Maize Gods

 

 

 

 

In my Year Twelve Literature class, Ms. Dargie introduced us to Tim Winton. One of our assessments was to write a creative response to Cloudstreet, his recently published magnum opus. My piece had only a flimsy connection to the original source material. In Winton’s masterpiece, Sam Pickles loses his fingers in a fishing accident quite early in the piece which sets him and his family on a trajectory from their Geraldton home into the eponymous house, Number 1 ‘Cloud Street’. There was a line in the texts that suggested this move to the city ‘left the local footy team without a snappy rover’. From only this oblique reference I drew the conclusion that clearly this was a novel about the footy and imagined a new chapter where Sam travelled across the Nullarbor to try out for Fitzroy. In my added chapter, the young Sam Pickles was asked to line up against the triple Brownlow Medallist Haydn Bunton in a trial game at the Brunswick Street Oval. Now to comprehend this fairytale that I wrote, you need to know that names like Bunton and his teammates were something akin to Biblical figures for me. I would scour the pages in my Footy Records with historical statistics about Fitzroy, memorise the premiership years, the names of past captains, the Brownlow medallists. ‘Dinny’ Ryan, ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn, Alan ‘The Baron’ Ruthven. I studied and learnt of their deeds with a relish and energy that I struggled to find for the periodic table or the algebraic formulas.

 

Ms. Dargie was the first person I ever met who wasn’t into the footy. Up until that point in my life, I’d been carefully shielded and protected from people such as this. Those who made withering comments and rolled their eyes when the topic of footy came up. With the power imbalance between us – my goofy teenage awkwardness up against Ms. Dargie’s imposing intellectual acumen, she needed only to raise an eyebrow to make me feel a bit stupid. And, for a second or two, wonder if the footy was in fact a bit lowbrow and that maybe there was more to life. Those thoughts were fleeting though. This was 1993, the year that Alastair Lynch kicked sixty-eight goals in basically half a season and was also named the All-Australian full back. It was a year of hope and optimism for Fitzroy.

 

At first, I got annoyed that Ms. Dargie didn’t seem to be interested in appreciating any of this. Ultimately though, I just felt bad for her. She knew a lot about Twain and Dickens, Shakespeare and the wunderkind Tim Winton, and she is the reason that their work has resonated throughout my life ever since. But she knew nothing of the Pauls – Roos and Broderick.  She didn’t know about the the trade that had brought John McCarthy, who North had deemed a poor man’s Wayne Carey, to Fitzroy that year. She couldn’t quite appreciate my character profile of Hamlet, who she described as brooding, rakish and impetuous.  I suggested that he shared a lot with Mark Zanotti and ‘Doc’ Wheildon.

 

Most of the other teachers weren’t quite on the same intellectual level as her. They knew it, we knew it and she didn’t bother to pretend it wasn’t so. Her mind was equal parts terrifying and fascinating and subsequently, so was she. Those few teachers with whom she clearly had some rapport would call her ‘Dargs,’ the type of nickname that suggested the staffroom had a bit of footy club culture about it. It also suggested that she was something of a lovable rogue and rascal herself.

 

There always were teachers with whom you could chat about the footy. Mr English, who taught English – helpful for navigating your timetable – was a Swans tragic. This was a time when it was not easy to cheer for the red and the white either. You had to respect that.

 

She tried though. And she was the first person who ever made me think about footy being a lens for something bigger. That’s not entirely true. There is a line in ‘Up there Cazaly’ that always intrigued me – ‘There’s a lot more things to football, than really meet the eye’. This was probably the first seed that was ever planted in me that footy might have some sort of revelatory significance. Ms. Dargie used words like ‘aesthetic’ when she explained why we had to read something. She was one of the first people I ever met who didn’t just use a pragmatic vocational rationale as an answer to why we were doing something. She opened the door to the possibility that, sometimes, there may be a deeper reason for learning something beyond what may impress our future employers at the local power station or paper mill. She opened doors that once walked through can never really be closed.

 

One class she came in and read us a poem by Bruce Dawe. To hear an avowed footy hater, use words like ‘Carn’ and speak of ‘tides of life’ being linked to the ‘tides of a home team’s fortunes’ was unexpected to say the least. She read of hot pies and potato crisps and finished with reference to a six-foot recruit from Eaglehawk being a symbol of salvation. And amidst it all there were two Fitzroy references. ‘Old timers by boundary fences who were dreaming of resurgent Lions’ and ‘Chicken Smallhorn returning like a maize-god’.

 

‘What does that mean?’ she asked us after repeating the maize-god line.

 

I forget sometimes that the minutia of Fitzroy history is not common knowledge to most people. That not everyone knows each and every year that Fitzroy won the premiership and that not everyone immediately knows that ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn was one of three Fitzroy Brownlow Medallists from the 1930s. So, I remember being a bit taken aback by the blank faces of my teacher and classmates as I went on to explain all of this. I held court for a while, explaining that Chicken had been a prisoner of war in Changi and had also spent some time in the media upon his retirement. Ms. Dargie let me proselytise for a while before redirecting.

 

‘I meant the maize-god reference, Shane’.

 

She had us there. So she went on to explain about the ancient Mayan custom of creating a symbolic icon out of part of their maize crop. That they would ritualistically cut off his head at the end of the cycle only for the god to be renewed at the beginning of the next crop season. It was my football-hating teacher who explained that the maize-God was a reference to the perpetually repeating cycle of life and the hope that springs eternal, season after season, was a way of giving life meaning. It was she who left us with the unanswered rhetorical question, ‘so why would Bruce Dawe reference that in relation to football?’

 

That class happened during the same week as the State of Origin game. It was a bye weekend for the clubs. Fitzroy were sixth on the ladder and looking likely finalists. That year it was the top six teams that made the finals. That Saturday, South Australia defeated Victoria and Paul Roos had his jaw broken in a heavy clash with Martin Leslie. Our captain missed the next four weeks and Fitzroy lost their next three games to Richmond, Geelong and St. Kilda. That season was atypically even. Fitzroy won ten games in total and were only two wins short of playing in the finals. We finished eleventh but, incredibly, only three wins off top spot. Would it have made a difference if our modern-day maize-God, Roos had played for those four weeks?[i] I guess we will never know. The maize God and Bruce Dawe promises a new season, a new crop and new hope again and again as part of the ongoing life cycle. He hadn’t reckoned with the VFL’s economic rationalist agenda and the expansion into the truly national competition which had Fitzroy in the cross hairs.

 

Ms. Dargie died far too young. I’m older now than she was then, and I now teach senior English classes of my own. There are times when I catch myself explaining something in the same way that she would. Every new year and new class that I teach, remnants of her pedagogy rise again.

 

 

 

 

[i] Paul Roos did rise again, not as a Lion but as a Swan. He played in a losing Grand Final in the red and the white before harvesting a premiership with them as a coach.

 

Note: The Footy Almanac was granted permission some years ago by Bruce Dawe to use his poem ‘Life Cycle’. We acknowledge his generosity of spirit in doing so.

 

 

 

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