When you are a sports fan and an art lover and a sensitive, poetic soul (this columnist has all of those qualifications) the division between the finest things in art and in sport is very blurred.
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The woman I love (who, in an old-fashioned coincidence in these promiscuous, polyamoric times is also my wife) and I were at the Narrabundah Ball Park last Sunday for the Canberra Cavalry’s baseball match with Geelong-Korea.
Suddenly the Cavalry’s Zach Wilson smote a massive home run that as well as zooming up and out of the ballpark seemed to keep going and going, till lost to view, in the rough general direction of Gungahlin. Veteran fans of the Narrabundah venue believe it to be one of the two most amazing biffs of a baseball ever seen there.
Of course, because arts correspondents are never sent to cover sports (a tragedy I will correct when by popular acclaim I am swept to the editorship of the Nine/Fairfax flagships) all reporting of the feat has been sporty, dwelling on exciting matters of blokey brute force.
But there was more to it than that. Zach Wilson launched himself into his monster wallop with a balletic grace and then (as is the way with baseball’s home runs) the pale ball took off and took its time soaring across the firmament, framed by a contrastingly bluebell-blue sky. When in cricket a batsman hits a ball for six it is quite exciting but the cricket ball is in such a tearing hurry (and some cricket boundaries are so short) that everything is all over too quickly. With a baseball home run hit there is more time for spectators to marvel (like amateur astronomers following a comet through their telescopes) and to gasp a heartfelt, reverent “Gosh!”
By the time, spellbound, you read this I will have been to see the National Gallery’s blocksplintering exhibition Love & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite Masterpieces from the Tate. I expect to find there some of the same wonder (for the best in art and sport are blurred) in John Everett Millais’ Ophelia (London, 1852) that was given by Zach Wilson’s masterpiece Home Run (Narrabundah, 2018).
As a migrant still sometimes torn between two loyalties (I’m always true to Australia, in my fashion, but still have lots of Englishness bobbing about in my heart) I’m fascinated by the behaviour of Indian-Australian fans at this current India versus Australia Test cricket series. Wittily, the media is calling these zealots the Swami Army.
The Indian-Australian fans are living in Australia now but are passionately, noisily, singingly, chantingly and flag-wavingly supportive of the team from India. I mention this not to criticise it (although the phenomenon knots the knickers of the Australia-Love It Or Leave It neanderthals and of governments that want migrants’ bosoms to heave with “Australian values”) but just to say, again, what a weird, playing-with-your-mind thing it can be to be a migrant.
At its weirdest it has the migrant somehow, in a form of bigamy, emotionally belonging simultaneously to two nations. I testify, from personal experience, that this is bewildering and psychologically unhealthy.
The theory is that over time the migrant becomes less and less engaged with her country of origin and more and more engaged with the country he has chosen. Good luck with that theoretical formulae, confused soldiers of the Swami Army, for my experience has been that I have become more national-belonging-bigamous, more bi-national with age.
Australians of a British background who know where I am coming from with this may be sharing my confusing experience that the UK’s in-the-news-every-day Brexit mistake, horrors and conflicts set up strange vibrations in the heart and mind. I’d hoped that I was by now too utterly Australian to care what happens in the UK but the Brexit tragedy is shivering what turn out to be my still deeply pommy timbers.
All of which means, I suppose, that if I had a totem animal it wouldn’t be an Australian animal but would be an utterly English animal, perhaps one of the sweet creatures of The Wind In The Willows and/or native to the corner of England that I come from.
I mention this because one day last week while hitherto only half-listening to a man being interviewed on ABC Radio National I suddenly heard him claim “My mother was a wedge-tailed eagle and my father was a red-bellied blacksnake.”
I pricked up my ears at this and was about to either scoff at the man for being a fibber or to applaud him for his poetical imagination. Then it unfolded that the speaker was an Aboriginal man and was talking, with conviction of his human parents’ animal totems.
How enviable, methought, to belong to a culture which enables its peoples to have these ancient, semi-sacred connections with the wildlife of the country that they, the people, come from. It made me think what my own dear parents, Britons, might have had as their own totems if only their culture had been as powerfully poetic as that of the First Australians. Today I might have been able to say with conviction that “My father [a rural Scot] was an Osprey and my mother [a rural Englishwoman] was a Badger.”