When cars nosed the boundary, blowing their horns in gladness

Like fragments of an old song, unexpected images caught in passing have the power to drag us to places that have rested in the far reaches of our memories.

A couple of weeks ago, I drove past a country footy ground on a Saturday afternoon. And there sat my childhood.

Spectators’ cars were drawn up to the boundary of the oval, side by side.

The Omeo District Football League 2006 grand final replay between Benambra and Swifts Creek.Credit: Pat Scala

I did not have to stop and listen to hear the happy hoots of horns if a goal was kicked. It was the forever sound of country Saturday afternoons.

How many of those cars would be equipped with a picnic hamper and two Thermoses, one filled with hot soup, the other with tea? These were my mothers’ essentials for an afternoon in the car at the footy.

My brother and I ran off between wintry showers and lined up with the other kids for sav rolls, the saveloys boiling and splitting their skins in a big old copper, the women of the ladies’ committee squirting tomato sauce with the dexterity of Basque peasants expelling wine from a wineskin.

We did not call our sav rolls hot dogs – American cultural imperialism was still scorned then.

Fish Creek supporters at Foster in South Gippsland for the reserves and seniors grand finals in 1999.Credit: Eamon Gallagher

Half-time, when the players ambled off to the sheds to get rubbed down with liniment, the eucalyptus and menthol scent of it mingling with cigarette smoke and Juicy Fruit chewing gum – the Saturday afternoon vices of our heroes in those simple days – we tumbled on the field for kick-to-kick, desperate for attention if we managed a mark, self-consciously falling to the ground at every failure.

My family felt a bit like royalty at the footy.

In the easy way reflected glory shines its blessings across small country districts, my mother’s cousin was the local team’s champion full-forward.

He was a tall rangy bloke named Kevin “Mulga” Malseed, who regularly kicked 100 and more goals in a season and who, at the age of 18, kicked eight against Hamilton in the 1954 grand final, giving Heywood its second flag in a row in the old Western District League.

It was also the club’s last flag of the 20th century, but we never stopped believing, and Mulga kept kicking swags of goals until he was almost 40.

I asked him years later why he didn’t play for a big VFL team. A shy and modest man, he muttered something about responsibility to the family farm.

Sir Robert Menzies watching Carlton play Footscray from his Bentley at Princes Park in 1972.Credit: Dennis Bull

I don’t know how this big old farm boy would have handled life in the city, anyway.

Supporters don’t get to draw their cars up to the boundary at the MCG, hooting their horns in appreciation.

The last to watch a big-time match in Melbourne from the comfort of his car was Sir Robert Menzies.

Menzies was the number one ticket holder of Carlton from 1952 until his death in 1978.

But he suffered two strokes in the early 1970s, making it impossible for him to climb into the stands.

Carlton solved the problem by building a dedicated one-car ramp above the boundary at the club’s home ground, Princes Park.

And so Menzies was driven to the game where he watched from the passenger seat of his big black Bentley.

Sir Robert Menzies watching his beloved Blues from his car driven onto a specially made platform.Credit: Dennis Bull

Might he have reflected on the humbler Saturday afternoons of his childhood in the tiny Wimmera town of Jeparit? No Bentleys in the family then – Menzies’ parents ran the Jeparit general store, struggling.

Country towns and their sporting clubs grab their history where they can, of course: the old footy ground at Jeparit is called Menzies Park these days.

I was never much of a football player, a truth made clear when I attended a large all-boys country boarding school that fielded footy teams so dominant in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Lou Richards named the place “the football factory”.

Come finals season, the sainted players of the First XVIII were given their own section of the school dining hall, where they were fed large juicy steaks and other hearty fare from breakfast to dinner.

The rest of us made do with porridge and toast and eggs and the like, but though we envied the champions, we were not resentful.

It was the natural order of things: the footy players won premierships and we basked in their glory. Let them eat steak, for their triumphs were ours.

Collingwood’s Billy Picken in action in 1974. He came from the “football factory”.Credit: AGE PHOTOGRAPHY

We still boast of the footballers from that era at my old school who went on to play in the VFL/AFL: Paul Cranage, Michael and Hugh Delahunty, Barry Grinter, the late Billy Picken and the late Phillip Walsh among them. Sebastian Rioli went to South Fremantle, the first in a dynasty of Rioli footballers from the Tiwi Islands.

Others could have become great players, notably the captain of the First XVIII, Patrick Dodson, who decided instead to try the priesthood before, eventually, becoming a senator.

Such vicarious pleasure our memories have granted us, relived each winter and spring, eventually attaching our dreams to the great clubs of the national competition.

All of which is a very long way around a fragment of a half-forgotten image to try to explain a little of why, this Saturday afternoon, almost 100,000 believers will set the MCG roaring, and vast numbers more will watch from our lounge chairs as if, somehow, we were nosed up to the boundary, an old song performing its magic.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.