The Best Australian Humorous Writing (27 page)

The debate around ethnicity centres on violence, and whether football under the old NSL structure was a lightning rod for ethnic clashes. Syson says that he has seen over 80 South games at Bob Jane Stadium, and only twice has he seen punches thrown, although he did miss a particularly controversial South versus Preston game. He is convinced that violence at soccer matches is grossly over-reported. “Soccer was always the game that threatened the comfortable hegemony of Australian sport. If soccer gets anywhere, it starts to eat into rugby league and it starts to eat into Australian rules. So there's a vested interest in linking ethnic disaffection with soccer.”

For his Das Libero website, Syson is researching the way crowd violence is reported. It's his theory that the drunken cricket lout is characterised as an isolated idiot, but the drunken soccer lout is immediately an ultra-nationalist.

“I'm not an apologist for people pursuing their nationalist agendas,” Syson concludes. “At the pre-season practice match (between South and Victory) the actions of a couple of so-called South supporters sickened me. But I do want to make sure people know what we're talking about when we say violence. That we're comparing apples with apples.”

In extra time, Whittlesea's Steve Martin taps home the winner, and the majority of the 700-odd fans go wild.

“Two one to the Whittlesea” sing the vocal Zebras supporter group celebrating behind the goal, before rounding out with an a cappella version of “Seven Nation Army”. They are the FDZ, and they laughingly describe themselves as “ultras” because the 12 of them are being guarded by two security guards.

Jason, a Whittlesea local, says the Zebras are his number one passion. “I've been following them for eight years, and that's where my heart lies. I'm in the minority though. These boys prefer the Victory. They watch the Zebras to have an interest in the offseason.” I ask Jason whether a club like South Melbourne should be admitted to the A-League. “I would,” he says. “You can't make another plastic club. There are rumours of the Gold Coast Galaxy … for heaven's sake …”

The final whistle blows, and after a brief celebration, there's a collective rush for the tram to take us to the Victory game. I'm running with Ian Syson and his 10-year-old son, Dan. We make the tram, and Dan removes his blue and white South Melbourne shirt and replaces it with the navy, white and silver of the Victory. His father smiles. “He might wear that, but you still want to play for South, don't you, Dan?”

“We're north end, we're north end, we're north end over here.” The north terrace fans sing this song every home game, and the south terrace answers, like birds answering the call of a mate. One of the lovely quirks of this tradition is that it was established at Olympic Park, where the north terrace fans actually sat at the northern end. At Telstra Dome, they sit at the southern or Coventry end. Nevertheless, the ritual continues, unadjusted: the north terrace fans declaring their northness from the south. The south terrace fans declaring their southness from the north.

The Victory is in the middle of a home goal drought, and it doesn't break against Central Coast. It isn't a bad game though, and the team has a flush of chances in the last 10 minutes. When the final whistle blows we are out of our seats. If Thompson hadn't been brought down deliberately in the last few minutes, he would have been clean through, one-on-one with the keeper. The lower-level retractable seating shakes with the injustice of it all. Rita Zammit, who travelled with me to Germany last year, is red with excitement. “This is what football is about, frustration, disappointment, excitement. I mean the adrenaline was pumping, even if there was no score … The state of football? There were 27,000 people here on a Sunday night. Where would we have been three years ago?”

Archie Thompson walks slowly towards us and kicks a ball into the crowd. A kid called Anthony, 12, who has “Go Archie” painted on his cheeks, tells the same story with his lungs. Rita swoons in adoration:

 

If you ask people in Melbourne who you know in football, it's no longer Neill or Bresciano, it's Archie Thompson. I mean you ask the kids. It's Archie this, Archie that. That's a big step. We finally have a local face of football in this town, and his name is Archie Thompson. We've come a long way.

CHARLES FIRTH

I was in Pyongyang last week and, boy, are those guys paranoid. I was there in the days after the South Korean President, Roh Moo-hyun, took his historic trip across the 38th parallel. You'd think that would make them more relaxed about technically still being at war with the greatest military superpower in world history. And yet they still think the United States is about to attack them.

Ridiculous. When was the last time the United States attacked a small nation just because they had some sort of program for the development of weapons of mass destruction floating around? Oh.

The difference this time is, of course, that North Korea has proven it has WMD, which kind of makes the diplomacy a bit different. Apparently the United States has taken to using words such as “respect” and “dialogue” rather than “bomb you back to” and “the Stone Age”.

One night I was sitting at the bar of Hotel Pyongyang where the beers are 50 cents a longneck (if you're looking for a great holiday I recommend North Korea—go with a humanitarian pretext, stay for the command economy). Anyway, I got chatting to a suave, grey-sweatered, long-faced guy from the foreign ministry who coolly told me in impeccable English that relations between the United States and North Korea were like “the tiger and the hedgehog”.

At first I thought he had simply had too many 50-cent long-necks, but the more he explained the more he made sense. When the tiger tries to bite the hedgehog, it gets stuck in the tiger's mouth, and the spikes get stuck in the tiger's nose. As he explained this, he chewed on a stinky yellow strip of fish jerky—a delicacy that was stuck in the mouth of everyone at the bar: eight years of famine drives people to do some pretty horrifying stuff.

Being stuck in the tiger's mouth, though, is where North Korea wants to be. This means that even though the hedgehog is very small, he can control the direction the tiger heads in. “Hedgehogs are small but prickly,” concluded the man with a smug grin that made me think for a moment he was a French diplomat, even though he was short and Asian.

Having discovered the essence of North Korea's foreign policy (deep background research in North Korea is amazingly cheap—the whole conversation only cost me $3.50—even including the jerky, which had me “researching” Pyongyang's plumbing systems for the rest of the night), it got me thinking. If America is the tiger and North Korea is a hedgehog, where does Australia fit in?

A few days later, I was hanging out with a former Chinese military spy in Tiananmen Square (it's a long story—but it ended with us being detained by police, of course). He started telling me about how he perceives China's role in the world. “It's like the tiger and the snake,” he said. Apparently, China is the snake—you can beat it with a stick, you can chop off its tail and it won't die. And yet it can kill with just one bite which the tiger won't even have seen coming.

All this talk got me feeling sorry for tigers—after all, our success in the world is directly tied to the United States. Like it or not, Australia's future does not bode well if our friend the tiger is limping around with a hedgehog in its mouth.

So what exactly is Australia in this overly extended metaphor? I'd like to think Australia is a kookaburra, sitting high up on a
distant tree, laughing at the rest of the animals. Others would prefer us to be a koala, sitting in the tree, stoned, not paying much attention to the world around us. But the truth is slightly less fun. If China is a snake, North Korea is a hedgehog and the United States is a tiger, then Australia is the hookworm of the world. It has penetrated the skin of the tiger and is making a decent living in its lower intestine. But it depends on the tiger's survival to ensure its own survival.

Which is probably why I favour eating fish jerky, and using diplomatic words with the hedgehogs. It beats having our host run around with spikes up its nose.

STEVE VIZARD

“Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle”, Norman Mailer provocatively proclaimed in his 1957 essay “The White Negro”, between stabbing his second wife and collecting a Pulitzer Prize. If Mailer had been poolside last week at Thailand's hippest hotel, the Library, I'm fairly confident he would have stabbed my 13-year-old son Jim. And he wouldn't have been alone.

The Library is a phalanx of cubes clustered around a glass library in the form of another cube overlooking the best bit of Koh Samui's perfect beach. It doesn't need a copy of Mailer's book on its shelves to exude hip. A triumph of right angles. Interiors by Euclid. Lines so sharp you can disembowel yourself leaning against a doorframe. Monochrome décor. Black benches. White, enamel-painted floorboards. Black stools. White matte walls. Staying at the Library is like vacationing on a chessboard. If Boris Spassky and Annie Lennox had a love child and it was a building, this is what it would look like—a minimalist structure so architecturally pure that even checking in creates clutter.

At least that's what happens when we check in. You can almost see the only other visible guests—the Argentine supermodel couple and a cigar-chewing Italian Marlon Brando circa
Godfather
— start packing and changing flights. The Library isn't expecting our
family. Or any family. And it certainly isn't expecting 13-year-old Jim. Within minutes Jim is dismembering hipness: Jim emptying contents of bar fridge; Jim locating iMac in library; Jim downloading dance tracks at blaringly loud levels; Jim ringing room service; Jim befriending eleven local Thai boys and instigating international soccer match using as goalpost a chaise-longue-bearing, cigar-gnawing Mafia guy; Jim feeding entire soccer team and their distant relatives on room service; Jim purchasing incendiary device in the form of skyrocket from Thai pedlar on beach; series of explosions outside Argentine supermodel bedroom; Jim unavailable for comment.

Jim is wild but this joint is wilder.

Our bedroom is a giant white box as vast as Mailer's ego. On one side, raised on a rostrum, is a double bed. At the other end is a bath. It might be a bath. It's hard to distinguish its white silhouette against the white walls in a white room, which strangely evoke the sense of skiing and après skiing simultaneously. The Library lives and breathes the hip dictum, form over function. No cupboards. No wardrobes. No racks. Only white surfaces. I spend twenty minutes feeling the walls looking for concealed storage cavities. The cleaners who valiantly attempt to make sense of my daily pigsty are equally hamstrung by lack of storage. Their solution is to repack my clothes into my suitcase each day. For an establishment that markets itself as “a leader in Thai hospitality”, there is nothing less hospitable than finding one's suitcases packed every day. The hotel is screaming, Get the hell out of here. Take your battered suitcase with your soiled underwear and your fake Polo shirt and the preposterous crumpled reefer jacket you brought to the tropics on the off chance of a formal dinner and your hyperactive son and his pirated DVDs and get the hell out of our brochure.

Outside, in the Library's obsessively manicured gardens, Queen's Bishop Two to King's Pawn Three, the dominating landscaping feature is a vast square red mosaic pool. Bright red. Every
time I wade in I feel like I'm bleeding from the ankles. When Jim and his eleven mates relocate their soccer match to the pool, the overall scene resembles the first twenty minutes of
Saving Private Ryan
. On the pool's edge, a lank-haired photographer and his lank-haired offsider man an expensive-looking Minolta on a tripod. Twice I walk or swim in their general direction, and twice the photographic duo abandons their post as if a solar eclipse has consumed the light. It isn't just that I am getting in the road of their shoot; reality is getting in the road. I watch them. Extreme close-up of foot of chair. Extreme close-up of prawn on plate. Extreme close-up of fork prong. An extreme close-up of lard-assed, middle-aged Australian cavorting in red water, in a manner reminiscent of dying mammal on the upper deck of a Japanese whaler, is never on the cards. Neither is any image capturing any human being.

The Library, like all hip hotels, lives in extreme close-up. It is a
Wallpaper
shoot. It is a freeze frame. It is best viewed through a macro lens, the better to magnify particulars, to distort reality, to render everyday life as a pastiche, too close, too far away, too hard, too soft, never just right.