Businesses come and go. It’s the way of the world. A shop opens. It stays open (or not) pending the vagaries of commerce, of supply and demand, of profit and loss, of competition, of something called the market.
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The Footy Jumper Book, by Tim Rath and Andrew Gigacz, has been published by Sporting Nation.
The hardback book features 320 vintage Australian Rules jumpers, from the 1890s to the early 2000s.
I was lucky enough to have a jumper of mine selected for inclusion. It appears in a section called Tricks of the Trade, about how footy clubs would cut corners to maintain the longevity of a jumper. In my case, the jumper had two numbers: 31 and, underneath it, 4.
Continue readingThough never a player
Too slow, too skinny, too scared
There are three footy jumpers
I wear
Country footy writer Paul Daffey showed magnanimity in the face of dashed hopes and grace in the face of disappointment when his book The Totem Poles of Ouyen United, Travels in Country Footy missed out on winning the 2020 History Publication Award that is part of the Victorian Community History Awards. The awards were announced late October. Continue reading
Has there ever been such a curious kick as the reverse torpedo? Does it have a rightful place in footy history, or is it a furphy? Genuine kick or party trick?
JD and me
Fifty-five and sixty
Kicking a brand new footy
Behind the cemetery Continue reading
FIDA Seagulls’ Indigenous and Special Event games guernsey. Photo Courtesy of FIDA Seagulls website.
Earlier this season, only a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece called Three Jumpers. It briefly re-visited stories from some time ago about two footy jumpers that have meant a lot over the years, and then concluded with a new story, about a third jumper. Continue reading
THIS is a story of three jumpers. Football jumpers. Australian Rules football jumpers. A story of stripes and numbers, of collars and colours. This is a story of a brother, a father, a daughter. Of a widow, a greengrocer, a stranger. Continue reading
The wonderful poet Bruce Dawe died on 1 April 2020, aged 90. The poem below was one of my first pieces of published work. 1981. It has quite a few internal references – phrases adapted from titles of Bruce Dawe poems.
You could call it an illusion, a trick of the stage lighting. Or maybe it was just tiredness that created the moment.
Hamer Hall. October 2001. Paul Kelly is onstage. His grey hair, what little there seems to be of it, is close-cropped. His face appears gaunt, his eyes in shadow. He has looked like this for some years now but it is only at this moment, late in the concert, that for some reason, perhaps merely a blink of my eyes, I think the songwriter bears a passing resemblance to one of Australia’s most popular writers. Continue reading
Teacher Education, Sport, Australian Rules Football,
Every scoreboard tells a story
With the first dog chosen in the AFL Canine Draft
escape to the Vasse idyll
australianrules.com.au 