Released in 2002, Australian Rules represents one of the few attempts by filmmakers
to use the greatest game of all as a muse. (Wikipedia lists
only five films ever made about the code.) Like all good sports films, it isn’t
really about sport, instead using it as a jumping-off point to explore deeper
social and political issues.
The film takes place in the fictional Eyre
Peninsula town of Prospect Bay, home to a football club (the Magpies), a pub, a
runners-up medal in a 1993 Tidy Town competition, and little else besides. The
first scene takes us into the club’s dressing rooms, where coach and local
butcher ‘Arks’ (as in ‘I’ve arksed you blokes a thousand bloody times’) is
giving his pre-match address. He is against handballing, “buggerising ‘round
the flanks”, and general “finessin’”, i.e. every tactical innovation made since
Ron Barassi strutted around Arden Street in a blue suit, and instead commands
his charges to “go the guts”. A sign on the wall reads ‘NEGATIVE THOUGHTS
CREATE NEGATIVE RESAULTS’ (sic).
We soon realise that the Magpies’ colours
are supposed to symbolise the town’s racial divide. (This is probably why they
wear Collingwood’s evenly-coloured stripes instead of Port Adelaide’s
predominantly black ‘prison bar’ guernsey.) It is the week of the Grand Final,
and with Prospect Bay’s Aboriginal ruckman having been arrested, his duties
fall to the central character, Gary ‘Blacky’ Black (Nathan Phillips), an
autodidact who immerses himself in books such as A More Powerful Vocabulary, and a sentimental bloke who feels
alienated by the harden-the-f***-up culture of rural Australia.
The deterioration in race relations in the
town is already underway when the Magpies’ indigenous contingent turn up with
only ten minutes remaining until the opening bounce, almost missing another of
Arks’ inspirational addresses. Prospect Bay’s opponents are Gundaroo, playing
in red guernseys with a white yoke (an uncommon design – one would expect a South
Australian team to go with North Adelaide’s red with white ‘V’). Blacky is
losing every ruck duel (even copping a few in the old Jatz crackers), and the
score is 15.10.100 to 6.4.40; it seems like a rather high-scoring game but is
perhaps realistic given the parched nature of the turf. Race is the fuel for an
all-in brawl (a Gundaroo players taunts his opponent with the line “you and
your black mates”), and the Magpies go to the sheds battered and bruised.
Sports films often suffer from
predictability in terms of their on-field outcomes, and this one is no
different. Blacky leads his team in doing some of that “finessin’” that Arks
dislikes, realising that his team’s height disadvantage isn’t conducive to
moving the Sherrin down the middle of the field, and instead distributing the
ball diagonally to indigenous speedsters like his best friend Gumby. The credit
for the tactical switch must, however, go to Blacky’s mother, Liz, who in an
earlier scene at the family dinner table, used sauce bottles for goalposts and
a loaf of bred for the centre square to demonstrate how the Magpies might use
space to neutralise their opponents’ superiority in the air.
Long story short, the Magpies win by one
point, 18.15.123 to 18.14.122. An Aborigine kicks the winning minor score, and
while the other thirty-four players are seemingly in Prospect Bay’s forward
fifty (flooding apparently being the only post-Whitlam tactical innovation that
Arks has absorbed), Blacky gets knocked out blocking a counter-attack by
Gundaroo’s ruckman. Cut to the post-match clubroom celebrations, where the
Magpies’ president (played by the guy who was in those Beaurepaires ads years
ago) informs us that it is the Bays’ first flag in thirty-eight years, while
another local dignitary waxes lyrical about the joys of football, noting sagely
that “whenever men get together, great things happen”.
This is where it all kicks off. Dumby
appeared to the naked eye to be the Magpies’ best player on the ground, but the
Gray Medal is instead awarded to a white player. Blacky begins a fling with
Dumby’s sister, Clarence, while Dumby and a cousin lead a robbery of the
clubrooms which results in his being shot by Blacky’s father. As the town’s
white population are in denial about the shooting, Blacky makes the trek across
the highway to the indigenous reservation to attend Dumby’s funeral, stealing
the Gray Medal beforehand to ensure that his friend would be buried therewith.
Having been discovered in bed with Clarence, things come to a head between he
and his father. After some random violence and some
this-town-ain’t-big-enough-for-the-two-of-us standoffs, the father leaves in
his rusty old car and Blacky is free to carry on his budding relationship with
Clarence.
In terms of its portrayal of the culture of
football, Australian Rules kicks a
goal. There is the way in which the local club serves as the focal point for
the civic life of towns like Prospect Bay (due, in part, to the fact that
Australia’s comparative lack of local government areas leaves most localities
without the mairie that characterises
small-town France). Then there is the antediluvian tactical obscurantism of
Arks’ ‘go the guts’ philosophy, inevitably outmoded by the space-creating barcelonista style used by the Magpies
in the second half of the Grand Final in a perfect metaphor for the way in
which the influx of Aboriginal players has altered the game. There was the
awkward running through the banners (country footballers not being as well-versed
in this art as the chaps on Mr. McLachlan’s circuit), the speechifying at the
post-match presentations, and the roles played by women in football.
