Almanac Poetry: An Historian reads Sports Poetry A to Z

 

 

This article by Bernard Whimpress was originally published in  The Australian Society for Sports History Bulletin No. 77 February 2023.

 

As a boy a large picture of the Holy Trinity hung over my bedhead – Father, Son and Holy Ghost. More than a half century later a large etching by Bruce Petty occupied a similar position. Petty’s ‘Mighty Men’ depicted several soaring player/aeroplane figures above what resembled the Melbourne Cricket Ground, one of whom appeared to be flying to mark a football-shaped sun while another attempted to spoil.

 

What happened in my personal history to see religion give way to sport? Had I put away childish things or merely exchanged one childish thing for another? Is Australian football a substitute religion? Did it get me through the night? No, but it can, and has helped.

 

In 1930 the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote of having met an American literary figure who wrote melancholic books but whose mood lifted:

 

… at that moment the most crucial baseball results were coming through

on the radio; he forgot me, literature, and all the other sorrows of our

sublunary life, and yelled with joy as his favourites achieved victory. (1)

 

Russell uses this story as a way of suggesting that fads and hobbies can be a means of escaping from reality.

 

In my teenage years I took up cricket statistics as a hobby and when my religious faith began to wane there was safety to be found in the numbers of Wisden Cricketers‘ Almanack. If holy writ offered little comfort Bill Lawry’s Test average did. I turned to sport before philosophy for consolation. If sport could be a suitable subject for contemplation, it could also be a suitable subject for literature, for history, for drama, for art.

 

As a sports historian I was asked in March 2003 to address the poetry chapter of the Lyceum Club of South Australia (a professional women’s organisation) on the subject of sports poetry. I welcomed the opportunity.

 

I welcomed it because I like to perform and because I admire fine writing. It seemed that some very fine writing about sport was done by poets (besides some mere rhyming drivel) and I wanted to share the best that the form had to offer. I also wanted to impress on my listeners how high culture and popular culture can meet.

 

My original selection consisted of work by several poets. Englishman Donald Hughes, of whom I knew nothing apart from his nationality. Simon Rae, the Poetry Society’s 1999 poet of the year in England, poetry broadcaster and playwright, fellow cricket-writer and mammoth biographer of mammoth cricketer WG Grace, whose satirical poems appeared in the Weekend Guardian for several years. West Indian Edward Kamau Braithwaite, professor of social cultural history at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, author of twenty collections of poetry, plays, history and literary criticism, and of whose poetry it has been written that ‘he discovers affinities between the songs, dances and language forms through which blacks have responded to a common history, not only in the New World but also in Africa’. A number of Australians were also represented including the larrikin South Australian­ born CJ Dennis whose humorous verse often masked underlying pathos; Geelong-born Queenslander Bruce Dawe whose interest in social concerns has led to him being described as spokesman for the ‘lost people in our midst’; Victorian poet, fiction writer, former academic and tennis historian Graeme Kinross-Smith; Californian-born but Adelaide Hills-raised Mike Ladd who has worked as national poetry coordinator for the ABC; Tasmanian-born Flinders University academic Syd Harrex who had taught literature in the West Indies; plus me.

 

In the talk I read Hughes’s The Short Cut’, Dennis’s The Happy Man’, from Braithwaite’s ‘Rites’, Rae’s ‘A Supplicant’s Swansong’, Dawe’s ‘Life Cycle’, Kinross-Smith’s poetic prose piece The Sweet Spot’, Ladd’s ‘Port loses the Grand Final to Norwood’ (with a great deal of pleasure as a Norwood follower), Harrex’s ‘All a Green Willow’, and my then one and only sports poem, ‘A Footy Crowd’. ‘The Happy Man’ is late Dennis and deals with good news in the Depression, the picking of Don Bradman for a Test match; the selection from ‘Rites’ combines both cultural and cricket history through the recollection of events in a Test match on England’s tour of the West Indies in 1953; ‘Life Cycle’ evokes religious elements of life-long devotion to Australian Rules football; The Sweet Spot’ may be about tennis in the Geelong district but it is writing of a higher plane which conveys the essential community of small-time sport; ‘Port loses the Grand Final to Norwood’ is a response to the Redlegs’ 1997 South Australian premiership success over its traditional rival and which epitomises not only class differences but tribal loyalties; ‘A Footy Crowd’ is about the loss of freedom, movement, choice and camaraderie (among other things) as Australian football moves from community to commercial control.

 

The Short Cut’ and ‘A Supplicant’s Swansong’ allowed me to use toffy English accents; ‘Rites’ to perform West Indian tones; The Happy Man’ to try out 1930s Australian; ‘Life Cycle’ to vary cries from infancy to old age; and ‘A Footy Crowd’ to use my own voice. The voice(s) seemed to appeal to the women at the Lyceum Club but when I reflected that I had dealt with not much beyond cricket and Australian football, and that the only sports poetry anthology I knew of was Leslie Frewin’s The Poetry of Cricket published in 1964, it spurred further interest.

 

I dragged out an essay ‘Saturday Afternoon Fever’ in the Journal of Australian Studies from 1995 by John Harms and Ian Jobling which examined the poetry of Australian football in its historical context but it was time to broaden the scope of my enquiry.

 

What follows is something of an introduction to an anthology of Australian sports poetry which has yet to be realised.

 

A good start was the Auslit data search in May 2003 which after keying in ‘sports poetry’ revealed 588 poems, although the bulk of those sourced turned out to be rollicking ballads from the Bulletin prior to 1960. Over the next few months, I began thumbing the Australian poetry section of the Barr Smith Library of the University of Adelaide, including selections from journals such as Meanjin, Quadrant, Overland and the local Friendly Street Readers.

 

I tracked down a few of the Auslit poems while leaving the Bulletin ballads aside but my research uncovered hundreds of poems. In doing so there was a need to justify the selection of the poems and the manner in which they were arranged. Starting with the second point first, the arrangement could be chronological, thematic, geographical, by subject or alphabetical starting with Aslanides and ending with Zwicky. An A to Z is a good organisational tool and this essay offers a broad range of such discussion. Certainly, I felt much better equipped when I returned to the Lyceum Club for a second talk in 2005.

 

Timoshenko Aslanides is a good poet to begin with because his 1998 book Anniversaries is based on historical events which occur on particular dates of the year. Thus ‘Stawell Gift’ corresponds to the timing of the race on 4 April 1988; 5 April is a reminder in ‘Phar Lapped’ that the big red gelding died (or was poisoned) on that day in 1932; 11 June turns the clock back to 1887 in ‘Bobby McDonald Sets a Fashion’ when an Aboriginal sprinter revolutionised athletics by using a crouching start which has been copied around the world ever since; 3 October celebrates another sporting invention in ‘Style for Champions: The Australian Crawl’ as Bronte swimmer Alick Wickham was first seen using that stroke in 1898; and 12 December 1925 was the day at Wingello when Bill O’Reilly bowled Don Bradman first ball after Bradman resumed on 234 not out and threatened to continue the mayhem of the previous week at Bowral. Let us hear Aslanides on McDonald:

 

Any race may easily be won

before it is completed. His start would give him his finish

and besides be his beginning; the world would follow. (2)

The poetry can be about personal histories. Thus, the hero of Pamela Bell’s ‘For a Rodeo Rider’ has ridden through life, grown old but remained still a boy with a dream’. (3)

 

‘Hang-gliding’ is about daring to do, stepping off a cliff into space. John Blight has been described as a ‘reluctant lyricist’ (4) and closes his poem:

 

Who sees the views/better than the hang-glider boy?

Soon, very soon, a whole season of hang-gliders … (5)

 

The transformation of space is picked up in Rachael Bradley’s ‘Gymnast’:

 

Dancing on the four-inch beam

The girl takes air and

grasps it…… (6)

Time is transformed in RF Brissenden’s ‘Olympia: A Walk Among the Ruins’ where the poet engages in two forms of reflection, back across the millenia to ancient Greece and across the decades to his own youth: (7)

 

BJ Brock is at the game. In this case the ‘Fifth Test’ between Australia and India in 1978. The poet has seen the play from the scoreboard mound at Adelaide Oval featuring, the ‘great Bedi, enigmatic Chandra’, debutants Wood and Darling, Test centurion Yallop ‘wallops the boundary’. (8)

 

Beauty takes animal forms. A friend once told me about the great grey, Gunsynd, being almost human and playing to the crowd in the winner’s circle. Vincent Buckley’s ‘Gunsynd’ captures some of this spirit:

 

At the end, he will reject all garlands

to move away, throwing his head, stamping,

the hiss of breath …(9)

‘Tobin Bronze’ offers another equine hero who for Grant Caldwell not only pays but wins with style. The poet shares the action on the way to becoming something else:   

 

… as he gobbled them up storming home

down the middle of the track … (10)

Maybe transformation is a key theme for Caldwell for it is also at the centre of another poem, ‘Like a tennis ball’ where a housemate’s life is stolen by his parents who refuse to let him live his dream of taking a tennis scholarship in America and make him study commerce in Melbourne instead. The result is a student drunk with the poet cleaning up the mess. (11)

 

JM Couper’s ‘On a Distant Prospect of an Australian College’ can be paired with Brissenden’s ‘Olympia’. But whereas Brissenden has been reminded of his sporting youth by visiting ancient ruins, Scottish-born academic Couper visits a pretentious Australian school, an ‘Eton in the wilderness’, and with sardonic wit emphasizes its Muscular Christian ethos. (12)

 

Bruce Dawe’s ‘Life Cycle’ is probably Australia’s best-known sports poem and its religious qualities have often been remarked upon, especially the way football is linked to key moments in life. While we have all heard stories of those inconsiderate bridal couples who tied the knot in season (and worst of all on Grand Final day), the result being that half the congregation had a trannie (transistor radio) or a Walkman pressed to their ears. The score matters to people of all ages, those starting out, and those leaving their lives behind.

 

But the dance is forever the same – the elderly still

loyally crying Carn … Carn … (if feebly) unto the very end,

having seen in the six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk their hope of

salvation.(13)

 

Religious imagery is powerful in another Dawe football poem originally titled ‘After the Game’, in which he writes of the crowd entering the ground for a boot of the ‘odd footie’ and reclaiming themselves. (14)

 

But Dawe is also a poet with a sharp eye as a social critic. We forget that athletes face hidden pressures, and they frequently have to confront scathing criticism, both public and private. In ‘good sport’ his subject is a sportswoman with weight problems but seemingly ready and able to deal with them. The reader is jolted by the reality of her husband’s discovery, the irony biting in the last line:

 

… To find, returning from a trip,

She’d hanged herself, in what for her

Was thoroughly bad sportsmanship. (15)

Racism is at the core of another footy poem, Graham Dixon’s ‘Black Magic’. (16)

 

Change the football code, swap envy for racism, compare the athlete that was with the injury-prone athlete of the present in Peter Goldsworthy’s ‘Trick Knee’. (17)

 

Sport in its simplest form is always about overcoming, one’s opponent in most games, one’s self in golf. Working-class poet Geoff Goodfellow’s old boxer in ‘Shadow Boxing the New Contender’ has a battle with cancer (‘Jack Dancer’s black shadow’) and uses fighting words. (18)

 

Sport is about life and death but art can also draw upon art. So, Jeff Guess in ‘The Cricketers’ reflects on the famous painting of the same name by Russell Drysdale:

 

A boy bowls up on the edge of red sand.

Beyond that – desert with no boundary

for a six…  (19)

 

And Syd Harrex is ‘All a Green Willow’ uses sporting metaphors in order to ‘read’ poetry:

 

A boy’s ear like mine

had just two seasons:

Aussie Rules and Cricket….. (20)

 

Philip Hodgins in ‘Country Football’ (like Dawe) plays on the religious symbolism of the game. The football is an ‘ellipse’, Hindu symbol of fertility, the goalposts ‘two-dimensional white cathedrals’, the dressing rooms ‘corrugated iron purgatory’ and then there’s the umpire, a God­ like figure:

 

But one without a number,

as resolutely white as a cue ball,

omnipotent in a classical pose…  (21)

 

Clive James represents a strong contrast to Hodgins although he was a proud winner of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Excellence in Literature in 2003. It has been said of James that his ‘eclectic interests range from high culture to mass entertainment and embrace literature, television, films and popular music’. (22)  His poetry (like his prose) roams across diverse cultural elements and mines his own life and experience. ‘In Praise of Marjorie Jackson’ sees the author casting his mind back to a boy in short pants and experiencing the early thrill of hero worship:

 

… Where she was the quickest of all my fantastic girls –

Than Shirley Strickland, then even Betty Cuthbert she was quicker….(23)

 

Manfred Jurgensen, who emigrated to Australia at the age of twenty-one, engaged in cross-cultural writing all his adult life, and held a chair in German literature at the University of Queensland, yet nevertheless shows the transition that is made in writing about Australian sport. (24)  Jurgensen’s metaphors in ‘the poetry of cricket’ (unlike Harrex’s) are for writing not reading. (25)

 

We are back to the game in SK Kelen’s ‘Bowling Alley’ and there’s an air of menace:

 

Like wrestlers

showing off their muscles to the crowd

they waited, balls in hand … (26)

Menace too is evident in Mike Ladd’s ‘The New Australian Nationalism (On TV)’ where the atmosphere is impersonal:

 

… the tv sports world

has a military feel … (27)

 

So different from Shelton Lea’s warm humanity in ‘picnic day at the Drouin races, or the day the bookie robbed me’ which ends:

 

well, we’ve had a good day, I refuse to let berks

throw a pall on things, our pockets are full,

so it’s off to the railway hotel to spend some cash … (28)

It has been said of Kate Llewellyn’s poetry that she has a ‘distinctive direct voice’. (29)  She grew up on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula at Tumby Bay but her experience of ‘Football’ – as an outsider – is of a game she saw ‘once or twice’, can recall the background details, but take or leave. She left:

 

it got cold

and we went home home

I forget who won … (30)

 

And it contrasts sharply with the engagement of Meg Mooney’s ‘Sports weekend’:

 

… teams from all the communities

some more than five hundred kilometres away

play round discarded boots on the red dirt oval … (31)

There’s no difficulty spotting Les Murray’s ‘The Aboriginal Cricketer: Mid-19th century’ (32) which (like Guess’s ‘The Cricketers) comes from art not life. The subject of the poem is himself the subject of John Michael Crossland’s 1853 ‘Portrait of Nannultera, a young Poonindie cricketer’ which was located in the Rex Nan Kivell Collection of the National Library so Murray didn’t have to travel far to find it. The painting is much represented. There is no record of Nannultera ever having played a game. (33)

 

Of all sports Australian football evokes the widest range of passions. Listen to the opening of Mark O’Connor’s ‘High Country Football Game’:

 

… A circle of cars parked round the flat.

Balaclavas, tribal colours, tin signs

For Fill’s Garage and Harold’s Mince. (34)

 

But sport is about more than passion. It is also about pathos as Geoff Page signifies in ‘Bowls’ as the bowlers:

 

Thinned out but undismayed

by strokes and skipping hearts

they stroll up down together … (35)

 

One of Page’s main concerns has been ‘the inevitability of old age and death and the ultimate nothingness’. (36) The ladies at the Lyceum Club didn’t like it much. It was too close to home.

 

Page is a poet who can observe and write sharply with most wonderful reserve. When the greatest of Australia’s sports heroes, Sir Donald Bradman, died, aged ninety-two, in February 2001 the mass media engaged in a month-long national grotesquery which mocked our history and sense of proportion. Page’s ‘On the Death of a Famous Cricketer’ appeared several months later and investigated through rhetorical questions the ironies of the public response to the private man. (37)

 

Sportsmen (and women) find their own level of expertise, and many avoid sport altogether. But before the avoidance comes that character­ building stage some are plainly not cut out for. Graham Rowlands in ‘Good Old Cricket’ is a have-a-go victim:

 

… he stood on school’s green wicket, trapped

within narrow practice net by balls turned

meteors against him played … (38)

In one of his early films (possibly Manhattan) Woody Allen sees a group of joggers, mainly fat and ugly, sweating and puffing along the banks of the Hudson River, and exclaims, ‘Why do they bother?’ Tony Scanlon’s ‘Joggers’ fall into three groups: ‘the serious ones, straining to burst their hearts out’, ‘the merely optimistic’, and those ‘who glide straight from the pages of a runner’s Vogue’. He, overweight, out of condition and sitting on a seawall, responds to the first two, groaning and sympathizing, but cannot connect with the third, who are:

 

beyond empathy, these gorgeous mannequins

of the Reebok Generation in their Lycra skins,

glimmering by in their self-absorbed orbits … (39)

 

There is a connection but also a remoteness between Scanlon’s observer (the poet?) and Andrew Taylor’s lounge lizard in ‘Telesport’, ‘… even the cruellest victories are taken lying down’, (40) a reality versus dream distinction, and about as far removed from the experience of catching a bigwave in Rod Usher’s ‘Surfing out of Season’ as it is possible to be:

 

In the brassy waters we bob,

waiting like blood for the cut,

for that rearing liquid edge …⁽⁴¹⁾

 

And so, finally, logically to Z and Fay Zwicky’s ‘Little League’ and its account of the ushering in of a ‘shivering season’ by fathers for sons ”Run, All For your life, boy!’ but with what purpose in mind?( 42)

 

 

(1) Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, Allen & Unwin, London, 1971,

p.100.

 

⁽²⁾ Timoshenko Aslanides, Anniversaries, Brandl & Schlesinger, 1998, p. 187.

 

(3) Pamela Bell, Poetry 1947-1989, Thomas Rowland Publishers, Toowong, 1990,

 

⁽⁴⁾ Biographical entry on John Blight in William Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews (eds), The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature OUP,Melbourne, 1985, p. 99.

 

⁽⁵⁾ John Blight, Selected Poems: 1939-1975, Thomas Nelson, Melbourne, 1976,

 

⁽⁶⁾ Rachael Bradley, Dragonshadow, Women’s Redress Press, Sydney, 1989, p. 35.

 

(7) RF Brissenden, Suddenly Evening: selected poems, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, 1993, p. 131.

 

⁽⁸⁾ BJ Brock, ‘Fifth Test’ in Andrew Taylor and Ian Reid (eds), Number 2 Friendly Street Reader, Adelaide University Union Press, ud, p. 21.

 

(9) Vincent Buckley, Golden Builders and Other Poems, Angus & Robertson, London, 1976, p. 27.

 

(10) Grant Caldwell, You know what I mean, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1996, p. 45.

 

(11) Caldwell, You know what I mean, p. 56. A biographical note on Grant Caldwell describes him as graduating with a commerce degree from the University of Melbourne and later being imprisoned for six months in Tangier for attempting to smuggle hashish suggests that he would have found it easy to empathise with the tennis player. See also Tbe Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, p. 143

 

(12) JM Couper, ‘On a Distant Prospect of an Australian College’ in Meanjin

4/1965 (No. 103), Vol. 24 No. 4, p. 125.

 

(13) Bruce Dawe, Condolences of the Season: Selected Poems, Longman, Melbourne, 1971, p. 66; https://www.footyalmanac.com.au/poetry-life-cycle/.

 

(14) Dawe, originally published as ‘After the Game’ in Westerly,Vol. 37 No. 1, Autumn 1992. Republished as ‘After the Football Game’ in Mortal Instruments: Poems 1990–95, Longman, Melbourne, 1995, p. 121.

 

(15) Dawe, Condolences of the Season, p. 71.

 

(16) Graham Dixon, Holocaust Island, UQP, Brisbane, 1990, p. 59.

 

(17) Peter Goldsworthy, This Goes with That: selected poems 1970-1990, Angus &

Robertson, Sydney, 1991, p. 56.

 

(18) Geoff Goodfellow, Bow Tie and Tales, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1989,

 

⁽¹⁹⁾ Jeff Guess, Selected Sonnets, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991, p. 24.

 

(20) Syd Harrex, Inside Out, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 1991, p. 19.

 

(21) Philip Hodgins, Blood and Bone, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991, p. 14.

 

(22) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, p. 405.

 

(23) CliveJames, The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958-2003, Picador, 2013.

 

(24) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature , p. 419.

 

(25) Manfred Jurgensen, Midnight Sun, Five Island Press, Wollongong, 1999, p. 60.

 

(26) SK Kelen, Atomic Ballet, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1991, p. 46.

 

(27) Mike Ladd, Overland 99, July 1985, p. 6.

 

(28) Shelton Lea, Poems from a Peach Melba Hat, Abalone Press, Melbourne, 1985,

 

(29) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, p. 473.

 

(30) Kate Llewellyn, ‘Football’ in Rory Harris and Beate Josephi (eds) No. 10

Friendly Street Reader, Friendly Street Poets, Adelaide, 1986, p. 69.

 

(31) Meg Mooney, ‘Sports weekend’ in Overland 166, Autumn 2002, p. 29.

 

(32) Les Murray, ‘The Aboriginal Cricketer Mid-19th Century’ in Quadrant,

October 2001, p. 24; https://www.best- poems.net/les_murray/ the_aboriginal_cricketer.html.

 

(33) Bernard Whimpress, Passport to Nowhere: Aborigines in Australian Cricket 1850-

1939, Walla Walla Press, Sydney, 1999, p. 56.

 

(34) Mark O’Connor, The Olive Tree: Collected Poems, Hale & lremonger, Sydney, 2000, p. 194.

 

(35) Geoff Page, Small Town Memorials, UQP, Brisbane, 1975, p. 37.

 

(36) The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, p. 600.

 

(37) Geoff Page, ‘On the Death of a Famous Cricketer, in Quadrant, July-August

2001, p. 41.

 

(38) Graham Rowlands, ‘Good Old Cricket’ in Wester!J, No. 3, September 1976,

 

(39) Tony Scanlon, A Mask of Stone: Selected Poems 1990-1995, Kardoarair Press,

Annidale, 1996, p. 43.

 

(40) Andrew Taylor, Sandstone, UQP, Brisbane, 1995, p. 43.

 

(41) Rod Usher, Smiling Treason, New Endeavour Press, Sydney, 1992, p. 10.

 

(42) Fay Zwicky, Isaac Babel’s Fiddle, Maximus Books, Adelaide, ud, p. 42.

 

 

More from Bernard Whimpress can be read Here.

 

 

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