Kindred: A Cradle Mountain Love Story by Kate Legge
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm always intrigued by the decision writers must make when they choose to tell history. Too much factual information and it reads like a tax return, too much narrative intervention and it loses credibility. And then there's the decision about which history - which facts and what version? Another dead-white-male tale of political domination or something more social and intimate and perhaps less academically respectable?

In this account, I think Legge treads the right path for her subject. This is a tale of both the political history of a very significant part of the Australian landscape (literarily and figuratively) and the intimate relationships that gave the project vitality. Kindred is filled with the facts and figures that show just how important the history of Cradle Mountain National Park is to the history of Australia but it is also threaded with the relationship and character of the two imposing figures who were so integral to making the project come to fruition.

The scientific and political history is important, but human endeavour becomes truly meaningful when we can see the passion behind the achievements. Legge's history brings the wonder and beauty of Cradle Mountain to life through her telling of the tale of two people who knew and loved it intimately.

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Football

Jabiz has been trying to explain to me why football matters. And I understand, a bit, and respect the passion, a lot, but I'm still not sure I'm persuaded.

Flickerd [CC BY-SA 4.0]

My vision is clouded, of course, and explaining the history of my relationship with football will help explain why I raise an eyebrow when Jabiz starts talking passionately about the latest game results.

In both the US where Jabiz grew up, and Australia where my values were formed, football, in its different codes, is god. Almost literally I suspect. For many young boys in our cultures, the Saturday afternoon ritual of sitting with Dad and watching the game is an induction into the divine, a process of hero worship where the gods perform marvels and set the standards to which we aspire.

My childhood relationship with football was a little different. I grew up in a little country town where my father was the only doctor. Saturday mornings he did his morning clinic and in the afternoon we would be out in the garden, mowing the lawn, running around, playing with the dog.

Until, usually just on dinner time, the phone would ring. While we were sharing some rare family time with Dad, the rest of the town was at an Australian rules football match watching the visiting team do battle with the locals. As is required in Australian rules football, after a series of carefully choreographed interactions, one of the players would break the arm of another. The traditional first aid was to ply with alcohol, massage the ego, and then, when an appropriate amount of time had elapsed for both elements to take full effect, ring the doctor. Family dinner was inevitably interrupted by a drunk footballer who thought he was god supported by a tipsy coach who knew he was. My father would return home to a cold dinner and tell us in colourful Australian colloquialisms about his view of football.

It is through this clouded lens that I look at football. On Mondays at Primary School, I would listen to friends idolising a local farmer who had kicked a winning goal and wonder why this person deserved more respect than my father who had put his arm in a cast and missed dinner. Or why, when the nightly news came on, politics and war and humanity at large got less airplay that the football results and updates on the football tribunal and its decisions about which players should miss how many matches for hitting each other.

When I grew up and became a teacher, I found myself unable to converse with 50% of the staff for 50% of the year as normally decent, articulate human beings reverted to childhood tropes, congregating in their football tribes and throwing provocations at their foes. I once alienated half of a Grade 8 class by writing on the board that "football is the rubbish tip into which we pour our social intelligence".

My history with football hasn't been pretty. With age, I have mellowed a bit. I admire the work that the Australian Football League has done to actively address racism. The AFL seems uniquely culturally positioned to challenge racism and other cultural illnesses and it is to their credit that they have begun to do so. The latent aggression in football still worries me but maybe this stylised conflict acts as a social catharsis and is protective against other forms of violence. Maybe.

I don't hate football, but I haven't yet found in it enough good to warrant the time and effort needed to read its stories. And if I want melodrama, politics is scripting better episodes.

Seeing things

Half my lifetime ago, and a quarter of the world away, I started my first job in a tiny rural town on the edge of the Australian desert. At night I could jog 10 minutes over the crest of a hill and see no artificial lights, only stars. There were no public busses, no parks, no traffic lights, no supermarkets, one policeman, one doctor, one store, two pubs and a school of 100 students where I taught.

Every other weekend I drove 10 hours round-trip to visit the girlfriend I had left still studying in the city. The first hour of the drive was along a single-lane bitumen road that, in line with popular practice, I would travel at 120 kilometres an hour slowing to 100 to put my left wheels in the gravel if I met a car coming the other way. I might pass 4 or 5 cars before I hit the T intersection with the main highway and could relax onto the two-lane road that would carry me down to the city.

Half way along this first stretch of road was a small shop with a section of concreted footpath and a wooden bench. I assume the building was a shop because it sat so close to the road but it no longer served any commercial function. A section of wire fence on one side enclosed the dry weeds of what once was a garden.

As I whizzed by I would see two old men sitting on the bench. All I’d get was a snapshot glimpse of two hat-clad men sitting in the shade looking out across the road. I never stopped. They sat watching and I drove by.

What strikes me most, in retrospect, is the speed of it all. In a place of such stark beauty and timelessness, I passed, regularly, meters from these two men and knew nothing of them. Perhaps they knew that I was the young teacher - one of a regular cycle of young teachers who would stay a few years before moving on. Perhaps they didn’t notice me at all and just waited for the dust to clear and their view of the wheat paddocks to re-emerge.

 Some rights reserved by Valley_Guy

In Singapore where cars are so expensive, I ride a bike. In the park each morning I pass dozens of old men and women out for their morning exercise. One man always waves and says “good morning” as I ride by. No dust here. The sky is much closer and regularly washes everything clean. Strange, though, that in such a fast-paced city I find myself travelling so much more slowly.

The younger me never took the time to wonder at what those two old men might be seeing as they looked into their memories. 

In praise of garbage chutes

There are many things to miss about Australia. I miss the quiet in the evenings; the stunning clarity of the sky at sunset; the sound and texture of the sand at my local beach. I almost miss the possums that wake me up at 2:00 in the morning running up and down the gutter and fighting over women.

What I don’t miss is taking out the rubbish. Once a week the outside bin has to be wheeled down the drive to the spot by the letterbox where, early the next morning, a truck will come and hoist it up and over and deposit it back down emptied. I usually forget and Sharon either reminds me or does it herself and I end up either rushing out into the cold or feeling guilty.

What a pleasure as we move up into the world of high-rise Singapore to discover the garbage chute. Just a little tilt of a hatch, in goes the rubbish, and with a very satisfying whoosh, it disappears, no longer my responsibility. Height has bred ease and a reduced sense of responsibility; the effluence of affluence is no longer such a chore.