by H. G. Nelson
Sport was her passion. The shotgun was her sport. She shot with the Wangaratta Trigger Pullers, who were thrilled when the wombat trail tapped her for the top job in Canberra.
Bridget was in great company. Australia has had so many great shooters and wonderful success at the highest levels of international competition. Our stars have climbed the heady heights to the top step of the Olympic podium. Remember, it’s the only sport to feature in both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.
No one can forget the golden joy unleashed across the nation by Australian shooters in Atlanta in 1996. Michael Diamond, gold in the trap, and Russell Mark, gold in the double trap. Michael backed up and blew the competition away in the trap for a second time, getting gold in Sydney. This early nugget of precious metal unleashed a golden shower of success in Sydney, making it our best Games ever.
Australians can shoot. Our politicians can shoot. The sport looks easy but requires total stillness, a dead eye, trigger coordination, concentration and the ability to shout ‘Pull’ and then pull the trigger.
Our master blasters were not forgotten in the election of 2019. Bridget, dubbed Minister for Hunting, produced a compelling report that suggested a gun- and shooting-led economic recovery was the most likely pathway to the nation’s continued economic success. The income generated by the shooting industries from gun sales to bullets, from travel to hospital admissions, from clothes to merchandise, was eye-watering.
This timely report was accompanied by an equally startling online survey in which participants, mainly shooters, were asked how they were travelling health-wise in their work–life balance battle.
Once the survey votes were in, researchers discovered that shooters and, especially, shotgun shooters, were among the most well-adjusted members of the Australian community. Between them they contributed $17.47 billion annually to the nation’s economy simply by pulling the trigger and blazing away at clay targets and bush junk across the nation.
Remember this was a survey of shooters. There was nothing technical about the sample but look at those results! Other sports were green with envy.
Sadly, climate activist PM, Malcolm T., was dumped by his colleagues in the night of the long gladiolus before he could finish the sport cash dish-out job. In a three-way run-off for the crown on 24 August 2018, ‘Our Miners Are the World’s Best’ Scottie Morrison saw off the challenges of Spud Dutton and Blinga Bishop. There was a cabinet reshuffle once the new PM, with an all-trade, have-a-go agenda, located the keys to The Lodge.
‘Shotgun’ McK clung tenaciously to the Sport portfolio in the subsequent ministerial reshuffle. She was put in charge of the 2019 election sport pork strategy. Her department was allocated $98.5 million large to tip into the nation’s sporting clubs. Seasoned observers maintain this was a sensible and well-targeted cash splash. All federal seats were on the table, apart from safe Labor seats, obviously.
Bridget was quite capable of dishing out the money. She took a steady bead on those pesky marginal seats. She drew up a map, aimed truly and pulled the cashflow trigger.
She took a steady bead on those pesky marginal seats. She drew up a map, aimed truly and pulled the cashflow trigger.
As the election day approached, the boss, ‘On Water Matters’ Morrison, wasn’t happy. He could see the handiwork was not good enough and picked up the phone.
But when the PM involved himself in the details the troubles began. Here the nation is indebted to the work of Australia’s number-one sports-rorts researcher, Theo ‘Red Ted’ Damp. Theo anchors a podcast, Sink Your Teeth into This, Australia!
Damp’s extensive research, using FOI requests, revealed that the marginal seat sporting loot plans went backwards and forwards many times between the PM’s office and the Minister for Sport’s parliamentary cubby hole. They were amended and amended again. The gravy train of sports rorts dough only ground to a halt on election day when the polls closed.
‘It’s not a race’ Morrison went above and beyond. He tasked Bang Bang McKenzie to roam the country pleading with sporting organisations to go for a grant whether they needed it or not! Many grant applications came in late. It did not matter. If there was time to swing a vote, there was money in the kick.
Once the vote was counted, the ABC’s Anthony Green declared at 7.04 pm that the government was returned. It was a stunning night of nights for federal politics. How good? But as so often happens in the corridors of power post hooter, tongues started wagging.
After a vigorous probe putting chilli on the in/out stick, Red Ted Damp unearthed emails which suggested that everyone in a marginal seat had been offered something. Here is a sample of how it worked:
To ‘Mouse’ Brown
Hon. Sec. Budgewoi Smugglers and Shooters Club
Budgewoi NSW
21 April 2019
Dear ‘Mouse’ Brown,
Thanks for the dozen frozen mullet, the kids and the neighbours loved them. And regards to Breffnie, Shelby and the glamorous Nadine.
Now to business. I know that the date for lodging any application for the current round of sports grants has passed. Don’t worry! It is never too late to get a snout deep into the federal pork trough. And every snout deserves something. My office can tidy up loose ends and do any backdating required.
Never mind that you don’t have a women’s team in any competition, apply for a grant because you never know what might happen in the future. We just need an indication that your committee could be considering gender diversity sometime in the next fifty years.
To make it easy, there is a tick box form attached. If you need any help working out whether ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is the right answer, please ring Vera in my office.
Bang away, Mouse, and win big!
Yours at the trigger end of a shottie!
Bridget McKenzie
Min. for Sport
The Big House
Canberra ACT
This email struck gold. A response came from the Budgewoi (Budgie) Smugglers and Shooters Club. This progressive club is located in downtown Budgewoi, that NSW Central Coast jewel which draws holidaymakers from across the world . . . well, it will when COVID travel restrictions are lifted.
This area has a wonderful sporting history, home of rugby league’s Ray Price (the Parramatta great, dubbed ‘Mister Perpetual Motion’), and tough nut, front row forward and Kangaroo, Mark O’Meley, the Bear who became an Eagle, then a Dog and ended up a Rooster (he played ten games for NSW and fifteen for Australia).
After several days the minister’s office received an application for federal funds by email from the Budgie Smugglers. It was a heartfelt plea for a grant to build a toilet block in Slade Park just off the Central Coast Highway.
The club president and 2011 Lake Munmorah Shooter of the Year, Albert ‘Knocker’ Toole, wrote a covering note, which ran:
To Minister for Sport
The Big House
Canberra ACT
31 July 2019
Dear Shotgun,
How are you?
How are they coming out? Are you getting a few?
Mouse Brown passed your letter dated 21/04/2019.
Sorry for a case of the slows in replying.
This is a covering letter for our application for a grant of seventeen hundred and ninety-five dollars. I hope we have completed the tick box form to your satisfaction.
We are not a big club like the some of the shooting outfits on the Central Coast of NSW. The Wyong Mad Bastards or Port Macquarie 303s come to mind. They are very go-ahead with millions of dollars in poker machine and clubhouse bar action turnover. We are a very modest outfit. But we are doing our bit to keep the feral pest load in our area under control.
Our night shoot records show that last month we put away fifteen stray cats (at least I hope they were strays), nine foxes, four goats, 245 Indian mynas and a wild camel.
Sadly, we managed to drop quite a few koalas when a member unfamiliar with night shoot protocols, young Harry ‘Houseboat’ Hunt, w
ent silly. He let a few go in all directions and collected nearly two dozen of our gumleaf-chewing furry friends.
The kid was spooked by an extremely rare night parrot flying towards him. In the gloom, as dusk turned to night, he swore, in the post-shoot debrief, that he thought it was an ambush of aliens coming to get him. He let a few go and winged a brush-turkey on the prowl nearby.
With Houseboat letting loose, everyone opened up without thinking or pausing to look. Suddenly we were walking on a carpet of fur and feathers. From body armour video evidence, the alien attack turned out to be nothing more threatening than a pair of parrots flying in formation close to young Hunt’s melon.
The birds were featherless when the shooting stopped. We rushed towards the kill zone to tend to the wounded and found we had brought down twenty-three koalas, a couple of dozen black cockatoos and the endangered parrots that started the firefight. They lay dead among the feathers on the forest floor
They were listed in the shoot record as collateral damage. Thank God none of the Smuggler membership caught a stray bullet.
The kill numbers are estimates taken from post-shoot conversations with recording secretary ‘Bagpipes’ Bruce Blinkhorn. Bruce was tasked to conduct a full-on probe into the incident. It was a devastating and sobering report that the Blinkhorn Committee handed down after three weeks of quiet deliberation. The Club had no option but to suspend young Houseboat for nine months and twenty-one days.
It’s the biggest penalty imposed by our club in a decade and recalled the time we had to expel ‘Stubbie’ Prendergast after he went silly in the main street and took out thirty-five car windscreens in a single night of MDMA-fuelled madness.
I mention these actions taken by the Smuggler’s management team to give you an idea that we are a serious club with an eye always on the correct safety protocols.
As to the grant for toilet facilities, you can understand, with environmental issues front and centre, the days when club members could take a leak in a creek or squat with the pants around the ankles and drop the load on an endangered toad are long gone.
Shotgun shooting in Australia has left all that hoo-ha behind in the sewage treatment works of history.
Bridge, we are a humble club. We are not looking for much. We want enough to bolt on a Portaloo to a box trailer. We want to tow the trailer behind the Club’s Ford F-100 out on site when we go a full-on night shoot. Plus, we would like an outdoor shower with solar-heated hot water back at base to wash off the dirt and muck from ten hours of crawling through the swamps taking out vermin.
We don’t own any land in Slade Park. But if it was OK your end, could we have a grant to allow us to buy three Portaloos and the outdoor shower as a stop gap? I am sure the local council will eventually green light the plans for a five-storey amenities structure to be erected on a block of land owned by club patron, retired Major General Sir William ‘Wobbly’ Monk.
Remember the Budgie Smugglers motto . . .
‘If it’s feral, it’s in peril!’
Love to see you up this way for a bang any time.
Thanks very
Yours sincerely
Albert ‘Knocker’ Toole
Bang Bang!
Minutes later an email reply winged its way to Knocker’s inbox from the federal Department of Sport.
Dear Knocker,
Thanks for the letter and the Budgie Smugglers’ very thorough application. If only all our requests for grants were this accomplished.
Please find enclosed a cheque for $227,000.00.
Use it however you see fit.
Good luck with the dunny build.
And Knocker, keep banging! If you run out of bullets, you know who to call.
Yours with Both Barrels
Bridget McKenzie
Minister for Sport (Rorts) Ha Ha
Red Ted says it is literally that simple. And Ted thought the subtext of the message was quite clear. If you want us to deliver in the future, there is only one way you and your members can vote on the big day. As in, vote for us!
And according to Ted, in that federal election of 2019, Knocker and the Smugglers shooting crew got the ham bag message loud and clear.
SONGS OF PRAISE AND SONGS OF REDEMPTION
When the rugby league flock welcomes back those who have strayed, the sideline assembly will sing out ‘Halleluiah! Brothers and Sisters, the sinful will be blessed and returned to the flock once the Steeden is kicked off in anger.’
AS REVEALED ELSEWHERE, RUGBY league’s great hidden strength is its redemptive power. The chaplain of the Central Coast church Our Lady of the Heaving Sea, Monsignor the Very Reverend Brodie Grundie, had this to say in a recent issue of the Catholic Weekly when interviewed by South-East Asian Vatican correspondent Bishop Dom Bloodknock:
Dom, I wish the church had the same ability as rugby league to save souls. Imagine welcoming those who have strayed from the true path into the weeds of temptation and found themselves doing the devil’s work on TikTok and the like. Imagine getting them back to the flock in front of 20,000 cheering fans filling the stands at the new Parramatta Stadium or the Adelaide Oval. That is what the good book is all about!
The redemptive act before the kick-off in a top-of-the-table clash is the powerful message of a life reborn in Christianity writ large in club jumper and shorts. Rugby league is the gospel made flesh with a kick to come after the try has been scored. Remember all the action is filmed live for Channel Nine with Ray ‘Rabbits’ Warren going upstairs to the bunker should there be any controversial decisions. Upstairs to the bunker that keeps the eternal score, says it all.
For the less religiously inclined, rugby league is a mechanical bull of a sport. Spectators throw a leg over the bouncing, corkscrewing, machine-powered beast and hang on for the ride, never knowing how long the trip will last or where it will dump them. When the congregation throw a leg over the Texas Cannonball, they know they will be tossed off onto the beer-sodden bar room carpet sooner or later.
For the less religiously inclined, rugby league is a mechanical bull of a sport.
One of the go-to sounds of rugby league is the soothing, smooth strains of the cabaret classics canon smeared with a dollop of burlesque. The game is so tough it seeks out, for post-hooter relaxation, the easy listening, the familiar tunes. Those songs that swerve around the reality of the game. The reality of the big hits, the aches, the injuries, the weeks on the sidelines, the pain and the concussion – all need the soothing balm of chart-topping tunes.
League fans are familiar with the sweet noise of scraping the bottom of the barrel. On occasions, the bottom of the top barrel is scrapped away completely and the sound that emerges is the sound from the barrel beneath. This tune is a deep dive into aural liquid manure. It is in this gooey goop nourishment of the barrel beneath that the game has found sonic guano gold. It is the sound of success.
The game’s musical culture straddles a tricky balance. One boot in the greatest hits and the other boot sunk into slabs of the totally duff.
These choices are woven into the fabric of the game. Both cabaret styles and hard rock blasts are baked into its DNA. This is what is known around the grounds as the code’s culture. Popular culture has served the G.G.A. extremely well as the code wobbled along the tightrope strung between the sound of success and the cacophony of noise.
Beginning nowhere in particular, Frank Hyde, the game’s great radio caller, found time mid-week to record three albums in the 1970s, once again proving rugby league players can do anything. In his playing days Frank packed down for ninety matches, scoring twenty-seven tries with the Newtown Bluebags before moving to the Balmain Tigers (premiers in 1939), and finishing up pulling on the shorts thirty-seven times for the North Sydney Bears (RIP).
Frank then took up the clipboard and coached the Bears for forty-six matches before he moved to the seat behind the sideline card table and began a long stint of calling all the game-day action. His great contribution to the language of league was his c
atchphrase used whenever the kick for a try conversion was on its way from the kicking tee towards the black dot: ‘It’s long enough, it’s high enough and it’s straight between the posts.’ This was a regular dollop of the Hyde magic the public loved. A career can be built on a line like that! Frank’s multi-pronged career featured a substantial stint behind the card table. He camped on the sideline stool for thirty-three Grand Finals.
Hyde was a great contributor on many levels. His astounding and outstanding musical gift to the game began with Frank Hyde Sings (1973). This heartfelt collection featured songs like ‘Who Threw the Overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder?’, ‘Right! Said Fred’, ‘Surfin Bird’ and standards like ‘Somewhere My Love’, and the track that he made his own, the Irish tearjerker ‘Danny Boy’. This song, Frank’s party piece, reached number seven on the top forty charts in 1973.
He was back in the studio later that year, when he put down the cabaret classic The Frank Hyde Party Sing-a-long (1973). This selection of toe-tappers featured tunes tinged by the green of the Emerald Isle, like ‘Galway Bay’, ‘Ramblin’ Rose’, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’, ‘Baby, Let’s Play House’, ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ and that great ‘Irish’ seasonal heart-tugger ‘White Christmas’. The song selection alone indicates it must have been a ‘helluva party’ when the genial host laid this solid gold twelve inches of Frank onto the Stromberg-Carlson turntable and lifted the needle. The fans wanted more from the game’s number-one caller. He was lured back to the recording studio for a final hit out with Frank Hyde Sings for the Good Times in 1976.
As Frank said in a long interview with Rolling Stone magazine’s Wendy Williams:
Wen, cabaret is my thing. I loved the greats, Ian ‘Turps’ Turpie, the singing jockey Donny Sutherland, Barry Crocker, the ‘I Go to Rio’ man Peter Allen, the country classics from ‘The Sheik from Scrubby Creek’ Chad Morgan, the lanky yank Don Lane and Ernie Sigley. All great Australians who could hold a tune. It was the razzle-dazzle that talked to me. It’s the whole package – the big wigs, the ill-fitting suits, the shoes with pointy toes, the shoulder pads, the champagne glass in hand, the Craven A ablaze on the lip, the hot band and that loveable rugby league audience. They were wonderful cabaret years when the NSWRL premiership trophy came home in the back of the FB Holden station wagon.
