Cracking the code of the Green Beasts

Clues: the late Rennie Ellis

THE GREAT GREEN BEASTS ARE COPULATING. This enigmatic statement has nothing to do with recently elected MPs and senators. It was painted on the grim grey walls of the Collingwood Football Ground by a person or persons unknown at a time when “green” lacked either of today’s meanings – environmental aspiration or denigration, depending on your political persuasion. Green? Once, it was just a colour.

The letters on the CFG were so huge that my photojournalist friend Rennie Ellis (1940-2003) included them in his 1975 book Australian Graffiti. In this land of big bananas, big lobsters and big guitars, the Green Beasts had their place – as the biggest graffiti.

Alerted by Rennie’s book, and with the phrase tugging at my memory, I drove to the CFG only to find the words erased by time, weather and perhaps some water-blasting by the council. But I could still read them in my mind’s eye. Strange yet strangely familiar.

Then, just as I was fearing early-onset, the mists of memory cleared. And I realised I was guilty of the graffiti. While not the artist, I was the author, having written THE GREAT GREEN BEASTS ARE COPULATING in one of my columns.

I don’t keep files of my columns. At this stage I’ve been writing them for almost 70 years, and apart from having a few republished in collections, most are long lost. But I recall this ancient column telling the story of a Melbourne man on a memorable Monday morning.

He would have a very bad day. Awoken by a particularly hostile alarm clock, he went to the bathroom and applied a buzzing Braun to his light beard – only to feel it draw blood, biting into his face like “an electric rat”. I clearly recall the words. Thought them pretty good.

The bloke’s breakfast was also marred by technology in revolt. Instead of providing him with golden toast, his pop-up toaster fired two slices of burning shrapnel at him. Pop-up? It was more like a mow-down.

Before proceeding with the plot, please permit me a little digression. We live at a time when our technologies pretend to love, honour and obey. But they use algorithms not to aid and abet but to dominate. And soon AI will reduce our status as royals of the heap to that of, at best, household pets. Robotics and robots, the real living dead, will run the place, if they don’t already. My current columns, for example, are now written by machine unintelligence.

While I’m not claiming that my little parable was all that prescient, some early warning of the horrors that lie ahead, I have always been a Luddite, so ignorant of techno-progress and that metaverse stuff that I fear Facebook. So perhaps my story of the electric rat and the shrapnel-firing toaster came from technophobia.

An old Melbourne tram

But back to the narrative. Escaping the house, the bloke jumps into his car. It also behaves badly – I don’t remember how – so he jumps out again. And, fatefully, heads for the tram stop. (Before the grand finale, please remember that Melbourne trams were traditionally painted green.) But what’s this? A kerfuffle at the tram stop! Something has happened! People waiting at the stop scatter in panic. Has there been some dreadful accident? Death and injury? Has a tram derailed? Have two collided? Certainly one is on top of the other, erect poles entwined and ejaculating, if you’ll forgive the expression, orgasmic showers of sparks!

Giant graffiti decoded. The mystery solved. THE GREAT GREEN BEASTS ARE COPULATING.