Helen Garner on Watching Her Grandson Play Football
What is it all for, these early mornings and evenings in the park with her notebook? The bruises and the pain? She wonders about it many times, but is quiet, self-conscious. She does not spend too much time trying to answer the question. And whatever answers she comes by are less engaging, anyway, than the quality of the light at dawn, and the crash of bodies, and what she’s recording in the notebook.
The boys don’t wonder-not about her, whom thay do not see, or about injuries, which happen all the time.She envies them for their obliviousness. She worships-not too strong a word-their hardening, growing bodies, their virility, their youth. They play footy, Australian-rules football, as if it is indeed their birthright, and, in her view, it is.
she is Helen garner,one of Australia’s best-known writers,renowned for her unsparing novels and journalism,and for her complex view of intimacy and power relations. Garner hasn’t written a stand-alone book in a decade. She hesitates to tell people she is writing one about watching her grandson playing for the U-16 flemington Colts. “I keep quiet about this,” she writes in “The Season: A Fan’s Story,” “as I don’t want people to think I’m romanticising it, or to reproach me for not writing about women’s footy.” But she is romanticizing it, and she is certainly not writing about women’s footy. Later in the book,she notes,”I’m surprised how many people jump to the conclusion that it’s something polemical,a critical study of football culture and it’s place in society,informative,analytical,statistical.” It is, in fact, specifically uncritical-admiring, even awestruck. What she wants to create, instead, is “a little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.”
To do this, “I’m going to have to find a way to efface myself, to become a silent witness,” she writes. because it is a man’s world, a young man’s world at that, and she is neither a man nor a young person. She is not interested in c