As soon as my mum got off the plane from England to move in with my dad – according to family legend – one of the first things he did was take her to a Collingwood game.
Mum is from the north of England, but she came to Australia in 1979 to visit her sister in the Grampians, and met my dad at a barbecue. In our family, their story is as mythic as it is tragic: she had a boyfriend back in England on that initial trip, but in 1981, when dad was travelling through Europe shearing sheep, they reconnected. They got married and moved to the Wimmera to his family’s sheep farm in 1986 – but he died in a farming accident less than 10 years later.
Collingwood’s motto is “make it legendary”, which suits how my family thinks of them. Mum often tells us that story of her first AFL game as if he took her straight from Tullamarine to the game. She was brought up on rugby and always says “for a game of football, they barely ever kick the ball”. But their black and white uniform suited Mum, whose rugby team back home, the Widnes Vikings, wore the same colours. I’ve always liked the symbolism of black and white together: it’s a nice parallel to Dad’s Aboriginal family coming together with an Englishwoman.
The family love of the team can be traced back to the few seasons Dad played for Merbein Magpies in the 1970s; we still have the woollen jersey he wore, along with some best and fairest trophies.
After Dad died, Mum led the family charge for the Magpie army, alongside my Aunty Eleanor and late Uncle Colin Bourke. Currently chair of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, Aunty Eleanor once ran a pub in Noorat, a small town in south-west Victoria. My aunt and uncle were academics involved in First Nations politics, and both were staunch Pies supporters too, hanging black and white behind the bar alongside the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags. I’d always feel proud when I visited.
Still, as an asthmatic bookish kid who could barely wheeze her way around the school oval, it didn’t feel like sport was for me. For other kids growing up in the Wimmera, football and netball were life – but without Dad I felt too much like an outsider, grieving for something I’d lost.
When Collingwood and St Kilda drew in the 2010 grand final, I was studying at uni in Melbourne. A fledgling poet, I wrote about walking through the city that night. An overwhelming sense of detached confusion gripped everybody: “They left the stadium sombre, unmoored. The city clouded over in response to the subdued crowds even though it was early in spring.” After a season of a sport had provided a lifeline through the long Melbourne winter, the delayed gratification – they’d have to play each other again – seemed to spin everybody into a portal of strange possibilities.
In 2014 I moved to Sydney, and when I returned to Melbourne in 2020, I’d been away long enough to forget what the sport means to the city. It was January, the pandemic was on the horizon, and I was unsure whether AFL should be allowed to continue. Why should football players be allowed to roam the country while we were locked up at home?
But a couple of years later, as the world opened up again, I started to change my mind. My siblings and I all lived in the city, and Covid-19 had rattled us in our own ways. I thought being back in Victoria would give us a chance to reconnect, but we barely ever hung out. So I suggested we go to a football game – and they both said yes.
It was Essendon v Collingwood, round 19 of 2022, and I was instantly brought back to all the things I’d forgotten from childhood: the nonsense calls from umpires, children in oversized football vests shouting “put him in the ground!”, men who seemed to have come by themselves just to provide commentary for everybody around them. From one point down and against all odds, Jamie Elliott kicked a winning goal as the siren went and I lost my mind in the best way. I completely understood why people needed this feeling during lockdowns.
Football has opened up a new space for our family to come together. This year, we became official members of the club, and I’ve attended more games in 2023 than in my entire life before. Mum blows up the family chat with her insightful takes on the game: “The umpire’s wearing the wrong-coloured knickers!!!”, “Bloody commentators”, “He dropped the ball!”.
In families it can be hard to talk about the best of times and the worst of times, but when there’s a game on, we always have a common language. The mythology of our family is tied to the club, and it connects us to something Dad loved. It also gives us a place to express big emotions – frustration, excitement, anger – and to emerge on the other side intact, unscathed and together again.
The Body Country, a poetry collection by Susie Anderson, is out now through Hachette
