Almanac Life: Stawell and the Hand Gluers

 

 

The hand gluers, egg throwers and padlock-and-chain wearers have won again. Chipped away at a piece of Victoria’s historical fabric, indeed, Australia’s fabric, and it fell to naïve good intent and blunt stupidity.

The slogan eaters, cliché consumers and blessed do-gooders have nailed the coffin lid shut which, in truth, had been in place for quite a while. Ever since the second chance was introduced and the clean skins imposed their will, without understanding what they were crushing, things have been slowly wilting.

The born-again hippies, who’ve been lurking in the suburbs since giving up the grass in the early `70s, have re-emerged. They emerge out of the swamp like tadpoles after a rain having saved their money and created a superannuation fund that keeps them immune from thinking beyond the front fence. Now they use their time grid-locking major city intersections as they know best, destroying the day of the good folk going about their business.

They paint banners and giggle to themselves as they think up another snappy one-liner about the climate or meat or punting or drinking. What do we want? Who’s WE anyway? The banners get packed into the back of the Subaru and driven to within a few hundred metres of the protest target then hidden in the trees, so no one sees the footprint. It’s all about perspective. There are no Gazman shirts today. They’re folded away and replaced with a strategically designed flannie.

Things “send a bad message” apparently. A bad message to whom? I would ask. But the easy target is picked and pursued relentlessly. This year the target is the staggering and spluttering Stawell Gift. A tradition that’s been on its knees for years, battered by a massive confusion as to its own identity, beaten into submission in its quest to please everyone it pleased no one. It had no fight left. Hollowed out like an avocado at a Melbourne café its last grip on a past of imagination and intrigue, of endeavour and aspiration and spirit was pried open and let go.

As Luke Burgis, writer and academic says, “The cultural moment is characterized by the technological flattening of personalities and ideas….”

The Stawell Gift was built around punting. It emerged out of the Gold Rush sweat and effort where people sought to improve their lot. They weren’t punting for fun necessarily (though some obviously were) they were punting on life. But those days are well behind us. Now a few bookmakers set up under the elm trees and take the flutters from the punters in a fairly innocuous manner. They don’t have apps and internet or promos. No TV advertisements at school pick up time. They are there because that’s where the people want them.

“Each way the Gift!” is all they have.

But they send a bad message. I ask again – to whom? They’re caught up in the tornado of nihilism that will smash anything in its path. I think of words written in 1945 by Walter Ulbricht, prominent German communist and mate of Stalin, “It’s quite clear – it’s got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.”  And I feel a shiver down my spine.

And if it’s a leap worthy of Bob Beamon to align post Second World War Eastern Europe with the banning of bookies at Stawell you may well be right, but tyrants and lunatics always start small.

And this all comes on top of the banning of campers at the local Stawell camping ground. Powered sites are OK, tents are out. So where do the people stay even if they still want to watch what’s left? They’re banished. Quietly removed from their own little traditions that have persisted for decades. The campsite was set year after year. The neighbours acknowledged. We still dig up the bricks for the barbeque that the old man buried under a tree in the 1970s. Saves carrying them up and back each year. The community of campers at Stawell every Easter was another of its charms. Discussions in the facilities block were had as blokes shouted over the showers’ noise or sprayed the tooth paste to make a point or hollered from behind a toilet door whilst undertaking the morning ablutions.  Strangers they were but united in the intrigue of it all. Enthralled after watching the favourite win his heat.

Was that his best?

Can he cope with the weekend wait?

I reckon the bloke in the fourth heat was walking.

Nah, that’s him.

Ya reckon?  

Got him at 16/1.

Good work.

The Queenslander’s come along way. Won’t be for nothin’

I like the lad from the bush.

See his run at Sebastopol?

No one’s talking about the beach sprinter??

 

I had a dream when I was a kid. A dream to win this romance because that’s what it was. A quirky, utterly Australian, beautifully chaotic, completely unpredictable sporting stroke of genius. We had it but we’ve lost it. And we can’t have it back. It sends a bad message.

“Literature must become party literature…….”

Vladimir Lenin, 1905.

 

Read more from Dips O’Donnell HERE

 

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