Local pride

I'm really not sure what I'm doing with my life. My head is all over the place. Whatever Leilani Kai has going on, I want to be part of it. Or Natalie Avellino. I also saw today that in the USA, you can hire a "celebrity package" where for two hours a pretend paparazzi follows you around and you get a faux fur coat. I wouldn't mind that for my birthday party - it might also be what Natalie Bassingthwaite needs after her solo album bombs. That's probably the fed upness talking, since I like The Bass, but her book with her sister has really put me off her.

One of the themes of this blog so far has been local pride - whether it's taking a visitor from Scotland and proudly showing them Tacos restaurant or simply mocking another nations inferior weather, a bit of local pride doesn't go astray. I was a little harsh on the Advocate in the last post, at least they are out having a crack at restoring some local pride. When I was in Scotland lately, a newspaper had published a report from an Englishman slagging off parts of Scotland and invited the locals to write in and defend the area. I saw some old woman walking past, and she clicked her teeth and said "Yeah, it is a shithole, no one is gonna write in!" - the Advocate would have organised a march on the guys house. When the Big Penguin was mocked on Have I Got News For You, I felt quite moved to send them an angry e-mail on behalf of the Advocate, to which they never replied. Guess you didn't have a comeback huh Merton?

Two quick stories on local pride - firstly, my Dad is from a town called Paisley in Scotland. It has an abby (and an Abbie - how are you babe?), an obviously fantastic football team, some neds, some would be drug lords, and hundreds of years of culture. My Dad is reasonably proud of his home town and my parents are really, really proud of Scotland. Just ask them, they'll tell you everything ever invented by a Scottish person and compare it to Australia's record of the Hills Hoist and Vegemite. Anyway, my Dad, when we first moved to the North West Coast was talking to a local about what was interesting and fascinating about the North West Coast. This local really thought about it and said "The paddock" - a paddock is a field with essentially nothing in it. And this was some pretty non specific advice, given just saying "the paddock" could have meant anything. The local looked my Dad in the eye and said "Yeah, the paddock in Latrobe! Shits on the Eiffel Tower!" - I definitely admire the guy for trying to sell 1982 Tasmanian fields as something to go and see, he had a lot of local pride, but shits on the Eiffel Tower? Sure, if he'd mentioned the Courthouse Museum...

Of course, it's easy to have a flippant attitude to this kind of thing. Hell it fills up some space on a blog. But my main thought about local pride is as always revolved around Burnie (such a clumsy sentence skinny man). If you didn't spend Xmas in Burnie in the 1980s, you really missed out on a treat. A fat, slightly awkward man clamering for children to sit on his knee and call him Santa, the hum of the Fitzgeralds carol singers, and most of all, the decorations. My god, the decorations. Well, I say decorations, but basically they strung some of those crepe bells you see across the top of some lamp posts. I hate crepe bells, they really are the worst Xmas decoration you can have, they are the Josh Fraser of Xmas decorations. But the mayor was really proud of them, going to great lengths to make sure that he was photographed every day in the paper pointing and smiling at them. So far, so good for Xmas in Burnie...problem was, Billy Connolly was in town. And doing a gig in Burnie. Comes on stage, first line, very line..."hello Burnie...I see you've got your decorations up! Fucks sake! Nothing like Xmas in Burnie! Get those shite decorations oot the box Doris, it's Xmas time!"

At which point, a certain local dignitary stormed indignantly out of his seat. Yes, Billy might have been the Big Yin in general, but nothing offends a man more than questioning the size of his bells.

I think I heard that phrase right...

Tommy Hafey, he sleeps with the bogans

There's this book out at the moment that I saw in Angus and Robertson - not the one in town with the really grumpy woman who shuffles magazines next to anyone who browses, and not in a certain store where a certain girl with blue eye shadow works either - which is called Billys Book for Blokes by Billy Brownless. Just so you know if you are a furrener, Billy Brownless is a "colourful" ex football personality who makes a good living out of having gentle fun poked at his weight on television and travelling all over Australia visiting local football clubs spinning chocolate wheels and drinking bars dry. I think a lot of blokes would quite like to be Billy Brownless, since he played football, has a wife roughly 200 times hotter than him, and never has to pay for a beer. So it makes sense for him to write a book - much more sense than scumbag Andy Mahers "book of jokes" anyway - all about blokes. I haven't read it, but I'd imagine it's got chapters about drinking, fighting, mateship, cards, pool, cars, changing a tyre...all the usual things that real blokes are supposed to like. I'm sitting staring at a Hannah Montana poster and I spend most of my days wondering how anyone could possibly fancy Gabrielle Climi. Even knowing who she is probably DQs me from the real bloke category, although I do have a lot of opinions on what Mick Malthouse should do next. I've tried to look at a couple of times in a certain store, but I could probably guess the contents from here. If only the woman in that shop didn't keep walking past with her security intercom...

Anyway, thinking about Billy Brownless and the role he's played in local football (and by extension, local pride) got me thinking about two things important to any local community. And certainly I could write a very good post about being a bloke. In fact last nights news probably was something of an inspiration. Apparently Kevin Rudd stopped all the funding for community groups (such a sexy two word phrase, up there with smart casual and day off) until he had a review (get out, that doesn't sound like Kevin) of whether the funding model was viable, or summat. Anyway, the heads of the community groups got together to discuss this, and how to get their funding back, and they were all on the Tasmanian news, chatting about this over Tim Tams and weak tea. This is definitely going to be my future career path, helping out the local community in some way around a pot of tea. Mostly, I'm just going to sit in a room and pay out on everyone. Maybe it was just the community groups and CWA in Penguin, but I've always found that community groups are massive bitchfests. Between bitching about how little funding you get, bitching about respective governments, bitching about the quality of the cake that committee member X brought last week, and of course bitching about how here you are giving up your free time to plan a big event and damn punk kids/local council/senior citizens etc won't support it, you can pretty much spend your days just having massive sprays at everyone. Sounds like terrific fun, throw in my love of local pride, and it's amazing I never do it.

The first thing important to any small local community is the visit of a celebrity. In Penguin, it was always Kevin Sheedy or Tom Hafey. I think those two are pretty much who goes and visits the place now to be honest. Can't imagine Rihanna and her 3 different expressions popping in for tea and scones. The visit of a Kevin Sheedy, particularly in the 1980s, was a cause for celebration and an 8 page special in the Advocate. The format for their visit was pretty much set in stone - funny speech, bit of Q&A, help out with a bit of fundraising via raffling off a couple of footy jumpers, then a few drinks at the bar. The best bit about this visit (and it was always a footballer who visited Penguin for our celebrity quotient, we never quite got Jason Mraz - even Burnie got Slim Dusty every 6 weeks) was that in preparation, the local dickheads would pump themselves up that they were going to confront Sheeds on why he wasn't playing a particular player or how they could do a better job. And then, they would melt like starstruck 8 year olds when they actually had a chance to ask their question. Eddie McGuire a few years ago yelled at the crowd at the casino to just buy the fucking jumper that was raffled, so tedious were these stuttering questions. I felt the spirit of these important local visits a few years ago when I did work experience for a company that was in a very rah rah phase with it's employers. The company booked Tom Hafey, who if you don't know is a very motivational old football coach famous for yelling at people and keeping himself in such amazing physical shape he could still outrun you all at age 80. Everything was all set, except our ditzy secretary had mistakenly booked Mr Hafey into a caravan park, and not a good one - one in Warrane (Tassies equivalent of Beirut). Naturally, this was easily fixed, but I thought the company went a tad far in firing her for her error. I mean, Tommy would loved the place - he could have yelled at lazy bogan slackers to get up and do some push ups. Who knows, maybe one of those ugly Warrane ducklings could have become a beautiful Anne Maree Cooksley (one in every post) type swan through Tommys rantings?

However, as much as there is lots of local pride in showing a Billy Brownless your town, there is one group of people who don't enjoy the visit of a celebrity - the existing local identities. These people spend roughly 364 days a year in exalted local status. I'm obsessed with old fashioned local identities, people spoke in awe struck tones because they bake the best scones in the village or something. I loved that in Penguin when Kevin Sheedy was in town, how personally they would take being marginalised. If Mr Sheedy asked for a particular type of tea or biscuit, he copped it right in the neck for being a snob. If Mr Hafey made a remotely off colour joke, he was bitched about for a week. They would patiently wait at the back of the hall until the celebrity left town and then seized control and attention back as rapidly as they could. One family in Burnie of a certain standing used to shove their daughter into the face of any visiting singer or footballer, and bitch about them based entirely on their response. If they didn't hit on her, they were gay, if they did, they were sleazy. I used to love when we'd throw a BBQ in Penguin seeing the more known families bringing a particularly posh beer or a salad because they didn't want to be common and just have a pork sausage. Their kids were always with us in the rumpus room, and we'd get them drunk or get them to do something embarrassing, just to keep ourselves amused. Even the kids would bitch about the footballers speech, and how lame it was, and they weren't even allowed in. This one kid I went to school with, he hated Kevin Sheedy, hated Tom Hafey, thought David Parkin swore too much, and yet, went to Melbourne and got about 20 pictures with David Dixon. And they gave him social standing? I'd have taken it off him just for that...

Mind you, at our school, we were definitely bitching, the only celebrity speaker we ever got was Jane Fleming, a woman who never got over the first hurdle at the Olympics, telling us to work hard and never give in. I'd only have paid attention if we got the sexy early years Melinda Gainsford...whatever happened to Mel G?

Womens Basketball Brings Sexy Back

So I saw some stand up comedy last night, which basically revolved about taking the surname of Gabrielle Climi and turning it into a an STD. "Imagine," he pondered, "if you found out your girlfriend suffered from Climi" - you can supply your own "what is the deal with..." or laugh track if you want, we just went home.

This blog, initially, was going to be about what was found in soccer programmes and what it told me about local pride. I kind of went off that idea and wrote about other areas of local pride, but I'm still very conscious of the role sport plays in a community. Every so often when they aren't telling everyone how useless Kevin Rudd is you see some bewildered and blinking old duck or crusty old farmer standing in the middle of a football ground bemoaning the death or merger of a country football or netball team. These articles are easy to write, old duck, club won 6 Premierships in the 30s, VFL superstar grew up in the town, town migration, why aren't the AFL doing anything, didn't see the drought coming and so on. Kingstons team for instance, the Kingborough Tigers, mean nothing to me, which is a shame. They are my local team, so I should be on board, but AFL is everywhere now, I've got enough to worry about with Paul Medhurst. At some time in the next 50 years, I know there will be no more Penguin, but I don't think there's much anyone can do about. 

In the early part of the 90s, there was a massive push in Australia to make womens basketball sexy (like they are doing with netball now, dispersing the talent so every team has a hot girl - don't think we haven't noticed). This comprised of two things - first, putting every single woman in the WNBL (our local basketball league) regardless of shape into figure hugging lycra bodysuits and secondly, focusing all the leagues marketing muscle behind Trish Fallon, a sort of poor womans Emma George. It says a lot about how successful this was that while I can't name you a single team or player from that era other than Trish Fallon, I know she was married to a black American DJ called Rodney O who later beat her up. She was everywhere for a while, especially after we hosted the womens world championships. I think there was a brief Michelle Griffiths era, but that was about a week long. My mate (I promise this isn't a "my mate" story meaning it was really me) was stalking this womens basketballer called Mary Anne Di Francesco to the point that when it was announced on TV she was manning a phone line taking charity donations, he kept ringing it in different voices just to talk to her. Wonder what happened to him. Anyway, the point is, eventually they gave up when they realised it was hard to make Lauren Jackson hot, and the phase passed quietly and without comment.

This was a big, big awkward shock to me, because when I was living in Penguin, womens basketball was anything but sexy. It was violent and gang warfare, a complete expression of local pride which essentially became the towns focus. Penguin vs Ulverstone wasn't somewhere where you would expect to find a Trish Fallon or Michelle Griffiths model type, it was two teams of girls who looked like Peggy Lee Leather or Reggie Bennett. They were stocky, big, strong, and every possession was a contest. Every single team had a "Plugger", a reference to the girl who looked most like Tony Lockett. Anyone attempting a three pointer could expect to be absolutely flattened as she took the shot, and one game I went to, I think Penguin vs Wynyard, had the best crowd fight I've seen at any sporting event, which started because someone in the Wynyard crowd ordered a hot dog, someone in the Penguin crowd said only gay people (I didn't say it was a PC crowd fight) ate hot dogs, and two families of hillbillies just punched on for ages, to the point even security didn't want to break it up, it was so compelling. Now, these girls deserve everyones respect. Some people would tell you oh they were so ugly, and let's all laugh at them - they weren't ugly, they were beautiful local legends. If you were short, sweet and petite, you entered the Queens Quest competition, married a footballer and raised funds for the football club, and if you were stocky, big, could throw a punch or were just fat, you did your bit by playing womens basketball. It was sort of the same in the mens basketball, but to be honest, it just wasn't the same. There was a place for everyone in Penguin, the last fully functioning local community I'll ever live in.

And I hope it's always that way, forever and ever. There's still no place for you though Fallon, it's not your type of game...

Tasmania vs Public Liability Insurance

So I'm turning 30 soon, to which you might say "Oh, what do you want, a round of applause blog boy? You've found the Internet at 30, well done, aren't you just like one of those elderly white guys in a Chris Rock film who finds rap music and jives on down, well, next week you'll buy a walkman?" - actually, it really annoyed me last night, there was some soul singer wannabe on V who said something like "soul music is being embraced by youngsters, but if you ask a 25 year old, they'll say it always around!", and I wanted to beat her to death for her urchin cheek - and I'm having a party and I decided it would be quite fun to have a bouncy castle, you know, because pretending to be young is just so in right now. And to be honest, once I turn 30 I'll probably shrivel up and die and spend my time telling the kids about soul music from the 90s, but the problem with my hilarious plan is that I'm not allowed to have a bouncy castle because the bouncy castle people won't rent a bouncy castle to adult parties with alcohol because of public liability issues. Of course this is something of a shame, as it's always annoyed me that I can't just hurt myself on my own time without everyone thinking I'm going to sue. When I lived in Penguin, as I said before, our #1 piece of play equipment in the park was three bits of PVC piping joined together, each piece getting progressively smaller, that were full of what we prayed was rain water, and the other option was a killing machine of a flying fox. I had my leg ripped open on a slide at Ulverstone slide park (that place needs an entry) and I took all the skin off my neck running into uncovered tennis wire, and was rewarded with my Dad telling me I was making too much noise. Now the park in Penguin apparently has fenced off areas and crash mats - we only got crash mats at my old school if we were good, and if you had to a somersault onto a hardwood floor, well, that's how people got to the Olympics in those days. Of course, we were all sitting around listening to soul music young people, you didn't invent it you know...

This blog at some point took a sharp left turn into dealing with the issues of local pride, mostly after I saw the Think Falkirk campaign, but obviously, there are obstacles that the purveyors of local pride have to deal with. Fuel prices stop a motorbike convoy delivering toys, dis-interested communities fail to stump up volunteers, chosen fat guys who get the job as Santa suddenly have a dodgy past brought up - but nothing quite tops the burden of public liability insurance. Things have calmed down a bit since the hysteria of the early 00s, when every second day seemed to feature, certainly in the Mercury, some small children standing around a slide pulling a sad face because they nasty liability people wouldn't insure it or the annual Fingal Fete being shut down because the horses couldn't get insured. When I lived in Penguin, every single year there was a Xmas parade, in which kids could run alongside the fire truck and jump on the back of it and people would try and shoot them off with a hose or hit them in the head with lollies. Try running that event these days, see how you go. As far as early 80s public liability went, all we had was Wally the Wombat, the mascot of the Tasmanian fire service. Brilliantly (yes Kid Rock, we didn't have no Internet) a large part of the year was spent waiting for the new Wally The Wombat sticker to come out, with it's new safety message brought to us by the mascot with the mostess, Wally The Wombat. The excitement that would grip the North West Coast as we unpeeled the free "84, on fire, we declare war!" sticker from the free calendar the fire department sent us was palpable. And certainly, I learned a lot about safety from those stickers. I've never lit a fire in my life, so I did my bit - well, apart from the one at the fat guys house, the one who throw a Mars Bar at me while I hung off the edge of the fire truck. Anyway, the point is, it wasn't an issue in early 80s Penguin, no one was going to sue, but now, we have people pretending to fall in K-Mart, and it's causing community groups no end of grief. Not as much as the poor quality of Tim Tams at the meeting, but still, a lot of grief.

Now, I suspect it's a massive pain in the arse for, say, the Avoca Community Group to cover every we don't want to get sued eventuality every time they want to organise a market or Celtic dancing festival, and insurance is a huge enemy of local pride, but someone told me something once that I found really interesting...apparently lemmings don't kill themse...no wait, that's not it. Apparently one town in Tasmania (not Avoca, I wouldn't slur them like that) had their organising committee set up to sort out the end of year show - but they got to the end of year show, looked at the books, looked at the lack of volunteers, looked at the amount of effort vs the amount of time left in the year, and mostly how freaking lazy they had been all year in the Tim Tams vs actually booking celebrity guests and rides debate, and worked out that there was no way the end of year show could possibly take place. And then one of the committee members saw an episode of Bad Behaviour Caught on Tape, and saw someone pretending to fall over in an American casino, and decided they could simply blame all the failings on public liability insurance. So that's what they did, sorry kids, no show this year, the nasty insurance company won't cover our show, won't let us have ponies, better pose for the Mercury and look sad. Then the committee took the money they had and went to Queensland. The town was pretty upset that they didn't get their Xmas show, and pretty much ran the insurance company out of town and had a massive campaign against them waged in the church newsletter, at least, until someone from the PR department of the insurance company checked the phone records and found out they'd never been asked to supply insurance. One family doesn't live in that town anymore, that's for sure.

Still, it is a pain in the arse public liability insurance, not just because it stops me having a drunken bounce on the castle at my birthday party. I honestly think that one of the things that binds local towns together is their ability to hold events and bring everyone together, and it's a terrible shame when events like insurance issues stop them from happening. Bad weather, that can't be helped, but someone famous cancelling a speaking engagement at the last minute can really deflate a town and hurt the local pride the community is trying for when they create these events. I can still remember a particularly grim sausage sizzle - now, I love a sausage sizzle, which is completely different to a barbeque of course, which i suspect you all know anway, the differences being completely vast - outside Mitre 10 in Penguin back in the day where everyone just felt really lousy about living in Penguin on that particular day. And it wasn't even that we couldn't get insurance for the BBQ - it rained, the BBQ wouldn't light, the sausages were just horrendous, a big name guest didn't show up, the balloons they released floated away in the air - it was just awful, and everyone was cringing after all the effort the people organising the event had put into fliers and promotion. The final straw was a particularly difficult to raise inflatable which showed the independent spirit of a pre Cater 2 U Destinys Child, and threated to make a run for the railway tracks at any moment. And just when things were at their most dismal, a car full of bogans from Ulverstone drove past and said "Hey! Penguin sucks!" just as our inflatable finally broke free of it's moorings and limply collapsed to the ground, the perfect visual representation of our awful day.

Truly, no insurance based cancellation will ever, ever wound like those words...

Theres a Store where the Creatures meet

So I found out yesterday that popular fashion designer Alannah Hill (no, me neither) was not only born in Geeveston, here in Tasmania, but her parents owned the world famous Penguin milk bar. Now, this was on Wikipedia, so there's a better than average chance it was complete rubbish and tomorrow it will say she got her big break at the Geeveston show when she won best pig in show, but it is really interesting to think that someone made it out from under the oppression of running the family business (believe me, you don't want that) to fulfil their dreams, even if it was via running away and joining the circus. And to think, it must have been HER parents that were the Golden Gaytime Gigglers...

It's interesting to me that this is a blog essentially about local pride, and i haven't taken the time to talk about the local shop. Now, this isn't referring to, say, the big Coles Supermarket or a thinly disguised franchise "with the same old owners", I'm talking about Cut Price Sams, or the local milk bar, or even the local newsagency. I don't think it seems as important down here as it does on the NW Coast, because in Penguin it was really frowned upon to travel into Burnie and shop at Roelf Vos, when there was a local store run by local people. My local store here in Kingston isn't thought of in the same way - in fact, to be honest, it's really weird. Since I've lived there, it's had about 15 different owners. I don't want to get all Pauline Hanson on everyone, but all 15 owners have been Greek, and I think there's some sort of immigration thing going on with it, either that or it's a great way to have a holiday, come and run the shop for 6 months. The main and only reason I like it is that it is the only place in Tasmania you can get the energy drink Viper, which I suspect is banned or something given I can't find it anywhere else in the whole state. And when I first moved down there they had one of the greatest front of store paint jobs I've ever seen - a twisty auburn cartoon snake that should have painted in a museum, but it's certainly not part of the local community, although it does seem to be a gathering point for some of the creatures of the night. Hooded tops, blank expressions, armed with sticks. You know the kind...

Anyway, Penguin Milk Bar was a fantastic little shop. It was always the place you went when you got a treat, having been good at Swannies hairdressers when he was chopping your locks off (or in my case, after he cut my ear), or were feeling sick or were tired after running along the beach. The main thing I remember about it was the delicious frothy chocolate milkshakes that I always ended up ordering. I think it's because I always got a frothy chocolate milkshake when I was good and well behaved, and it was important for teaching me how to manipulate the system to my advantage. So I learned to accentuate my achievements, cut out the negative parts and not discuss my failures - in other words, lie - and it was all for the sake of a chocolate milkshake. I also loved the way adults interacted at the post office, kids interacted at the milk bar, or at least, at the post office with their parents looking at the milk bar and trying to get mum to shut up so they could get an ice cream. I also think it was the only place in Penguin that had a coin operated video game. I might be wrong on this, but I think nowhere else (except maybe the laundrette) that had Frogger, so it was very trendy. They had some really funky furniture as well, the kind of straight backed design that you just don't get these days. No stools in Penguin Milk Bar, oh no. Everyone had a proper seat. And that's before I get to how many chips you got for 10c...

In a town as small as Penguin (and yes, I do have a point, this isn't just "remember when chips were 10c a bag" nostalgia) the local store really mattered, and it was always the first place that was decorated when the football team made the Grand Final. However, at some point, they put in the Dial Arcade, a sort of shopping mall that was meant to represent the future. I don't know how well it worked, because we moved out of Penguin roughly around the time it opened, so I didn't see the rise and fall of the initial investment buzz. It was the last gasp of 80s risk and reward, and I have no idea what's still there or if it's still open, I just remember it opening. And what I remember the most is that one of the stores had this exotic, exciting ice cream store, with bright lighting and funky music. Someone told me that it was the second place in the entire world that had a machine where you could take, say, a flake, and have it crushed up and put into the ice cream. Imagine the future, mango ice cream with a crushed up bit of flake in it. Take that, Iphone generation. I really believed it, and was so excited that our little town had this magical machine with it's delicious flavour maker, and it was really hyped up. The problem was - it was awful. For some reason, it really was disgusting no matter what combination of flavour you tried to create. It was a wonderful metaphor for what everyone really thought about Penguin - a local town, for local people, with local pride and local ideas. No big city flavour makers were required. Don't bring your flashy Milan based designs to our yard thanks very much. Chocolate, Vanilla and Strawberry, that's all we need. No wonder everyone went back to the local milk bar, where things were as they always were.

I wonder what they'd make these days of Cans of Viper and hooded youths hanging outside the milk bar in Penguin...actually, I know what they'd think, it's the same as they told the recent developers...

He's my home town hero (and he's 112)

So I was reading this morning in the Herald Sun (before I boycott it for going off about Alan Didak) about the Gippsland netball team (as you would know, netball has a special place in my heart) and how they didn't get a licence to be in the new Victorian State League. This was really sad to me, not just because the young gun of the team who was pictured, Mary Livesey, was super cute, and shoved up to the front of the photo little red dress Chinese girl style, while two of the older players were shoved up the back. It turns out the team will fold, which is something I always hate - any time a local sports team disappears I get really sad, unless it's Airdrie - because the community really suffers. I lost my Australian Rules team in Tasmania, Sandy Bay, who ridiculously became the Southern Cats, and didn't have a social club, due to economic rationalisation or some such gubbins, and one of my favourite ever teams, South Burnie, because they all smoked pot on the team bus (dude). Obviously, the Gippsland team folding ruins a lot of social events, causes bitterness and takes away something for people to do, but it's more than that, because you lose not just local heroes and identities (if Mary Livesey wants to move to Hobart, call me) but several levels of junior competition where the kids can get involved. At a time when Kevin Rudd is probably maybe possibly formulating Fatwatch to get the kids less tubby, and Grant Hackett is patronising us with his get fit campaign, why take away a sports team? Sport in places like Gippsland and Tasmania has always represented a vital element in community life, It's enough to almost make me write an angry letter to the Mercury...almost...

Our home town sports hero as best I can remember growing up in Penguin was a bloke called Bill Fielding. Puffing Billy they called him, and we all loved the bloke, and his mad skills on a football field. I think the major inspirational feat was that he was roughly 112 year olds, and played about 923 games. Any time some old bloke would yell out something like "I'm 50 and I could do better!" they would know they couldn't do better than our Bill, so it was a crap thing to shout out. I presume he retired to a farm and is one of those blokes who's able to walk into a pub and just say "easy fellas" and calm down any situation. Of course, the great thing about Bill aside from probably his right wing views (well, I presume he retired to a farm, being of that age) was his sphere of influence wouldn't have extended beyond Penguin. In Riana or Natone, someone else was the hometown hero, with apple cheeked girls lined up to be impressed by the football star. As the years have rolled on, the influence of local football heroes has diminished at the same rate of influence as the local team (hence why I'm outraged by Gippsland et al), and it's AFL stars who visit their home town once a year who seem to be more feted, which is just sad. In Penguin, it's Russell Robertson who they are most proud of - the Melbourne footballer who I knew as a kid, and who broke my calculator when I was a kid by kicking it off a balcony. He was actually in the pub the last time I set foot in Penguin, round about New Year in 2001, and he was playing pool and chatting away. Someone ran up to him, flicked his ears, and said "Hey! Well done! You came second!" because his team had lost the Grand Final and he was smiling because it was someone he knew, but really, you knew that if we wanted, he could have him killed. I find that with AFL footballers, their spheres of influences are now all encompassing - their associates more evil, their outlook much broader. The days of a local footballer who's idea of an entourage was their best mate Kev who bought them beer after a game and organised their testimonial and meat tray raffle are slowing dying, and it's really sad...

A staple of any local sports team is unquestionably the fund raising. Where an AFL team can simply conjure up a new multinational sponsor, the finances of local sporting teams depend on people buying tickets to meat tray raffles (you can be a smart arse about in your ad Luke Ablett, but I don't like that) and women selling lamingtons. My girlfriend, the netball player who I dated on my gap year (I prefer saying I was rested), was the best maker of lamingtons in the world, which was great for when we smoked funny things (thanks Kid Rock). She refused to share the recipe with me, and I think now works in a bakery, with piles of lamingtons being sold and no one buying the custard tarts (they were awful babe). I've mentioned before that on the North West Coast, the local identity around the football club in charge of the fundraising was the Queens Quest representative, a local footballers wife or, in a pinch, the girl with the best reputation for not being a skank, who would compete Miss World style to raise funds and interest in the local football team, and organise the working bees that were needed to keep everything painted. As a further sign of my world slowly dying, apparently men are now entering as Penguin's Stuart Whiley won the Queens Quest award in 2005 - that's somehow even less man than the guy on the Electrodry advert with the ginger tache. Anyway, this one time at the Penguin club rooms the prize was like 500 bucks or something, in cold hard cash, not just 500 bucks worth of lamingtons. Everyone was very impressed with the efforts of our Queens Quest representative and how chaste she was, and the MC announced the winner was someone called Johno (all football clubs have a Johno, or a Boof, but never both) who proceeded to get up, tell everyone they were a wanker, should get stuffed, and stick various things up their arse. Except when he got to the stage, the MC said "Nah mate, only kidding, you didn't win" and he had to go back to his seat with everyone returning the compliment. I just don't see this kind of hilarity coming out in a corporate, franchised Scott Wade future, or at an AFL club - unless Spider Everitt runs the raffle of course...

Of course, when a local sports team dies, the youth teams die off as well, which denies people their one lifetime moment of sporting glory. Mines are fleeting, long lost on muddy Tasmanian fields. My best moment was a soccer hat trick against Natone in the semi final of the school six a sides, on a freezing awful day at Montello - Montello, incidentally, a long time enemy of my school, with some ginger kid on their team who used to cry if they lost. I kicked him in the stomach one day. That might have been my highlight. Anyway, I tried out once for the local team when I was a kid, Burnie United - I know, I know, I lived in Penguin, but the population wasn't going to extend to a basketball team AND a football team, and besides, Penguin wasn't going to have a soccer team, way too gay - and I lined up shyly with a lot more talented kids. I had watched Rocky, I had watched that weirdly homoerotic film where Pele teaches the American kid how to do the overhead kick, that I always thought was called Flashback but which was called Hotshot, the video I rented out when I stayed with my friend when I had to hide in the cupboard to avoid being axed. I believed in miracles, I believed that this muddy field was my field of d...oh who am I kidding, I was rubbish, I didn't really do anything but faff about and get muddy a bit. I was definitely not identified, I had no Soccer Superstar style coming out (wait, that should be coming of age these days shouldn't it?). As I came off, I saw my Dad sitting in the car looking downcast, and my Mum said something like "Nae way would I a fucking picked ye son", I realised that thanks to local sport, I'd learnt a valuable lesson. Life wasn't fair, but life went on, and a new day would come - but my dreams died on that muddy field, and I realised I'd never play for Celtic, or even Riana. I think every day on local fields, courts, and courses, dreams are born and die, in seconds. I find that quite inspiring, and powerful. Local pride in Gippsland will go down now they don't have their netball team, no young 9 year old will win the game with a last second shot, no fat kid will blow a game with a turnover. It's the circle of life Simba, and it's slowly being lost...

Incidentally, Mary Livesey is 17...oh well, she should still move to Hobart, she'd get into Syrup pretty easily...

Duelling Banjos (or Corporate Bakeries Still Suck)

So today I'm sitting in my car, driving obviously because if I was just sitting there I'd get tooted, and the bridge is allegedly closed according to our breakfast radio hilarious duo who are talking this complete drivel that I eventually turn off, not just because I can see quite obviously it's open and because they talk about how much they are loving Brian McFaddens new single and my head is just full of drivel to begin with because I can't sleep and I've got this confused tired expression on my face like the bass player from the Living End trying to do backing vocals - I often think when I'm driving over the bridge about that time the boat crashed into it and knocked it over in the 70s because the captain was incredibly drunk, and how few boats I actually see these days, and I sometimes think about what happened to Brashs or I sit and get myself all pumped up for the finals and think if Early Dawes gets dropped for Rocca would they bring in McAff...then the traffic in front of me comes to a complete stop and it's time to slam the brakes on. The bridge is where I have most of my thinking time, when I don't drive semi-legally listening to Melissa Mars or White Lillies or, I don't know, Real American by Hulk Hogan on the IPOD. To be honest, Tasmanian drivers are pretty useless - I've adopted my Dads tried and true philosophy with cars "right up me arse" of just driving a lot slower - of course, this course of action will one day get me killed in a horrible road rage incident, but what the hell - and I've become a really bad person when I drive because I don't let anyone in at all, hence contributing to the problem not solving it. I think about the year Freddo had a creamy Blueberry version, and wonder if I could still get one. Not the standard blueberry one, but this extra thick whipped blueberry mousse style that wasn't the usual drippy liquid you get in a Freddo...and then, my conscience kicks in, and if you want to know the voice of my conscience, imagine Kathryn Harby crossed with Debbie Black...it resonates in my head to this day....

Banjos, should you not know, is a franchised chain of bakeries and eateries that down here in Tasmania inspire, if not quite the fervour of the day in 1992 Burnie got a Maccas, at least some form of passionate devotion from pensioners who swear by it in that uniquely "we like everything safe and tepid" kind of pensioner way. Why take a risk with that home made hedgehog slice when you can have a mildly appetising "worlds best" sausage roll (The Albanians beg to differ). Actually, that's a little harsh, but the reason I sometimes talk like this is because (here we go again) I used to know this girl who I would see on the bus to work. We got to chatting, as you do, before I became rigidly terrified of buses and people cutting my head off up the back and before I scared people on buses with my "Hey! Remember City South! What a footy team!" line of banter. I can't even remember what she looked like as she was all teeth and voice, but you know, I'm surprised at myself that I was talking to a stranger so there must have been something to her. I think it was because she knew who Catatonia were, maybe that was it. As it happens, she would lecture me pretty regularly about the horrific nature of multi national and national and even state based franchises, and she would always have No Logo by Naomi Klein (which if you remember became a logo) on hand to rescue her arguments. Everything with her always had to be single identity mom and pop (she was also against Americanisation of our language - oh wait, did that joke) stores selling local products with local service and nothing else. She was always telling me about the quality of the sliced hedgehog (that's a chocolate slice foreigners, we're not that crazy down here, despite what it says in Lonely Planet) in little Grandma Pakingas bakery down in the Fingal Valley and how she was going out of business because there was a Banjos built on the grazing land of the sparrow in Avoca, and...obviously, all tedious nonsense in hindsight, especially since I think a Tasmanian owned Banjos anyway, but she had picked her target with me. Gosh darn it, there's local pride at stake, little Grandma Pakinga has been making those hedgehog slices for 20 years! She's a key part of the local community! She raises funds for the local football team! How dare you turn up with your slick advertising campaigns and your sub Bakers Delight slices and drive her out of town! I was naturally furious, in that fantastically unfurious way of the early 20s male, in that you get quite indignant but forget about twenty minutes later because the cute girl in Tracks Record store is putting up posters. The last I saw of this girl she was organising a rally in Brisbane against a corporate whistle company (no, really). Still, she did re-inforce several of my beliefs in local pride and local businesses and whenever I had a purchasing conscience moment, it was her voice that nagged me - at least, until I saw her two years later, jogging out of Chickenfeed (franchise! Driving cheap salvos shops out of business! Or something!) in a Nike tracksuit (Naomi wouldn't have liked that). Naturally, I felt compelled to question the melting of her beliefs, and she simply held up a bucket of pegs and pointed to the price tag, and indeed, Naomi Klein, for all her sound and fury against the corporate machine, wasn't going to question a full bucket of pegs for 99c, regardless of their ethical origin...

My local Banjos is really weird - I know Granny Pakinga needs the business, and I should buy local, but sometimes I get a bit Sophie Monk at KFC and can't help myself - I can't get a handle on it, or it's consistency. Sometimes the sausage rolls are great, sometimes they are terrible. Sometimes there's no sandwiches, sometimes there's so many sandwiches you think Jesus is turning water into thick crust ham and cheese. Sometimes, the girls are lovely and sometimes they are terrible. What I love in life is a consistent shop - I know if I go and get a Boost Juice, I certainly won't get a boosted ego from the actress/model/slash I'm doing my time until Tyra Banks discovers me girl serving me. Against that, I can guarantee that if I go into my local pub in Kingston, they'll ask me if I want herb bread, even if I've ordered a chocolate mousse and a coke. My only other problem with my local Banjos is they always ask how how my day is - the surly ones and the cheerful ones, always the same question. It's one of those questions I spend too long thinking about, when the correct answer is good thankyou, how are you? I'd love to give them an honest opinion after careful consideration. Actually, the real problem is queue jumpers. To get served early in Banjos where I work, you need Tetris like dexterity - it's like Frogger, you've got leap over the moving people just to get a powdered mudcake. There's this one old lady who's an absolute maestro at it. There could be a queue of a hundred and she'd work her way to the front. I watched her today, her trick is usually to jogamble to the counter, in an opposite corner to the queue, huddled over like a munchkin, some kind of woolen hand knitted blanket over her shoulders, and then feign an interest in the little charity tin up the front or to pretend she wants to get a sample slice of Boston Bun from the counter, and obviously everyone gives her some air as she ponders the merits of spending her last 3 bucks on a Daffodil Day pen (what a good egg) and then, with the reflexes of a Batkovic, she's suddenly alive, blanket thrown aside, singing like Shirley Bassey that she wants a pie. It's genius, it really is. The bewildered or the patient just never expect that kind of move. As an aside, my Dad is one of those bewildered, and to this day he still doesn't understand why, on a 37 degree day in Burnie when I had to sit in the car in a suit going to a job interview (it was so hot we got Melbourne TV, always a treat), when I asked for a "tasty treat" from the local shop, and expected a Calippo or a Solero, and he came back proudly with a pound of mince, I wasn't over the moon...

Anyway, so I was in there today, felt like a sandwich, and she was obviously in prime fool the bewildered position, and there was no way out of the queue, the long snaking queue, and I was thinking about how jaunty I would make my "good thanks, how are you", but my mind was already wandering off, to the last time I had been in a Banjos queue this long - it was the day Tassie hosted the Sheffield Shield final against NSW at Bellerive, the sun was shining, my IPOD was shining, the Shining was mildly disappointing the first time I saw it, and I was in town (mainlanders, from now on, this entirely refers to Hobart) having breakfast with a friend of mine before the eternal Bellerive struggle of beer vs light beer began. I obviously proved my masculine credentials by ordering a hearty manly breakfast of waffles with a hint of raspberry jam. My friend ordered the more North West Coast option of 245 things deep fried in chip batter (or is that the Scottish option?) including eggs and bacon and several types of toast (I forgot to ask if they deep fried Apricot Ripple cornettos). So we sat and waited, and enjoyed the magic as his breakfast was brought our ingredient by ingredient. Even the tomato got an individual entrance (he didn't appreciate my is Joan Rivers hosting a red carpet entry special, mostly because he didn't know who Joan Rivers was). As the beginning of the match approached, there was still no toast. The bacon was stringy and cold, the eggs were tepid, the waffles were bloody delicious now you ask, and my conversation was fluid with a hint of cheek and a garnish of repetition. After 45 minutes, there was still no toast, and of course, we were getting anxious to see some cricket, so, politely, he asked the Banjos girl to find out what was going on, and as she wandered off twirling gum around her finger, she got the manager, a small and frail fan of the band Jet (can't you just tell?) and he said, in full seriousness and from the bottom of his little heart, "I'm so sorry, this normally doesn't happen...the toast chef has called in sick"...and preceded to make it up to him by helping him to another serve of delicious cold stringy bacon. Obviously, no toast ever came, what with the toast chef crisis...lucky the bacon chef was on hand...

And they don't do sliced hedgehog either...that chef quit in 1995...fight the power...

Tassie vs The AFL

Melissa Mars
Originally uploaded by JungsPN

So today, she goes back to her old hair, and looks great again. I guess I wasn't the only one who thought it was awful. I thought you all might like a Melissa Mars picture. Go and find an MP3 of Apocalips, the best song of 2008. Do yourself a favour, as Molly Meldrum would say between homophobic jokes about him on Hey Hey.

Since this is essentially a Tasmanian blog, you might be wondering, the hell aren't you talking about Tasmania trying to get into the AFL? For those of you who don't know, the Australian Football League (Aussie Rules) has decided to bring in a 17th expansion team on the Gold Coast, and an 18th expansion team in West Sydney. The team in West Sydney is going to fail completely because no one in West Sydney is interested in football, but this is the reason they will get a team, in case one day they are interested, while Tasmania is so interested in football, they don't need to put a team here because we already like football. A 10000 crowd in West Sydney will be amazing, 25000 in Tassie is unsustainable. Follow? Good, because the bogans don't. They are out in force with bumper stickers and radio phone ins, and it's doing no good at all because the AFL hates us, and completely patronises us. Let's make this something I can relate to - it's like if I fancy Leilani Kai and have a shot with her, and she fancies someone totally not interested in her even though I'm making lots of money and drive a fast car, because, even though he's ugly and a problem drinker, in 40 years he's inheriting a vast fortune - maybe - and has potential one day to be a catch. The simple answer to all of this would be for us all to be uninterested in football and get a soccer team, that's my idea, or get interested in monster trucks and have no one go to a football game ever again, but we're in too deep.

It's good though to have ambitions beyond your station, even if you know they can never be achieved. I went to school with this South African kid who used to always say "You can do anything! Just put your mind to it!" - and we'd come back with all these things like "So, what, if I wanted to play NBA basketball I could!" or "If I wanted to jump off a cliff and live, I could!" or "If I wanted to go out with Effie Michaels, I could!" (that was mostly me). He'd always tell us we could do anything, and when this kid dropped out of school to form a country line dancing academy, he was the only one to wish him well and believe in him. I wonder what became of him, he was always so positive, I'd hate for him to have a crappy life and be disabused of all his sunshine and energy. Luckily for me, I'm Scottish, ambitions are generally crushed pretty early on. I think the only kid with ambition when I went to school in Scotland was the girl with the ambition to sneakily grope every single boy in class during woodwork. I think she managed it now I think about it.

My major problem with a Tasmanian AFL team (apart from there's no way I'd support them vs Collingwood) is that all it does is create more footballers. There's a lot of footballers out there already, and they already get into Syrup without paying and get all the girls. It's probably one of my main regrets in life that I wasn't better at sport. On the North West Coast, it was drummed into everyone that if you played football, you could do anything you wanted. My Dad always remembers this one time when the girls netball team (one of whom was really hot) won the state title, and it was the footballers brought on stage to get congratulations for just winning a game. We all had to applaud them for one win after like ten straight losses. I know that when an AFL footballer gets into a nightclub, they take over the place, so it's going to be a nightmare thinking of them going into the Saloon in Launceston or down here at the Observatory (or "The O", as I found it it's called by hip kids). God help us all if, say, Tasmania beat Collingwood, the reception they would get. As I've said before, in Penguin, the WAGs of the local football team used to go in at 1/2 time and scrape the mud off the players boots with Paddle Pop sticks, so you can imagine what they'd do for an AFL footballer. And that's before we get to the "You think you are so great!" dickheads looking to punch them...

The other problem of course that always gets mentioned is that it will kill off local football, which I would hate. Although, to be honest, it's already dead. The last local football game I went to was part past players re-union and part creche, and the crowd was tiny. The last places the local football club means something is places like Dodges Ferry where there's absolutely nothing else to do. I've spent a couple of days down there, and to be honest, there's so much drinking, it's like the 80s in Penguin. I don't think it would matter if Tasmania had three AFL teams, the Dodges Ferry community would still go to the local football. In truth, this has nothing at all to do with the game, it's about 1 dollar Boags. And the ever present threat of on field violence. And more 1 dollar boags. It's just not like the old days when Peter Gilligan would talk about local football losses like someone had died. "City South...............", he'd say with a long, long pause..."No good...just......no good". Then they'd bring on, like, the coach of Longford and he'd talk like they'd won the champion of the universe title, and at then, he'd get a loaf of bread and a big ham. Ah, the good old days.

So there's a chance that getting an AFL team might create some local pride in the state, at the expense of local pride in the town, and that we might actually, you know, go to a football game to watch the football rather than drink and bitch about AFL. To be honest, given the AFL response, I'm not sure I want a team. After a while, if Leilani Kai keeps turning you down, you have to settle for Judy Martin. I'd love for local football to come back as it used to be, but it's not going to happen. After a while, we'll focus on what's really important - Muay Thai kick boxing, I'm sure they won't patronise us...

The Middle Of Nowhere

I'm really really proud to have lived in Penguin on the North West Coast of Tasmania when I was younger. I lived across the road from the football ground, the hub of the community back in the days before AFL ruined everything that was once good about local football. I loved the jumper the Penguin team wore, since it was dark blue and light blue vertical stripes, a design no one else in Australia had. I loved Hiscutt Park, although I liked it better before it had a name and got a bit poncy. I loved how incredibly fierce and violent the girls basketball competition was (which has lead to my lifelong love of womens wrestling I think). I loved the Penguin shaped rubbish bins. I loved the local milk bar, I loved that on one day we got a new Soapbox and a new Sock Shop, and I loved the long sandy beach that seemingly went on forever, only to come to a crashing halt on a big pile of stones and rocks. It really was a lovely place to spend a childhood, and I really have a lot of local pride (hey, theme!) for the area.

Of course, when I was a bit older, I hated the place as well. Nothing happened. Ever. It was like someone hit the pause button in 1984. It really was the kind of place where Sunday seemed to last a month, and the month seemed to last a year. It was pretty predictable as well. You could tell what day of the week it was after a while by the cakes in the window or by who was collecting their mail. When we moved back there, it was like the entire world had stopped moving for me. Stupid things would bother me - if I saw the same girl two days in a row, I would think life was really boring and want to see different people. We didn't have proper TV, and I couldn't get Irn Bru. Stupid little things that add up to a million little things that add up to massive despair. I would lie in my room immensely frustrated that nothing was happening. Secretly, I would sneak out of the house late at night away from my parents and just walk around. That's why I know what was on sale late at night in the park - I think I ended up selling some tapes myself there one night, although this may be a trick of my imagination (like thinking Chris Tarrant was ever a good player).

A lot of people in conversation ask me if I've ever been truly happy or truly sad, and to be honest, I was both in one night. Now, I don't have any real regrets in my life apart from the usual - I've never left a girl stranded at the altar, I've never shot a man just to watch him die, my regrets are probably to do with time wasted (and never meeting Vilimaina Davu). I could have worked harder, I could have done more with my life, but I don't regret it. It is what it is. But I wonder what my life would have been like if I had really run away the night that I planned to. I couldn't see any good at all in Penguin, and absolutely no way out of my lonely boring life, and so, one night, I went to run away, took some meagre possessions, two hundred dollars and set off out the house really quietly, determined to have a new life away from this town that I couldn't stand.

Now, everyone has done this I'm sure, but I really wasn't doing it for attention, I was genuine about somehow getting back to the UK. Problem was, I decided to sleep in the Penguin football club grandstand. This wouldn't have been a bad thing, especially considering someone (oh the trust of the early 90s) had left two doors unlocked, and I could get easy access to food (all the Orange Jaffa Big Ms and Cherry Ripes a boy could want) but as I was just about to go to sleep (my memory might be off here, I might have been sleeping in the middle of the ground, to be hardcore) I saw the most beautiful star I've ever seen in my entire life. It wasn't just twinkling, it was glowing so brightly, it was illuminating the whole town, lighting up the sky, making it impossible to sleep, but also lighting up the houses dotting the skyline, almost to the point I could see people individually, fighting, arguing, loving, living. Everyone with their own problems, everyone with their own lives, but all of them facing up to them as best they could. It really remains an important part of my life, the night I realised that I could never run away from myself, and while from time to time I've tried, I always really remember that clearly - and how beautiful Penguin looked on that cold October night.

And that's why I always try and have as much local pride as I can - the people in Tasmania are just good people, making the best of what they have. Even with a terrible radio station...

Whatever became of the Monopoly kid?

I wouldn't say that I feel very motivated sitting typing this post after a fairly bad day at work- I did see blue eye shadow girl, and she actually spoke on the store microphone. Luckily, she didn't sound like, say, Bea Arthur, that would have been disconcerting. Speaking of microphones, the man who last night said at the Jeff Fenech fight for the crowd to give Josh Fraser a round of applause is on my hate list today because really, the only time I want to give Josh Fraser a round of applause is when he's leaving the ground for the last time and I never need to see him ever again.

Down here in Hobart there's not much going on right now - our new state Premier though wears a ring on his thumb, which is good for him, but the Mercury, our local paper, got about four days worth of stories out of it. One day to analyse it politically, one day of will he wear it, will he not, and two days of analysis from style experts. The style experts are probably the same people who run my favourite piece of journalism, the weekly fashion find in the "Attitude" (a poor mans Hit) section on a Friday. Basically, they find some bogan or goth or girl dressed in a bed sheet in the middle of the mall on a Wednesday, and take a photo of them. Everyone ever in this section of the paper seems to look horrendous and be having some horrific practical joke played on them, but they proudly talk about how putting a beanie and a Brisbane Bears jumper (and god I want one of those) and some longstockings together really accentuates their eyes or some such thing. The Mercury is definitely an odd paper. The sports section is now three pages long and full of adverts, and there's no longer some sneaky brothel ads in the classifieds. It takes about 10 seconds to read these days. 

However, the Mercury is spun gold compared to the paper I grew up with on the NW Coast, the mighty Advocate. Do you like Hagar the Horrible? Well, the Advocate had it three times a day! Did you win 50 bucks at bingo or have the same name as someone in the news? We'll be round straight away! Making rice filled heat packs for a Young Achievement group? Oh wait, that was me, and yes, I was in the Advocate, looking at the heat pack like it was a miracle invention. In fairness, it was hard being a journalist on the North West Coast - the place was very regional and they tried to instill a lot of local pride into the citizens. The trouble was, just about everyone my age was aggressively calling it a shit hole and couldn't wait to leave. I imagine the editors of the Advocate sitting around going "those kids getting drunk at Hiscutt Park? Why aren't they out making jam? Local pride is at stake!" - for once cynicism took over and the world got bigger, once Collingwood were more important to people than City-South, the Advocate lost it's way, and it could never get back to it's "integral part of YOUR community" place that it used to hold.

My all time favourite ever piece of journalism in the Advocate was this one time in about, oh, 1995, when this kid had just become Australian Monopoly champion. That's front page news up in the North West. And sure enough, it was front page news, and the Advocate really went to town. They came up with a special little inlet box about this kids hints and tips about how to play Monopoly. However, the kid really outdid himself. "I used to play my family," he huffed, "but they really aren't a challenge now." - I wonder sometimes when I see child prodigies what became of them, but really I wonder mostly what happened to him. I like to think he sends constant letters to Jacques Rogge, demanding Monopoly be put into the Olympics. Maybe he took up another board game, like Scrabble, for the sake of family harmony. Maybe someone one day made him bankrupt when he threw a double three, and thus he lost all his competitive spirit. I really would like to know one day, I'd love to find out what became of the Monopoly kid.

I bet he's on Facebook though playing online. I can just tell...

The Coast is fading like a flower

So it turns out last night that while I was innocently sleeping in my comfy comfy bed, a man was rampaging around Kingston at 2 in the morning in a souped up doof doof mobile (no doubt blasting Noiseworks) terrorising innocent BP workers with a replica pistol and getting involved in a hilarious car chase with pratfalls a-go-go. This is obviously significant because the angry rabble rousing residents now have another reason to ark up about the bottle shop plans, but also because we never have any crime in Kingston - sure, there's some mild prostitution from the girls in the swing park, and you can't put up a phone box bar it get smashed by a bunch of naughty kids but whenever I've got a taxi home, there's never been anyone out on the streets (just in the swing parks) at all, hence Kingstons reputation as a nice retirement village. I think if Kingston is going to start with crime, for instance if someone goes down and cuts down the "Fork In The Road" (quite literally, a big fork - what an attraction) it could be a fantastic way for me to start my career in community groups, petitioning against naughty kids. I thought this was really interesting, because I'm spent most of my years here thinking that one day I'd be standing up and demanding that Kingston got a night club - I spent one Boxing Day sitting on the beach with a carry out of West Coast Coolers with my cousins (the one I don't like, and my adopted Asian cousin, who basically said once without irony the trouble with Melbourne is it's full of Asians) because everything was closed by 4pm. We figured at that point, Kingston could really do with a nightclub - it's not fair to deny the home town the chance to be punched in the head by an angry Maori. The only night out I've had in Kingston was the one I wrote about before, at the RSL when the man and woman virtually got divorced on the spot - what I didn't mention was that we went to watch Richmond vs Collingwood at a fundraiser, and because the game was delayed, the big screen showed Burkes Backyard in HD Big Screen Dolby sound for an hour. Yes, I might not have been able to get a cheap drink or pick up anyone under 60, but I sure learned how to pot a petunia (if you don't grow petunias in a pot, it's the only flower I know, and as you'll see, mentioning flowers is a good segue)...

Yesterday I was so futuristically talking to a friend of mine about back home (I realise that could mean a few places for me, but in this case, it's the North West coast). Apparently, according to the Advocate, the local newspaper taking a rare break from insightful woman knits socks in football colours front cover they specialise in, I found out that instances of the STD chlamydia on the North West Coast have risen 300 percent in the last 5ive years. Obviously, this is a massive concern, if it's not overblown reporting like when the Mercury tells us to lock ourselves in the basement to avoid Asian gangs. I'm frankly stunned that the awareness campaign on the coast failed - a few years ago they basically plastered the streets with leaflets and stickers that said, quote, "chlamydia - it's not a flower" (under which someone put the graffiti "but it grows in a dark place"). I'm staggered that this campaign didn't work, especially at the target group of young North West Coasters who's main word is that word that rhymes with "runt" - incidentally, when I grew up on the Coast, our main awareness campaign revolved around Wally The Wombat (who isn't a flower), a rotund fire safety expert mascot who's stickers were highly sought after. Every year, along with the phone book and the footy season, a new dawn was signified by a new message from Wally, usually about fire, until the obtuse reference to clearing your attic in 1985 that preceded his demise. One year, someone told me once that at the Penguin football oval, someone had a Wally Wombat costume made and was mobbed by kids who for once didn't kick a mascot in the groin, and were paying rapt attention until Wally asked this ginger kid "Hey! Are you fire safe!" and the kid said "Nup! I nerfuckin burn shit!" - at which point, the kids probably kicked Wally in the groin. Yes...kids...other kids...certainly not me....whistles idly...

Anyway, the Coast seems to be in a little bit of trouble with the chlamydia spread referred to in in no way sensationalist terms in the Advocate as "WORSE THAN THE PLAGUE!" - probably. Not helping this plague is the fact that apparently the pubs up there (nice use of the word apparently) continue to serve beer well past the point at which a bouncer at Syrup would smash you in the head and throw you in the street, and nothing says bam-chikka-bow-wow like too much alcohol. A Burnie Dockers football official, he was stripped by his team, and vomited on a pool table, and still was allowed to keep drinking. He's not too happy about this, so the Advocate says, and he blames the pub for allowing him to keep drinking, naked, until he "almost died", spending 23 hours on life support,  to which I say...almost? What a lightweight! Boy in my day you were still plied with beer until Laurie from Laurie's pub called the coroner! Some of the drinking sessions of legendary cricketer/fat bloke Danny Buckingham would make your liver rot, and this bloke is whinging about almost dying? I don't have the stomach for a big chlamydia inducing drinking session anymore - my stomach aches after a few beers now, which is amazingly girly, but I am an old man. I've never almost died, but I did pass out on a nightclub step in London, and work up with an 8 foot Nigerian looking at me going "You want taxi?" - I thought he wasn't referring to the best work of Tony Danza, so I thought sure why not - which given my incredible fear of being stabbed to death, probably isn't the smartest thing, jumping into a taxi from a solicitous Nigerian stranger, but luckily, he was a taxi driver and not a crazy murderer. I for whatever reason have never had a massive drinking session on the NW Coast, but I do know that there are certain rules - don't beat the locals at pool, only play the Gambler and Khe Sanh on the jukebox, wait behind any locals to get served, even if they queue up for 10 minutes less than you, and most importantly, if you are in Penguin, don't go and pee on the local landmark, the Big Penguin. Someone told me once this bloke was having a cheeky pee on it at 2 in the morning, and he was caught and they tied him to a tree and left him there, sans his pants, until morning when some startled church goers got an early morning shock. I'm sure he learned his lesson...

So if the North West Coast is plagued with drinking problems and chlamydia - well, it's not all that different to when I lived there, although I am disgusted that men are winning the Queens Quest competition (what manner of evil is that!) but obviously, if I did move back there as a concerned citizen, to show some local pride, I'd have to move up there with a positive attitude and talk up the North West Coast. I'd be quite happy to don the Wally The Wombat costume if it helped and turn my focus away from fire safety to chlamydia prevention and warning about the perils of drinking. I don't really remember getting too many visits from local groups when I was at school, we got the odd visit from inspirational speakers telling us to stick in at school and work hard (I must have been looking out the window) and someone came in to teach us breakdancing once (I was doing the Running Man much to their disgust) but we didn't get many people telling us about local pride and events and things about our community. The best guest speaker we had at school was...well, me, so I was told. It wasn't so much a guest speech, I just talked this one time reluctantly for as little time as possible about my job at the ABC, and got some big laughs for the story about the broken tap. I don't know, but I suspect it was because if they encouraged me to talk for longer, they wouldn't have to go back to class, but it was the biggest laughs I got outside of my own Dad laughing at me when I had my tracksuit on back to front. It was probably an OK little talk, a bit of a snapshot about what you could achieve in Burnie with a bit of hard work - brought a tear to a glass eye. At least, in comparison the girl after me, quite a serious but flighty girl who told me once about angels and fairies got up and obviously threw her prepared notes away to try and crack some gags. She started with a gem of a story about working with a girl called Joelene..."we all sung at her!" she exclaimed to a compete murmur of indifference (it's all in the delivery). "The Dolly Parton song!" she said, tapping the mic impatiently. She then started singing the song, in a terrible off key warble, before wandering off in disgust, muttering something about "should have stuck to the Janice Ian material"...

So, stay safe North West Coast kids, stay away from the plague, stop drinking when you need to, and listen to the Wombat...he'll at least ensure your loft is flame resistant...

Confusion and Caramel

I'm personally in a really good mood today - driving to work, sitting by the side of the road, I saw a cheeky midget. I love cheeky midgets - I see enough grumpy midgets, to see a cheeky midget really put a spring in my step. My beautiful girl with the blue eye shadow was at work, being her ever helpful self at the shop counter, and my favourite video on Youtube, the moving tribute to Alan Didak set to Delta Goodrem, got a well deserved shout out in the Herald Sun. And, just to put the cherry on the cake, I saw some bogans arrested in the shop where blue eye shadow girl works which I always enjoy. I love bogan theatre, to the point that I was going to pull up a chair and get some popcorn (the cinema kind, not the horrible blue kind you get at parties). "Idintferkindonuffink", that's always a great bogan thief phase, and they kick from the bottom of their legs, from the shoe down. I always love to see what the bogans have stolen, and today, it was a putter. I don't know how you steal a putter, or why you steal a putter. Maybe at Royal Penguin the bogan found out that while his long game was standing up to pressure, he was missing crucial putts and thought "Imaferkinstealone" from a low budget shop (not that you are low budget blue eye shadow girl). There was a chase, he made it almost to Boost Juices stand where the girls loathe you (and I mean really loathe you - outside of the sheer hatred of the bar staff at The Quarry, it's probably the least friendly girl group in the whole of Tassie - to the point you think, I wonder if this actress/model has spit in my Guava drink) before slipping over and almost breaking his neck while his girlfriend squealed something about "Leavemalonhesonlyakerd" or something...outstanding work...people who go on about the rise of the bogan and the decline of society, they just don't understand good solid cacks...

Despite this frivolity, it's been a pretty awful day for Tassie - it seems like we've lost Cadburys factory in Claremont, well, they are sacking 200 people, but they say the job cuts are simply part of a bid to turn the plant into, let me get this right, a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks, which sounds like they've opened the Ponds Institute or the Max Factor Laboratories in the middle of downtown "C". I don't know what a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks does, well, apart from produce bloody rippingly excellent moulded chocolate blocks, but it apparently requires 200 less people to operate it. This is terrible news because obviously because of the job cuts, but I hate Cadburys anyway, since they got rid of the DMCs, the much lamented and missed dinner plate sized M&Ms style chocs - and it robs us of the best tourist attraction in Tasmania, the Cadburys chocolate factory tour. I've often thought of the Cadburys chocolate tour as being like knowing you are going to play a great game of catch and kiss (where this nonsense to call it kisschasy, like the lame band, has come from I don't know) after triple maths - sweet delight after utter tedium (or if you prefer, Shane O'Bree taking ten minutes to get the ball to Medhurst). The tour part of the tour is massively lame - look kids, it's a bewildered and low paid Malaysian woman in a hairnet glazing a Walnut Whip, don't all take a photo at once - and tedious and involves a lot of boring men pointing to machinery parts and conveyor belts. However, after, what, 3 hours, you get your reward - the big barrel of cheap chocolate. Yes, at the end of the tour, you are depositeed blinking into a shop with a sawdust floor where there's buckets of cheap chocolate and licorice. It's fat kid paradise, and I remember when we went, almost being barged into a big stand of boxes of caramel by a porcine young girl in a "Sexy Biach" (sic) T-shirt that seemed hand made, and then thinking how brilliant it was when, on the bus back to town, she choked on a Chupa Chup and had to be revived with a massive slap on the back from a man in a Tassie Underwater hockey T-shirt. I think she thought it was love, he thought it was duty, and there was a mass of confusion on both of their faces as they munched seperately and thoughtfully on their respective free goodies. There's no way there's going to such a hormonal mass of confusion and caramel (I should have caused the blog that..) in a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks, and that is quite frankly sad...

The Devils, for what it's worth, are our VFL Australian Rules team - they play at the level below AFL standard (where the Pies play) and should, should, be a great signpost on the way to getting an AFL team (don't laugh, I've had my Believe bar). However, they are about to get the arse because we can't afford them, and Scott Wade (a man who's grasp of decision making makes Burt Reynolds decision to make Cop and Half (yes! Finally I get in a reference to Cop and A Half!) seem inspired) has decided to bring back the Statewide League instead. Yes, we're going to stick to West Sydney by bringing back East Launceston (go you mighty Demons!) vs Lauderdale in a statewide mate vs mate struggle. This is obviously such a stupid decision, you'd imagine Scott Wade would dump Ana Ivanovic for Catriona Rowntree because CR has frequent flier points. I might have referenced before though, I can't talk, well, I can, I'm not a selective mute, but I didn't do enough to support the Devils, unless you count my going to 1 game, at Bellerive, when we made the Preliminary Final a few years ago, and that wasn't entirely Devils related - I went, with jet lag, just to see the semi legendary Clarence (they were playing the curtain raiser) water boy slash scoreboard attendant. I can't remember the team, it might have been Longford, but there was one day at Penguin when some team came with two water attentends - one amazing, ridiculously beautiful female who was allegedly anyones for a Violet Crumble (no, wait, that was Bracknell, sorry for questioning her purity) and one twin brother of Mick Martyn. It was hilarious to see Longford players lie in the Penguin mud, pretending to be hurt, asking for water, and then suddenly recovering if it was Igor that came out with the water or the Deep Heat. Clarence though, he was in charge of both water and the scoreboard, and memorably asked us what 3x6 was, because he couldn't keep up. Anyway, the Devils got flogged, and I haven't thought about them much until today, but for some reason, I have a Tassie Devils cap, and I have no idea how I got it - this is much like my Delta Goodrem DVD...when the hell did I buy that...

So having suffered the loss of our chocolate economy and our football team, local pride has been seriously wounded, but better news is at hand, because it's nearly cricket season (next year football in Tasmania is going to be 6 months of waiting for cricket season), and it's almost time for colourful football identities who's teams aren't involved in the finals to come down and talk about...the finals they failed to get to. Russell Robertson, Kevin Sheedy, Richo, they'll all be out and about speaking at local football club lunches to slightly put out coterie groups, and I hope at least one of them makes a big Jason Saddington style faux pas. I'm a massive rap for cricket season, but what I hope happens is some kid steps up and wins the handball competition at one of these functions. If you don't know, it's a bit of a tradition at these appearances that people line up to try and handball an Aussie rules football through a hoop, and if you do it, you can guarantee immortality within your local community, "aren't you that bloke than when Justin Murphy came to town" style. You can get free beers forever. Your team may vanish, your job may go because you don't fit in at a centre of excellence for producing moulded chocolate blocks, but you can always be the bloke who...I'm afraid at Penguin in the 80s, I choked at my big handball moment. I remember the Sherrin, the target outside Cut Price Sams, the line over which I could not step, the mildly interested shoppers, and the celebrity, well, it was actually the double act of Terry the Tipster Morris off local radio ("Give us a tip Tezza" I think was his catchphrase) and the 1985 Queens Quest winner, Jeanette Hamilton from Ulverstone (boo, Miss Penguin was robbed, she didn't even win the Miss Personality award...it's politics I tell ya) resplendent in sash and red hugging top. Maybe some albino cleavage distracted my young eyes (which may be unfair to the lovely Jeanette, but that's how I remember it) but my final handball clipped the inside of the bullseye, and agonisingly, deliberately and awfully fell to the floor, and I felt awful despite TTTM giving me a voucher for the Soapbox and I lost to some smart arsed kid called Glenn who hit a bullseye despite the handicap of eating a Redskin split at the same time. So he became "Aren't you that kid" and I became someone who in an hour had a doctors appointment...

If nothing else, I hope someone restores some local pride here in Tassie by getting their picture in the paper for their incredibly accurate handballing. That's much better than getting in the paper getting your blood pressure taken at the doctors...and after the day that state has had, we need all the local heroes we can get...

Funny how a high profile knife attack makes everyone hate living in Tasmania

So something really weird happened today, and luckily that was something weird that you can spin into an anecdote and not someone dying from stab wounds in the middle of a relatively cheaply priced rack of plain white T-shirts (I was going to say "Ts", but lets not speak of that band again). Incidentally, our ever vigilant police force have been on hand to say don't worry, you won't be stabbed by strangers in the middle of Hobart, the stabber knew the stabee, so those plain white T-shirts are still OK to buy. Phew, says Hobart. I'm still not getting on no bus fool, say I. Anyway, so I was wandering through my day, wondering if I should rip up my party photos because I look a bit mental, and I caught the eye of this girl - she had a blouse on that looked like paper mache to be honest, and we exchanged an unremarkable glance, but as I turned away, she's let out this massive squeal, and when I turn around, she's done her knee in the middle of the mall. Now, I'm thinking, did I do that, did my unremarkable glance at the paper (I know it's papier incidentally fans of spotting prose errors, but it's a homage to how a kid at my school used to call it "payperrrrrrrrrr mashie" in his Wynyard accent - old school represent y'all) mache blouse startle her and cause knee ligaments to collapse? Luckily, she sort of limped off unconvincingly, but I did wonder what had happened to make her knee collapse and buckle in the three intervening seconds. As it turned out, there was an even stranger and more bewildering trap for the shoppers today, no, not leaflets (I saw those promotion models off, don't you worry about that) but...wait for it...a cheap and cheerful Salamanca style stall, run by two Asian businesspeople in red T-shirts selling cheap socks off a grubby varnished table. I thought Glasgow was the home of the "sports sawks, two for a pound" cheap sock stall, but there it was in Tasmania. At one point, I'm sure Mrs Asia was staring at my unremarkable black and blue socks, thinking she had a customer. What is going on lately? We're one step away from people setting up a curtain rack stall with clothes hanging, selling those knock off AFL tops with "Colinwood" and "Hawforn" on them...and people will buy them, you just know they will...

Anyway, away from the incredible high octane blogging action around socks and knee joints (good name for an album that), for some reason I've had to today, in my menial real world, deal with a lot of people hating on Tasmania. You'd think the fact that Sam Mitchell mentioned us for 0.3 of a second in his Grand Final speech would have boosted morale, but no, surprisingly, it hasn't resonated. One woman launched into an entire strange rant about how she should have stayed in Manhattan and how she should never have left and moved back here, the weird bit being we were chatting amiably about her dog, and then out of nowhere she turned into the Manhattan tourist board...then she had the misfortune to say that she also lived in Canada, which meant I could say, well, at least no one here gets stabbed and eaten on a bus...which she didn't know about so I looked a bit mental. Obviously with the incident, there's been some feedback too, with one woman telling me Hobart was like an alligator swamp and she was a piece of pork...do alligators eat pork? So this didn't do much for my usually high feelings of local pride, everyone saying they'd rather live in places with David Letterman taped down the road or places with a less toothy crocadillian feel when you are buying Sara Bareilles CDs in Sanity. However, I did see something that made me feel proud to live in Tasmania - a kid called Tyson getting a swift boot up the arse for his troubles after knocking over an old lady who was sipping a lemonade. His bogan mother did warn him in fairness, and then waddled over with her mesh black tracky daks struggling to keep up with her movements, and as promised, give him a good old fashioned kick in the arse, just like the old days of Penguin. Even my friends sounded downcast about going out on Saturday night, which I put down to getting old and tired and inevitably preparing to not get in anywhere after 10pm...again. Me, I plan to try and lift morale around Tasmania at a down time in our history by belting out a drunken tune at Montgomeries...something from the Bananarama collection maybe? Nope, it was still no good, my friend simply texted back the word "shit" - Tasmania, my singing, "Montys" (where even knowing the 9x tables isn't proof of sobriety) or Bananarama? The mystery went unsolved...

My Dad, he found Tasmania really weird when he first moved here - I don't know, I may have mentioned before, he's quite an amiable person to strangers. When he was teaching, he tried to engage one of the school bus drivers in a conversation about the different qualities of recycling bins vs the different local councils, and the bus driver responded by grunting and turning up his Noiseworks CD. Still, he does keep trying. When he first moved to Tasmania, he asked a local what the best thing to see while he was living in Tasmania, like, the best local landmark (he was a fool to himself, the Big Penguin was right there) and after about 10 minutes of deliberation the local said "Well there's this nerfuckin paddock in Latrobe...nerfuckin beautiful it is...better than that Pyramid shit!" - Dad didn't know if that pyramid shit meant the ones in Egypt, the little green ones in a Quality Street box or the kind of money making schemes that always go bad, but whenever he thinks of Tasmania, he's sure to mention "that paddock in Latrobe". About a week after that, he was in the fantastic local meat emporium, Lethborg Smallgoods in Scottsdale, where the bacon was Lethborgianly good (so the sign said). He engaged the Lethborg (the Cyborgs were busy) shopkeep in some idle chit chat, mostly about Scotland, and the proper way to make fruit pudding and he was being his usual quite chatty self, a skill he never really passed on to me. Someone told me a story at work yesterday about rosary beads that made me lose the will to live. Anyway, at the end of this chat, Mr Lethborg has said something akin to "You know fella, yer alright!" and as Dad has gone to leave, Mr Lethborg has said something like "Oh, and if you come back again, don't buy our sausages!" - now, Dad has turned around and gone, er, what was that? "Oh, don't buy our sausages, they aren't very good - just telling you now! So you don't buy them! Cos I like you!" and continued, I don't know, mincing a small vole (PETA just don't care about the Vole). Dad was a bit taken aback by this, and has to this day pondered just what was in a 1983 Lethborg Smallgoods sausage that could possibly have caused such self sabotaging sales tactics...I suspect it was ground up vole, but Dad was so rattled, he never went back...

Of course, we still live here, sausage related foibles aside and I guess since we've been here for so freaking long there must be something good about the place. I made it my mission when I thought about the lack of pride in Tasmania today to find something genuinely good about the place. It was really difficult with all the unease about, not just because of the incident, or the fat bogan kicking her kid up the arse, or the continued bewildered procession of old people getting in my way. I did see blue eye shadow girl and consider her a tourist attraction, but that would be too easy. I was really struggling to capture any kind of positive sentiment out of the day, and then I saw her. A small innocent child, in a clean white dress, smiling serenely as she waited for the bus, so pure, so cute. That was my positive sign - sure, there might be knife fights, the economy might be in strife, and the quality of Banjos sausage rolls might continue to plummet, but as long as there are children with innocent optimi...luckily, as I even sickening myself, the girl gave the bus driver the finger, so I was happy with that, as it stopped my Olympic opening ceremony mental sentiments. Instead, my bliss today came from two old women who were talking at the bus stop quite happily about the world economic crisis. For whatever reason, Old woman #1 was quite excited that the economic crisis was happening, and old woman #2 couldn't understand why as her Terry had said that it would mean people would lose their homes. OW1 was even more excited..."yes! that's good!" she said, dementedly..."all those Gagebrook ferals! They'll be the first to lose their home! That'll teach the ferals!" - OW2 was a bit upset about the lack of compassion OW1 was showing towards the admittedly somewhat undesirable ferals, but OW2 was cackling with glee just thinking about it. "One of them stole my Jeffs Boags out of the esky on the back of the ute...and when they lose their home, it's my payback!" - OW2 didn't quite seem to agree that an entire community losing their homes was equitable to losing a slab of beer, but OW1 had her position and she was sticking to it. "Hey, when Jeffs drunk, at least he's asleep! When he's sober, he bores the arse off me with his football talk...I hate ferals! Send them out on the street!" - and with that, she got on the bus, no doubt about to launch into phase 2 of her Gagebrook final solution...

That's what I really love about Tasmania...everyone really rallies around in a time of crisis...

Hobart vs Launceston

So i was driving back from Launceston after listening to some terrible old school hits (and i mean proper old school, like Gene Vincent) and making mental notes about all of the wonderful out of the way towns that dot Tasmania that you just never get to. If you do the basic Launceston to Hobart drive, there's that giant boring stretch in the middle, but there's a lot of really interesting dirt roads, down which you can find the real Tasmania. Everyone seems to stop in Ross or Campbelltown, but what about Pyengana, where you get to walk on a duckboard (who needs the Internet kids). Evandale might have the Penny farthing championships, but what about Avoca? Fingal? Nile? Canoe paddling in Falmouth? Sounds great doesn't it? No one ever seems to go to the North East of Tasmania, it's just completely unspoiled and rustic, and I'd love to visit these places, especially since this is a blog about local pride within Tasmanian communities, particularly small ones. I often tell people these places out of the way are the real Tasmania, where the opinions are unreconstructed, the men manly, the women quite often manlier, and the beer always Boags. It's just a shame that as far as I seem to get these days (and it's my own laziness) is Launceston, and even that's a massive effort these days. I'd love to be able to expand my Launceston stories beyond a night at a quiz night, and a trip to The Saloon. Mind you, I must get to my night at The Saloon one day, but I'd love a lot more to be able to do a post about my trip to Binnalong Bay. I'm sure I'd learn a lot about girls the size of Cheryl Haworth in flannel shirts selling bait...always selling bait.

I was in Launceston to see the football, between Hawthorn and the Brisbane Lions. A man with fuzzy hair had a lot of interesting opinions on the relative merits of the umpires. He also was much funnier in his head than he was out loud, but I don't think I'm much better watching Collingwood in fairness, and when I went to the Telstra Dome, I threw my Paul Medhurst badge a shamefully long way across the lower tier in a hissy fit. I've mentioned before about the pride I always showed when Penguin did well, and how the community rallied around them, but AFL teams have moved a long way beyond that, and Collingwood as I've said before don't mean anything special to the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood for instance. Hawthorn want to become Tasmanias team, which I won't buy until I see Sam Mitchell at Isobar, and we pay them a lot of money to come down to Launceston and play. This is no guarantee of entertainment or interest though - the girls, I have to say, came to see Buddy, the men came to drink beer, and I have no idea why I attended. During the game I ended up talking to strangers about the saddest TV deaths in history (no question, Molly in A Country Practice - anyone who says Cathy Godbold is insane) and whatever happened to Rob Brough. There wasn't much feeling at the game, and we left before the predictable meat market that was the after match meet the players function. I went to one for Melbourne by lying to Jim Stynes that I was a member, and it was wall to wall mini skirts trying to pick up a footballer. I was tempted to grab a Melbourne tracksuit top and hang out and flirt, but I'm not fit enough to pass for that, although my cousin had a stone cold excellent reputation for picking up in England by putting on a Scotland tracksuit and claiming to be a member of Scotlands under 21 team. Sadly, my attempts to pick up by pretending to be a Penguin player always failed - no one wanted to clean my boots with a Paddle Pop stick, and mores the pity...

Part of the problem with Hawthorn being Tassies team (frizzy haired Melburnian visitors aside) is that four games a year isn't enough to build up a rivalry with anyone that Tasmanians can get behind. The real rivalry in Tasmania is between Launceston and Hobart, although no one is quite sure how to harness it. I think they want to be the capital city, and I spent an hour once with a Launcestonian telling me how great the Saloon was compared to Syrup (like picking between Anne Maree Cooksley and Rob Brough as Australias most obscure celebrity really). Scott Wade dreams of a football league where Launceston and Hobart grind to a halt to cheer their city on. We hate Launceston though mostly because they get all the AFL games, not because they could beat us in a contrived local league. Our great lovely radio station here (when they aren't pimping out their DJs) often try and stir up a local rivalry between Hobart and Launceston by organising tug of war competitions or referencing Launcestons monkey park where the monkeys have herpes. I don't know what they do in Launceston, but I'd imagine they get up to similar hilarious japes and probably mock our local hooded hoons and street parades for Reggie from Big Brother, where women dressed as chiko rolls cop a spray from unemployed males for wasting their time. There seems to be a rivalry there though that is begging to have money made out of it by a slick huckster, although I actually do like Launceston I must admit. I really enjoy the mall there, the girls are pretty, and the coffee in a cart is fantastic. And Target up there used to have the (second) prettiest store girl in the whole world, and the fact that she overused the word "cunt" every day did nothing to dim her light.

As much as living in Hobart has ended up skewing my view of Launceston a bit though, and as much as I would love for Hobart and Launceston to have something really big to harness the rivalry that isn't just Kim and Dave being tools, it's the small rivalries in Tasmania that fascinate me even more. I love going to the Regional League games down here in Tasmania and seeing a game between, say, Huonville and Dodges Ferry and seeing a crowd of about 150 getting into a massive bitchfest and bringing up old games from the 1970s. It reminds me of my childhood in Penguin, and the stories the old timers used to tell. One old timer who went to all the Penguin games was obsessed with East Devonport football club, and was delighted when they disappeared off a cliff one year, almost taking an advert out in the paper. One day over a Violet Crumble I asked him why, and he said that when he was younger, he had come home early from work, and found a pair of East Devonport logoed football socks in the wash. His wife said they must have got mixed up at the laundrette, but he didn't believe her and thought she was having an affair with a East Devonport player, and was convinced even more by the fact that there wasn't a laundrette within miles, but he didn't bring it up again for a few years, until their tenth anniversary, at which point he gave his wife a gift - an East Devonport jumper rolled in pig manure with divorce papers in the middle of it and her ring in pieces on top of it, lovingly laid out in the middle of the bed. I don't know whether or not his wife ever did cheat on him, but rivalries like that burn for years.

Scott Wade, you can't create rivalry like that...you can't even come close...