Missing Martin Flanagan and Why I Subscribe to the Almanac

It’s now over 2 years since Martin Flanagan retired from The Age.

 

Indeed, it’s now over 2 years since David Wilson wrote an open letter to Flanagan in The Footy Almanac upon his retirement. Like Mr Wilson and – as the comments made clear on that day – many readers of the Almanac, I too am a Flanagan-phile. That’s probably a more Flanagan-esque description than the more accurate “fanboy”, so I’ll run with it for the moment. During these past two years, though, I’ve come to understand that it’s not really Flanagan’s footy writing in the back of my Saturday Age that I miss, however beautifully he wrote about the characters and theatre of footy. Instead, I still find myself mourning his absence for a different reason: it feels as if he and his style has been lost from the front half of Australian newspapers forever.

 

During Flanagan’s career, the comment section in every Saturday Age would publish a piece from this man who wrote about people and relationships with the reverence that everyday interpersonal connections rarely receive. Flanagan appeared to understand the extraordinary of the everyday, and the beauty within simple moments.

 

Others who inhabit our comment pages have their own deserving presence, of course. Danny Katz and Peter FitzSimons have their shticks that have their place. Others lend their personal support to favoured political causes. However, it appears that no-one has been called upon to replace Flanagan’s quieter presence. No longer can we read his simple yet magnificent tales, composed with such an assuredness that he convinced his editors and his readers that not only did he have an extraordinary ability to tell these stories, but also – perhaps more importantly – that they were stories worth telling.

 

The older I become, the more I crave these small tales from the lives of others. The sense that the daily routines and the minute moments with family, friends and culture are actually the fulcrum of life. Flanagan’s presence in The Age provided these stories with a level of prestige, implying that such storytelling helps to build our collective culture. Flanagan himself called his storytelling ‘authentic’, and I fear that this kind of regular personal authenticity may never appear again in the ever-contracting “mainstream” media.

 

You see, just over two years ago, we would open our Saturday paper and suddenly find ourselves alongside Flanagan and his dog: “The whippet is sitting beside me in the car. This is progress. Early days, he vomited most car trips. Now he shakes a bit when something like a big truck looms up in the side window but basically he’s OK if he’s sitting on the front seat beside me. We talk as we go. Sometimes we make music.” Or we’d find ourselves observing Flanagan as he navigated grandparenthood: “A couple of times, when you’re tired, I’ve laid down with you on my chest. Realising you’ve been tricked into a sleeping position, you cry and fix me with an accusing eye. But then you relax and sink into sleep like a swimmer on a warm beach.” And then we’d read on, finding ourselves tearing up at the imminent separation of grandparent and grandchild as the kid’s family was moving overseas: “I find myself thinking that if I had you until you were seven, we’d be mates for life, the sort who can sit together and not have to speak. Maybe you’d watch the footy with me like your mother and aunt did. Your mother tells you to say goodbye to me when I leave. One time, you sang the embryo of the name your sisters call me. The next time, you cried. You wanted to come with me. Parting can be hard, my little mate.”

 

These days, in a post-Flanagan world, The Age and other papers that used to be referred to as broadsheets employ people to recap reality television shows on their websites, but they don’t employ people to write the equivalent of Flanagan’s personal narratives. Only on occasion can tales like these be found, written by random authors in the print media. The articles written under the ‘Personal History’ banner of The New Yorker are always magnificent, and there’s an occasional inspiring ‘This (something) Life’ piece in The Weekend Australian. But no longer do we have a Great Australian Storyteller expressing and exploring our culture in this fashion every week.

 

It is perhaps unsurprising that Flanagan’s absence from The Age has coincided with the two years in which I have been least interested in engaging with the paper, let alone the rest of Australia’s media. And, perhaps most importantly, it has also coincided with the two years in which I have been most consistently visiting this here Footy Almanac.

 

For it’s those stories that I love the most about this most beautiful, welcoming, and authentic corner of the Internet. It’s David Wilson (writing as E.Regnans) driving his family to Uluru. It’s Mathilde de Hauteclocque sharing her father’s “folkloric status as the only Frenchman in the world obsessed with cricket.” It’s Anna Pavlou going to the footy with her Dad and her Uncle James.

 

It’s the stories of ordinary people who, of course, are never ordinary at all.

 

Martin Flanagan once imbued my life with poignant, familial storytelling of the everyday. Now, in his absence, it is the Almanackers who tell these stories.

 

Mainstream Australia is missing out. But those of us who visit the Almanac sure aren’t.

 

I rarely comment on individual pieces, but I just wanted to say: Thanks, everyone.

 

I’ve ponied up once again.

 

Here’s to another year of reading you all.

 

 

Our writers are independent contributors. The opinions expressed in their articles are their own. They are not the views, nor do they reflect the views, of Malarkey Publications.

 

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