~ saint jacket

At the recent Atheist Convention, Dan Barker - an apostate who was once an evangelist preacher but now runs the Freedom From Religion Foundation in the US - described what it was like being a vessel for god. No challenge could ever penetrate his faith, because - to paraphrase from memory - god was right there with him, a certain presence above and slightly to the rear of his head. How could he possibly doubt when, on stage, the numinous power surged through him, unerring and incandescent, whipping like a high-voltage cable, gathering energy from the swelling emotions of his congregation?

For some people - and it has been suggested the root cause may be genetic, - such levels of spiritual experience are possible. Barker’s experiences were unusual though, even in the very godly context in which he worked. Most of a religious bent merely trudge on, nourished by a workaday relationship with their god, in awe of the Dan Barkers of this world, of the St Bernadettes, the Ezekiels and St Johns with their visionary frenzies and holy ecstasies.

I’ve always suspected, intellectually, that football provides for me what I cannot get from religion - but last night at the Docklands Stadium, like Dan Barker, I felt something above and slightly to the rear of my head - and it wasn’t a drunken Collingwood supporter.

Admittedly, I was primed. A grey pall of depression moved with me as I passed across the city to the ground. Despite all my efforts, the precious things in my life are under renewed threat and, as I walked, I could see no way of saving them that hadn’t failed many times before. I felt as if I’d spent a century in a dark cul-de-sac, squinting at the mortar between the bricks, thinking it was an horizon.

I drank a glass of wine. Another. I took my seat (provided by the generosity of my dear friend Andrew Park) and spent two hours riding the violent emotional ebbs and flows of a truly strange game of footy. I merged with the body of saints fans like a droplet merges with an ocean. I screamed my tonsils out until the final bar of the final iteration of the club song after a truly famous victory. For a while I was immaculate and cleansed. My soul was pruned to a single essential fact: I was a devotee of the St Kilda football club, beyond that - nothing. The brilliant, courageous, harrowing performance of my team against Collingwood - particularly Collingwood - was all the meaning I needed.

It’s good, I suppose, that such feelings are evanescent. After all, there is a lot more to me than that. Let’s just hope that ... Nick Riewoldt’s hamstring doesn’t keep him out of the game for too long.

Above is a picture of Michelle's glorious jacket

~ the sweet milk of success

I don’t like to talk too much about football. After all, it’s only football, but sometimes I just get too excited to shut up. I’m hoarse [and more than a tad hungover] today from shouting my lungs out at the Docklands stadium last night. And not because it was a close, edge-of-the-seat type game, but because the St Kilda Football Club were just so, so good it was heaven to watch.

(That it was Collingwood under the sword only made it sweeter.)

For years now, we’ve been up there, a contender, but something’s been missing, some essential spirit or hardness or determination or who knows what. There was always the possibility that, instead of putting the knife in, the team would fall to pieces. You could never really be sure whether they’d shine or be shameful.

But now that elusive final element has clicked into place.

Through the long grey years of St Kilda history, there have been few sunny days and supporters have learned not to expect too much. The disappointment is just too hard to bear. But this year, this supporter, member 31800, is standing up and crying out the news:

This is St Kilda’s time! Our year!

(Will I regret this down the track, I wonder?)

Lynne, the Englishwoman I converted to St Kildaism nearly two decades ago, was with me there last night, lapping up the sweet milk of success. She’s right in the middle of preparations for Snatches, the annual theatrical mosaic she directs at RMIT’s Kaleide theatre.

Snatches' facebook page
Another Snatches link

If you are able or feel inclined to come on Wednesday you’ll see me play a squalid predatory gay psychiatrist. On Friday, I’m a psychopathic German neurosurgeon in Matthew Lambert’s play ‘Hitler’ and a venomous tool of officialdom in my own ‘The Goitre Birds’.

I promise that the title 'The Goitre Birds' came direct from my imagination. I had not the faintest inkling that such a thing might really exist - but here, courtesy of Glittersmacked, proving the old adage that there is nothing new under the sun, is a Supentius camelus or Goitre Bird ...

~ what football can do for a man

My father, Vilis Sejavka, arrived in Australia around 1952. He was a refugee from the Second World War, a displaced person who had spent at least six post-war years in internment camps around Germany.

Latvia, his home country, had fallen under Soviet rule. To return there meant probable incarceration in the Gulags. As he had been a (19yo) conscript for the Latvian division of the Waffen SS, this would more than likely have lead to his death.

His kidneys had been ruined after a night spent playing dead in the snow as a Red Army column passed close by. His German lieutenant, with whom he had deserted, lay beside him but his was no act; the pair had been fired upon earlier by the Russians. It was standard practice for the Communists to bayonet the dead, so Vilis did not so much as twitch. Imagine that. He claimed to have never been quite the same.

As truckload load after truckload of refugees departed Germany, bound for new lands in which to settle, Vilis watched and waited, praying that eventually his turn would come - which, ultimately, it did.

It is not difficult to understand the gratitude he felt towards Australia - though, as a willful, contrary child, I did my best. Once here, he worked in logging camps in order to fulfill his contract with the Government. While doing so, he contracted rheumatic fever and then tuberculosis. Down the track, it was the rheumatic fever that doomed him.

In a TB sanatorium, close to death, he fell in love with a nurse, my mother, and so on and so forth. But that’s not the story for today.

What I want to communicate is his unconditional love for Australia and all things Australian. He threw his heart and soul into this country. He had little contact with the local Latvian community - to my later chagrin - largely because of the Soviet spies who were thought to have infiltrated. He was fervently anti-communist, almost to the point of paranoia - Australia, his country, and the new family it had given him were all that he trusted now.

While I was being called a wog at school, he was calling himself a New Australian with absolute, unadulterated pride. He whole-heartedly embraced our traditions and culture. He acquired English at speed. Though he retained his accent, and was partial to borscht, pickled herring and sauerkraut - these things were all that remained of the Latvian Vilis.

My father grew up with the slow, exasperating species of football we call soccer, but once he hit these shores Australian Rules became his code. He was a New Australian and soccer was for ingrates. Because he lived with my mother in one of those little worker’s cottages on Acland St. up from Greasy Joe’s, St Kilda became his team. Not long after I was born, I was attending matches in my swaddling, first at Junction Oval, then, in actual clothes, at Moorabbin.

My father and I had precious little in common. He was an engineer and I was an artiste, but on football we saw eye to eye. It may seem sad, but it was our strongest link as father and son. The one certain thing we shared. For me the night of St Kilda’s 1966 Grand Final triumph is a volcanically joyous memory, perhaps the sweetest of my boyhood.

Now Vilis is long gone, but our team is not. Whenever I set foot in the stadium, whenever I bellow the team song, whenever St Kilda manages to win a game, the my father's ghost is there. That’s why I sometimes cry at matches, in case you were wondering.

We start another finals campaign this week, and already I feel him stirring. We’ve had a few chances over the years, but, since his death, no premierships. Still just the one ... Just the one ... This year Geelong stands in our way, but there is always hope.

From my father, with his harrowing, unforgiving life, ... from his thankless son ... for Robert Harvey and his twenty-one seasons of scintillating brilliance and old school tenacity … let me just say ... Carn The MIGHTY SAINTS!

~ dragons, pandas and shipping containers

On the front page of The Age today there are some indistinct pirated images of rehearsals for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. One of them appears to show an enormous stack of rectangular white boxes.


Could it be that the hyper-sensitive, deeply paranoid nation of China has shrugged its profound humorlessness?

Do these boxes represent shipping containers?

The universal instruments of trade which would so accurately typify China’s relationship with the rest of the world.

A vista of anonymous oblongs, reaching to the horizon …

Bursting open, theatrically, before a global audience, to reveal cheaply manufactured goods of almost infinite variety …

The irresistible current of plastic gew-gaws and gaw-gews which serves to make our lives in the Western World so comfortable, so cheap, so unsustainable …

What could be more appropriate at this ceremony? What better to symbolise China’s victorious exploitation of our greed?

Indeed, the likeness of a shipping container would not be out of place on the Chinese national flag. Forget dragon dancers, peonies and giant pandas, in this modern age the shipping container trumps them all.

The image above immediately brings to mind a dockland scene. Every large port in the world has stacks of shipping containers which look like this. Mind you, these ones, though of the correct proportions, are standing on their heads, but there could be a million explanations for that… [to make them look less like shipping containers, perhaps?]

If these boxes are indeed containers - and, sadly, I doubt they are - wouldn’t it be a great leap forward for this somewhat retarded global citizen - stressed by gigantism, delusions of grandeur, issues of trust, behaviour and perceived inferiority – to portray itself to the world with some genuine wit?

PS: I’ve recently finished reading William Gibson’s 'Spook Country', so it could be I’ve got shipping containers on the mind.