One for all and all for one

 

Dear Hawthorn,

If what is alleged is true, I no longer want you in my life.

I’m not sure you think I even exist. But that’s not the problem, is it? The problem is that I’m not sure you think anyone other than blokes like you exist. Or matter. But we do. And you mattered to us. And you have trashed everything that meant for our family.

There aren’t that many properly working class families who love Hawthorn as passionately as catholics love Collingwood or Mancunians love United. But my family is one of them.

 

Dear Hawthorn,

When I grew up, my mum and siblings and I would join my cousins and aunties and uncles and grandparents, and we’d drive out to VFL park with our little plush hawks dolls, with the number of our favourite player drawn on the back. We’d eat pies at half time, and bang the advertising boards when you got a goal. My brother had a poster of Peter Knights on his wall. After family lunches at Pa’s place, all seven grandkids would climb the fence with a football and the boys would both run with the ball and offer a running commentary, pretending to be Lou Richards, or Jack Dyer.

I was the first girl in the local VicKick program in 1985 and 1986 (until I turned twelve and girls could no longer play). I told my mum that if my brother could go, I could too, and she proudly took me down to the sports store and bought me a scratchy woolen jumper, brown shorts, long socks and boots with stoppers. I remember clunking around with stopper boots, feeling (for a clumsy kid) like I was sporty, for the first time. Like I belonged with my family.

Every freezing Saturday morning, I would proudly jog down to the oval at Balwyn High behind my brother and show up for training. I even got my even clumsier best friend to join me a few times. At first, most of my training was learning not to close my eyes or duck when the ball flew towards me. I learned to handpass, how to bounce an oval ball, and how to kick with the bridge of my foot. Mum took photos on the first day I played a game for the club. We still have those photos and I used to show my kids, proudly, that girls could do anything (at least before twelve).

I’ll never forget the 1989 grand final. The one where the whole thing was a simmering brawl, where Dermie fell flat on the ground at the first bounce, and Dipper played most of the game with a punctured lung, and they still won. In the playground at school, full of kids in Essendon jumpers, Hawthorn had respect.

 

Dear Hawthorn,

Our lives stopped for the footy. One year, we were driving home from a family holiday in New South Wales, and Mum realised we weren’t going to get home for the grand final, so we drove as far as we could, then pulled into a motel on the side of the Princes Highway and paid for a tiny, brown brick room for the afternoon so we could watch.

When I was in labour with my first child, in East Melbourne, Mum asked the midwife how long I would be, because Hawthorn were in a final at the MCG. When she said I’d be a few more hours, Mum went to the footy. She came back and my child was born two hours later. I remind her of this.

Did you know my mother agreed to marry my dad after he bought her tickets to the 1971 Grand Final? I may not have been born if it wasn’t for her love of the club.

Later she would tell us the story of how they won the grand final for Peter Crimmins in 1976, and how he died three days later.

My parents divorced after thirty years of marriage. After the agony of dad’s long and painful affair, mum returned to her first love, the Hawthorn Footy Club. She became a gold or platinum member (whatever the top membership is), and she gathered a little gaggle of four women, who went to every match, no matter the weather.

The threepeat was for Mum. She turned 70 in 2020. But I'm not going to post a photo of that. Because it doesn't matter any more.

Dear Hawthorn,

Mum was poor – she couldn’t afford to go to grand finals, or even many games. When she grew up in the fifties, her father – my Pa – would take all five kids from their two bedroom house in West Heidelberg on the bus down to the Hawthorn Oval for training sessions. He’d put my mum up onto his shoulders so she could see, and they’d meet the players after training.

On a Saturday afternoon, if they weren’t at the football, they were at their double fronted cream brick veneer house in Lower Templestowe they moved into once most of the kids were grown up. The house had a magnolia, an extra bedroom and – luxury – a small above ground pool. The Alsatian next door was called Caesar and we weren’t allowed to pat it, and Pa walked down to the milk bar every day, stopping and chatting to every neighbour along the way, proudly introducing any grandchildren who happened to be along for the walk.

Nanna and Pa used to host a local bloke who had grown up with their kids. His dad had been in the war with Pa. He was socially awkward, shy, very unhealthy, and not the sharpest tool in the shed. He didn't quite know how to talk to us but he didn't have a mean bone in his body. And his main social contact outside his ageing parents was sharing the footy with Nanna and Pa.

My Pa – my beloved, booming, vegie-growing, piggy-backing, Borneo veteran, chain-smoking, kid-loving Pa – died at AFL Park in 1991. It was towards the end of a match between Hawthorn and Footscray. He was sitting with my uncle, my Nanna, and my cousins, and his heart stopped. The ambos worked on him right up to the siren. He lost. But Hawthorn won. And then they won the premiership.

Nanna lived for another twenty years. I visited her in the nursing home the day before she died. She couldn’t speak or swallow. The TV was tuned to the Hawthorn game, because there were two things that would comfort Nanna, that the day's work would stop for – Days of Our Lives, and the footy.

Dear Hawthorn,

Mum’s side of the family were bound together by their dedication to Hawthorn. They celebrated 50^th birthdays at the footy, raised kids watching games on a Saturday, grandmas and mums sewed and knitted custom brown and gold jumpers and hats and scarves, and the houses have Hawthorn mugs. Every Premiership draws tears. They talk about the players like they’re mates.

I feel like an outsider looking in a lot of the time. I didn't really like footy after it became AFL – at first it felt like an unhealthy relationship with a guy who got rich, rather than something to bond with your grandpa over. Then The Footy Show era arrived when I was a young adult. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – or more likely, reading the next day. Wayne Carey happened. Night Games happened. I felt sick at the thought of going anywhere near a footy game other than RRR’s community cup (where everyone else was similarly sad and disgusted). And Adam Goodes – it makes me angry even to write this – got booed while the AFL stood by in silence.

But eventually the Footy Show ended with the whimpers of crackpots and the whiff of charred misogyny and stale resentment. Eddie Maguire got caned for joking about drowning a woman who dared to criticise him, then caned again for his thick-headed response to Collingwood’s report on racism. Sam Lane became a commentator. Then the Women’s AFL arrived – and it was awesome. The footy was awesome. The players’ lives were awesome. These were good, well-rounded humans. And – joy of joys – so many of them were queer and it was completely normal.

The AFL had rainbow rounds and indigenous rounds. Tony Armstrong’s on the telly.

I finally like we could take the kids to the footy with my Mum without feeling like I was paying the goddamn Melbourne patriarchy.

 

Dear Hawthorn,

I read today about a family that was torn apart by you. About a woman who – despite wanting to welcome another beautiful baby into the world – felt she had to terminate the pregnancy. About the marriage breaking down, a family with little children. About a young man who parented a child who wasn’t his because he loved the child’s mother with all his heart.

I read it and wanted to vomit. 

Because, if this is true - and it was found to be credible by an independent review - this is my family’s legacy now too. My family have supported the club financially, and ten times that with enthusiasm, for the best part of a century. And you used it to pay the salaries of people who destroy families for the sake of profit. For a threepeat. No threepeat is worth destroying the lives of children and families - or any person, actually. You evil bastards.

And, if it's true, you did it to first nations families. You did it to families from communities who were taken away from their Nannas and Pas. To a community irreparably traumatised by routine child separation. Who didn’t have Pa swinging them up onto their shoulders, the way his father did with him. Who are still scared to talk to anyone from a welfare agency in case their children are taken away from them if they can’t hold down a job with their footy club. To families that we – white people, the ones who stopped to celebrate a white monarch half way around the world – tore apart. Families who have fought against the forces trying to pull them apart for generation after generation.

I am not a first nations person. But I have worked with first nations communities. I have seen the damage and I have seen the courage and I have seen a devotion to children second to none. I sat and yarned with elders and I learned so much. Including that children - including my own - are sacred. I visited the Tiwi islands, where the legendary Rioli family come from, and sat on a picnic blanket eating stew and listening to grannies teaching little kids songs about turtles and crocodiles until it got dark, and the dads turned up to round up the kids and take them home to bed. 

You made me and my family a part of the destruction of first nations families.  

You have made our memories shameful, gross, and toxic. You have made us participants in disgusting behaviour. You have shamed my 72 year old mother’s pride in her club. You have forced all of us to not talk about the footy, or Hawthorn. You have damaged the glue that holds the clan together.

And there will be hundreds, or thousands of families like us. Families who raised their kids to be proud of a club. Families who give their kids the gift of a universal language for difficult times, the simple language of a ball and two people. And kids who need the language of footy to connect with other kids, no matter their intellect, or class, or race.  

You have stained and damaged all of our families with your reckless greed and thickheaded racism, your cruelty and manipulation of your own players and their young families. And you've played into the hands of feral racists and misogynists in Australia who I'm sure are now out there defending you online. I'm not even looking. We all know how that goes.

So, if it's true, then all of you -  the board, coaches, ex-coaches, anyone who did this, or who stood by and did this - just fuck off. Resign, do whatever. I don't care how you do it. Just fuck off. Slink away. Get off our screens and out of our newspapers. Because it’s not just the players who need to heal (although they are number one) it’s everyone and every family who put their faith in you. You’ve violated all of us. You’ve violated our families and their century-long devotion and trust. You’ve violated the memory of my Pa, and my Nanna.

You’ve forced us to either confront horrible, hideous violations of a family and a woman’s body, or to never speak of Hawthorn again. And I'm going to have to choose the latter.

Also you’re idiots. Why would any good Aboriginal or Islander player ever want to work for you again? Even if you all resign, this will take a decade or more to recover from. You’ve screwed your own business. And you get paid a hell of a lot more than I do.

Hopefully the sort of people who won a grand final out of the love of their fellow player will return and start knitting everything back together again. It's going to be a long road. And it's going to be expensive.

So apologise. Hang your heads in shame. Pay for your damage. And then just fuck off. 

 

*** added 23 Sep 2022

So after everyone responsible has fucked off, then you need to change your constitution so that you have at least fifty percent women, and two First Nations members at all times, and quorum for any meeting must include at least one FN member.

As should every team. For about eighteen different reasons which I should not have to explain to you morons.