They were good, we were bad (and robbed). But, baby, bring on the Bunnies. Also: Milk book extract
After a brief overview of last week's shellacking and a nod to Saturday night, behold! A free extract from The Milk, the book about 40 years of fandom for the great enigma, our Green Machine.
Sports fans. Good day.
We’ll leave the recriminations from last week’s … whatever that was, besting, belittling, full-blown buggering, you’re free to call it what you will … for another time, suffice to say they were good and we were bad, but we wuz also robbed, true, we wuz, with Turbo Tom Trbojevic in that form, only way we were winning was to post one more point than however many they scored, and hang in until Golden Point at 46-all.
But Turbo decided Sunday was the day he’d actually run at full pace and audition for Origin, and he smoked us as he’s smoked everbody, the bastard’s a bit bloody good.
And yet! We wuz, true fact, robbed given Elliot Whitehead’s ‘knock-on’ over the line that was punched out by Jake Trbojevic and would’ve made it 18-14, and Turbo playing at Jack Wighton’s kick for no six-again, and Matt Timoko’s try which was a try in any other era than this begotten one which demands absolute consistency and thus uniformity and thus a defender can win a penalty for obstruction by running into an attacker even if the defender is not, you know, obstructed.
I give up. I have ranted upon this inequity in the past, I may as well lobby to bring back the scrum, which I did, too, in august journal The Guardian, it’s like weeing into a southerly buster.
Now.
In tomorrow’s column we’ll have the usual Big Match Preview fare in which we list all the ways Canberra Raiders will beat South Sydney Rabbitohs on Saturday night at Accor Stadium, genuinely think they will with any rub of the green there’s not a lot between any NRL team, the Eels just beat the Bunnies and we beat the Eels, and they’ve got no Latrell Mitchell and if we hang onto the ball and tackle like fiends, and don’t get stung with an 8-3 penalty count like we did against Manly we can win like Parra did, true fact.
This column, meanwhile, is something of a tease / sales pitch for folks to spend $1 a week in return for a daily extract from the well-received book of Raiders history called “The Milk”, we’ve dinkum got one (1) hard copy left for sale, so now selling the words in digital form via this excellent weekly newsletter medium.
And so! Today, for free, one time only, we’ll begin in the beginning, and chapter one…
“The Canberra Everythings”
The Game: Monaro 32 defeated Great Britain Lions 17.
The Venue: Seiffert Oval, Queanbeyan.
The Date: Sunday, June 26, 1977
THEY DIDN’T PUT Canberra on the world’s whitest sands at Jervis Bay because it was deemed too close to the sea and thus attack by enemy navies. You know, if the Germans or French or an armada of the Ottoman Empire, say, sailed some great thumping dreadnought down to invade Huskisson.
And if you’ve had a swim at Hyams Beach* or supped a schooner at the Huskie Pub, you will agree: the capital’s founding fathers missed a trick there.
Instead, the lords and gentry, counts and barons and assorted stiff-shirt beardies decided upon the plateau lands of the Monaro as a place near enough half-way between Sydney and Melbourne, the capital cities of the British colonies named for their Queen and old South Wales.
The Monaro... hotter than hell in summer, it could spontaneously combust at any time, terrible conflagrations fuelled by eucalyptus leaves full of oil; fires that burned most everything.
Winter? Frozen tundra of Lapland, friend. Total frost. Animals dying where they stood; wombat-shaped ice sculptures, like topiaries in The Shining except made of ice. Growing up you’d hear ’Sheep Weather Alert Warning’ on the telly**. Wrap them up, farmers: winter is coming ... tonight.
And so! The toffs ran a competition to design the capital city of the fresh nation state of Australia. It was won by 36-year-old Californian Walter Griffin, a devotee of anthroposophy, a philosophy founded in 1912 by Austrian clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner that postulates the existence of a spiritual world accessible to human beings. Griffin also built incinerators.
Griffin’s design for the city was chosen from 130 entries and used Washington DC as a model. The brief from the beardies was effectively: You have a fresh slate. Create a gleaming Emerald City in the bush. Make it the finest capital city in the civilised world.
Griffin thus placed many Important Buildings on imposing avenues and wide boulevards and lined them up in eye-pleasing geometric fashion. Parliament House was central, with avenues shooting out like so many poor man’s Champs-Élysées; spokes in a multi-prong Mercedes Benz symbol.
Years passed.
In 1963 they dammed the Molonglo River and flooded the Ngambri people’s major corroboree ground and named the resultant mega-billabong Lake Burley Griffin. But it should’ve been just Lake Griffin - or as the Ngambri may have called it, Lake the Fuck Are You Doing? - because ‘Burley’ is the man’s middle name. It was mooted the lake should be named after Robert Menzies but, magnanimous prime mover that he was, Menzies declared: “I want to have the lake called ‘Lake Burley Griffin’.”
And who was to argue? Even if ‘Burley’ was not the non-hyphenated half of the creator’s surname and he had never used it thus, man was prime minister. Whatever you say, boss - Lake Burley Griffin it is...
Back in the baby bush capital and for a long time Canberra seemed eerily empty because they’d designed so many avenues and Important Buildings and it would take several decades for people to come and be in them.
They did play footy there, though.
Tomorrow: Fights, Frenchmen and flying saucers
Footnotes:
* Hyams Beach has the world’s whitest sand, it says so in The Guinness Book of Records.
** Also on the telly in Canberra were advertisements for drenches to kill stomach parasites in sheep, the ingredients of which MP Craig Kelly says can cure COVID-19, it would be best if you did not take that as medical advice.