Maroon state of mind
A sacred and savage and silly ol’ game can turn people’s lives around.
Contrary to popular belief it was not Wolfgang Mozart who said rugby league is “the greatest game of all”. It was, in fact, the king of Brisbane rugby league radio commentary, George Lovejoy.
This extraordinary Queenslander had a Cameron Smith-like ability to turn up on game day. Through 19 years of radio commentary in the 1950s and ’60s, “Mr Football” called 652 games straight. An unbroken run of majestic, take-you-there, smell-the-cut-grass, smell-the-vaseline-rub local league radio calls.
He’d call all that blood and sweat and Sunday afternoon tomato sauce on hot chips for 80 minutes and, for 652 games in a row, he was left with the same profound conclusion. “Rugby league?” he’d ponder for his loyal 4BH listeners.
And 100,000 welders and cane growers and socks-to-the-kneecaps school science teachers and Madeira cake-making battle-hardened mums would swill their XXXX Bitter and sip their Bundaberg Rums and bite into bananas as fat as their wireless radios and nod along to a truth as inescapable as Gorden Tallis and death. “The greatest game of all!” Lovejoy gasped, as that yellow pill in the sky sank into maroon-coloured clay across the Sunshine State.
Should you ever find yourself in the company of someone who shares Mr Football’s reasoned opinion on the merits of rugby league and should that same person tell you the greatest rugby league grand final ever played was not the 2015 grand final between Johnathan Thurston’s victorious North Queensland Cowboys and Justin Hodges’s brave Brisbane Broncos then you can rest assured that person is either batcrap crazy, born south of the Tweed River or yet to read journalist Joe Gorman’s exceptional and exhaustive modern history of Queensland rugby league and all that it means to Queenslanders.
Where else could Gorman end this blood-soaked and beer-stained deep football dive than with that glorious ambassador of the game, Thurston, standing on the sideline with the hooter blown and taking his sweet time to kick the grand final goal that would or would not send the Cowboys into the history books. A moment in time and place and sport so deep and significant to Queenslanders that Queensland Theatre built a whole bloody stage play around it.
I’ll sure as hell be telling my grandkids what happened next: ball hits post, courageous Broncos half Ben Hunt drops ball after extra time kick-off, miracle man Thurston slots winning field goal and jumps so high they almost name a star after him.
Cowboysium Thurstonae.
I’ll also be telling the grandkids the 40-year backstory to that moment, as outlined in infinite detail by Gorman in Heartland: How Rugby League Explains Queensland, with its endless roll call of Queensland Maroons greats and league-writing gods and, in an author move as clever as an Alfie Langer grubber, a collection of diehard fans who remind us that Queensland rugby league has always unfolded from the inside out. From the heart to the hands. From the country to the city. From nothing to everything.
Every year during Queensland’s holy Sabbath period — State of Origin season — that cantankerous and hard-to-squash cockroach Phil Gould ponders openly the mysteries of the Maroon spirit, that mythical force, a blend of devotion and courage and passion with a splash of madness that keeps us bouncing back for more in the face of insurmountable and overwhelmingly blue odds.
What if the secret to it all is the fact the stakes are higher for us? What if it’s our very DNA that’s on the line? What if it’s our very identity that’s up for grabs beyond that thin white try line? State of Origin, says seasoned Queensland sports journalist Phil Lutton, brought about “a set of values for Queenslanders to treasure and to hook their teeth into”.
“They kind of stumbled into this giant colossus of sport by accident,” he tells Gorman. “Once it started, Queensland had some heroes. Mal Meninga and Wally Lewis were godlike figures. And what do these heroes represent? Sticking up for the little guy.”
Statistics will never tell you why Lewis is the greatest rugby league player of all time. One needs a Queenslander, preferably a drunk one, to explain it. One needs a maroon-coloured heart to know what it felt like watching him lift a team and, in turn, raise a cauldron. What it felt like watching him stare down a blue bully named Mark Geyer. No tallies on ticker. No counts for courage. That good deep stuff is only measured in the warmth of maroon blood passed down from Queensland father to Queensland daughter, from maroon mum to maroon son.
What if the 40-year growth of a state could be reflected in a single 80-minute game of football? What if the very thing they levelled at us Queenslanders — the cultureless league hillbillies up north — was the very thing that united us, that saw us crash and tumble out of premier Joh’s “Bananaland” and find the legs that allowed us to sprint down the sideline into the 21st century and, indeed, into our own unique and rich culture?
Not as nutty as it sounds if you follow Gorman’s gaze from one end of the growth chart — a spectacular South Sea islander named Mal Meninga abused by knuckle-dragging spectators in the local state competition — to the other — two proud and unflinching indigenous Queenslanders captaining their sides through the most sublime 10 minutes of national rugby league ever staged, five minutes either side of that Thurston grand final goal kick.
“Black fag,” the spectator shouted face-to-face to Mal Meninga, the most promising and gifted local league player not named Wally Lewis in March 1983. Meninga’s entire sporting life had been a series of racial insults he’d learnt to swallow. Single-handedly carrying entire teams to victory was usually response enough.
On this day at Wynnum-Manly’s Kougari Oval, the powerhouse Souths back snapped, thumping his abuser on his way to the dressing room. “I think it was racially motivated,” Meninga told The Courier-Mail. The hordes of “Joh must Go” protesters who had marched against the Commonwealth Games — “the Stolen-wealth Games” — wouldn’t have disagreed.
“One of the sorriest days ever in Queensland sport,” said radio commentator John McCoy. It was, perhaps, Queensland rugby league’s Adam Goodes moment but, as Gorman so eloquently illustrates without banging it over our heads, the boil of racism surrounding Queensland rugby league was lanced in the years that followed through the actions, on field and off, of indigenous league pioneers and marvels such as Arthur Beetson and Steve Renouf and Greg Inglis and, of course, our zippy and glorious Mozart, Johnathan Thurston, who does more in a single day to inspire North Queensland indigenous kids than a 100 well-meaning fly-in Brisbane-based government types do in a decade.
Gorman has gifted us with two parallel tales of growth. Here is a microscopic look at the decline of Brisbane Rugby League and the rise of the Broncos and the Cowboys and the eternal fight of those mighty Maroons. But here also is a story of how, through a sacred and savage and silly ol’ game, people can turn their lives around, take themselves from nothing and turn themselves into something, from the inside out, and how a whole state can turn itself around with them. He had to end it at that 2015 grand final.
“What we watched that night was nothing less than a festival of positive thinking about the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia,” said Bundaberg-bred indigenous educationalist Chris Sarra, in a deeply poignant Senate address weeks after the game. “We saw indigenous leadership working with non-indigenous leadership together in an elite and honourable, high-expectations relationship. This is the perfect analogy for the Australian society we can develop.”
Contrary to popular belief, Sarra did not end his Senate speech with a raised fist and a celebratory, “Queeenslanderrrrr”, but few doubted the colour of his heart.
Trent Dalton is a journalist and author. His debut novel, Boy Swallows Universe, was long-listed for the Miles Franklin. He lives in Brisbane.
Heartland: How Rugby League Explains Queensland
By Joe Gorman
UQP, 296pp, $32.95
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