“When I die, will you wear a black armband?” Helen Garner asks her footballer grandson. “Yes,” he replies, unselfconsciously declaring both his love and his acceptance that she will die. They are watching a first-grade AFL game on TV and a player is wearing two black armbands. Garner surmises that two of his grandparents have died.
An acceptance of mortality is at the heart of the writer’s latest book, The Season, which she modestly tells friends is “a nana’s book about footie.” In various ways over the decades she has been documenting her own life, from her share-house days as a single mother in her first novel Monkey Grip to the diaries that record her marriages and their failures. The title of the last of these, How to End a Story, might have seemed like a signing off, but now she returns to consider her grandson’s season in an under-sixteen Australian rules football team. “I’ve got no work,” she tells him. “I’m burnt out. I don’t know what to do with myself. I need something to write about.”
Anyone who’s faced the boredom and discomfort of regular sports training supervision, week after week, over a long winter, will consider this unpromising material. Garner has set herself the challenge of making something interesting from the everyday routines of suburban life. No murders, no love affairs, no betrayals. She calls on all her powers of observation, her eye for telling detail, her sense of the poetry of the moment to bring this ordinariness to life.
We are with her as she perches on the back of a seat (to get a better view of the training), delineating each of the boys on the team, attending to the coach as he urges them on, noticing the women chatting as they jog by, listening to the parents who turn up to comment on their sons’ progress. From February to August she charts the changing skies as the evenings grow darker and eventually, after Easter, the park lights come on.
Through it all she asks dumb questions of Ambrose and his coach. Can she really not know what a “torp” is? (Even I knew that.) A friend who’s attended every Essendon game since he was eleven explains the sub rule. The players in her family describe the joys of tackling — how satisfying it is to hurt your opponent with no hard feelings. Ambrose opens up about how he needs to let his aggression out; he can kick goals but he needs the satisfaction of engagement with the other team to release his anger.
This is Garner’s art: leading people to tell her things that are important to them, and finding them important too. In this way, gems of wisdom are passed on: “A kicking team will beat a handball team,” “Knot your boots on the side,” “Face it, it’s gonna hurt for a whole season.” There are small dramas within the team, a brawl at a match, reprimands for bad behaviour and a key player’s heroic return from Darwin for the grand final.
Garner acknowledges the risk of romanticising these boys as they are initiated into manhood through the rough and tumble of football. An epigraph from Camille Paglia exalting the warrior ethic is matched by the earthy advice, “don’t turn your back on the play.” Yet it is the romance of football that has turned her into a signed-up supporter. After the failure of her last marriage and her return to Melbourne, she watched a documentary about the Footscray team in which the team captain refused to join a richer club after receiving a letter from a boy begging him to stay and enclosing fifty cents. Garner immediately joined the club.
She collects stories of star players caring for each other, being personable in airline queues and helping the injured from other teams from the field. Virgil and Homer might have recognised “their manly tenderness to the wounded.” Then she punctures the mood by noting the Collingwood crowd booing the Swans’s Buddy Franklin from the field: “Franklin, a hero of the game, a dancing god of the game, in his last season.” This is the thoughtless crowd, but Garner insists that the players themselves can be noble, playing honourable matches that make her admire them “without reservation.”
Bruce Dawe once mocked Melbourne football’s religious nature in his poem “Life Cycle,” but Garner is no mocker. She’s ready to take these devotions seriously, collecting those moments of faithfulness and loyalty when individuals give themselves to rituals in support of the game. At one point she switches channels to compare the coronation of Charles III with a lively football match on television: “The poor old king, pale and dry-skinned, already wearied by life, his hands puffy and stiff, his strange silver-buckled shoes, the Supertunica, the colossal, ridiculous crown being jiggled and screwed into position on his head.” With an an honesty forbidden to television commentators at the time, Garner puts into words the strange fragility of this ritual.
Garner listens so well to the football experts on television and radio that she might well have a future adding insights to their comments on play. She enjoys the comedy of their mixed metaphors and allows Ambie to deflate the seriousness of her project with his artless comments on football hairstyles and clues about how to stop the tomato leaking into your sandwich bread. Yet the heroic elements here are not undermined by references to homely activities like feeding the chooks and making zucchini soup, because the book is a celebration of community life. These middle-class people from the suburbs care about their children and the world they live in.
Through it all Garner notes her own physical decline, her inability to pick out her grandson in a moving game, the loss of status that leaves her in the back seat of the car with the dog where her failing hearing means she can’t hear the front-seat conversation. But it is not just nanas who fade away to invisibility. With their injuries and concussions and retirement in their thirties, all the great players face decline. Part of the appeal of the game is grown men’s nostalgia for their own glorious football youths, when they learnt about the inevitability of pain. The Season reminds us all, briefly caught up in our own season, that there are beginnings as well as ends.
I have never lived in Victoria and this book didn’t make me feel any less alien to Melbourne and its tribes, but it has given me a little more tolerance and an understanding that football offers its own life lessons. Other grandparents tell me they have cried reading it. I recommend the Audible version where Garner reads it in a no-nonsense voice. At times I laughed out loud. •
The Season
By Helen Garner | Text Publishing | $36.99 | 208 pages
