I hear a burst of cleats on the concrete behind me and turn in time to see the U16s emerge from the rooms and stride towards the ground. Our boys. My God, they are men, in their vertical stripes and white shorts, even the little skinny ones are men: the groupness of them is what makes them men, moving with purpose in a thick bloc. Why do I feel like crying?
What are these tears? What do they mean?
I always knew, without trying to articulate it, that footy goes very deep in people, particularly in men; that it draws to the surface and makes unshameful a whole well of otherwise inaccessible emotion.
What I didn’t know, late in the summer of 2023, was that I too contained such a well.
I was 81. I was finished as a writer – bored, burnt-out, a shell, too deaf to sit through a trial and too lazy to invent a story, let alone write a novel. My memory was failing. I had glaucoma, my joints ached, I’d lost three inches in height. I couldn’t ride my bike or climb on a chair to reach the top bookshelf in case I fell and fractured my osteoporotic skeleton. Whenever an editor tried to commission a piece of work from me, I would think, “I can’t be bothered”.
I volunteered in my idleness to drive my youngest grandson to twice-weekly U16s Aussie rules football training. I would drop him off and duly go straight home. But one warm February evening, watching this recently bulked-up creature jog away to his teammates on the sun-parched oval, I heard a little whisper inside me: you won’t be here much longer. Any minute now he’ll be fully a man, and you’ll be dead. Wake up, old girl. There might be something here for you.
Turns out there was.
I got myself a brand-new notebook and some nice sharp pencils. I didn’t ask the club for permission: I didn’t want them to expect anything of me, in case I really was past it. Nor did I want to interview anyone, or do any research. I just turned up, ignorant and curious, and leaned on the boundary rail. I watched and listened. And the world of footy opened out before me.
The boys, all of them, whether I remembered their names or not (I didn’t), whether or not they gave me the most basic acknowledgment of my presence (they didn’t), repaid my curiosity in full. The spectacle of their training, which I loved even more than their matches, was a revelation to me, a source of strange bliss, like watching an orchestra rehearsing. I couldn’t wait to get there.
It soon dawned on me that if I was writing about boys I should write about men as well. My third marriage had miserably gone belly-up in 1998. My wounds healed. I became a hands-on grandmother and learned about that kind of love. Once sex and romance were out of the picture, I remembered that I had always been good at friendships with men. I like them. They can be wonderful company, they’re funny and irreverent and verbally playful, and the best of them have serious conversational stamina.
Many people, when I told them I was interested in my grandson’s suburban footy, laughed and warned me against the players’ mad fathers who browbeat their sons and brawl and abuse the umpires and ruin everything for everybody. But I found the opposite to be the case. The handful of footy dads who regularly came to training (the mums, those fabulously efficient and devoted stalwarts of the team, being at home at that hour with younger kids) didn’t despise me for asking dumb questions. They would answer clearly and kindly. They were keen fathers, founts of good sense and hilarity.
Maybe, I thought, now that my attention to them had matured into a cheerful comradeliness, men would reveal themselves to me more fully, in their world of passionate sporting loyalties and technical expertise. So I began to keep a record, from within football and from way outside it, of scenes and incidents I witnessed in private and in public places, of things I noticed men saying and doing, or holding back from saying and doing. When the season ended and I started to sort these fragments and sprinkle them through the text, I found a wonderful richness there – generosity, stoicism, faithfulness; rage, violence and splendid self-command; mysterious rituals that worked; fairness, anxiety, bravery, sudden openness; laughter, grief and sometimes tears.
Alongside my grandson’s team, of course, ran the season of the AFL side that my family follows, the Western Bulldogs. It was not a successful year for us, and from this fact flowed to me a great deal of understanding of the purpose and meaning of football. I found I was able to incorporate more profoundly into my imagination things I had read in mighty poems about war, in Homer’s Iliad, and Virgil’s Aeneid – human gestures and postures and behaviours which, rather than being “lost in antiquity”, are at work so deeply in our psyches that we recognise them at once, and are moved, comforted and heartened by them, when we see them spontaneously enacted in the games that we know and love and need.
Dark changes have been surging through the world since I finished this book. I didn’t set out to defy Donald Trump and his grotesque strongman persona, but I hope this story might stand as a challenge to the abyss he represents, an antidote to ugliness, stupidity and arrogance. I want it to be a hymn to the decency of life as we live it in our suburbs, a salute to the Flemington Colts U16s of the 2023 season, and a song of praise for the joy they gave us.
The Season by Helen Garner is out in Australia on 26 November ($34.99, Text Publishing)
