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| Penguin Books Australia, 1972 |
In my twenty-fifth year I start my reminiscences, sitting by the window with a can of beer, the whole town at my right hand, my first night back and maybe also my last. Look, said the locals all afternoon –– see that kid over there? It's the great McCarthy, none other, the old Mister Football himself. How the mighty have etcetera, and pride comes before a you-know-what. The country boy who went too close to the bright lights and copped a fast burn on the behind. In all the papers and the kids still wear his number. On TV and married himself a heiress, and now look at him. Whatsamatter boy, you got tickets on yourself? Warwick not good enough for you? Don't rubbish it kid, a fine place to live. A big river, Rotary and Apex Clubs, sunshine all the year round. With the biggest comfort station in Australia down there in the park.
Voici McCarthy avec sa plume, back at his own level, a scrapbook of cuttings only months old to prove what he once was. He'll cradle it on his knees at sixty, the bore in the back bar. See? That's me. McCarthy smiling, hair matted, being chaired off the field. McCarthy injured, flat on his back. McCarthy leaping high, knees on the shoulders of the others, about to pull down that ball. I hear the cheers, faint old-gramophone noises, remote as Melba, and less than one year old.
The Novel: Many a fine novel has been written about the world of sport, ranging from Bernard Malamud's 1952 debut The Natural to This Sporting Life, David Storey's gritty 1960s tale of life as a rugby league player in northern England, to The Art of Fielding,
Chad Harbach's gripping 2011 take on the modern game of baseball. Very
few sport-themed novels, however, have been set in Australia –– a
puzzling anomaly in a land where sport, and particularly the playing of ball games, is an obsession
frequently elevated by both sexes to the status of a national religion.
Barry Oakley's second novel A Salute to the Great McCarthy
is a notable exception to this rule, depicting the swift rise and equally swift fall of its naïve title character in what, prior to its becoming a nationwide competition in 1990, was still known as the
Victorian Football League. But this version of football is not the
soccer or rugby of the British Isles or the elaborate
derivative of the latter game played in North America. The fast-paced,
slightly anarchic game at which young Jack McCarthy excels is played with a
spheroid ball by teams of eighteen unpadded, high-leaping players and known, fittingly enough, as Australian Rules. What McCarthy learns –– and A Salute to the Great McCarthy is a bildungsroman or 'formation/education' novel in the truest sense of the term –– is that on-field success is no guarantee of success in your personal life and that celebrity has its permanent drawbacks along with its delightful if transitory compensations.
McCarthy hails from the small Victorian rural community of Warwick, a tall,
mark-taking prodigy (a 'mark' is awarded when a player catches the ball
on the full after it's been kicked by another player, thereby earning the
recipient a 'free' or unobstructable kick) whose talent for the game is first spotted by his high school coach MacGuinness, a demanding, urbane and somewhat
aloof man who tries to introduce his ingenuous pupil/player to the pleasures of city life
by taking him to Melbourne, the bustling state capital, in his flashy white sports car
for a weekend of sightseeing, shopping and fine dining. But MacGuinness also wishes to prepare the lad for the very different milieu that his performance on the
football field may introduce him to should his services be acquired by a VFL club whose selectors are canny enough to appreciate
his as yet untapped playing potential.
MacGuinness
also needs an ally in town, a buffer
between himself and men like McCarthy's blustering father Jim –– automobile salesman, heavy drinker, illicit Thursday night lover of a sluttish teenage girl out in the scrub
–– who have their knives out for him figuratively if not literally
because they suspect him, with his fancy clothes and expensive British car, of being homosexual. And the knives soon find their target. MacGuinness is fired from his
position as coach and hounded out of town one night by a gang of McCarthy's own
schoolmates, crossing the railroad tracks in his MG to
what now appears to his former pupil to be an enviable, much desired freedom.
With
his one support in town removed, McCarthy is thrown back on his own
resources. After lazing away the summer dallying with a local waitress and
servicing cars for his father, he's ready to prove himself when the
cooler days of April bring the long-awaited return of the football
season. 'We played Wentworth first up,' we are told, 'the
poor relation across the river. The town that hated our wide streets and
the irrigation greenness of our parks, our big schools, all glass, and
our single supermarket. It was bred into them when they were kids and
when we visited them for football it piped out with a high whistle;
light a match and we'd all go up, boom.' Called up from the reserve
bench after Warwick's best player is injured and taken from the field, McCarthy does himself proud, kicking three goals and, after much
hemming and hawing by the club's selectors, earning himself a permanent place on the town team.
But an even greater honour awaits McCarthy in the form of an offer from Kingswood, a city VFL club whose visiting representatives promise him $40 a week (a sizable sum in 1967, the year in which the book is set) in addition to guaranteeing to find him a full-time job. (This was an era before sport became a full-time professional enterprise, when it was common for even the best players to work a standard eight hour day in other occupations while devoting their weekends to the fulfillment of their on-field duties.) He signs the contract, leaving his elder brother to run the family business in the absence of Jim who has fled in disgrace after his activities as a middle-aged lothario have been revealed by the town's disgruntled 'dunny man' whose livelihood is threatened by Jim's push for a long overdue municipal sewerage system. 'I sign,' McCarthy informs us, 'I listen to the pen scratch, a thin and deathly noise. Straightaway they get up, in unison. Out come the big hands, enclosing mine. "No, no more beer, thank you very much. We'll be in touch. A step you'll never regret. A big day in your life, mark my words." They mumbled to me all the way down the hall, preoccupied and not looking. Into the car quickly. Driving off fast. Leaving me feeling like a trussed-up package.'
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| William Heinemann Australia first edition, 1970 |
The image of McCarthy as a trussed-up package, a commodity bought and paid for like a five pound slab of meat, is an aptly chosen one. He now belongs to the Kingswood Football Club, no longer to himself. Nor does his long dreamed of move to the bright lights of Melbourne live up to expectation. Having pictured himself comfortably domiciled in a
swinging bachelor pad in trendy South Yarra, he instead finds himself a
rent-paying boarder in the suburban home of his slightly dotty aunt, a
strict vegetarian who is also landlady to a pedantic retired English teacher and a
senile bedwetting Catholic priest. Nor is his new job at city
investment firm Security Trustees the junior executive position he was
led to believe it would be. He's put to work in the company's file department,
buried in the basement far from the sight of its female typists and a
particularly gorgeous blonde secretary named Lois whom he can only lust after from afar. But the basement is also home to Ackermann, head of stores and emperor of
stationery, a European immigrant who encourages rebellion and spends his
spare time trying to perfect his self-designed version of a pedal-powered
aircraft. Ackermann is an eccentric, even something of a clown, but he's his own man in a way that McCarthy, for all his talent on the football field, is not. Nor does he share his young friend's bamboozling weakness for the charms of the opposite sex.
The second half of the book contrasts McCarthy's progress as the rookie full forward for the Kingswood Bears with his off-field adventures as a budding Casanova, struggling to balance romantic entanglements with the club's expectations of him as a player and seasonally adjusted minor celebrity. His first entanglement, after some drunken unsatisfying groping of the still unattainable Lois at the office Christmas party, is with another girl from the office named Vera, outspoken daughter of Russian refugees with
whom he has one unconsummated sexual encounter at a local
drive-in and a second consummated one at the annual player's picnic that is unfortunately witnessed by his new coach, a crusty old campaigner named Twentyman. 'Help!' McCarthy mentally cries out as voluptuous Vera rolls on top of him, her intentions impossible to misconstrue. 'Vera
the octopus, huge eyes an inch away, nose big as a beak, catching me in
her tight arms. I struggle, this is lovely, you get it both ways,
protesting yet giving in… Our hands wandering here and there, rough and tumble on the
green grass, then I come up for air to see the distant peering head of
Twentyman on a search for wild life.'
With angry Vera soon out of the picture, McCarthy's amorous attentions turn to bespectacled Miss Russell, attractive olive-skinned teacher of the night
school business course he has now been enrolled in at the urging of his employers. After
some initial reservations, Miss Russell takes him under her
cultured and politically active wing, introducing him to Bartok and
experimental theatre, insisting that he accompany her to a rally
protesting Australia's ongoing involvement in the village burning conflict
in Vietnam. But McCarthy, forthright yet dangerously credulous, is no longer a private citizen. He's the property of the club and its supporters, neither of whom are pleased
to see a photograph of him in next day's newspaper, striking an officer
of the law on the jaw with his meaty fist. The Club President is likewise displeased and
threatens instant dismissal should another such incident occur.
Angered by this affront to his individuality, McCarthy goes on to play the game
of his life, trouncing Kingswood's traditional rivals North Melbourne and
earning himself the eternal hatred of its supporters, a pack of whom lurk in the carpark after the match for the purpose of gaining revenge on him for the merciless humiliation of their heroes. 'In those awful seconds,' he observes, 'I am
MacGuinness trapped in alien country; they kick the car, hammer at the
windows, I see their wild Heathcliffe faces, foaming with hate… Another
lesson for the student McCarthy, fast reaching his diploma in the school
of hard knocks: hate, the strongest force in the world.'
Meanwhile,
his relationship with Miss Russell is coming to an end thanks
to her patronizing attitude to football and, by extension, to anyone
'primitive' enough to enjoy it as either player or spectator. They part during a visit to the National Gallery where she's taken
him to view an improving exhibition of modern art. 'Now she's alone,' he muses after watching her slink off in unexpected and unprecedented tears, 'and
I'm alone, our primal condition… In the Hall of Technology I catch up
with the schoolkids again. I'm standing there looking up at Hargreaves'
marvellous old flying machine, one of Australia's first –– a wonder of
wire, bamboo, dust –– when two kids come up to me: "Excuse me, Mr
McCarthy?"… "That's right"… "Could we by any chance have your
autograph?" I sign, and more kids come, they crowd around me, and I
love it, for the moment this is all I want, though I know it's as
fragile as that thing of struts and wood hanging above me. Hargreaves,
Ackermann, McCarthy –– flyers unsteady, all of a piece.'
Free
again, and with the end of the football season fast approaching,
McCarthy receives an offer from a
producer named Tranter to appear, dressed as Batman, in a television
advertisement for Buckwheat Breakfast Food. Tranter also has a sexual interest in his new discovery which,
while in no way reciprocated by straitlaced McCarthy, makes the producer keen to show him
off to his fashionable acquaintances at a swanky party held each week in a photography
studio. And here again the boy from the bush strikes trouble. Having met and made a
favourable impression on irresistible fashion model Andrea Miller, McCarthy is teased
by Tranter's latest pick-up, a pouting male mannequin who describes
him as being just what Tranter always fancies in his men –– 'The clean-cut classic type.' Fisticuffs ensue, seemingly nipping whatever chance the impetuous young footballer might have had of bedding the gorgeous Andrea firmly in the bud.
Tranter, on the other hand, is delighted. McCarthy, he declares, was born to wear the Batman suit and slide down a cable to the street, a stunt that will be the thrilling finale to his commercial. But complications arise as complications always will. Before filming the big finale McCarthy expresses concern that the angle of descent from apartment to street might be a tad too steep. Nonsense, Tranter says. And anyway, he's fully insured, the light is fading and time, which is also money, is pressing. 'I'm still shouting as his hand goes down,' besuited McCarthy anxiously confesses, 'and the warm wind snatches away my sentences… My flight seems gentle, the cape billowing in smooth free fall, the tree-thick park opening its arms to receive me… The speed increases, the angle's too great, save me, they're bracing up that mattress with another, panic, trees, people, ground rise up like a single punching fist. McCarthy is stunned, the crowd are in fits, and as they take me from the wire all I can remember is hoping I'd broken a bone.'
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| Penguin Books Australia, 1975 |
McCarthy gets his wish. He
breaks his leg and
is confined to hospital for Christmas where, jobless after having caused undue embarrassment to the good people at Security Trustees,
sentiment-charged thoughts of home and family cannot help but impinge on his serenity. But hope is on the horizon.
Hobbling along the corridor one day, he comes upon a bedridden Andrea
Miller, now a patient herself after having broken her dainty foot while water-skiing. Their acquaintance quickly renewed, they concoct a plan to defy
matron and enjoy an illicit tryst in Andrea's room on Christmas
morning which, after some grappling with the logistics of how to
successfully copulate while parts of their respective anatomies are encased in
thick unyielding plaster, goes more or less as anticipated. The next day, however, finds Andrea gone, whisked off by her rich but financially overstretched father –– 'the famous biscuit king' ––
to her luxurious Portsea home on the shores of Port Phillip Bay. Thankfully, the mail soon brings
an invitation to McCarthy to attend a New Year's Eve party at this same beachside dwelling, an event which happily
coincides with the removal of his cast and his long awaited discharge from hospital.
This gathering, also attended by Tranter, is reminiscent of their first meeting,
full of beautiful people doing not so beautiful things to themselves and each other
while stuffed to the gills with consciousness altering drugs
and other, more traditional intoxicants. McCarthy, smitten with Andrea as he never was with distant Lois, aggressive Vera or snooty Miss Russell, joins in, becoming so stoned that he willingly plays the role of her
mock bridegroom in a hastily arranged mock marriage ceremony. But, mock ceremony or not, it encourages McCarthy to consider the not entirely sensible idea of making Andrea his real life bride, sending him scurrying off to her father's mansion in Toorak a few days later to seek his permission to propose, only to have Andrea, unpredictable as ever, propose to him while seated, topless and beguilingly desirable, at her bedroom dressing table. A week later they're married at a registry office, the ceremony witnessed by McCarthy's aunt, a commiserating Ackermann,
a skeptical Tranter and a selection of hippies, blissed out beautiful people and assorted hangers-on.
A week after that, their honeymoon well and truly over, Andrea is sarcastically describing him as 'Mr Excitement'
and leaving him to brood over his evening paper and get drunk alone on
brandy while she gatecrashes a party raging on in the flat upstairs. This becomes McCarthy's new life. Criticized and humiliated by his new and perhaps
mentally unbalanced wife, who declares he's nothing when he's not wearing
a football jersey, a martyr to misplaced affection who prays for the day
when she'll be sick enough of accusing him of cheating on her to walk
out of both their flat and the marriage. When that day, or rather night, arrives it is Andrea herself who
does the cheating, unapologetically cuckolding him with their party animal
neighbour. All he can do is let her go, breathe an overdue sigh of relief and return to his one true love,
the game of football.
But
McCarthy's life is not yet free of entanglements. Andrea's father intervenes, demanding that McCarthy allow his daughter to commence divorce proceedings against him in exchange for
$5000, a fee which increases to $7500 when McCarthy rejects the original offer as an
insult to his pride. Satisfying though this feels, it is also rather
foolish. The Biscuit King is a man with many powerful connections. Damaging articles about his uncooperative son-in-law soon begin appearing in the Melbourne newspapers, suggesting it was McCarthy who was the
unstable one in the marriage, an inflicter of unspeakable
cruelties on an innocent, too trusting girl who found herself understandably dazzled by his celebrity. When McCarthy's efforts to bring
this salacious smear campaign to an end prove unsuccessful, he tries again to console
himself with football, only to lose his former edge along with the
respect of his coach, his fellow players and Kingswood's staunchly working class supporters who feel insulted by the fact that he chose to marry his 'posh bird' in secret at a registry office instead of doing it out in the open in church like any 'normal bloke' would have done.
One
night before training, the Club President takes McCarthy aside and declares that
his next game for Kingswood will also be his last. Certain that he's being unjustly
persecuted thanks to the intervention of the Millers, McCarthy pays another visit to their home in affluent Toorak,
determined to have it out with Andrea and bring an end to the bad
publicity that has prematurely derailed his career and made his life a
living hell. Unable to see his estranged wife, whom he is told is holidaying in
England, he demands that her father pay him $10,000 compensation
for the damage his lies have done to his formerly spotless reputation. Mr Miller, of course, won't
hear of this, demanding again that McCarthy be the one to initiate
divorce proceedings against his daughter so she'll be free to re-marry
the son of a US biscuit mogul in church and unite their
families as well as their respective business empires in a mutually beneficial alliance. This time it's
McCarthy who refuses, fleeing the house with a priceless vase after
Miller takes a shot at him with an antique hunting rifle. McCarthy drops the
vase, thankfully without breaking it, while fleeing across the back
yard, inadvertently setting off the garden's sprinkler system and saturating the
pursuing Miller, his daughter (who was of course hiding upstairs all along) and their crotch-sniffing
guard dog before scrambling over the garden wall to safety.
The
next day McCarthy plays his final match for Kingswood. Taunted and harassed by his ape-like opponent, heartsick at having to abandon the game he loves because of crazy Andrea, he knocks his harasser to the ground and is reported to
the umpire for it –– an act of defiance which immediately changes the whole mood of the match.
When his opponent retaliates a few minutes later, McCarthy receives a free
kick. 'I go down, I get up, they give me the ball, the ground is lurching, I start to run, not knowing where. "Kick it!" ' the infuriated crowd cries out to him, ' "Kick
the bastard!" The umpire's whistle blows but I keep running, a
waterfall in my ears, veering towards the boundary, coach up on his
feet, everyone up on their feet, McCarthy's gone mad!'
Although several
players try to stop him, McCarthy keeps running toward the
concrete ramp that leads to the dressing room and freedom, the
stolen ball still clutched tight against his chest. 'I run up the roaring race, into the
dressing-room, brushing away trainers, across the passage, out the
players' entrance, and into the park.' There's a carnival in
progress out here, food stalls and other concession stands set up beside a truck emblazoned with the sign
'ACKERMANN –– NOVELTY & GIFT.' It's his old aviator friend, the former emperor of stationery, now working the carnival circuit to earn the money required to
perfect his pedal-powered aircraft. McCarthy hides in the back of his truck
while Ackermann, helpful as ever, sends the angry football crowd on a
wild goose chase in search of him. Where does he want to go? Ackermann enquires once the mob has departed, leaving them to ponder their respective futures together. Far
away from Melbourne, from football, from all the madness the game
inspires in its devotees but also, McCarthy now sees, in himself. And then eventually back to Warwick, he decides, the sleepy rural town
where his adventures began and will no doubt end in a mixture of relief and beer-fuelled regret.
A Salute to the Great McCarthy was a very popular novel in its day, being reprinted twice in paperback within two years of its hardback publication and again in 1975 when a film adaptation of it, featuring a young John Jarratt in his first starring role, was released to surprising indifference despite one of its supporting cast being Australian comedy legend Barry Humphries. It's easy to see why the book sold as well as it did. It's both wickedly funny and disparagingly honest in its depiction of Australia's obsessive football culture and the fickleness of the average spectator who, unable to do what their on-field heroes do with such impressive ease, can be viciously unforgiving of their foibles and setbacks.
The game of Australian Rules has changed a lot since 1970, as has the nation in which it is played, but the book continues to offer an important perspective on Australia's obsession with sport and the forces, financial and otherwise, which both stoke and dominate it. Long unavailable, it cries out to be reprinted so it can take its rightful place as one of the truly great Australian novels, a linguistic tour de force whose sentences sing on the page as those in few other novels, antipodean or otherwise, ever seem to do.
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| BARRY OAKLEY, c 1990 |
The Writer: Barry Kingham Oakley was born in the Victorian city of Melbourne on 24 February 1931 and educated at the Christian Brothers College located in that city's seaside suburb of St Kilda where he also grew up. (He supported the Melbourne Football Club and, in his teens, played in the goal square for The West St Kilda Catholic Young Men's Society.) He attended the University of Melbourne, earning an Arts degree in 1954 after which he worked as a secondary school teacher in Maryborough between 1955 and 1962 (where he was approached to play on the local team, only to have the offer snappishly withdrawn when he stated that he preferred to get away from the place on weekends), subsequently leaving that profession to spend a year as a lecturer in Humanities at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
For the next two years Oakley worked in advertising, a job he left in 1966 to become a copywriter for the federal Department of Trade and Industry, a position he'd retain until 1973. During this period he published several short stories in Australian literary periodicals including Southerly, Meanjin and Quadrant while working on his debut novel A Wild Ass of a Man which was published by FW Cheshire in 1967. That year also saw the debut performance of his first work for the stage, titled Eugene Flockhart's Desk, at the Emerald Hill Theatre in South Melbourne. Although William Heinemann Australia published his next two novels in 1970 –– A Salute to the Great McCarthy and the similarly picaresque Let's Hear It For Prendergast some months later –– Oakley would find his greatest success throughout the 1970s as a playwright, with many of his works staged at the La Mama Theatre in Carlton and the now iconic venue known as The Pram Factory.
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| BARRY OAKLEY, 2012 |
Oakley did not publish The Craziplane, his fourth novel, until 1989, one year after becoming Literary Editor of the daily broadsheet newspaper The Australian. He would keep this job until 1997 and go on to publish his second non-fiction work Minitudes: Diaries 1974-1997 in 2000. (This was preceded by Scribbling in the Dark, a collection of reminiscences subtitled Lifetime Encounters with Fame and Family that appeared in 1985.) A fifth and final novel titled Don't Leave Me followed in 2002. After a ten year hiatus from playwriting, he produced the dramas Sunday Sundowner's Club and Killigrew Karaoke in 2003, following them five years later with a revival of his popular 1975 play Bedfellows. Music, his final dramatic work, premiered at the Fairfax Studio on 9 November 2012 in a production staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company. This was closely followed by a third book of non-fiction titled Mug Shots: A Memoir.
The father of six children, Barry Oakley has lived with his wife in the Blue Mountains region of western New South Wales for more than thirty years.
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| Stoney Creek Films/Umbrella Entertainment, 2004 |
The cinematic adaptation of A Salute to the Great McCarthy, re-titled The Great Macarthy (allegedly to disassociate it from the 1950s US Senator and Communist witch-hunter of the same surname), produced and directed by DAVID BAKER and starring JOHN JARRATT as Macarthy, SANDY MACGREGOR as Vera, JUDY MORRIS as Miss Russell, KATE FITZPATRICK as Andrea and COLIN DRAKE as Ackermann was released by Stoney Creek Films/Seven Keys on 7 August 1975.
OAKLEY himself disowns the film, stating that 'The guy who produced and directed it, he was an amputee –– born without a sense of humour. I realised this too late. I said to him, "Why is this guy farting?" He said, "Because it's amusing." ' He has also told his children that they should buy any copies of the film they happen to come across and immediately burn them.
The film was last re-issued in 2004 as a Region 4 DVD (Australia and South America) by Umbrella Entertainment.
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