Sport

Almost thirty years on, in a post-Samaranch age, when the wealthy Olympic movement mimics the United Nations in world affairs, the 1980 Moscow Games resemble prehistory, especially for Australian athletes, officials and spectators still revering 2000 Sydney successes. Yet as Lisa Forrest recounts, the Moscow boycott shredded the traditional views of Australian sports people, ensured national sport would become more politicised, and produced shameful behaviour all round.

Before and soon after Federation, Australia established itself as a sporting nation. Australia enjoyed good weather, with space for play. Despite the hardships of these times, youngsters, especially boys, found time to indulge in a wide range of sports. Two boys in particular, one the son of a boat builder/operator in Sydney, the other an East Maitland farm boy, became legendary figures in their chosen sports. The first was Henry Herbert (‘Dally’) Messenger, an all-round athlete and champion rugby player who turned away from the amateur rugby union and became a professional. Its best player, Messenger was a mainstay of the ‘new’ game, rugby league, in the lead-up to World War I. The second was the boxer Les Darcy, who, fighting mainly as a light heavyweight, won a series of titles in Australia prior to and during the war.

IBy the Balls opens in the 1950s, when young Laszlo Urge and his family were forced to leave Stalinist Hungary and head to Australia. Laszlo was shocked to find his new country to be a ‘dry and colourless’ place where soccer (which he refers to as ‘football’) was unpopular. However, this situation was to change. In the following decades, Laszlo became ‘Les Murray’, a popular television sports commentator who has publicly championed his favourite game.

Shane Warne is one of the greatest bowlers of all time, if not the greatest. Highly competitive and aggressive, he is one of the main factors in Australia’s prolonged dominance in world cricket. He has been involved in a series of controversies, on and off the field. He has been fined for sledging and over-aggressive appealing; and for providing, along with Mark Waugh, information to a bookie (something they both readily admitted, which the Australian Cricket Board tried to cover up). In 2003 he received a one-year ban for taking a banned substance, diuretic tablets, intended, he claimed (and this is not disputed by Barry), to help him lose weight. Off the field, like many leading sporting personalities, he is a serial womaniser

Albert Thurgood, whose first season playing for Essendon in 1892 was described by the Leader as ‘in every way phenomenal’, was simply the ‘Brighton junior Thurgood’ when Essendon selected him for the first game of that season, though his all-round athletic prowess at Brighton Grammar School had already marked him as a possible ‘prize’ recruit. Though St Kilda was his nearest club, and though, as Lionel Frost recounts, St Kilda actually selected him for a game in 1891 ‘in the hope that he would join them’, he opted for Essendon, a decision which moved several other clubs to wonder if Essendon had organised a financial inducement. Plus ça change.

Gideon Haigh likes cricket, literature and history, and his writings on cricket are accordingly shrewd, learned and illuminating. He writes particularly well of Jack Gregory and of George Headley. Gregory was the embodiment of the Anzac legend: tall, bronzed, blue-eyed, an artilleryman in the Great War. He played for an AIF eleven in England after the war, took dazzling close catches, demolished Cambridge University with ferocious fast bowling and went on to test match triumphs with Australia against Eng-land in the 1920s. Injuries that so often cut down bowlers of explosive pace curtailed his career. Headley, on the other hand, was a batsman in the early West Indian sides, a black man in teams of mixed race captained always by whites, representing a divided nation of particularist energies. Haigh writes with great understanding of the immense difficulty of maintaining form, as Headley did, in a team that always lost.

The Melbourne Cricket Ground was established on its present site in 1853. The first cricket match was played there the following year. It was a busy time in the early life of Melbourne: the University of Melbourne, the State Library of Victoria, the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Society and The Age newspaper were all founded at this time. At a recent social gathering in Melbourne, someone asked which of these institutions was the most important and influential. Nobody hesitated in reply: it was the MCG, of course.

Australian football has lost its magic, a unique quality existing in the 1950s, and even as late as the 1970s. It derived from the fixed positions that players adopted and from their physical diversity. In their competing forms, they became metaphysical constructs – good versus evil, beauty versus ugliness, benign innocence versus malevolent experience – constructs limited only by the human imagination ...

Paris has gone crazy.’ There are people everywhere; ‘players and officials have been arriving like migrating birds’. The German team – including Hermann Hesse, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius,Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger ...

Tara Brabazon’s Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects – including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner – Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie Fight Club, Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that. However, for a book that celebrates the brazenness of feminism, why not include the F word in the title? In fact, the lameness of the title’s pun turns out to be characteristic of a deeper identity crisis. While Brabazon argues for a non-populist feminism, a tough and gritty brave new world of feminist critique, the style and packaging, and sometimes the substance, of her book seem to be trying hard to reach a market that is both ‘young’ and ‘popular’. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this market, but it contradicts Brabazon’s wider project of taking us somewhere other than feminist readings of popular culture that dumb down many of feminism’s most critical insights.