The Footy Show

In the 1960s and ‘70s, when I was growing up in Tasmania, sport and art were like two neighbours who never spoke and took care not to be seen together in public. With this in mind, I once wrote that Tasmanian footballer Brent Crosswell “was an athlete and an intellectual at a time when Australian culture didn’t permit you to be both. An outsider among footballers and a footballer among outsiders, Crosswell stood alone at the centre of Australian society”. With his solitary gaze and natural eloquence, Crosswell is also one of the best writers the game has had. 

Art and sport have a loose but abiding relationship. Each sport has its own aesthetic. Sport has folklore and folklore has art. Sport is also like art in that it aspires to ultimate expressions of self – as Raygun demonstrated at the Paris Olympics, this puts it one short step away from the theatre of the absurd and high comedy.

The first place I found myself vaguely at home in relation to all these issues was the (Tas) Uni footy club. I played for the Fourths, our coach was Pete Hay. He published my first book. (How good a coach was he? He was that good). We had a lot of fun. I subscribe to Plato’s view that you can learn more in an hour of play with someone than you can in a year of conversation. I started writing for the other Uni players about games we played and thereby found my first audience other than an older brother. 

I got to Melbourne in 1985 and recall seeing a postcard of three big-name Collingwood players grimly running a lap at Victoria Park while in the grandstand a little man with a big moustache determinedly looks away. The caption read: Neitzsche denies the existence of Collingwood. I saw that and thought I’m home.

Melbourne has a great street culture, one in which books, music, footy and politics can co-exist in a single conversation that is capable of transcending class, religion and gender. If you want a quick insight into the formative character of the Collingwood Football Club, check out John Brack’s 1953 painting “Three of the Players”. Sidney Nolan approximated the physical act of painting, of addressing a blank canvas, to a player in a football match hovering outside a pack, waiting for the moment to “go in”. 

There is a wealth of Indigenous footy art. Both parents of Essendon’s great Aboriginal player Michael Long were stolen. He used art and the game of Australian football as a way of visiting places he’d never been. I bought his painting “Football In My Mother’s Country” – a bush setting at dusk, the players little black stick figures, the ball an orange speck. The goalposts are trees.

Not everyone speaks footy, but a remarkable number do and it amounts to a whole other way of talking to people. I well remember Paul Kelly saying to me during a game at Waverley Park in the 1990s that he privately wished they’d reintroduce the drop kick. He was quite earnest about it. He proposed making it compulsory for full backs to use drop kicks when kicking in after points.  

That says much about Paul Kelly. More than any other kick, the drop kick had to be a co-ordinated marriage of timing and force. Seeing one done well was like witnessing a classical virtue amid the chaos and sometimes brutal reality of a game of football. 

Most of the artists I’ve met over the years were into footy.  Why? Because it’s a great game. Like jazz, it combines an uninhibited sense of play with a dynamic idea of form. Don’t believe what I say? Watch Cyril Rioli…. 

I always say being a footy writer in Melbourne was like being a jazzman in New Orleans; I just loved playing along. The best time in Melbourne is finals time. It’s like a pagan festival; old suburbs like Richmond and South Melbourne, their teams once more to the fore, burst into life like flowerbeds. Part of finals time was the Footy Art Show at the Artists’ Garden in Fitzroy,  an annual exhibition of art animated by the game. Be the work naïve or sophisticated, all that was expected of the artists was that they be sincere. 

So yes, in conclusion, I want to congratulate the Bett Gallery for putting on what, to my knowledge, is Tassie’s second ever footy art show (Dick Bett staged the first in the 1980s). Crowd noise, please.

- Martin Flanagan, 2024