Punching on with the Punch, a jock conversation, and a dash of that loser Ned Kelly

(Above: Sidney Nolan doing Ned Kelly)

It being a slow day on loon pond - with loons everywhere looking forward to the football fever of the weekend - we turned once again to The Punch for Australia's most jock-headed conversation, and sure enough they've mounted a sports special, headlined with Our Ten Biggest Sporting Losers.

Now you might like to have a debate about whether this is setting the right tone for a cultural weekend - you're allowed an hour, and wanking is permitted as an optional sexually relieving extra - but I'm told it's hard to argue with the nominees, which include, inter alia, such losers as supporters of the Wallabies, Collingwood and St. George. (If you've strayed in from elsewhere, never mind, you surely have your own losers, go any team New York).

But really things take a turn for the worse if you follow up by reading Tim Hilferty's A red hot Aussie go: a brief history of our love of losing.

Well brief's right. By my count, it takes Hilferty some 166 words to summarize the national psyche. There's brief for a probing insight into the national psyche, and then there's a Zen Buddhist koan.

The time and word pressed Hilferty wanders through Don Bradman scoring a couple of ducks, as if worship of Bradman doesn't happen to involve Bradman's remarkable achievement in scoring century after century with the bat, and somehow he thinks Collingwood supporters are infatuated with Collingwood because they're losers. While clinical evidence - I note here that Tim Blair is a Collingwood supporter - surely suggests they're deluded.

Along the way Hilferty delivers such bon mots as these:

Our entire national psyche is built on it. Triumph over adversity is great, but what is more important is effort.

Ned Kelly fought the law, and lost, and we loved him for it ...

We love our champions, but we don’t want them to be supermen. For the masses to truly embrace a sportsman, he needs to fail once in a while. Just like us.

Now hang on a second. Effort and Ned Kelly in the same thought bubble? Love Ned Kelly? You mean we love a sociopath, a psychopath, a common or garden thief and killer?

Simply because he managed, with an eye to history, to write a long, rambling, incoherent defence of himself and his actions, long immortalized as the Jerilderee Letter? Which you can catch here, and still be none the wiser as to what Ned got up to.

Love Ned Kelly? Not really. Not if we adopt any standard definition of the word 'love'. Perhaps be fascinated by, or interested in, or fanatically obsessed with, in much the same way as America loves, treasures and relentlessly celebrates its serial killers in drama and true life crime docs.

Because if we're in love with Ned, that would mean in recent times we've been in love with Chopper Read.

Well no thanks, I'll pass on Chopper, and it's not just the ear thing, just as I'll pass on Christopher Flannery, just as I can't summon up love for the real Ned. An Irish roughneck with a murderous chip on the shoulder? Sorry, got too many of those in the family already.

Perhaps Hilferty meant the love of a mythical Ned, an Irish champion determined to overthrow the bloody English, even if that meant taking out a copper or five. Well I guess that means we could all safely love the Baader-Meinhoff gang, or the Weathermen, and all that talk of Obama being associated with domestic terrorists like Bill Ayers is just showing the love.

More to the point, could it just be that the culture industry has always sought to mine the past for ideas, and up against the likes of Ben Hall and Mad Dog Morgan, we didn't have quite the range to chose from as was offered up by America's wild west (there's a convenient list of bushrangers here, including Captain Thunderbolt, who according to family tradition once obtained flour and other rations from my great grandmother. Without paying).

Amongst the chief offenders who've celebrated Ned Kelly, we surely have to fix some blame on Tony Richardson for casting Mick Jagger in his film version, while no one should spare Grigor Jordan for his truly abysmal offering, one of Heath Ledger's weakest films, which not only introduced flora and fauna at regular intervals for the international market, but also introduced a circus for the climactic scenes. It didn't help the film and it certainly didn't help the history. Still I suppose there's a small mercy and didn't go with the demand of some backers of the show for Ledger to lose the beard.

Then of course there's Sidney Nolan, who also should take a fair share of the blame. Nolan himself has an AWOL history, as this convenient summary from a review of Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in His Own Words provides (here):

Nolan's life has taken on a quality of myth, almost akin to Ned Kelly's: the St Kilda lad whose father was a tram driver and an SP bookie, who grew up canny and streetwise during the Depression; a sensitive Irish larrikin; a shrewd dreamer; a resolutely ambitious artist who was utterly his own man. Nolan, who went AWOL from the army when the New Guinea front line got that little bit too close.

He abandoned his first wife, Elizabeth Paterson and their daughter, Amelda, to live with Sunday and John Reed, Australia's visionary philanthropists. And left them -- both broken-hearted -- to marry John's sister Cynthia, a psychiatric nurse and a writer, who committed suicide in 1976. Two years later, Nolan married Mary Boyd Perceval, Arthur's younger sister, earning him the ire of his close friend Patrick White, leading to a bitter public stoush.

It's a pity Philippe Mora doesn't seem to have got up his feature film about that strange triangle of Nolan and the Reeds, but who knows, it might come to pass, and make Nolan a more sympathetic figure.

That said, I've never been much of a fan of Nolan's work, as he seized the easy image of Ned Kelly's armor and wrung the very last drop of paint from it over and over again. Nothing to do with his private life, more to do with his facility. A room full of Nolans dedicated to Ned Kelly is just too much to bear, though you can find such a room in the National Gallery in Canberra. (Naturally Nolan hooked in to Gallipoli as well).

At least Brett Whiteley painted junkie dreams and lived out the dream in lost Hopper motels until he went to one motel too many. He didn't waste time on a goose who couldn't even design a decent bit of armor (what about the legs, you goose, think of the legs, not to mention the weight and the sight lines. At least Lawrence Hargrave got his kites to fly, and there's a nice backgrounder on him here).

Anyway, if you watch an Australian male play cricket - oh the wasted lives, the lost dreams - you can see all this talk of loving losers is post-ironic male discourse by alpha males who just want to cream the opposition, and will do whatever it takes - from vile sledging to insinuations about the sexual behavior of wives and sisters. And if that's what it's like in cricket, I dread to think what happens on a football field as men chase pills without once pausing to think of the Freudian implications.

I dare say there will be images of men playing ball games on the television this weekend, and when (if) you see the losers sobbing, tears welling, come back then and tell me how much Australians like losing.

Unless you happen to think we liked losing at Gallipoli, when we all know that really we only lost because of stiff necked English dullard generals. I mean, we could have won, we really could have ...

Well as Dave Allen once said, may your god go with you, may your team win, and if not, may you understand you're just another in the long line of Australian losers. And second prize is you get to back the same club next year ...

(Below: any Marc Chagall port in a storm, eh Mr. Nolan? Loser).