Over a decade and a half ago, a friend told me that he had just ordered a new dinner suit as he had joined a yacht club and they regularly held formal dinners he needed to attend.
There was no talk of him actually going out in a yacht of course – it was all about the formal feeds onshore.
As I discovered a couple of years later, my friend had told me a rather egregious fib – he had not actually joined a yacht club, but rather, a masonic lodge which met on the premises of that yacht club, and he had been sponsored into the Freemasons by a trustafarian who happened to run a yachting supply store.
I believe that the lodge was rather pretentiously named ‘Hearts of Oak’ or something equally silly, and that any yachting enthusiasm by either most of its members or my (now long former) friend was at best fleeting and superficial.
This was a bit like my friend’s sudden enthusiasm, a couple of years before that, for the newly launched A-League, Australia’s new national soccer competition. He had fallen in with bad company, the sort of people who wanted to attend Melbourne Victory games regularly, and he desperately wanted to fit in, just like he did when he joined the Freemasons.
My friend’s passing enthusiasms for niche sports represent something which is more than a mere weak attention span (he has been bundled out of the masons and I doubt he can afford to attend A-League games anymore), it is symbolic of Australia’s own infatuations with certain sports.
As the Matildas progressed through the Women’s Soccer World Cup tournament in recent weeks, there was talk of calling for a public holiday if they won. This was in recognition of the national significance of such a victory, similar to the jubilation which erupted when the yacht Australia 2 defeated an American defender to claim the America’s Cup in 1983. At that time, whilst no public holiday was declared, then Prime Minister Bob Hawke gave his moral endorsement to people to unofficially take the day off and celebrate.
I was only 14 at that time, but I was a bit skeptical even then about the significance of winning the America’s Cup. Yachting is a very elitist sport for the rich, and it consumes much money to undertake successfully. Alan Bond, who was the principal sponsor for the Australian challenger, was a ruthless nouveau riche businessman who sought to use yachting as a way to propel his social standing upward to match his self made wealth.
It did not escape me at the time that he had, weeks before the yachting contest in Long Island Sound, closed down the Waltons department store chain in Victoria and put hundreds of people out of work.
Only a few short years later, this former painter and burglar was found to be extremely crooked as well as ruthless in his business dealings. However Perth is probably the one place in Australia where social standing is less nuanced and more meritocratic, and I doubt that his fall from grace was as harsh as it would have been on the eastern seaboard.
So what happened after we won the America’s Cup? Fremantle was to host the defence in 1987, and was all transformed for this event, possibly in a way which ruined its previous charm (I am not sure as I first visited in 1991). Then we lost the race and with it, any collective interest in yacht racing as a source of national pride.
And so it will be with soccer. Our national women’s team did much better than the men’s team has ever done, and did so hosting on home ground. There has been great interest shown both by the live TV audiences and in the packed stadia.
But it is over. There is no fairy tale history making win, and no public holiday – official or otherwise – to celebrate.
We will now sleep off our hangovers and forget it, just like my former friend with his faux yacht club masonic lodge and his deluded enthusiasm for Melbourne Victory.
Lost For Words! 