Les Murray on Laszlo Urge, and non-linear academic discovery

This is something I started last year but never got around to finishing. Seeing as how Les Murray the soccer pundit passed away this week, and seeing as how South has a week off, it's about time I fished it from the depths of my drafts folder, finished it off, and got it out of the way. I liked what was going on in this a lot more back then than I do now. A more useful version will hopefully end up buried in my thesis' literature review in due time.

This is the story of both the sometimes tedious and arcane nature of academic research, but it's also a story about the meeting of two parts of Australian culture that have little do with one another. If, as the popular notion seems to suggest, that sport and the arts in Australia are inherently irreconcilable pursuits, whose meetings are at best rare and awkward, then perhaps nothing quite encapsulates that cultural schism quite like the existence of Australia's two Les Murrays.

For perhaps most of Australia, even that which is not particularly enamoured with soccer, Les Murray remains the better known of the two Les Murrays. As the face and voice of Australian soccer, and by extension also the face and voice of SBS and a certain strain of the Australian multicultural experience, Murray's fame exists outside of the narrow trench of Australian soccer; this is best typified by the Australian public's familiarity with that strange, untraceable accent, which famously prompted TISM to ask 'What Nationality is Les Murray?' - a song which would not have worked quite so well had people had no idea who Les Murray the soccer pundit was.

Then there is the 'other' Les Murray, often lauded as Australia's greatest living poet and among the finest living poets writing in the English language, but whose work most Australian have probably only come into contact with by accident and most recently twenty years ago (unless they teach poetry in schools; do they still do that?) as the co-author of John Howard's preamble to the Australian Constitution which was attached to the republic referendum. For a minority of Australians, those who might be classed as too educated for their own good to care too much about sport and popular culture, as the poetry editor for the right wing literary and cultural magazine Quadrant, Les Murray the poet is a figurehead of one of the two sides waging perpetual cultural wars against each other.

So how is it that these two Les Murrays would have anything to do with each other? Many years ago while I was still an undergraduate, I seem to recall - though this could just be me inventing a myth of my own - that some now indistinguishable person told me, probably somewhere in the imaginatively named Building 8 at Victoria University's St Albans campus, that Les Murray the poet had written a poem about Les Murray the soccer pundit. Not knowing where to start looking for it, and not having much help from either the person who must (or may?) have mentioned it, the notion of trying to find the poem died quickly. This was before I had even decided that my honours thesis let alone doctoral thesis work would focus on soccer and its relationship to Australian literature; before, too, my ending up teaching some of Les Murray the poet's works in the Australian Literature unit that we teach to second and third year students at Victoria University.

After laying dormant for so many years, the re-ermergence of this apocryphal poem owes as much to the accidental happenings one experiences when travels Melbourne in the style of a flâneur, as it does to the inner suburbs of Melbourne still having enough bricks and mortar bookshops so that the act of finding one is less a freak accident than a statistical probability.

After meeting with my mate Chris Egan in the city, and conducting another piece of historical detective work at ACMI, we decided to head towards Lygon Street for lunch. Taking the tram up there from Federation Square, we - probably mostly me - had stopped paying attention to where we should have gotten off, went several stops further up Lygon Street than we had intended, and then kept walking in the opposite direction to where we were supposed to be going. By a happy meeting of statistical probabilities, we ended up outside Red Wheelbarrow Books, a small independent bookshop. While we could have turned around and just caught the next tram back, there in the front window were an assortment of books by the anarchist poet Pi O, so of course I decided to enter the store.

After discussing Pi O with the store's proprietor and being offered a returned/secondhand copy of one of Pi O's Selected Works for $15 (as opposed to $35 for a new copy), we somehow moved on to discussing my current doctoral work on Australian soccer and literature; the chance to discuss one's thesis work with interested parties who happen to be people other than one's supervisors being an opportunity few PhD students can afford to miss. The catalyst for this was I suppose my making a remark on Pi O's lack of interest in sport, especially soccer, despite his extensive work covering (whether incidentally or not) the lives and language of migrant Europeans during the 1970s and 80s.

Indeed, one couldn't help but note the sole poem where Pi O does discuss soccer, a piece called 'Soccor', which still barely manages to discuss the topic of soccer at all. From there the proprietor of the bookshop managed to make a couple of suggestions about other literary Australian soccer texts, including Peter Goldsworthy's Keep it Simple, Stupid, which I was already well aware of, but he then recalled that Les Murray the poet had written a poem about Les Murray the soccer pundit.That he could recall no further details of its content, title, year etc was now far less of an issue than it would have been in the past. For nearly a decade on, I was now armed with the resources of the AustLit database and duly went off to search for the database entry on Les Murray the soccer pundit, and works which were about him.

Alas, there were no poems listed as being about Les Murray the soccer pundit. What to do? After noting my disappointment on Twitter that the existence of this poem may have merely been an urban myth - a poem by one Les Murray on the other Les Murray, surely it was too good to be true - someone working diligently and anonymously behind the scenes at AustLit came to the rescue.

@PaulMavroudis @eenfish Found it! 'The Sports Machine (for Lazlo Urge of SBS TV)'.https://t.co/HziNAHlW0d

— AustLit (@AustLit) May 15, 2016

As it turned out, according to people at AustLit the poem had never been published either in a literary journal nor in a collection of work by Murray, but rather in one of the supplements of the Weekend Australian in October 1991. So, after a detour to a university bake sale, it was off to the State Library of Victoria to search through the microfilm, sifting through generic right-wing commentary and classified jobs for professionals, until there it was - in all of its if not quite unfortunate mediocrity, then its being something quite different to what I'd expected.

One didn't expect one of Murray the poet's more stunning efforts, but even so, I could not help but be underwhelmed by the poem's style as well as its content. To begin with, even a quick overview reveals that the poem is not about Les Murray the soccer pundit at all, but merely dedicated to him - and even then, not to Les Murray the soccer pundit, but to Laszlo Ürge, the identity the soccer pundit had left behind at the start of his television career.

Without knowing of the existence of any possible prior interactions between the two Murrays, the motivation for Murray the poet writing this poem and dedicating it to Murray the soccer pundit is hard to fathom. At the end of the poem, Murray the poet affirms that 'I'm Les Murray', but it is hard to read between the lines of whether this signing off is meant to be playful and linked to the opening gambit in the dedication itself, or whether it is instead some sort of pointed attempt at reclaiming the rights to the Les Murray name - and if so, what would be the nature of that resentment?

The poem then seeks to describe, in the semi-abstract, various sports played by Australians - among them rugby union and league, Australian Rules, soccer and basketball - but with a kind of dismissive attitude. These sports seem to Murray to be fueled by an anger and relentless trudging and sense of aimless, furious activity; worse still are those who aren't participants, but who live vicariously through the athletes making those exertions. In that sense the poem's tone is entirely consistent with Murray's oeuvre so far as I'm familiar with it - an innate distrust of modernity, and also of the speed and lack of space for thought and contemplation that is attached to that notion of modernity.

It is strange then that as an Australian bush nationalist of sorts, that one of Murray's preferred sports at the specific time of this poem's publication is not cricket, especially as it may manifest itself in those idyllic John Harms-ian forms played in the Australian bush, but instead what he calls American cricket - in other words, baseball. This is strange in the context of Murray's politics because as Michael Manley has noted, whatever elements of idleness, rest, anticipation and craft are shared by cricket and baseball, cricket in its purest essence is an agrarian and time-less game, while baseball was moulded very early on into becoming an essential part of the ordered and regimented cycle of life in the modern industrial north of the USA.

Strange also are Murray's interpretations of those sports, especially the various football codes enjoyed by Australians. Here Murray plays the accidental historian, placing the rugby codes first in order of genealogy but re-interpreting in a sense the origin myths of union and league, and therefore rugby as a whole itself; while one can perhaps sense Murray vaguely alluding to the class split which saw league split off from union, at no point does Murray place rugby union's origins in the English public school system, nor allude to the inherent link between industrialisation and the professionalism of rugby league. Instead we have 'poachers in blue', who one supposes may be members of the upper classes or the military, playing for a time at least either with or alongside - it's not clear to me which Murray deigns to mean - 'farmers in brown'.

The depiction of Australian Rules in this poem is typical of the generic response someone from the northern states may make of the game - the comical appearance of the players in their sleeveless shirts and tight shorts jumping on top of each other, and the near incomprehensibility of the large crowds who are there to watch them. Murray's familiar dislike of crowds and fear of their encroachment on his personal space gets doubled down in the depiction of soccer - the implied barbarity of the kicking of heads among caged foreigners, with little definition of who is being separated from whom. Aside from this however, Murray the poet offers little more on soccer than this scene of stylised allegorical violence and the crowds of foreigners who watch the game - an unusual step to take when dedicating a poem to a soccer man.

For the rest, basketball gets short shrift, as does tennis and the grunting efforts of its players. But the point seems to be that those watching either in person or drowsily watching on a TV screen, combined with the furious exertions of the players, are suffering form a kind of madness. For Murray, for whom crowds are a form of madness in their own right, the sporting machine is not a benign illness. It's almost as if Murray sees modern professional sport - such as it was in 1991, and goodness knows it's only gotten worse - as a corruption of both work and play. the idea being that play should be left alone, untainted by commercial interests, for when play is turned into work, work too loses its own nobility. Modern sport and professional athletes begin to less resemble people participating in a vocation or ritual attuned to the rhythms of nature, becoming instead automatons.

The Late Report - Hume City 3 South Melbourne 2

This isn't going to be much of a match review, even by my standards.

There's only so many times you can give up two goal headstarts and expect to get the chocolates at the end of the match. Defensively, for whatever reason, we are a mess at the moment. Is it all due to the absence of Alan Kearney? Some may like to think so, but we'll have to wait until he comes back to get a clearer picture on that.

Going forward, at least in the first half, we weren't much better. What to several people looked like an obviously not ready yet Trent Rixon was selected to start ahead of Renco Van Eeken. Van Eeken apparently was suffering from the ill effects of last week's game, but still managed to come off the bench.

Meanwhile the game plan we had constructed for this season was thrown out the window, with long ball after long ball being sent forward. What was surprising about this is that in its own cackheaded way it worked - well, one time at least, when Rixon got what looked like the most un VPL-like of penalties. Take what you can get and all that. Still, we managed to get it back to 2-2, and looked the more likely side to score a winner, but that defensive frailty stung us again.

Some of the substitutions and tactical decisions seemed strange. I still don't get why Joe Keenan, who has no right foot, is being played on the right hand side. Also, why was Rhys Meredith taken off? He was the one troubling Hume the most out of any of our players. Why at 3-2 down did we bring on Tom Matthews, a defender? Well, at least we're scoring a few goals this season, which is a lot more entertaining than whatever we were trying to do last year. Are we in the A-League yet?

Steve From Broady's Under 21s report
On Sunday the 19th of May South Melbourne's under 21s took on Hume City at Broadmeadows Valley Park. South were coming of a solid 2-0 win over last season's champions Richmond. The game started off very sloppy with both teams consistently turning over the football. South pushed forward in the 23rd minute and earned a free kick just outside the penalty area. Cartanos stepped up and curled it around the wall and into the top corner to give south a 1-0 lead half way through the first half.

South hung on for nearly the rest of the first half but controversially the ref played seven minutes of injury time in a half that had no injuries at all. Hume managed to equalise in the 51st minute of the first half with a classic counter attack that ripped through the heart of the South defence. 1-1 it was when the lads headed into the sheds at half time.

Hume come out in the second half meaning business, putting South under pressure from the get go and 10 minutes into the second half South's defence was breached again when the Hume City striker rounded the keeper and fired a shot into the frame, but Hume City had their left winger ghosting in and he got the follow up shot off the frame and made no mistake putting the ball into the back of the net to give Hume City a 2-1 lead.

As the half went on South just could not get into the game. South thought they earned themselves a penalty in the 80th minute when a Hume City defender was all over Anthony Giannopoulos and tackled him to the ground, only for the ref to wave the appeals away. Hume City then ran the ball down the other end and a throw in was awarded to South next to their defensive corner flag. In the following events that saw the South number 22 get a straight red card for telling the ref to fuck off. Three minutes later a Hume City player found himself sent off for an early shower when he received his second yellow card.

2-1 it finished for Hume City, a very disappointing loss for South - hopefully the boys can bounce back next week when they play the Oakleigh Cannons at Lakeside Stadium.

Steve From Broady's Canteen Review
On the 19th of May Hume City's canteen had its chance to shine and did not disappoint, producing a quality kebab ticking all the boxes. Hume managed to fill the kebab with lots of meat that's a big + and at a reasonable price. I have decided to give the Hume City canteen an 8 out of 10 which sees them take the lead off Bentleigh Greens on the VPL canteen championship leader board.

1. Hume City 8/10
2. Bentleigh Greens 7/10
3. Southern Stars 2/10
4. Green Gully 1/10
5. Dandenong DQ

South food truck
Week 1 4.5

Room Without A View
I know that their new stand is half under construction and thus fenced off, but even so, the viewing experience on Sunday was seriously sub par. Watching the game from the opposite wing was nigh on impossible, thanks to large metal benches - and their metal scoreboard cousin - blocking huge chunks of the field of vision. The only place to watch the game from even semi-adequately was in the corners, as directly behind the goals they've erected these large black fences to stop balls flying off into some gosh forsaken quarry or something. I suppose the one saving grace was that for once the wind was entirely absent as factor.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream
It also doesn't help if you're not there. Hume's support has never been crash hot - and who are we to talk considering how our crowds have abandoned us - but their attendance was just pathetic on Sunday. There was a cheer, I suppose, for each of their goals, but the atmosphere was more like that of a pre-season friendly.

I Say, Good Sir, That Was An Outrageous Decision! I Demand That You Rescind It Immediately!
So security was sent over, because someone, somewhere had had enough of the foul language. To be fair, the supporters and security person handled the situation well. Cue then the calls of goshdarnit, dangnabbit and the like. My pick? Whoever blurted out 'what the dillyo?'.

The Ethics of Kicking the Ball Out of Play for an Injury
To sum up. When Gavalas was down hurt, Hume played on. Late in the game, they kicked th ball out because one of their players was cramping I guess. We refused to give the ball back. They got angry. We've pretty much been here before, so I don't think we need to cover this again.

Other Sports From Other Planets Department - Rugby Union
As a favour of sorts to Steve from Broady, who's been to several footy matches with me, even though he doesn't like the game - I think he mostly gets a kick out of watching me being sullen in a different context - I decided that it was time to make my debut at a rugby union match last Friday.

I bought my ticket from a scalper outside the gate. OK, he was probably just some guy with spare tickets, and honestly, I don't even know if I got a good deal or not, but man, did I feel like a badass by not buying a ticket at the gate.

Now I know the basic rules, some of the history, but otherwise don't give a toss about the game. I knew it was a Rebels' match I was going to, but I had no idea who their opponents were. Turned out it was the Stormers from South Africa. I was hoping that it would have been one of the Kiwi teams, as that would have increased the Maori and Islander count a bit, but there were a few Saffas in the crowd at our end, including one who waved his flag around like nobody's business.

Otherwise, it was classic case of 'who are these people and why are they here?' Part of that answer was that a lot of them in our vicinity seemed to be from private schools. Marcellin was one of them (I have no idea who they are; their website seems to indicate they have a rugby program, but no soccer, even though I've read elsewhere that they have or had a soccer program). I could tell they were from Marcellin because it was written on their hoodies.

There were some others behind us in maroon tracksuits with blue and yellow trim, but couldn't see what school they were from. And yes, there were blazers, and talk of whether one had ever been to Xavier or not. The rest of the crowd seemed to be made up of a certain upper middle class type of person, in that they wore tasteful scarves, cheered and occasionally jeered at the appropriate moments and mostly kept to themselves. Pretty boring.

Every time there was a break in play, there was music. Not just for injuries, not just after tries, but even every time the ball went out of play. And I thought the AFL was bad in this department. There was scarcely a free moment to think, and considering the copious amount of time lost due to as far as I could tell, not much at all, it was bloody irritating. The Mexican style trumpet at the start of each half also grated.

Though this was of course not a Wallabies game, it has always confused me as to why the upper classes, those descendants of the squattocracy, who watch this sport at a national level, have somehow chosen Waltzing Matilda as their song. It makes no sense. It's an anti-authoritarian song you goons. Anyway, the game of the upper class calling their Melbourne franchise the Rebels is also a bit of a laugh - more so when you see people displaying the Eureka flag as well. Jas H. Duke might have had something to say about that. Or perhaps not.

I used to think, perhaps in my own Victorian way, that the extra kicking in rugby union made the game more watchable than its league cousin. Seeing it in person made me realise how wrong I was. While I still think there's a place for kicking in rugby league - if they bring back unlimited tackles - the kicking in this match was terrible. More often than not, when the Rebels were resorting to kicking it was also unnecessary.

And the knock ons! So many knock ons! I suppose it was a combination of the quick play - somehow I had this idea that rugby union wasn't quite as fast as that - and the relative crappiness of the two teams on show. But back to the fast play for a moment. Rugby union on a pristine surface didn't make sense to me - shouldn't these matches be played on a mud pile? But there wasn't much time to ponder that because of the classic 'What was that for? Oh, you've got it on the screen' moments.

In soccer there seems to be a limited number of infractions, and thus you can pretty quickly get on with the game while abusing the referee for giving the opposite decision of what he should have awarded. In the footy, the umpires make it up as they go along, but at least provide clear signals most of the time as to what made up decision they actually decided on, and then we have the pantomime of everyone craning their necks towards the scoreboard for the replay to justify to ourselves that they got it wrong.

In rugby, it goes like this. Everyone gets in a big pile. At random moments during these piles - and not at every pile - the official in charge declares that some sort of infringement has happened. And apparently we look to the screen not for a replay, but for a text message telling us what it was for. Good luck to people like me for whom every one of these piles looks exactly alike.

It may be due to my own petty Victorianism, but I could not get this question out of my head. Why is this team in existence? Whose needs are they serving? Yes, I understand that as a city with a certain amount of people in it that we 'need' to have one of everything when it comes to sports franchises, but someone should have drawn the line here.

Finally, two things stood out above all else. Firstly, South needs to play at this stadium. Hurry up and make the grand final you clowns. And secondly, tries mean nothing to me. Seriously.

First They Came For Stunning Steve McKee, and I Said Nothing...
Apologies to everyone I bored with talk of last Saturday night's atrocious AFL umpiring.

Next Week
Oakleigh, at home. They're a rabble at the moment apparently, but even if that's true, they're a rabble with some good players still in their team. Not to be taken lightly.

Overdue and out of date Tony Squires book review

This review was originally commissioned by Ian Syson to appear in Das Libero 2. It took me far too long to get around to writing it, but after I'd finished it Ian said he liked it, and that he'd put it up soon. He didn't, and it's been sitting on my USB stick for months now. I shudder to think how many people have gone out and bought this book without first reading the genius that is this review.

There are many things wrong with Tony Squires' Cracking The Footy Codes: A Beginner's Guide To AFL, League, Union and Football. First of all, it's written by Tony Squires. The reasons for his longstanding and continuing popularity of any sort elude me. So, if you happen to be a Tony Squires fan, you can skip the rest of this review. You're probably already enamoured with near everything he does, and likely already have a signed copy of this tome.

Cracking The Footy Codes seeks to take a general look at the four major football codes in Australia, in an attempt to provide a useful primer to those wishing to brush up on unfamiliar sports and possibly become some sort of convert. It contains relatively thorough overviews of the rules of soccer, league, union and Australian rules. It also throws in some trivia and cultural observations which are intended to prepare the neophyte follower for their early experiences, done with what I presume is Squires' trademark humour.

What works well in this book are the clear rules and regulations, together with diagrams. The problem with this is that all this information is also available, for free, online and has been for quite some time. Therefore the book’s strongest characteristic – and perhaps its only one – is technologically defunct. There is no real point acquiring this book if all you want to do is read up on the rules. The book in that sense is fundamentally a 19th century product. It ignores the existence of video games, the internet, television – especially Pay TV which lets us watch so many sports. I learnt most of what I know about American football through these means, often by osmosis rather than careful study.

Which leaves us with what remains. The humour was lost on me. I found it lazy, generic and outdated. AFL – not the name of the sport, but hey, he's from New South Wales and that's what they call it up there for some reason - gets some of its club theme songs mulled over. Rugby League has some of its teams mentioned – Manly are rich, no one can remember South Sydney’s last flag even though they've won so many, haha. Soccer though misses this. We get the 'Hand of God', diving, references to Posh and Becks and that mysterious gap between 1974 and 2005 that no one can penetrate. The skirting of local soccer issues is obviously because Squires is not fluent in that language – or he does not want to impose new and strange knowledge on soccer noobs of the alternate reality that was Australian soccer before it began its Cultural Revolution a few years back.

The presumption of sports generality – the ability to become a fan of multiple sports – also left me feeling cold. Who are these people that have so much time that they can become experts or dedicated to more than 1-2 sports simultaneously? I, and I assume most sports fans, have the time and emotional capacity to dedicate themselves to only that many sports. So what kind of person who is already interested in one or two of these sports with any sort of dedication, would have the time and inclination to pick two or three more? This book is therefore firmly directed towards the sports generalist. The one for whom sport is a pastime and not a duty, for whom the spectacle and the occasion is just as important if not more so than the result. An oversimplification? Perhaps, but I think the point is valid.

But seeing as this is a soccer/football publication, we should take some time out to review that particular section in a little more depth. It doesn't start well. In the opening pitch for the game, Squires refers somewhat obliquely to the difficulty of choosing a team in Australia until recently, and how many Australian fans have fallen for English clubs. There are also elementary factual errors. The A-League choosing to play in summer is a furphy. It merely followed on from the NSL's practice since 1989. Johnny Warren was not the captain of the Socceroos in the 1974 World Cup – that was Peter Wilson. Craig Johnston was not the first Australian to play in the FA Cup Final – that was Joe Marston. Someone using this book as a reference for a trivia night is going to get a nasty surprise.

Yes, I understand that this book is meant to be light-hearted, though it failed to raise chuckles at this end. And yes I understand it's not meant to be a hard hitting sociological piece on the where, why, how etc of football fandom in Australia – though if it does contribute to that debate, it doesn't paint a very positive picture of Australian sports fans and their supposed loyalty. But most of all, it doesn't perform any of its purported instructional functions any better than a quick web search would. One day some of these people who are still insisting on top down modes of communicating to the masses will come to realise that the masses just aren't listening. One for the Squires fans, people with a pathological fear of computers – who won’t see this review anyway – and no one else.