Memory is a funny thing. What we choose to remember probably says more about us than anything else. I’m useless with names for example which is unfortunate as I’m also useless at bluffing. So I’ve met people in the street that I’ve known for years and can’t for the life of me remember what they are called. But instead of coming up with a story about a bang on my head that has suddenly made me amnesic or how I’m really my twin brother and I believe the person in front of me is my sibling’s friend, I mumble a few words and stumble on.
For reasons I’ll come to, this week I tried to remember a school class from years ago. It was in 1980 I think and the school had reluctantly decided to teach us Civics. I say reluctantly because my school cared only for academic achievement and Civics wasn’t on the State exam system in those days. In hindsight it seems strange that a country so obsessed with its History and national pride should care so little about teaching its kids about modern Irish life. I guess like its people, it prefers to live in the past. In the 1980’s our past was a glamorous place of heroes and princes. Our present was a grey and rain-sodden tale of strikes and emigration boats.
I can remember everything about that first Civics class except the name of the teacher. Maybe I’m just fascinated about what she was talking about or maybe she was the first female I had a crush on. Only Freud will know. The subject that day was national cultural events. Like most teachers, instead of telling us things, she asked questions and tried to tease the answer out of us. This took hours and I often wondered why she didn’t just tell us the answers in the first place.
So for forty minutes we struggled to name Ireland’s annual cultural events. Christmas didn’t count apparently because it wasn’t uniquely Irish. After much huffing and puffing, Snotser McKeown mentioned St Patricks Day. It was the first thing Snotser had said all year, apart from asking for the loan of a tissue (a loan I might point out that nobody ever wanted to be repaid). Those of us in the smart row were upbraided by Snotser beating us to the teacher’s approval, so we argued fiercely that St Patrick’s Day wasn’t uniquely Irish either. Even in those days, it was clearly an event for yanks and other plastic paddies. But she wasn’t having any of it and wrote it on the board were it stood naked and alone for the rest of the class. As the bell was ringing for lunch, she lost her patience and screamed “what about the bloody All-Ireland Final”. We looked at each other with surprise and thought, “Isn’t that just a football match”?
I thought of that class this week because the AFL Grand Final was on in Melbourne and it made me compare it to Ireland’s premier sporting event. And I’m sad to say that in comparison to the Aussie Rule’s final, the All-Ireland final is just a football match. Over here, it’s a week long activity that starts with the semi-finals. That itself comes after two weeks of finals activity which works up the passion of supporters. On the Monday of Grand Final week you have the Brownlow medal ceremony, which is an opportunity for player’s wives and girlfriends to display cleavage and pearly white teeth while supporting a $3,000 dress with the aid of double-sided sticky tape. They also hand out a medal to the player voted best and fairest by the competition’s umpires. Which is a bit like asking the Police to name the country’s best burglar.
The rest of the week is dominated by a carnival at Federation Square, where you can test your marking skills by leaping onto the back of a mannequin dressed as a Collingwood player and propelling yourself towards a hanging ball. Most people just take the opportunity to kick the pretend Collingwood dummy, which is how it should be. All right thinking people hate Collingwood after all.
By Friday, excitement is building up in the City as the media goes into overdrive. The City itself hosts a parade on this day, featuring all the players from both finalists. This being Australia, they are transported along the parade route in the back of Utes. Special chairs are placed in the open back of each vehicle and the players sit in pairs and wave regally to the crowd, like some Indian Viceroy and his wife aboard a ceremonial elephant.
If you’re not part of the lucky 100,000 people to procure a ticket, then the Saturday of the match itself is traditionally spent at a barbeque. Thousands of these were held across Victoria last weekend as the first warm day of spring came to join the party. I ventured into the heart of the Eastern suburbs for mine, to a land of white picket fences, detached bungalows and mighty front and back gardens. This facilitates the barbeque itself but also the obligatory half time kick about. This is a blokes only affair and allows middle aged Australian men to relive some lost childhood. To my amazement, I found that I was able to skilfully kick their odd shaped football, although I think the 6 bottles of beer I’d consumed in the first half helped.
The game itself wasn’t a classic but at least the underdog (Hawthorne) won. Geelong have dominated footy for the last two years but on this occasion they froze like a rabbit in headlights.
On Monday morning, there were a lot of happy and hungover Hawthorne fans at work. And the rest of the staff were just happy that Melbourne finally had a winner in the game it invented after eight barren years. If cultural events are measured by the amount of interest that ordinary men, women and children display, then the Grand Final is up there with the best of them. I couldn’t find one person in Melbourne that had no interest in it. They don’t need Civics lessons here to tell them what to be proud of.
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