53. Sport

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about sport.

My grumble is not that it is the opium of the masses. It is, but we should not blame the medication for the disease. And I admit, I like most sport, despite finding much of the TV commentary fairly obnoxious. In fact, I am always glad for week 2 of the Australian Open tennis when all the Australians are out and the tennis can take centre stage.

And on the subject of nationalism, there was the Asian Cup. A brilliant dramatic final with Australia becoming the Asian champions of a sport we still struggle to call football. It is football all over the world, but like the Americans, we self-reference and pretend our parochial games are somehow international when we can find one or two other countries that play them.

I grew up playing soccer football when it was called “wog-ball” and only nerds played – a generation before a Samoan Australian called Cahill was the toast of the town, and blokes called Luongo and Triosi delivered an Asian Cup. But amid the nationalistic celebrations (which at least highlight our migrant heritage), did anyone remember that the Australian women’s team won the Asian Cup in 2010, the country’s first piece of soccer silverware?

But my current sports passion is bike riding and I love the festival of cycling that is the Tour Down Under. It was a great week in Adelaide, apart from Channel 9 getting out the cheque book out to buy the TV rights so that they could show the race highlights at 11pm.

Of course it was the public broadcaster, SBS, that built the audience to make it worthwhile for the commercial parasite to grab the rights, but we are used to that. Our hospital system works on the same principle with the public system doing the teaching and complex procedures, while the private hospitals skim the profitable bits.

But back on sport – I played soccer at a school that was dominated by rugby league and rode a bike a long time before lycra hit the café strip. So, I am glad the country has caught up – and it leads me to cheer all the weekend plodders who play whatever unfashionable sports they like.

But then I pick up a newspaper and see sport defined as elite, narrow and usually macho.

I am Greg, and when I am not bike riding, I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 3 February 2015

26. Australia Day

Hi. I am Greg and it should come as no surprise that I want to grumble about Australia Day. I grumbled about Christmas and New Year’s Day, so why wouldn’t I grumble about national Flag-Waving Day?

Public holidays and long weekends are good things, but could we please commemorate something decent, rather than religious celebrations, a horse race, two military invasions and a foreign monarch’s pretend birthday?

Labour day in October is a start, but wouldn’t it be good if we had public holidays to celebrate our unique environment, perhaps a volunteers’ day holiday, or international human rights day, and maybe a multicultural celebration. And is it too much to ask for Australia Day to be on a day that doesn’t require a re-writing of history?

Quite apart from the obvious problem of celebrating the invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal people, the day is not the anniversary of the founding of the Australian state or nation. Australia came into being in 1901, not in 1788 when a failed “tough on crime” policy put a penal colony in one small corner of our continent. And that colony was essentially a military dictatorship, so we are not talking about a great moment of Australian democracy.

It’s tricky though. Most countries’ national days mark an event of liberation from colonial rule (not its imposition), but there is no clear liberation event for Australia. It might be the advent of responsible (though not democratic) government in the 1850s, or of federation which brought about an “Australian” state. But the laws of the British parliament still applied up until 1932, and 7 years later our Prime Minister still appeared to believe that Britain declared war on our behalf. And it was only in the 1980s that the highest court in Australian law was actually an Australian court.

Of course we still have another country’s monarch as our queen, a foreign logo in the corner of our flag, and the future of Holden and Ford workers is determined in overseas Board Rooms. So perhaps we still await a definitive Australia Day. Or maybe in an era of globalisation it is not really that relevant. Or possibly nationalism was a bad and bloody idea in the first place and we would be better focusing on community rather than country, and people rather than states. Hmmm, there’s a thought.

I am Greg, and I am grumbling.



This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 28 January 2014