The State of Origami

For my dear Victorian readers, I should explain that tonight is the first of three State of Origin Rugby League matches.

I prefer to refer to it as State of Origami, which isn't meant to refer to the elegant simplicity of origami, but rather the sheer boredom you would suffer if you had to watch it for eighty minutes.

HG Nelson was interviewed on Radio National this morning and thanked the radio announcer for giving tonight's game a bit of publicity.

"There just hasn't been any media attention around this game," he said. "I am pouring over the newspapers today and not a damn thing about the game tonight."

The beautiful irony would not have been lost on those boring pinko lefty Radio National listeners.

Which brings me to the small fall-out from the article I wrote this week about a certain opinion piece by Michael Duffy that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday.

Published in Crikey on Monday, I had a good old fashioned rant that defended the role that the arts (and more particularly artists) play in our little corner of the world.

Central to my argument was that; "Art is going on all around you Michael, with or without the support of you and your colleagues in the media. Australians attend more theatre and live performance than they do sport. But one look at our media organisations and you'd never know it."

A comment to the article by 'Sandy' was a very interesting response to the article that I think a lot of people would have;

"I'd like to see the end of both of these wasteful elite slush buckets, but at least the sports people deliver some results and help large numbers of people feel good," he said.

"And really, Nick, if you were running the news, would you replace the sports coverage with analysis and previews of the high art scene? Not if you wanted anyone to keep watching," he said.

This is something that I have been thinking a lot about recently. Over the weekend I flew up to Brisbane to check out the Super 14 match between the Queensland Reds and the NSW Waratahs. And you know what, it was really quite boring.

And that wasn't just me. That was the response from the 20-odd thousand people in the stadium. At times it was so quiet, I wasn't sure whether I was in a museum or at a big and bright spectacle that we call 'sport'.

Indeed, the Queensland Rugby organisers practically pre-empted a boring match and hired drummers and musicians whose job it was to get the spectators cheering. And boy did they work hard.

And this isn't the first time that I have experienced a boring game of Rugby. I have experienced it at AFL matches, Rugby League matches and soccer matches. Sometimes you can get a really exciting game. In fact, odds on, you probably experience a really exciting footy match at about the same frequency as you experience a really exciting theatre production.

I am starting to think that the people in our little corner of the world are MADE to think that sport is this big, bright and beautiful thing all the time. The roaring graphics we see on television all the time, the hysterical commentators make you think that something really, really exciting is happening.

But it isn't really. It is sometimes but you need to fuel the interest with booze, cheerleaders, drummers and load sounds.

Feel good indeed. And yes, I would replace the sports coverage with analysis and previews of the arts. And I'd get Ray Warren, Eddie Maguire and Sam Newman to host the bloody thing too.

UPDATE: What a shock! Maybe people are catching on. This in Crikey today;

State of Origin suffering a popularity crisis in Sydney

For the first time in a long time -- perhaps a quarter of a century -- much of the build up to this year’s State of Origin series has focussed on the inability to get a capacity or near capacity crowd at tonight’s opening match at ANZ Stadium.

The ARL will need a good walk up crowd on the night to get anywhere near last year’s 75,000, which was still short of capacity. Ticket sales are reported to be in the region of 60,000, but anything less that 70,000 will raise further questions about the true state of the game of rugby league in Sydney ...

Nothing even compares to going to the Rugby

My father loves Rugby. Not that other poor excuse for a game referred to as 'League' but the Rugby of his youth when he played in the rough and tumble of Parramatta first grade.

He used to take me to as many games as he could afford, the highlight always being when we played the All Blacks. The atmosphere as it whips up with the teams running onto the field. The Haka, the staring down, the whoops and cheers.

You can see the glint in his eyes when the Wallabies are close to scoring a try. He lifts his huge frame and starts yelling at the players. If they don't score, his exasperation is a most marvellous thing to behold.

It's a shame I don't really share the same level of passion for the game as he does. I like it and am always captivated by the spectacle, but take me to the theatre any day and I am just like my father at a Rugby match. Without the whooping that is.

After many years of not going to any Rugby matches with my father I thought it was about time for us to revisit something we had always done when I was a kid. So I went online and I got us some tickets to the upcoming Wallabies v All Blacks match in July.

I go onto the website, select the match and order the two tickets. I click next and go to the checkout. $280.

What?!

$140 per ticket, to not even sit near the half way line. In fact, we are down near the goal posts. Bloody miles away.

$140 for that?! And thousands of people pay this? In fact 83,500 people pay between $79 and $164 for tickets to a Wallabies match. We are talking about approximately $8 million in ticket sales alone. For one day.

Suddenly I find myself harking back for the days when that beautiful game was amateur... and cheaper.

Or maybe just harking for something that's the price of a theatre ticket. Who's the fool that said theatre was expensive? What rubbish.

Pick a night, any night this week and compare the prices between thirty blokes running around on grass with a football and some damn fine theatre.

$20 online ticket special to see the STC's Serpent's Teeth HERE.
$29 to see Toby Schmitz giving it his all at Belvoir St HERE.
$26 for a Beer, laksa and a show at the Old Fitzroy HERE.
$28 for D Reserve tickets to the Ballet HERE.
$30 for some comedy at the Darlinghurst Theatre HERE.

And you could see all of that in one week and still get change from one ticket to the Rugby.

Theatre affordability? It already is. (And there aren't any 'no alcohol areas')

This is really weird...

A little message..?

Today Tonight, Tonight Tomorrow

An interesting response from a reader on the Crikey website to my published article yesterday:

Our athletes aren't so bad:
Winsor Dobbin writes: Re. "Our athletes suck. Good thing they don't sing" (yesterday, item 19). Nicholas Pickard is clearly an arts writer who knows nothing about sport. He boldly states: "The Australian athletics team delivered what is probably one of the worst performances at an international meet in recent memory and we are now only eight months out from the Beijing Olympics". Actually we are 12 months out from the Beijing Olympics and the performances by gold medal winners Jana Rawlinson and Nathan Deakes ensured this was, in fact, Australia's best performance at a major athletics meet (Olympics or world championships) since Mexico City in 1968. Still, let's not let the facts get in the way of a good story. Today Tonight would be proud of such outrageous spin.


Look, I know I am totally unqualified in so many respects, but seriously, the next person that says that the performance of the athletes in Osaka was A-OK obviously doesn't know what teamwork is about.

At the last games, Australia as a team finished seventh. And as Jenny McAsey reported in The Australian on September 4; "On the championship table Australia finished 23rd, the second worst result since the event began in 1983."

But don't listen to me, listen instead to the CEO of Athletics Australia, Mark Peters;
"There were some disappointing performances and relatively few top eight finishes this year in Osaka, so Athletics Australia will have to consider carefully its strategy in the lead-up to Beijing, as it balances support between proven performers and those younger athletes who have demonstrated that they are worthy of support for Beijing and beyond."

And I will go onto Today Tonight and repeat it if you want.

Arts v Sport - Round One

It's interesting to point out that while our athletes in Osaka were striving for their second worst result since the world athletics championships began in 1983, our ballet dancers were also on tour in Japan.

"'That was me shouting bravo,' Masashi Miura, one of the city's foremost dance commentators, told The Australian, and he wasn't alone. At the final curtain large sections of the crowd stood and everyone cheered," said the report on the Australian Ballet tour.

There is a wonderful synchronicity between athletics and ballet as anyone who appreciates both sport and the arts will know. The physical hardship and strain these performers and athletes go through is phenomenal.

A report published in 2000 found that "the injury rate for ballet dancers over an eight-month period was 61 percent. This is comparable to rates found in other studies for athletes in collision sports such as football and wrestling."

It's remarkable that the Australian Ballet even gets to tour, let alone wow audiences and receive gold medal review after gold medal review as they did with their latest Japan trip.

In the same way, the physical journey that the rugby lads are about to go through will be an amazing test of determination and physical strength during the Rugby World Cup. According to that ever trusted source, Wikipedia, the Rugby World Cup is the third biggest sporting event in the world after the Olympics and the FIFA World Cup. It puts to shame the US appalling habit of calling everything that they do (on their own) a 'world series'.

As I write, there is only 1 day, 19 hours and 59 minutes till the big event starts!

It might surprise those in the anti-arts brigade to know that some of us arts people enjoy sport. In fact, in 1 day, 19 hours and 58 minutes, I will be walking down to a mates place with a slab over my shoulder ready for the start of a month of sleeplessness.

And surprisingly, a lot of other 'arty' people will be there as well. Actors, directors, musicians. Can you imagine?

I think its one of those urban myths that the anti-arts brigade like to push - 'Arts people don't like sport'. It's absolute rubbish of course and to prove it, I won my father's Super 14 tipping competition this year against a bunch of ex-footballers. $500 thanks very much!

It's just as ridiculous to claim that sports people don't like the arts. Take Collingwood's Rupert Betheras who recently jumped from AFL Premiership winner to visual artist. I just hope for his sake he doesn't get any Australia Council funding, otherwise the brigade will be after him! I can see the Bolt headline already - "Footballer Now Painting With YOUR Money."

Here's to a good (and successful) World Cup folks!


Image credit: "ballet by Denis Germain"

How embarrassing

Did not qualify. Last. Sixth. Did not qualify. Did not qualify. Last. Fifteenth. If you saw the look on the faces of the SBS presenters including Jane Flemming and Les Murray during the closing ceremony of the Athletics Championships in Osaka you would know what I was talking about. It looked like something had dropped on them from a great height and it wasn’t gold.

The Australian athletics team delivered what is probably one of the worst performances at an international meet in recent memory and we are now only eight months out from the Beijing Olympics.

The Australian Sports Commission, the Federal Government’s agency responsible for implementing the national sports policy released figures that showed that the Australian taxpayer spent $6.3 million on athletics in the last financial year.

More than $580,000 was spent specifically for the lead up to the Osaka meet which was to allow “medal potential athletes and their coaches to spend more time in Europe for valuable training and competition in the all-important European Grand Prix circuit events”.

It’s no wonder that the SBS Commentary team was totally lost for words.

It appears that many other commentators are also lost for words. Andrew Bolt, Tim Blair and Piers Akerman who are always quick to condemn failures in the arts sector have been deathly silent about the abysmal failure of the athletics squad.

As recently as June, Tim Blair led a scathing attack on arts funding in NSW by suggesting that if the health sector is in such a bad shape, maybe they should apply for arts funding grants. “Health department needs a big slice of this action. It should be easy enough; application forms are available online and Arts NSW has lots of cash to throw around,” he said in The Daily Telegraph.

Blair has also made consistent attacks on performing arts groups, such as Circus Monoxide, a troupe that travels around regional NSW entertaining kids and families referring to the performers as ‘creatively unemployable’.

Bolt has similarly condemned publicly funded arts programs, most notably the Melbourne International Arts Festival and Piers Akerman consistently takes aim at the ABC.

Central to all of their arguments is that ‘your’ dollar is being wasted and that any failure by artists or arts organizations is wasteful. This is surely remarkable double standards by commentators such as Blair, Bolt and Akerman.

Imagine the contempt they would have for Opera Australia, the Sydney Theatre Company or any other arts organization if performers gave the same excuses as the athletes did in Osaka

Australia’s best sprinter, Josh Ross was reported to have been afflicted by homesickness, depression and was too fragile to compete at his best and ended up coming home early without any success.

Other athletes used similar excuses of not having done enough preparation or hadn’t done the right preparation. If an opera singer in any major Opera Australia production had been in a similar predicament and suddenly sung off key due to a ‘lack of preparation’ abuse would be hurled at them from audiences, it would be critically slammed by the mainstream media and commentators would be quick to draw blood.

The Australian public expects a lot of our professional sports men and women and many of us share the highs and lows without a hint of antagonism towards the public sponsorship which aims for excellence on the world stage.

Attacks by commentators on artists or arts organizations if placed on agencies such as the Australian Institute of Sport would see them quickly face the wrath of the Australian public. Somehow, abusing artists is an easier point scoring tactic but is just as less justified.


Image credit: Jupiter images