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The age of enlightenment
We found the archetypal Australian this week and he’s an absolute cracker, much too good not to share. Speaking at a charity dinner on Wednesday night marking fifteen years of Aussie Rules footy legends, former AFL star Mal Brown complained about the lighting in the early era of night matches. “We were at a disadvantage,” he told the audience, “we couldn’t pick any of the cannibals”, adding that, because they didn’t have any white shirts, his Aboriginal team mates weren't selected because they couldn’t be seen in the dark.
This came in the same week as New South Wales Assistant Rugby League coach and former star Andrew Johns was in hot water over describing a Queensland player as a black c....t in the built up to the second state of origin match. And not long after current AFL player Jason Akermanis advised gays in the league to remain in the closet because “footy is not ready” for them to come out. It would break the fabric of a club and be unsafe, the now former HeraldSun columnist wrote.
But back to the enlightened Mr Brown, on his way out of the dinner he told journalists not “to go writing what I said about those Abos” and later told media that his use of terms like “cannibal” and “little black buggers” were terms of endearment. To illustrate the extent to which he isn’t racist he went on to say that he’d helped Aboriginal boys and grown up with them all my life; thankfully he stopped short of claiming them as some of his best friends.
A true dinosaur, Brown told the HeraldSun that, while not sorry for making the comments, some “sensitive” people had told him he’d made a dickhead of himself and he accepted that. He agreed his comments were inappropriate in 2010, but added that he had made those sorts of comments probably 5,000 times in the last five years and, not to be restrained, he thought that the attention paid to his comments was unwarranted in light of the fact that “we are being led by a dickhead of a prime minister”.
This man is a true gem and, as if had not dug a considerable enough hole for himself, when asked if he had learned anything from the furore, he responded that if asked do another charity lunch he would just tell them to go and get stuffed.
Don’t you just love Australians?
Charity fundraising must be all the go this week, in an EBay charity auction the winning bid for breakfast and a surfing lesson with Liberal leader Tony Abbott came from a group called “GetUp” which campaigns on social issues. It paid $16,500 for former Afghani refugee Riz Wakil to get the chance to bend Abbott’s ear about the plight of refugees. Wakil, who spent nine months in an Australian detention centre, intends to tell Abbott that his hard-line policies on immigration and detention arrangements for refugees are inhuman. He quipped that he was more qualified to talk about people smugglers than Abbott’s now infamous budgie smugglers.
Wakil hopes Abbot will listen, but it is difficult to imagine he’ll get a word in edgeways.
Incidentally, the winner of a date with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was television Channel 10’s Seven O’Clock Project starring the very, very funny Dave Hughes.
Not quite so funny was news that our friends, the Andersons of the trucking-across-the-Nullabor-story, were truckless and walking back to West Australia from somewhere near the New South Wales and Victoria border. A wayward, on-coming, four wheel drive wagon attached to a mobile home, sideswiped their brand-spanking new Kenworth (with only 6,700 kilometers on the clock), rendering vehicles and trailers in need of surgery, the mobile home strewn up the highway, the other driver injured and all others shaken.
By anyone’s standards, that an extreme way to get a few weeks off work.