<nettime> Get your piece of the 20th century now

["Kevin Murray" <kmurray@mira.net>]

Get your piece of the 20th century now

It is a Melbourne weekend, the last for the winter and, I guess, the
millennium. On that weekend, there are three rites of passage designed to
banish the old century, and herald the new. At 3am on Sunday, the public
transport system is officially carved up into private businesses. What was
free public space now becomes a contested ground of marketing and customer
services. 

But this isn't the most dramatic passing. Saturday afternoon, as we knew
it, has come to an end. Melbourne's winter culture has been dominated by
the action on the football ground. The suburbs fought it out as Lions,
Tigers, Demons, Dogs, Swans, Kangaroos, Bombers, Blues and Hawks. Each had
their own ground, decked in their own colours, peopled with familiar
faces. After this weekend, there will be no more 'home' games in
Melbourne. Two football grounds are closing in order to increase profits.
In their place is a new multi-purpose stadium, in which even the weather
is controlled. While the closure of Waverly in the outer suburbs attracted
a protest crowd of 72,000, the demise of Victoria Park milked the greater
volume of pathos. 

For 107 years, Collingwood had played at Victoria Park. Even when this
working class club was in poor form, visitors found it difficult to win
here, against such a fiercely parochial crowd. Yet Collingwood supporters
understood the vanity of victory. For many years, the team followed the
same script. During the home and away season, they would play superbly,
thrashing the opposition at home to rise to the top of the ladder. Despite
this good start, Collingwood would inevitably fail when it counted, at the
official finals venue, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. So predictable was
this phenomenon, that a word has evolved to describe it. As regular as
blossoming jasmine, Melbourne's spring would bring on the 'Collywobbles'.
You could rely on the 'Magpies' to flounder when it matters. It is the
story of the underdog-the story of its working class supporters,
traditionally Irish Catholic, with recent injections of rembetika Greeks. 

But not in 1999. For the second time in the club's history, Collingwood is
looking to win the wooden spoon. The team that would make this happen is
its antithesis-Brisbane. The Queensland capital had no tradition of
Australian Rules football. It was colonised by the Australia Football
League for television spectacle, to be watched by sports potatoes in the
southern states. Worse, when a football neighbour of Collingwood, Fitzroy,
fell into receivership, it was 'merged' with Brisbane, which promptly
stopped winning games. They were last year's wooden spooners, but this
year's premiership hopefuls. Worse, the man who turned their fortune
around was Lee Matthews, who had previously led Collingwood to its only
premiership in living memory. 

In front of its diehard supporters, in its last home game ever,
Collingwood lose badly. It is what they call a 'lose-lose' situation, a
'half-empty Monty'. During the course of the spectacle that follows, the
new millennium spares nothing for the old. 

Immediately after the final siren, the ground's speakers blast out the
Brisbane theme song. It is a version of the old Fitzroy theme song, which
was to the tune of the Marseillaise. In the 'original' version, the call
'Marchons!' was neatly replaced by the chorus 'Fitzroy!'. While it would
have been sensible to substitute this with the name of the new club, the
merger conditions meant that the title 'Brisbane Lions!' had to be used.
The result is un-singable, which is not really the point any more:
Brisbane supporters are more likely to go and make themselves a cup of
coffee after their win, rather than punch the air with the crowd. 

The response is understandably hostile. Moans of humiliation echo around
the crowd and the administrators cut the song out of pity. In its place,
they play a custom-made rock anthem to appease their disenfranchised
supporters.  The forced confidence of 'The Black & White Army' only
deepens the wound. 

 Week after week, day after day,
 We live and we breathe the Collingwood way.
 We are at every game, day or night,
 Waving the flag, our blood's black and white.
 Mother to daughter, father to son,
 The choice is here, the tradition lives on.
 We're dyed in the wool, completely one-eyed,
 And we say,
 We are the black and white army,
 We say 'Go pies!'
 -  in the wind or rain, win or lose,
 We're still in the members, how about you?
 They took us away from Magpie land,
 'cause no one could beat us in front of our stand,
 But we don't care, we'll go anywhere,
 And we'll say


In filtering tribal loyalties through customer relations, this mock anthem
attempts to sell the exile from Victoria Park as yet another challenge to
the underdog club-Collingwood had to leave because they were too good. If
they believe this, then they'll happily continue the fight elsewhere. 

The crowd at the far end of the ground suspects a swiftie from their
bosses.  Behind them is a tiny stand filled with less than a hundred
anonymously suited people. Whether they are sponsors or not, they are
certainly a different class. One diesel-powered voice booms out to his
mates: 'See up in there, the toffs!' And then he berates them directly,
'One good thing-they'll be able to pull this down'. Like an ancient rusty
sword, he brandishes class rivalry, 'Then you'll never know what it's like
to be in a real football ground. You'll know that all you did was take
space from the real supporters.' As he is scolding the sponsors, the club
president starts addressing the crowd. Eddie McGuire is a double-breasted
game show host who provides the people's face for the Australian
Republican Party. 

In many ways, McGuire is what many people will vote for in November, when
Australians will decide whether or not to cut ties with England and become
a republic. 'McGuire the Messiah' comes the sarcastic cry. This is too
much from the sponsors, who loosen their ties and scream back 'Shut up'.
Drowning out the president's address, the Rabelaisian stream continues
'I'll never fucking shut up'. 

Flanked by his sponsors, veiled Emirates stewardesses, McGuire leads the
crowd in the final performance of the club theme song, 'Good Old
Collingwood Forever'. Of those four words, only 'Collingwood' rings true.
As a further act of crowd appeasement, the club flag is lowered and given
military escort out to McGuire in the centre of the ground. He promises to
raise the flag on the new ground, the Melbourne Cricket Ground, in the
'new millennium'. 

Finally, to cool the crowd down, an electronic screen suspended in mid air
by a crane shows a video of the club's proudest moments. To the
accompaniment of the schmaltzy 'Con Te Partiro' by Andrea Bocelli ('Time
to say goodbye') the crowd watches slow motion footage of their heroes
rise in the air to take spectacular marks. Over the tenor's soaring voice,
we can hear the roar of the crowd from that time.  Despite the artifice,
this for me is the most moving part of the whole event. The mud at our
feet, the flushed bitter faces of the crowd, the screen glowing in mid air
and the echo of distant triumphs-it circumscribes a mythic theatre I can
imagine nowhere else. It isn't like a movie, or a rock concert, or a book.
It is like… football at your home ground. 

I remembered my own weekly ritual, the Friday morning reading group when a
few eggheads would gather together to pour over works by a few Germans.
One idea that lingered with me came from Heidegger's later writings, when
he outlines something he calls the 'fourfold', in which mortal, immortal,
earth and heaven come together to constellate a primary moment. While not
wanting to be too German about it, the demise of Victoria Park provided
for me the clearest instance of that fourfold. 

What follows is the de rigueur ritual of any Melbourne home and away
football game. The crowd races on to the grass, freshly ploughed by their
hero's boots. This time, however, it is different. Whereas usually the
crowd falls into small groups for a frenetic 'kick to kick', this time
they go straight to the sacred turf. By the time they leave the ground,
most supporters have tufts of grass in their hands. Here is privatisation
in its raw form: the public body is divvied up by its members in a
collective sparagmos. As Australians partook in the great Telstra share
grab last year, now they devour the very ground of Victoria Park. 

While the new millennium had claimed their football team, the black and
white army managed to retrieve their own bit of the 20th century. 

__________________________________________________
Kevin Murray

Forecast for Melbourne Issued at 0450 on Thursday the 2nd of September 1999
Fine apart from local morning fog. A mostly sunny day with light wind
tending northerly and afternoon bayside seabreezes. Max 21


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net