by Anna Krien
One of the Mexican competitors explained: ‘This is a death-defying activity – the men are taking a great gamble to prove their courage. What would be the point if everyone saw that a woman could do the same?’
Is this still about sport? In 1896 Cambridge male students celebrated the refusal to grant women degrees by hanging an effigy of a woman riding a bicycle, while in Mariah Burton Nelson’s The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football she wrote about how the growing popularity of lifting weights and bulking up among men coincided with an increased female presence in traditionally male domains.
In the last decade of the 1800s, the ideal male body as portrayed in advertisements put on about two dozen pounds. Men gave birth to the ‘he-man.’ The he-man was a redundant man, a man dedicated to the celebration of maleness. If women were determined to act like men, the ante would be upped: a woman could never be a he-man.
In a similar vein, females groupies may find themselves punished for making themselves available, for wanting ‘it’ as much as the players do. Jacquelin Magnay hinted at this, writing that ‘many women aggressively pursue the players and record a notch on the wall when they score with one. But there is a code among some players that “bonus” points are given if women are shared among their mates; the more mates, the more points, and the more laughter afterwards.’ In response to women upping the ante, becoming more like ‘lads’ in their pursuit of a score, it is as if certain groups of men have gone a step further in an attempt to reclaim their territory and diminish ‘her’ conquest in comparison to theirs.
In this sense, a woman defines a man. And if football really is just about men – as many insiders I spoke to claimed, seeing this as reason to leave it alone – then this book would be a waste of space. But it’s not just about men. Women have been used – as have homosexuals, aka faggots and poofters – to reinforce a certain code of masculinity and hierarchy.
As court resumed and I watched Justin approach the dock, his shoulders hunched, I realised that boys have been used as well – used to win, to bolster kingpins and egos, and discarded when no longer of use. You could even say that in being denied the genuine and equal company of women, they’ve been abandoned. Giving the guard a small, weak smile, Justin entered the dock, sat down and took a deep breath.
PART 4
END GAME
CHAPTER 21
Prosecutor Ryan called them the ‘Mount Eliza Drinking Team’ and it was as if the cast of Home and Away had found itself on the set of Law and Order. Suntanned boys in tight suits, their jauntiness lost somewhere between shirt cuffs and collar, girls in smart business-like dresses but still managing to look raccoon-eyed and rickety on their heels. This group of friends, who started off grand final day with a barbeque in Mount Eliza, then headed to a twenty-first and then Eve nightclub, before finding themselves back at Nate’s house in Dorcas Street, was asked one by one to recount their evening.
It was a tale of boozy weaving, the group separating and meeting up again, a murky haze of shots, vodka and raspberry, and beer, the endless hailing of taxis, stops at McDonald’s and walks to 7-Eleven – while for a couple of the boys, the evening turned into a comedy of errors as they were repeatedly locked out of friends’ places, unable to get a mate passed out inside a flat to open the door, returning into the night, only to be locked out of another house as they cabbed and walked all over town, trying to find somewhere to crash.
But each of them, at one or more times of the night, had seen a tall blonde girl in a colourful dress: Sarah.
Andrew Patterson had seen Sarah standing out the front of Dorcas Street, near the open door, chatting with John McCarthy. ‘It was casual as saying goodbye,’ he recalled. ‘Pretty sure she was led out by John McCarthy. Just normal, like she was leaving a normal house.’
Then came Matthew Bateman, a solid bloke who held the Bible like a football when he was sworn in, his fingers spidering around it. After last drinks were called and the lights were turned on at Eve, he and his friend Megan went to Dorcas Street. No one answered when they buzzed on the intercom, but they knew where the spare key was hidden, so they let themselves in.
Some members of the Mount Eliza Drinking Team – a tag that was beginning to wear thin as the procession rolled on – were already there. They hung out upstairs and at one stage Bateman, Nate and a friend decided to walk down to 7-Eleven to grab some food, their route passing each of the potential laneways where Sarah and Justin could have been.
It was dark, Bateman said, but the sun was coming up. At one point he glanced down an alley and saw two people.
‘Did you see anything that concerned you?’ asked Malcolm Thomas.
‘No, I would have stopped otherwise.’
The third on their mission to 7-Eleven, Toby Davis, a young, smartly dressed Asian man, also saw two people in an alley. Stopping to tie up his shoelaces, he glanced down the lane.
It was just over Cecil Street, he recalled – the laneway of Kathy Hackett – but it was just a ‘glance.’
At the house, Davis recalled seeing the blonde girl in a ‘bright floral dress’ talking on the stairs to a guy in a ‘scarf T-shirt.’ Justin was wearing a T-shirt with a scarf screen-printed on it – ‘an unfortunate choice,’ Ryan said at one point, having a go at Justin’s fashion sensibilities as he sat in the dock behind him.
On their way back from 7-Eleven, Davis said they saw the man in the scarf T-shirt and the girl in the floral dress getting into a taxi.
Jake Bergin was next to give evidence, then Celia Talbot. They had arrived together at Dorcas Street around 6 a.m. Bergin saw a blonde girl in a colourful dress walking down the hallway ‘by herself’ and noticed she was smiling. After passing her, he and Celia remarked to each other that she seemed ‘happy for this time in the morning.’
*
‘It’s not going to her credit, that’s for sure,’ said Judge Taft at one stage while the jury was out, and it was not. The night was loaded with doubt, glazed with booze. The jury members were starting to look bored as they heard about twenty-first birthday parties, tequila shots and drunken walks punctuated by hollering at taxis to pick them up, all ending up at a house owned by the parents but lived in by their children – sounding more and more like a tale of privilege and dumb hopeless drunken journeys than a narrative of rape.
But as in any good soap opera, the outsiders were the conflict-makers. The tall blonde girl whom nobody knew and a country footballer.
Toby Davis’s evidence was double-edged. It supported Justin’s claims that he and Sarah had made contact inside the house and left together, contradicting the version put forward by the prosecution – that Justin, a stranger, had sidled up beside Sarah on the street – but he also placed the two people he had seen in the lane where Kathy Hackett lived.
Hackett was a small woman with a fringe and long brown hair. Her body was wiry, tough like a piece of beef jerky.
In the witness box, she sat up straight and looked around the court, at the judge and at Ryan.
‘Were you asleep?’ the prosecutor asked.
‘Yeah!’ Hackett responded enthusiastically. ‘I was.’
‘But you were woken?’
‘Yeah – I was.’
Of the night traffic down her alley, Hackett said, ‘I usually hear ’em laughing and walking down the laneway.’ This time she heard a male and a female. ‘It sounded like they were arguing underneath my window. I was rather peed off.’ She went to the door and stood there for about three minutes before going back to bed. ‘Then I heard “Don’t,” then “Leave me alone,” then I heard clip-clops. Like a sandal, with a big heel, not a small heel.’
During Ryan’s questioning, Malcolm Thomas did not look at Hackett. Instead he focused on a pile of documents in front of him, scribbling something on a piece of paper. But when Ryan sat down, it was as if Thomas drew himself up out of his chair, maki
ng himself a sudden presence in the room, his eyes practically swallowing the small witness in the box.
Thomas asked how Hackett had learned that the police wanted to speak to her.
‘I had been down the street, my son said the police had been here, and I said, “What for?” He handed me the card, I called, and they came down immediately.’
Thomas raised his eyebrows. He asked Hackett how old her son was at the time.
‘Twenty-two,’ she replied
Thomas paused, glancing at the jury. Not a child, he may as well have said, not too young to be asked questions by the police before they asked to speak to anyone else in the house. As Thomas cross-examined, you could practically see him looping a length of rope around the feet of witnesses, who were oblivious until he tugged on it with a final question, the lasso tightening around their ankles and tripping them up.
Thomas asked, ‘He didn’t tell you how he’d spoken to the police?’
Hackett shook her head vehemently. ‘He just handed me the card … he just said they said, “Get your mother to ring.”’
And when she phoned the policeman, asked Thomas, did they tell her then what they were investigating?
‘He goes, “Do you mind if I come around to your house and talk to you?”’ replied Hackett.
Thomas shook his head. ‘Look, that’s not true, is it?’
Hackett would not budge. ‘I didn’t say anything over the phone. He came to my house and that’s when we spoke and I told him – because when he first told me what had happened, I felt sick to the stomach about it.’
Thomas again shook his head. ‘Can I suggest to you that it is simply not true that there was no discussion about what the police were investigating in that phone call?’
Thomas referred to a police note that said an officer had spoken to Hackett on the phone. He read from it: ‘Female heard a female voice in laneway on Sunday morning, said “Don’t,” went to investigate but nil seen.’
Hackett shook her head vigorously. ‘That was not on the phone. That was face to face. That was not on the phone.’
Thomas kept going. ‘So how did you know what to tell the police if you didn’t know what they wanted?’ he asked. ‘What may you have heard before that phone call to the police? Were you watching the news from time to time?’
‘I don’t have time to be watching anything,’ she said. ‘I go to work, I come home, I iron, I cook tea and it’s time for me to go to bed. I’m lucky if I see any of the TV.’
Thomas nodded sympathetically. ‘You weren’t working then, were you?’
‘No.’
‘So you didn’t have so little time in your day?’
Hackett’s voice rose as if no one could understand her plight. ‘I still don’t have any time in my day. I’m a mother … I’m a mum and I do things every day of the week and I don’t have time to be sitting there watching TV twiddling my thumbs … I have four children and two grandchildren.’
Thomas persisted. ‘Too busy to watch TV, listen to the radio … and too busy to ever read the paper?’
Hackett snorted. ‘I don’t believe in the paper anyway because it’s a whole lot of hogwash.’ The court laughed.
‘Too busy to chat to anyone about anything in the news?’
The rope, it was tightening, tightening, but Hackett was nimble. She replied, ‘It’s no one else’s business, not mine.’
Thomas decided to ask her straight up. ‘I’m just asking you about what you may have heard prior to that phone call from the police and let’s put it this way: what you say is that you’ve heard absolutely nothing about any news?’
‘The only thing I have heard,’ said Hackett, ‘which I thought was a whole lot of hogwash, is it’s all the Collingwood players, it’s all the Collingwood players because everyone always blames the poor Collingwood players.’
Bam. Got her.
Thomas drove it home. ‘When you made your statement, it’s in your mind that a sexual assault has occurred.’
‘Not until after I said what I heard,’ said Hackett. ‘Halfway through my statement I knew.’
Thomas pointed out that in Hackett’s original police statement she made no reference to clip-clop noises. ‘You hear “footsteps,”’ he said.
‘I gather she was running off,’ said Hackett.
‘Of course you gather that,’ said Thomas, looking at the jury, ‘because you had been told a sexual assault had occurred in your laneway.’
Thomas sat down.
*
Like Kathy Hackett’s, Rajan Adani’s dealings with star footballers or students living at college were likely to be brief at best. In Adani’s case, no more than a short taxi fare. Starting his shift just before 6 a.m., Adani stopped to pick up Justin and Sarah. It seemed an ordinary fare until the police tracked him down a week later. ‘They were sitting very close,’ Adani told the police. ‘They were talking very gently and slowly.’
And he had been reliving it ever since – from giving his statement to the committal hearing, until now, over a year later, at the trial.
Softly spoken, the cabbie sat nervously in the witness box and described the journey. ‘They were both deciding between Elwood and Carlton; he said his house was closer. In Elwood, he paid his fare and got out of the car. She got out too. I was wondering, you know, if I was going to lose a fare.’
Then, after a couple of minutes, she got back into the cab. Adani recalled the boy leaning in and giving her a goodbye kiss. He then drove her to Carlton.
‘The boy leaned in and gave her a goodbye kiss,’ repeated Thomas.
*
Outside in the foyer, I was sitting next to Justin’s older brother when John McCarthy came over. Tall and striking in a suit, the young footballer had been delisted by Collingwood last year and snapped up by Port Adelaide. The only one not called on to give evidence, he was also the only one from the night, let alone from Justin’s Melbourne circle, to show up to support him.
‘Listen to this,’ he said to Justin’s brother, and read from his phone a story about a violin player who sat in a subway station in Washington and played. Thousands of people had walked past him, paying no attention.
‘No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world,’ read McCarthy. ‘He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.’
McCarthy stopped reading and lowered his phone. ‘And two days before, he had played a sold-out show where people were paying $100 a seat.’
Justin’s brother was confused. ‘What’s your point?’
McCarthy was a little taken aback, not realising he’d have to explain it. He thought for a second. ‘Well, if you don’t pay attention, you might miss out on something amazing,’ he said, then shrugged and walked away. Six months later, the 22-year-old midfielder was dead. John McCarthy fell from the roof of a Las Vegas hotel while on an end-of-season footy trip and could not be revived.
CHAPTER 22
Can males bond without it becoming sinister? Of course they can. In the Age, Timothy Boyle, a former AFL player, described meeting his two best mates – Brad Sewell and their former teammate Luke Brennan – for a coffee. When the time came to say goodbye:
Brad shook Luke’s hand as if making his acquaintance anew (a handshake is off-limits while still in the playing group).
‘Well, good to see you,’ Brad said. ‘Let’s catch up soon.’ They’re ghastly social words that mean: ‘I don’t know when I’ll see you next.’
He didn’t say anything to me until he’d closed his car door and was already driving. ‘What time we on tomorrow?’ He yelled it out the window, knowing that he needn’t say goodbye – there wouldn’t be enough time between seeing me to warrant it.
This is a mateship that doesn’t need a hello, g
oodbye or a catch-up; it simply flows from one moment to the next as fluid as passing a ball. This familiarity and ease with one another is no doubt one of the deepest pleasures of such intense team bonding. Yet this same bond can be corrupted – it can see night games turn ugly. In a world where camaraderie is premised on a code of silence, it can become a bond that won’t flex, and young men are not joined together by a love of the game but by secrets. And here, in this cloying space, it may become impossible to breathe.
Football has changed, yes. It is impossible to turn back the clock to the old days of full-time boilermakers and the like coming together each week to blow off steam. Players have gone from sipping Stone’s Ginger Wine and nips of port during a game to beat the cold, sucking on ciggies in the huddle, to being surrounded by sport scientists, chaperones, player agents and dieticians who are constantly pinching and measuring the rolls of skin around their waist. If the old days were a bad time for individualism, then today it’s near-apocalyptic. As the game is increasingly professionalised, players are programmed to within an inch of their lives, and when there are thousands of hopefuls who will give anything to take your place on the team, any desire to speak up or out of line may be rapidly quashed.
Football has always been thought of as the great leveller, a place where a kid from the backblocks has as much chance as a kid who has everything. For Tony Wilson, this adage still holds. ‘The worst mistake in this whole debate is the assumption that there is this homogenous footballer. Footy introduced me to a much wider world, to men for whom footy was their ticket out,’ he said. ‘You could say it’s bad to spend fifteen-odd years in the company of men, but I spent time with men who I’d never have met otherwise.’
Wilson tells me the story of when he was struggling to stay listed at Hawthorn, and Dermott ‘The Kid’ Brereton, then a senior and celebrated player, put his finger on what may have been holding the young player back. ‘Tony, you got good hands, you can mark and you’re brave,’ said Brereton, ‘but I wonder, what with you studying law, etc. … If I hadn’t have been playing footy, I would be in jail. And I wonder if you would hurt like that to get where I am.’ Brereton had a clear sense of where he would have been without footy, explained Wilson – while he, Tony, had choices. He wasn’t hungry enough.