In her charming ‘nanna’s book about footy’, Helen Garner writes with candour, vigilance and insight
- Written by Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
There are a number of good reasons you might want to read this little “nanna’s book about footy” from Helen Garner over the summer.
Maybe you are preparing to become a grandparent, or you might already be one of those blessed senior citizens. If you are, you’ll revel in the details and epiphanies of grandparenthood.
It might be that you, like me, just love the way Garner writes, so anything she writes about will be worth reading.
If you are lost and spinning aimlessly in the black hole of a footyless summer, then this quirky literary take on AFL and suburban football could be a needed fillip.
Or it could be that you are someone who loves the suburban culture of Melbourne’s parks, streets, cafes and ovals – so a book that opens this Melbourne-world to Garner’s acute and imaginative observation is one you would treasure.
Review: The Season – Helen Garner (Text Publishing)
The Season is a book with many charms, a few jolts, and a grand narrative arc. The charm comes, in part, from Garner being a deeply talented and intelligent writer tackling a subject she knows little about. Though a passionate Western Bulldogs supporter since 1997, she admits that she doesn’t understand tackling, how the sub rule works, what a “torp” is, why today’s footballers wear those absurd little moustaches, or why “mullet equals footy”.
But of course footy isn’t the point. At the outset, Garner explains to her last grandchild, 15-year-old Ambrose, that she doesn’t know what to do with herself, that she’s burnt out, and needs something to write about.
That “something” is the youngest of her grandchildren at a moment when he is leaving childhood behind. She wants to know the growing Amby and remember him – witness him – in the brief last season when she can still be close to him, even openly affectionate towards him. And Amby shines throughout her book.
Garner decides to attend all the training sessions and games of Amby’s Under-16 Flemington Colts team. Their new coach, Archie, a university student who is barely four years older than the players, accepts her presence with grace. He understands what she wants to do. So she finds the back of a bench at the parkland oval where she can perch with her notebook while she tries to make sense of the drills, language, attitudes and manners of these boys as they run around madly in half darkness on week nights.
Sometimes she loses focus or becomes bored, but always there is the rhythm of the training noises, the thump of footies being kicked, the smell of mown grass, dogs and runners, sunsets and rain to give her plenty to note down about the experience of Melbourne’s public spaces.
The book follows the fortunes of the Western Bulldogs in the AFL and the suburban fate of Amby’s team during the 2023 season. It is sometimes a dramatic ride, especially when a few parents become involved in a goal square melee and when one of their players is suspended for spitting.
Gradually, characters emerge from among these teenagers: the best player in the team, the goofiest player, the one who represents the soul of the team – and of course Amby, the reliable ruckman, who seems to grow in strength and manliness as the season progresses.
It is a sometimes painful, sometimes triumphant, always mystifyingly touching spectacle as the winter months drag on, and the possibility of a spot in the finals either recedes or becomes more likely.
For Garner, it is the spectacle that matters, for it points her to the mythic, almost hieratic significance of sport. Footy, she writes, really got a grip on her during Melbourne’s extended Covid lockdowns: “I saw it as a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers.”
She writes achingly well of photos that reveal the tenderest moments, the most enigmatic expressions, or the seemingly impossible feats of her Bulldog gods. One in particular is the wallpaper on her phone: a 2021 image of Marcus Bontempelli embracing and resting his cheek on the shoulder of a wounded, dejected Josh Bruce.
It was Garner’s treatment of a photo, in part, that inflamed the controversy over her book The First Stone in 1992. There are uncanny echoes of this when she writes of being reproached by her grandchildren and family for having on her phone a photo of some Under-10 footballers leaving the field after a final siren, featuring “a very small boy whose bravery I greatly admired”. She argues in “furious” justification of the photo for what it represents. Her family persuades her to delete it, though she goes on to say: “in my heart I never bowed to them, but I pretended to, to keep the peace”.
Garner has the confidence and stubbornness to write about the ways a photo might show something unintended. As a writer, she seems to need to begin with what is present as sensual, visual, active. From there, the poetry of thought and composition flows.
Moments of complaint, irritation or conflict are repeatedly exposed, but they don’t distract from the core of the book. Garner keeps her nanna’s book on track, even while it holds a tangle of possible (and possibly important) digressions in play. She turns to the matter of concussion in football at one point, but takes this discussion only a certain way before turning back to the narrative of the unfolding season.
Violence is part of the game, and the issue recurs. Amby speaks openly about savouring his ability to hurt an opponent without the consequence of hard feelings afterwards. His father makes a case for the importance of learning how to love being tackled:
You can curse yourself for being too slow or too unaware or too cocky, but you have to love it. And you have to respect the tackler. It’s like with surfing. You have to learn to love the power of the ocean.
These are not questions raised to be answered, but parts of the complex world Garner has entered as a witness. The issues are disturbing and her book is brave and open about them, while being humble enough not to presume to have solutions. The violence is part of a pervasive male culture that she is witnessing.
Garner worries aloud that some might criticise her for not writing about women’s football (her granddaughter played for Melbourne University), given her long commitment to a feminist perspective on the world and her lifetime of battles with men. Her only response is that this book is about her grandson at this time in his life.
She doesn’t shy away from the ugly things boys can say, in fact shout, to each other. “You wanna be a gay dog-fucker,” one lad loudly asks his mate who is missing next week’s training to go to a party. Garner noticing this and recording it somehow brings it into the sphere of human foibles, the immaturity manifesting itself briefly – not harmless, but not unredeemable either. Her writing is so open to whatever comes into its circle of light that tolerance becomes a key to its tone.
‘An archangel out of Blake or Milton’: Marcus Bontempelli flies for a mark, April 6, 2024.
Matt Turner/AAP
There are gorgeous moments of description that a “real” football writer would never dare to indulge in. Such as this:
I see the mighty figure of Bontempelli in flight, an archangel out of Blake or Milton, all crystalline and celestial – and the blue of the Bulldogs jumper! So intense, so mouth-watering, so made of sky.
Equally, there are insanely pithy images any football writer would die for:
Amby’s brother, with an ironical smile, stands still and marks it neatly on his chest, like a frog swallowing a fly.
In this book performed in a minor key, Garner the grandmother is on song, displaying the very qualities she exalts in athletes: candour, discipline, vigilance and valour.
Authors: Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne 
