bourbons, got full at the Melbourne Cup before he presented it, and looked so sadly common, Tandberg had him standing there cross eyed under that silly top hat, saying: ‘I like making presentations in November – like when I presented the nation to its true owners.’

The ineptness of Kerr, and the plain deviousness of Barwick, began the process of the softening of my position on Fraser. He was just a political leader trying to oust a very bad government – the real villains were two smart-arsed Sydney silks who should have known better.

And we should not forget just how inept that ALP government had become – it would be brought home to me every Saturday morning before breakfast at the Prahran Market by the ghastly apparition of Jim Cairns. Here was a former Commonwealth Treasurer selling political pamphlets from a cardboard box on the street – about the complete picture of a typical Australian political tragedy.

Besides, there was other form to consider. The deposition of John Gorton hardly had Melbourne Grammar written all over it, and there were other plots and putsches in the gross Oz manner.  All else paled beside the moral chasm of Vietnam – and Fraser had been in that right up to his neck. Like every member of the government, he was not subject to the ballot that sent our young men overseas to lose a bad war.

The softening up continued when Alcoa was building a huge installation at Portland. This vast project led to my first brief in the High Court. There were lots of dollars and jobs on the table, and some very big egos. The Americans were cutting up rough – until Big Mal called in on them and put them in their boxes. They called him Big Boots, and they were not going to give him any cheek.

I was most impressed – perhaps this aloof, imperious manner had its uses. It then also occurred to me that this kind of man would not find politics easy – it was not just that he was not the affable sort – he was not even prepared to dissemble, and a strong Coriolanus streak told him that chasing votes was vulgar (in the proper sense of that word). He looked out of place with the mob. On the other side, Gough was getting all the cheers – and losing all the elections.

I also changed my mind about the Establishment. For many years I was privileged to act for a number of them while a deluded NCA conducted an inane political witch-hunt. A former of partner of mine, who has authority on this point – ex officio at the moment – said that my guys were not just the Establishment – they were the Australian aristocracy. I came to admire and respect each one of them very much for at least one attribute – courtesy. As I have remarked before, it is like cutlery – it separates us from the apes. We do not put enough value on it, and that now shows in the mannerless nonsense, the plain vulgarity, of the Australian Parliament.

One of my people, Ian McLachlan, held ministerial office in a coalition government. He is as straight a man as I have met, and I was able to see close up how difficult it is for such an establishment man to come to terms with the awful mediocrity of Oz politics. I think that he and Fraser may have had a lot in common – one difference was that Ian got to a point where he could no longer stand the bullshit.

Malcolm Fraser did not leave his job voluntarily. Neither did Gough. Fraser was eventually voted out, and the slight tremble of the bottom lip may have presaged the humanity that he showed over the next thirty years, and the principles underlying which we can now see in his government. It has been a remarkable journey for a man who came under the influence of superior conflict-endorsers like Bob Santamaria and Ayn Rand – although the latter was reported to be unsure of the extent of Fraser’s commitment. She said ‘I don’t think he’s quite selfish enough.’ That statement of Ayn Rand looks to have been true.

A lot of people then and now say that Fraser was a failure as an economic manager in his three terms of office. The present government has blasted for eternity any claim by the Liberal Party to be a superior economic manager, a boast it pathetically made with the reference to the adults being back in charge. Messrs Howard and Costello in their terms of office are now criticised for wasting the mining boom by buying votes by showering dollars on a comfortable middle class in a very successful attempt to prove to them that there is such a thing as a free lunch, and that life was meant to be easy. The present government is finding out how hard it is to withdraw that largesse, either decently, or at all. If the Fraser government was a failure too, the late Dr Cairns is the only one they can beat in my adulthood.

There is a lot of blather about how Fraser moved from Right to Left, whatever that means, or whether he left the Liberal Part or it left him, as if this split was some observable event like the transit of Venus. Fred Chaney is a very decent man. As a politician, he is about my cup of tea. He said that Malcolm Fraser ‘was a very big man in every respect, and to be honest, I loved him.’ He went on to say that the two major parties are no longer recognisable. That is obviously true – the Liberal Party and Labor party are no more now in anything but name – but it is the profession of love that strikes you. Australian politicians do not talk like that, and it is hard to imagine that statement being made of any of the current crop.

Malcolm Fraser now looks like an old fashioned Tory with an old fashioned conscience. It is little wonder that the hard-liners who hunger after unelectability think that he was a wimp, and that the scrabbling vote-seekers who make up the Liberal Party now would rather not think of him at all.

There is something to be said for the Tory view that those who have a stake in the country have a duty to see that it is well administered. It used to be called noblesse oblige. That is just about dead in this country, as, sadly, is the involvement of the Establishment in the governance of the nation. It would of course be as wrong as it would be absurd to revert to the old Tory view that the government should be controlled by the biggest stake-holders, but if you want to know how bleak it gets when they are driven out of government altogether, just look again at the frightful motley that we have in Canberra now.

If not in government, then certainly after it, Malcolm Fraser stood for bringing people in from the cold rather than locking them out. This frightfully exclusive member of the Melbourne Club was far more inclusive than his weasel successors who would hardly be invited in as guests.

What I detect in the public mood in the nation is that they could see in Malcolm Fraser a political leader who was prepared to announce and stand for a position, and, just as importantly, who was a man of both integrity and compassion. In other words, they could see some of the makings of a statesman, and God only knows, there is not much of that about now. It was, I think, not issues of economic management or political ideology that came between people like Fraser and Chaney, and people like Howard and Abbott, but issues of conscience and compassion for people for whom life is not so easy, like refugees and blackfellas. This is what I see so many people are missing in our politics now.

Two things caught my eye in the press reaction, apart from a few matters mentioned above. (I might say that my Kyneton wine merchant and I had a long chat yesterday along the lines above.) One of those expressing his sadness on the TV last night – I do not remember if it was the SBS that Fraser set up – was the Governor of South Australia. That gentleman was born in Vietnam. This was a very moving moment. His Excellency the Honourable Hieu Van Le AO arrived by boat with his wife as refugees in 1977, when Fraser was Prime Minister. They started life here at a migrant hostel. Their two sons are named after Australian cricketers, Bradman and Kim Hughes. His Excellency and his wife were boat people and they may have got a different reception from other prime ministers of Australia.

The other item in the press today is one of the greatest political cartoons of all time. It is by Bill Leak in The Saturday Australian. Gough and Malcolm are in heaven, seated on a cloud. Gough is seated on Malcolm’s right hand reading The Australian. The caption is ‘Seated at left hand of Gough.’ With that ineffable and lofty ease, Gough says: ‘They’re all still at each other’s throats I see.’ To which Malcolm knowingly replies: ‘Don’t bother with that, Comrade – death was meant to be easy.’

Qantas – Is anyone there?

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The other day I booked by phone – at a price for the cheek of wanting to talk to a human being, and possibly even an Australian – flights with Qantas to Darwin and from Broome.  I had to use the phone because this laptop has a virus.  I did not get the promised email confirmation.  The next day the hire car company offered me a real inducement to reverse the air travel and fly to Broome and from Darwin.

Back on the phone.  After about twenty minutes, of waiting while those parroted ads drive you mad in cycles, I put the phone down  – and I lost the connection.  I started again.  At nearly forty minutes, I thought I might explode.  A remarkably sane operative pacified me, and changed the flights.  She said that the previous booking had not been confirmed because it was unworkable, but she said I would shortly get an email confirmation.

That has not arrived.  My unwell computer shows no sign of recent activity on my Frequent Flyer account – except that they recently cancelled 120,000 points without warning to me.  So I look for an address to send a query to.  Not on your Nelly mate.  We are not into talking to people, much less long standing customers.

This confirms my view that if you have any option, you are a mug to fly Qantas.  They must be the most notorious business in the world for abusing their best customers.

I recall that I wrote a note about nasty and incompetent corporates many years ago.  I will try to attach a copy.  Nothing has changed.  I then had to hire a travel agent to do combat with the flaks at Frequent Flyers.  Well, they have now seen to that, and I just have to get ready to give up half an hour or so for aural abuse, and then run smack into a wall of inept silence.

A little bird tells me that management – yes, they do claim that title – are getting ready to get rid of the flak-catchers they have on shore.  Perhaps the Indians are tougher as well as being cheaper.

In the unlikely event that you trip over someone connected with Qantas, could you ask them to let me know about my flights.  They know where I am – which is more than I can say for them.

Further reflections on the decline and fall of courtesy follow.

THE DECLINE OF COURTESY AND

 

 

Nat King Cole

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Ella Fitzgerald had as good an enunciation of English, certainly as a vocalist, as I have ever  heard.  Not all baby boomers would be familiar with Ella – but they will all remember Nat King Cole, and his unforgettable style and articulation. ( ‘Unforgettable’ was one of his big hits. )  His style helped to define the 50’s and carried on into the ’60’s.  People forget that Cole started as a pianist, and developed a trio that became famous.  I have a CD of twenty songs done by the trio, all first recorded in 1947.

While setting up to record the qualifying sessions of the Grand Prix,   I came across a TV documentary that I could not turn off.  It had comments from Tony Bennet and Sinatra, and the two sons of the great Nelson Riddle.  Cole had a voice and style that is now as instantly recognisable as that of Louis Armstrong.  Although Cole was a jazz musician, his vocals were closer to those of Tony Bennet than Ella Fitzgerald.  He was a popular singer or crooner.  He was immeasurably assisted by the arrangements of Nelson Riddle, a man whose genius – the word is not too strong – was recognised and employed by Sinatra.  With uncharacteristic modesty, Sinatra wondered whether he and Riddle ever reached the same plateau that Riddle and Cole had.

This country has not had a good record with racism, but we have no idea what it was like in the U S.  I can remember the Nat King Cole TV show.  This kind of show was common then – remember Perry Como? – but he was the first black man to have his own show.  It was a revelation and a revolution.  The production was seamless.  There was a skit where Tony Bennet insisted on introducing himself, and another where Sammy Davis Junior told Cole he had to have a style, and then proceed to mimic it flawlessly.  The great Ella Fitzgerald swung by with her inimitable ease and grace.  All these people gave their time for free.  They finally found a sponsor.  A plainly moved Harry Belafonte spoke of how much it meant to people of colour.  It was number one in its time slot – but the South hated it, and killed it after 60 episodes.  Cole said that Maddison Avenue was afraid of the dark.

It is shocking to recall this now.  Shortly after, Cole suffered badly from a bleeding ulcer.  He was hospitalised, and the doctor forbade him to go on tour in the South – they worried that if he fell ill, no hospital would admit him.  This happened in my lifetime, to a gentle man and supreme artist.  When Cole did get to Alabama, he was  assaulted, and then his own people turned on him for being meek.

Cole died of cancer before he reached sixty.  He had smoked heavily all his life, as so many did then.  So far as I know, he had not succumbed to the darker scourge of the jazz world in his time.

Opinions vary on Mr Obama as President.  I have a very high opinion of the man, and I am glad that I celebrated his swearing in with a number of Blood Marys starting at 4 am.  But whatever else might be said of Mr Obama, the shocking cruelty handed out to Nat King Cole, and recent events in Ferguson in the South, show the colossal importance of the mere fact that Mr Obama was elected at all – and  twice.  Many have tried, but they have not been able to turn his show off.

Commercial bullshit and Energy Australia

/ Geoffrey Gibson / 2 Comments

What follows is more research for a book on how not to think or write – the subject this time is commercial bullshit.  A company called Energy Australia does a real line in it.  They can tell an aggrieved customer they have ‘escalated’ a dispute by sending it higher up.  They will have a date with destiny at VCAT in Bendigo in June and see another kind of escalation.

Some years ago now, Tom Wolfe wrote a book called Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers. The first part was the story of a party that Leonard Bernstein gave for the Black Panthers. He did not know that Tom Wolfe was in the assembled gathering, and was planning to write about it. (To avoid having people see their black butler and maid, the Bernsteins hired white South Americans to wait on their guests.) The second part of the book was about how the beneficiaries, if that is the term, of the American social services system subject public officials behind the counter (the ‘flak-catchers’) to a reign of terror when they discuss their entitlements. (One Mau-Mau handed over ice-picks that he said were taken from gangs in return for financial grants.)

Well, we might now see the whole party for the Black Panthers as an exercise in bullshit, but we have now privatised the flak-catcher operatives, and the Mau-Mauing goes the other way. Large trading corporations now routinely train operatives not just to catch flak, but to hand it back with all of the vigour of a Mau-Mau expert. These big corporations are just walking all over us and our way of life.

The problem with so much of what the corporates tell us is not that it is sincere, but that it is anything but sincere, as in ‘Your call is important to us.’ And then they proceed to show that they are lying by keeping you hanging there while they blast your eardrums with propaganda calculated to establish that Doctor Joseph Goebbels was a person of taste and refinement.

 

When Tim Cook was addressing the faithful at Apple, he said: ‘at the end of the day, this is a very important day for Apple. When I step back from this terrible scenario…I think it is about the awareness piece. I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing.’

An executive at AT&T got positively excited: ‘We actually think that the industry is actually at a place where you can actually see line of sight to the subsidy equation just fundamentally changing, in a very short period of time.’

 

One corporation said that it would ‘action forward’ and asked if that ‘resonates on your radar’? PwC announced a new HR position: ‘Territory Human Capital Leader.’ When ABN Amro fired 1000 people, it said that it had acted ‘to enhance the customer experience.’ Ernst & Young trumped them comfortably. After it fired people, it said that it was ‘looking forward to strengthening our alumni network’ – with all the commanding logic of double entry accounting.

 

A director of KPMG who is a specialist in social media said that too many CEOs were not making enough use of social media like Twitter or LinkedIn. Some said it was narcissistic. (Perhaps they were put off by selfies, or just morons on trams or trains.) ‘They are missing the opportunity to not only follow leading thought leaders and experts in different fields around the world but also engage with a variety of stakeholders.’ The head of social media at a bank said: ‘This is not about having 100 likes on Facebook. It is about the business value, the value to our customers of doing this.’ Learned authors in the Harvard Business Review commented:

Old power works like a currency. It is held by a few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible and leader-driven. It downloads and it captures.

In case you thought that they were talking of the Nazis or the KKK, the authors showed us new power:

New power operates differently like a current. It is made by many. It is open participatory and peer-driven. It uploads and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most powerful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.

That sounds like sex – but this is the Harvard business School (that knocked back Warren Buffett).

 

Some bishops see themselves as middle managers. It is not therefore surprising to see one church say on a new appointment of bishops that this was a ‘radical step in our development of leaders who can shape and articulate a compelling view and who are skilled and robust enough to create spaces of safe uncertainty in which the Kingdom grows.’

 

We might segue to political bullshit. When discussing his move from Immigration to Social Services,

Scott Morrison said ‘I have no need or interest or desire to take this policy area into a combative space.’