It seems absurd that the lesser football codes - the imported football codes - persist in starting each season by arguing their supremacy on the national sporting stage.
As John Howard memorably stated on the day the CFMEU pulled down all the bollards outside Parliament House and smashed up the souvenir shop, it is both ugly, and un-Australian.
The origins of our one true national code, the great game of Australian Rules Football, remain the subject of conjecture. Some argue that it was invented by a couple of black guys kicking the shit out of a possum. Others argue it evolved naturally when the Aborigines rejected rugby on the grounds that none of them were stockbrokers, rejected league on the basis that they already had enough mindlessly violent initiation rites in their culture, rejected soccer because they didn’t want to spend another 40,000 years dreaming that someone might actually score a goal.
Its origins matter not. All that matters is that Aussie Rules is the one game that transcends class, race and ethnicity. As such it is the true national game - an egalitarian game for all Australians.
Rugby is essentially a form of corporate networking conducted in a sporting stadium. It’s for this that nobody knows the rules, or cares, because they’re too busy necking Stellas and commenting that the sushi is particularly good, and chatting about Ian Verrender’s column about the restructure of Telstra’s broadband division. There is no outer at the union, and no actual fans, just a series of boxes the occupants of which look like a Henry Bucks fashion shoot. It might not be much of a game, but it serves a vital role in giving grown men who first met in the showers at Kings or Joeys a chance to catch up and exchange business cards in a more clothed setting. I know that it is a working man’s sport in other countries but here it’s a toffs’ pursuit and the very antithesis of Australian values.
And what to say about league? Sure, the AFL has had one or two off-field dramas, but it’s Rugby League which week in week out conducts itself like the sporting wing of the Department of Community Services. In another of his trademark sprays Wyong intellectual Luke McIlveen has burst into print celebrating the sheer joy of seeing one man who is the size of a sherman tank run at speed into another man who likes like a Cocos-Keeling Islander crossed with a two-door Westinghouse refrigerator. If this is a sport surely it could be simplified by getting rid of the ball and holding it a more linear setting, like the back alleyway behind an Elizabeth St pub, where its true charm of bone-crushing violence could best be displayed without the taxing distraction of keeping score.
It might sound less than inclusive, it might even sound arrogant, but there is only one code in Australia which unites the dandy and the prole, the dinki-di and the recient emigre, the spooner and the bogan. There is only one code, to quote that great Fosters ad from the Olympics, which unites the Wongs, the Smiths and the Da Costis, and its name is Aussie Rules.
Finally, can I say that I’m becoming tired of the cheap jibes from the league-loving likes of Mcilveen that loving AFL is a form of homoeroticism. Although I will concede that if I was forced at gunpoint to choose between a night of manly romance with Willy Mason, or dinner for two with James Hird, I know which choice I would make. It’s for this reason that the ladies like Aussie Rules too. Truly a game for all of us.
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