What I Cooked Last Night

Saturday afternoon we were at the indoor pool. It was built some time in the 1980s overlooking City Oval. They put it right behind the northern goal, and the entire south wall is a window, making it a virtual grandstand. You go for a swim and get a VFL football game thrown in, with a view across the brilliant green to terraces, mainly empty, that rise away and almost obscure the Edwardian roofs beyond. The shadows creep across the green late in the afternoon, and sometimes rainstorms blow in from the west. The old grandstand is at the other end. I followed VFA decades ago when Essendon had some lean years and some Essendon players transferred to Dandenong, then a VFA power. Now it's VFL, a blend of the old VFA and the then-VFL reserves. On Saturday, they put the AFL grand final on the loudspeaker system and we - the boys and I - played pool volleyball and listened to the game. The place was almost empty, like two grand finals ago . Everyone goes home and watches it on television,...

Yes, he's grown . (He's not a Footscray fan, they gave out the caps at kindergarten as a kind of early recruitment drive. He remains true to the Same Olds, but the cap is handy.)

I don’t watch grand finals. Never have. I don’t like the angles or the commentary or the crowd shots or the stupid continuous slow motion replays. I listen to the radio so I can track the action in my own mind. I’ve watched one grand final in twenty years and it’s the only one I can’t remember. I took the boys to the indoor pool. They’d set it up with team balloons and the broadcast over the loudspeaker and after the first quarter we were the only ones there, plus the attendants and a few lane-swimming die-hards who barely raised their heads all afternoon, so it was our own private grand final pool party. William and I tossed tennis balls to each other and Tom practised his dives. Half time came and with it the 'entertainment'. Someone had booked an entertainer by the name of Meatloaf. He used to be a singer. I thought it was just the pool loudspeakers, but when he sang, he sounded like a man having a heart attack and a nervous breakdown simultaneously, to save time. Or Bri...

Saturday morning. I switched on the radio. You know the program. I mention it often enough. The voice was familiar. It was Ross Wilson. The song was At The Rock House . That finished and another Daddy Cool song came on. On 3RRR? Why not, of course. But there had to be a reason. It’s 2011. Surely not forty years since Eagle Rock? Surely yes. Daddy Cool was always part parody. You could tell by the name. No serious rock band would choose it. In an interview (no link available) Ross Wilson says "we were loving the forms but taking the p--- (sic: they print far more objectionable words in the papers, why not this?) at the same time". Wilson was especially keen to excavate the piano-based boogie-woogie sound he first discovered in his Dad’s jazz record collection. ... But in crafting a distinctive Daddy Cool sound, which suggested what he called "a past you never had", Wilson also plundered R&B and jukebox pop as well. Wilson says everyone remembers when they fi...

As a fair weather supporter, I read the sports pages when my team is winning. And so I turned to Mike Sheahan’s column in today’s Herald Sun. In warning Essendon supporters about getting ahead of themselves, Mr Sheahan pointed out an extraordinary coincidence. He noted the last two new Essendon coaches have recorded large wins in their first games, each of exactly 55 points. Nine goals, one behind. Not a common margin. Mr Sheahan could have delved a little further. On 3 April 1972 (my fifteenth birthday), I attended the Western Oval with my nineteen-year-old brother to watch the opening round of the season. That summer, Des Tuddenham had been controversially appointed Essendon coach after several turbulent years at Collingwood during which he and some other players once notoriously went on strike. Essendon defeated Footscray that day in 1972. Tuddenham helped himself to a margin of exactly one goal more than Hird’s or Knights’ 55 points margins. Literally. Tuddenham was playing ...

The first warm day. It was latest arrival of spring I can remember. I sat on the beach reading the weekend broadsheet while the boys tore up and down the sand. Then, following a story I had read them earlier about a windstorm blowing a beach away, they threw it. I was the victim. The idea was I had to use the paper as a shield or a tent against the gale of sand. It worked well for them. Next morning my pillow was full of sand. Tracy joined us with the small one. The gale had subsided by then and they were ready for afternoon tea. Their mother produced fresh shortbread, still warm with the characteristic grainy texture provided by the use of a combination of rice and wheat flours. They sat and munched while the small one blinked tiny eyes at her first view of sea. What do they think? Later, I walked back to the house with Tom through quiet ti tree-lined streets. It was unnaturally still. Dead. Not a car. Not a human. It was a ghost town. It must have been early in the last quarter o...

I was five feet up a ladder propped against a tree that was growing at a fifty degree angle to the ground, which was a hill. I was on the south side of the tree, because of the hill, and a northerly off Port Phillip Bay was blasting into my face, as was the sawdust from the branch I was sawing off. * It was Saturday afternoon. The weather was appalling, but I had a backyard full of overgrown ti-tree, a sharp saw and no excuses. I switched the radio on, tuned it to the football, turned up the volume loud enough to hear over the wind and positioned it on the ledge of the open window of the bungalow, facing out. Then I climbed the ladder, lopped branches and listened to the game. * I have criticised football commentators in the past, but I must say that Gerard Whateley has all the accuracy, enthusiasm and tonal qualities of Bruce MacAvaney but none of his verbal tics. Whateley is probably the best currently calling. (The commentator always does a better job when your team wins, ...