In fairness, however, it was a good day. The surfers were all physically perfect creatures, not a hint of excess adipose tissue, just muscles in places where lesser mortals don’t even have places. Their heaving torsos, honed to physical perfection thanks to years of self-sacrifice devoted to becoming total beach bums, palpitated against their rubber wetsuits. Flashes in contrasting colours running down their sides and legs further accentuated the tree-trunk thighs and the Grecian-urn-shaped legs. There were lots of sun-bleached locks in evidence, crowning extensive suntans.
The male surfers were not all that bad either, peripatetic Adonises well tried in catching waves and ‘hanging ten’ all over the world. The crowd went wild as Tom Curren of the United States and Australia’s Mark Occhilupo hit the water for the BHP Steel International final, to be contested between the two top seeds. Occhilupo, the local crowd’s favourite, emerged the victor, and Lolita-like surfing groupies wobbled dangerously in and indeed out of their bikinis as he took the podium to make his acceptance speech.
Dear me! Serious error! The pitch of his voice seemed to suggest a wetsuit perhaps two or three sizes too small, and the hard-earned macho image took a dreadful nosedive. The crowds dispersed, windburned, sunburned, some slightly sloshed, eskies (Oz for cold-box) empty. Yes, it had been a good day at the Surfest on Newcastle beach.
The very first surfers in the world, as it happened, were the Aborigines of Kahibah and Lake Macquarie, not far from Newcastle. They were members of the Awabakal tribe, who came to the area for their tribal sporting events, and combined surfing, swimming and canoe races with tree climbing and boomerang throwing. Few people realise that the first team of Australian cricketers to tour England (in 1868) was made up of Aborigines. They played five days a week for five months, with only eleven players on tour. Play started at 11 am and continued until at least 7 pm, with no afternoon tea break. Travel between matches was by horse-drawn carriage, on very rough roads, but even this punishing schedule could not diminish the team’s enthusiasm. The Aborigines had a reputation for bright cricket, and played just like modern West Indian teams. Their fielding particularly was remarkable, with one of the outstanding all-rounders, Mullagh, able to throw a ball over a hundred yards. Nicknames such as ‘Mosquito’ and ‘Twopenny’ solved English and indeed Australian scorers’ problems in spelling tribal names, and of the forty-seven matches played on that tour, the Aborigines won fourteen and drew nineteen. It’s surprising to relate how little has changed in terms of schedules since 1868!
On their return to Australia the Aborigines played three matches, the receipts of the last one ear-marked as recompense for their five-month slog overseas. Unfortunately the weather proved so hot that people failed to show up, and the team emerged poorly rewarded for their sporting achievements.
The men never played as a team again, although some did play for local clubs, and when Mullagh died in 1891, he had his bat and cricket stumps buried with him. In the circumstances, the current Australian selectors should start sending scouts out into the bush to look for a few talented Aborigine hopefuls, and integrate them into the green and gold uniform, just as the English have done with our naturally athletic West Indian-born players. The all-white Australian team certainly looks in need of a good injection of ethnic zip and zest.
Next stop Perth via a changeover at Sydney. This time we are staying at the Merlin hotel, a monumental piece of architecture, with the bedrooms and corridors all overlooking one vast atrium. The swimming pool here is a definite improvement on the Sheraton-Perth, where by some logistic aberration the pint-sized pond has been located in the shadow of the hotel. Manager Peter Lush has been tireless in putting his PR and marketing skills to good use on this trip, and has managed to negotiate far better rates for the team at the more luxurious Merlin than they were getting at the Sheraton.
Peter is a large, jovial and prematurely grey man. By the end of the tour he will no doubt be prematurely even greyer. His two greatest assets are a lot of common sense, an attribute not always overwhelmingly in evidence back home at HQ, and a fairly well-developed sense of humour. The day after our arrival, he asked me, tongue in cheek, whether I intended to watch the boys practising in the nets. Since assistant manager Micky Stewart is obliged to devote the entire gamut of his persuasive techniques to encourage the team to watch themselves practising in the nets, my supernumerary attendance seemed clearly above and beyond the call of duty. Besides, the siren song of the twelve-metre yachts was calling irresistibly from Fremantle: the French pavement cafes, the Italian pizzerias, the American bars, the British pubs and all those genuinely rippling biceps. As a real treat, our mate Spud Spedding invited us to go sailing with the trial horse, White Crusader II, affectionately known as Hippo.
The crews were at the time in a lay period, prior to the commencement of the elimination round for the semi-finals. The British crew were testing spinnakers and we followed initially in the twenty-knot breeze aboard the tender James Capel – guess who was sponsoring that little contribution to the British effort. It was an exhilarating experience, and provided some inkling of how the conditions would be when the notorious Fremantle Doctor arrived.
It is oh-so infra dig in Australia at the moment to maintain that watching twelve-metre yacht racing is about as interesting as watching grass grow or paint dry. However, for moribund matrons such as myself whose expectations of the Elysian Fields revolve around the possibility of staying in bed all day watching the cracks in the ceiling, this need not necessarily constitute derision. Such assertions, nevertheless, are completely unjustified. The more the knowledge of any sport, the more the enjoyment, and quite apart from any other consideration, the physical buzz of following a twelve-metre race must constitute one of the best spectator outings ever: cloudless blue skies, the open air, the sun beating down on a constantly oscillating grey-green-azure ocean, the wind in your hair, the spray in your face, the salt in your blood, a glass in your hand . . . there are few better sports to be viewed from the periphery.
Over in the distance was Yanchep Sun City, one of Perth entrepreneur Alan Bond’s earliest ventures in real estate. Originally Bond’s ‘Home of the Twelves’, Alan’s successive crews were not upset when he moved his marina further into Fremantle. To the delight of local fishermen, not suitably conscious of the future honours to be bestowed upon the Bond syndicate, the glut of seaweed in the waters around Yanchep produced remarkable quantities of free iodine. Bond’s erstwhile challenger, Southern Cross, was unfortunately made of steel and the resultant chronic stress corrosion meant that one day the fancy steel rigging fell down on top of the crew. The indigenes were not unhappy when the Bondy fleet sailed for less unsympathetic waters, and left them to their lobster pots and fishing nets.
The Japanese have now moved into Yanchep in a big way, and are probably eating the seaweed and producing special reinforced iodine-resistant steel.
Twelve-metre racing is a relentless pursuit of excellence. It is based on interminable hours of sailing in all weather conditions, and the careful refining, honing and tuning of every possible variable. Sails are extremely expensive items, generally nowadays manufactured from Kevlar or Mylar, which if not quite as light as gossamer, are certainly just as strong if not stronger than steel. After several outings the sails become so stretched and deformed as to be rendered useless. From the tender, one of the shore crew took photographs of the configuration of the trial-horse’s spinnakers in various modes. These shots would subsequently be fed into computers to assess possible design improvements. At the end of a day’s sailing, the sheds around Freo harbour buzz with the industry of sailmakers putting heavily analysed nips and tucks into genoas, spinnakers and mainsails. No such thing as an educated guess, and a quick session on the Singer. Thousands of pieces of data, carefully collected and collated, will determine even the slightest alteration.
We met White Crusader’s skipper, Harold Cudmore, on the harbour, after a hard three hours’ sailing. He is a tall, wiry man, with thick curly a
uburn hair and aquiline features. He exudes a form of tireless, nervy energy which generates the impression that he is loath to waste a single minute of his time in pointless endeavour. He was probably doing calisthenics as he talked to us.
Cudmore enjoys one of the highest of international reputations as a twelve-metre skipper. He is Irish, from Cork, and little is known about the man except that even Aeneas in his gutsier moments, or Jason and his Argonauts, had little on Harold.
I had heard on various occasions, and always from people who had never met the man, that he is an arrogant and awkward blighter. Not that I have anything against arrogant and awkward blighters.
After all, I married one, but these are the sort of people who have never met Geoff Boycott, and will tell you exactly the same about him. Beware the received wisdom of hearsay, and the omniscient opinions of tabloid-informed twits!
Cudmore, in fact, could not have been more helpful, informative and charming. I mention his name in juxtaposition with that of Boycott, because there is an indefinable similarity between the two; perhaps it is the degree of concentration on the job to be done, which is often perceived by outsiders as stand-offish behaviour. Cudmore made it perfectly clear that he did not particularly want to talk to anybody until he had carried his sodden sails off board and back on shore. Only then was he ready for the fripperies of polite conversation. This, to my lights at least, is the focussed sense of purpose of a true professional.
He showed us around the yachts, and adverted to the couple of hundred million things a skipper must keep his eye on while racing. From behind the helm, patently there is rather more to it than watching grass grow.
Quite apart from the America’s Cup, the Second Test at Perth has had plenty of competition for spectators this week. The mere sprinkling of folk on Sunday, the third day at the WACA, suggested that there was much better entertainment to be had elsewhere. Sure enough, Pope John Paul II, whose indefatigable peregrinations have added a new dimension to the concept of urbi et orbi, was winding up his six-day whistle-stop tour of Australia along the road at the Belmont Park Race Course, and causing the usual commotion.
By that stage in proceedings, the Australian team looked in dire need of some minor miracle of divine intervention beyond even the Pope’s orchestration. The highlight of the English performance was, without doubt, a magnificent century by the gloriously ‘in-nick’ David Gower. (If, on occasions, this diary might appear totally, utterly and irretrievably biased in Fender’s favour, it is because this diary is totally, utterly and irretrievably biased in Fender’s favour.)
Rhodes scholar Prime Minister Bob Hawke, no mean cricketer himself in his days up at Oxford, was much in evidence around the ground. There he was in the press box. There he was in the Channel 9 television commentary box. And there he was in the England and Australian dressing rooms. Quite as ubiquitous as John Paul, really, but without the range of languages or the popular support.
Mr Hawke has organised a prime minister’s XI versus an England XI one-day fixture in Canberra for 23 December, and patently did not see his selectorial remit confined to choosing his own team alone, and was making no secrets about the personalities he wanted to see gracing the opposition. No doubt apprised of superstars’ sudden inexplicable attacks of non-specific back pain or unheralded hamstring trouble when similar fixtures occur so close to Christmas he was at great pains to mark the England line-up card. Meaningfully, he congratulated David Gower on his magnificent innings, and expressed a strong desire to see a similar performance in the Australian capital. ‘And if you don’t appear,’ he explained, only half-jovially, to Ian Botham, ‘you might have serious difficulty in getting a work permit for Queensland next year.’
Neither Ian Botham, however, nor, for that matter, the disturbingly out-of-form Allan Lamb had managed to trouble the scorers in England’s first innings that day. As penance, the pair of them shared a present Lamb’s wife Lindsay had donated to England’s Ashes effort. The gift caused great hilarity amongst the Perth crowd; to be worn affixed to the nose at all times by prime offenders, it was a bright orange/yellow duck’s bill.
Meanwhile the greatest PR man on earth was entertaining a capacity crowd at the racecourse. Over 105,000 were in attendance, about one-tenth of the entire population of the Western Australian capital. People had queued all day just to catch a glimpse of the peripatetic pontiff and, as happened in the USA, many appeared more interested in the package than in the product. Wild cheers, applause and acclaim greeted an extremely hard-line traditionalist sermon on the joy of vocations; on the ultimate gift to God of a priest or a nun in the family; on the evils of the materialistic consumer society. Swilling their tinnies and their stubbies in the bright sunshine, the crowd nodded their evil materialistic consumer approval.
This was the Pope’s forty-second homily in six days, each one carefully prepared by the pontiff himself during his annual holiday retreat in Castel Gandolfo. There has been something for everyone. His strong appeal on Aboriginal land rights in Alice Springs constituted the emotional and political apogee of the tour, and ruffled not a few federal feathers. To give him due credit, this first non-Italian pope for 450 years does not seem to care whether his message is popular or not. His stern moral views and traditionalism, his reactionary thinking on birth control and contraception, and his unassailable belief that the little woman is better off minding hearth and home, have alienated many Roman Catholics. After a decade’s education in an Ursuline Convent, I for example now find myself more or less lapsed. There is probably quite a large group of like-minded lapsers, who ought now to be constituting the bedrock of a modern, youthful Roman Catholic church, and who find themselves instead thus alienated. In retrospect, I fear that my particular form of education imbues adolescents with all the right principles, but then thrusts them, without relevant support structures, into a secular society where such principles, particularly on sex, are virtually impossible to abide by. What is even worse for a lapsed Catholic is that it is almost impossible to indulge in a good secular time without the subsequent remorse of a well-inculcated sense of guilt. ‘Le sens du peche,’ Baudelaire used to call it. You do exactly the same things as other less profoundly morally aware people, but unlike them, you end up feeling very, very bad about it. It is a terrible thing, a Roman Catholic-framed conscience. I am sure such consciences inhabit some of the most deeply miserable creatures on earth.
There has been no shortage of more-than-gentle ironies to this papal visit. There has been much pontificating, for instance, on abject consumerism and soul-destroying materialism. Perhaps the message would have percolated through with greater spiritual purity if one of the visit’s major sponsors had not been a South Australian beer company epitomising both. And do not imagine for a moment that said brewery has not been getting its full PR mileage out of the fact! West End Export cans of beer are currently doing the rounds brightly decorated with a golden papal mitre. The marketing man’s road to heaven is patently paved with empty tinnies.
There have also been quite a few benevolent pronouncements on the importance of a multicultural society, which, coming from the leader of a church that has left no theological stone unturned in its rationale for wiping out entire, not-sufficiently-God-fearing cultures and societies in the past, have a tendency to sound somewhat risible. There have been cameos of the Pope kissing children, blessing old folk, hugging koala bears, wearing tin hats, going ‘bush’ and saying ‘mate’. And there have been unholy seas of tasteless plastic souvenirs, fortunately the sort of thing for which the materialistic consumers do not mind shelling out a sponsoring bob or two. The sight of them brought back my childhood with a rush of melancholic nostalgia. In my early years, before I graduated to big time materialistic consumerism, my most cherished possession had been a luminous glass bottle, cast in the presumed image and likeness of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and filled with holy water from the shrine at Lourdes by my favourite doting aunt, Margaret. Frankly, it beat rosary beads and pictures of stigmata-
ridden saints hands down in entertainment value. From its centre-stage position on my dressing-table, it used to glow with an unearthly luminescence in those twilight hours before I went to sleep. Like St Bernadette before me, I slumbered peacefully, dreaming of celestial visitations and waiting for the angels’ voices which would come in useful during Mother Vianney’s mental arithmetic tests.
Bored one day during the summer holidays with a replay of the entire Olympic Games against my three brothers (originally, as second eldest, I used to win the silver medal, but now the inexorable physical superiority of sex had superseded seniority, and I was edged off the medal list), I wandered around our light and airy house looking for some suitably Stygian darkness in which to gaze at my incandescent Virgin. In my mother’s dressing room I remembered a large free-standing wardrobe ideal for the purpose. I pushed my way in between the tightly packed dresses, skirts and blouses, and found myself in a deliciously tactile position smooched up against the mater’s fur coat. I can still remember the sickening click as the wardrobe door closed shut behind me. The noxious smell of mothballs was overwhelming, and the stifling proximity of fur equally so. Our Lady of Lourdes shone beatifically in my frightened, clammy hand, but resolutely refused to perform any miracles.
I was hysterical. I banged on the door. The fur coat seemed to metamorphose into its original owner, and became decidedly aggressive. I fought it off. Empty wire coat hangers reproduced parthenogenetically, and conspired in clinking droves to enmesh me. Even at the tender age of seven, I could see that this would be a fairly ignominious way to go – smothered in a fur coat, strangled by a coat hanger.
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