Tim Blair: Monkey say, monkey d’oh
IMAGINE rugby, but instead of a savage tackle we delivered a stinging rebuke, a verbal means of incapacitating. Former Wallaby Peter FitzSimons may have pioneered that tactic, writes Tim Blair.
Opinion
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I DON’T know anything about rugby union, except that it was always fun watching Jonah Lomu smash into frightened Englishmen.
Nevertheless, I may have come up with a tactic that could revolutionise the game.
Imagine if, instead of getting beaten up every time you got the ball, there was some verbal means of incapacitating opponents even before they were within tackling range.
Imagine if mere words had the power to make men fall to the ground, twisting in agony.
Never saw the bloke play, but it’s entirely possible former Wallaby Peter FitzSimons pioneered this exact strategy. The Fairfax newspaper columnist and author of Father’s Day books, seemingly written during red lights on the way home, certainly has the armoury.
Consider this cringe-inducing play-stopper from an ABC Q & A broadcast in 2010.
But please brace yourselves. Not even the great Lomu himself could absorb this level of punishment:
“With my son, not long ago, I was playing chess and I was white and he was black and I was winning and he started crying.
And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because this reminds me of what happened to the Aboriginal people’.”
What — they lost chess games? And here was me thinking our indigenous fellow Australians were more of a backgammon crowd.
Anyway, FitzSimons subsequently shifted his virtue signalling to the specific issue of Adam Goodes, the great Aboriginal ex-Sydney Swans player whose final seasons frequently saw him booed by AFL crowds.
Sometimes it went beyond booing, as FitzSimons noted in 2013 following a match at the MCG. “Adam Goodes heard someone in the crowd calling him an ‘ape’, and turned to see it was a 13-year-old girl,” he wrote.
“What to do? Just cop it sweet? Ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen? Or actually take a stand — this far and no further? Of course, we all know what happened. Goodes made a stand. As the cameras rolled — in a scene we will see for years to come — he called security and the girl was ejected.”
Well, Goodes for him. He got a little girl chucked out of a footy ground.
FitzSimons continued: “Let the word go forth from this place and this time, that we don’t do that in Australia any more. And if you do, you will be called to account.”
Adam Goodes isn’t booed for the colour of his skin. He is booed for acting like a pillock
Called to account, you say? Let’s remember that. Let’s remember those exact words.
In 2014 FitzSimons wrote about another match-day insult directed at Goodes, and applauded the Essendon football club for withdrawing the membership of a man who’d called the dual Brownlow medallist “Magilla Gorilla”. In the same piece, Peter FitzSimons took broadcaster Alan Jones to task.
“Jones couldn’t possibly think that calling a black man a ‘gorilla’ is not racist, could he? COULD he?” FitzSimons raged.
“But no, Jones went on to vociferously defend the 13-year-old Collingwood supporter who last year called Goodes an ‘ape’.”
Considering he writes like one, you’d think FitzSimons would be the one defending a teenage girl. Solidarity with the sisterhood, Peter.
“If calling a black man a ‘gorilla’ and an ‘ape’ is not racial abuse, what the hell does it take?”
Australian Republican Movement chairman FitzSimons continued. “I repeat, Alan, if that is not racism, what DOES it take?”
What DOES it take? Apparently it takes being Peter FitzSimons, who last week called a black man a gorilla — and, despite his earlier declaration, now denies it was in any way racist abuse.
FitzSimons, wearing his comical red bandana as usual, was chattering away on a Sky News panel when the subject of the South African cricket team’s arrival in Adelaide was raised. During that arrival, a local television reporter was manhandled by black South African security guard Zunaid Wadee.
“That was disgraceful,” FitzSimons roared.
“If you are touring in a foreign country, you are visitors to their shores, to have your gorilla throw that guy …”
TIM BLAIR: PETER FITZSIMONS IS DAVID BRENT
Having realised what he’d just said, FitzSimons quickly came up with an adorable excuse.
“I say gorilla in the sense of security, you know,” he claimed. “In Australian terminology a gorilla is a security guard.”
Sure it is, mate. So that Essendon fan was simply calling Goodes “Magilla the security guard”, and the 13-year-old girl at the MCG was merely requesting a greater level of crowd protection.
FitzSimons stuck to this line in Saturday’s SMH, insisting that gorilla is “well-known Australian parlance for ‘an aggressive security guard’.”
But FitzSimons knew he was on thin ice: “The instant I said it, a very small alarm bell rang ... ‘gorilla’ can also be used as an appalling and unforgivable racial epithet, as it was with Adam Goodes last year.”
Goodes retired at the end of 2015, more than a year after the gorilla incident. But you can’t expect FitzSimons to keep up with such details.
He’s too busy explaining why a word used by one man is “appalling and unforgivable”, while the same word from FitzSimons is just harmless “Australian terminology”.
In any case, FitzSimons continued, he couldn’t possibly be racist because … he has Nelson Mandela’s autograph! That, plus Peter’s magical red pirate hat, evidently grant him complete racism immunity.
“I was on the organising committee and MC-ed the Sydney Town Hall fundraiser for Nelson Mandela as he emerged from prison after 27 years,” FitzSimons submitted.
“Consequently, the most treasured possession in my house is the signature of Nelson Mandela.”
You’d want to keep a close eye on that valuable signature, Peter. Maybe you should hire a gorilla.
Oh, sorry. We don’t say that in Australia any more. If you do, you will be called to account.
Greens keen to keep ideal of great barrier grief going
GREENS and other environmentalist nimrods have been talking down the Great Barrier Reef for decades. It’s a wonder the poor old thing attracts any tourists at all, considering how often it’s portrayed as some kind of reeking coral corpse.
In October, American enviro-writer Rowan Jacobsen actually declared the entire reef dead — from his vantage point in Vermont, some 16,000km away.
“The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness,” Jacobsen sobbed. “It was 25 million years old.”
The area’s many tourism businesses constantly struggle to refute the reef-is-rooted myth, to the point of refusing to take Greens politicians on inspection tours.
“I made if perfectly clear that I wouldn’t have any part of a day on the reef that was going to further build this bloody hysteria story that the reef is dead,” Daniel McCarthy, president of the Cairns Professional Fishing Association, told the ABC in April after knocking back a tour request from Greens leader Richard Di Natale and senator Larissa Waters.
One Nation leader Pauline Hanson last week accomplished what the Greens hadn’t been able to, and took a dip on the reef near Great Keppel Island. From what she saw of it, the reef is doing well.
Greens were infuriated. They claimed Hanson’s reckless optimism somehow put at risk up to 70,000 jobs associated with Great Barrier Reef tourism.
“One Nation are insulting reef tourism workers by visiting an unaffected area of the reef and claiming everything is fine — because they don’t even accept that global warming is real,” Senator Waters seethed.
“One Nation is putting the jobs of 70,000 Queenslanders in jeopardy,” she added.
That’s Greens logic for you. Trash the reef and depict it as ruined? All good. But if you say the reef is rockin’, potential visitors will stay away. Presumably they’ll head for somewhere more ghastly, like an oil spill or Chernobyl. Or even Canberra.
The Greens are exactly wrong about everything. Absolutely everything.
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