by Anne Summers
The other group of women who are indispensable to the gambling hordes are the clerks and cashiers employed in TABs. The TAB will rarely employ men below the level of supervisor as female labour is cheaper and more ‘manageable’. The women themselves are grateful for a job that offers flexible hours and comparatively good money for casual work, and TAB jobs are much in demand. But these inducements are mitigated by the responsibilities involved in the work. Foremost among these is that each cashier is responsible for the money she handles and, if she is unable to balance it at the end of a day, must make up the deficit from her own pocket. The Clerks’ Union has made the TAB a closed shop and has acquiesced in the penalising of cashiers in this way. One union regulation states that if a woman works at a window for two hours she must take half an hour off. This means in practice, because of the penalty rule, that no-one else may handle that cashier’s money and take over from her for that half-hour, and so one window closes and the other cashiers have to cope with the extra volume of work, enhancing the likelihood that they will make an error in their calculations.12 The cashiers are not allowed to set up a fund to cover possible losses, the argument against this being that because the cashiers are casual workers they could not be trusted: some of them might deliberately register a deficit and keep the money.13 The irony of an enterprise whose raison d’etre is speculation and gambling adopting this kind of reasoning appears to have bothered neither the administrators of the TAB nor the officials of the Federated Clerks’ Union. All of the things that comprise the mystique of racing are rather remote to these women, for whom each race meeting means simply another spell at an overworked, deadly monotonous job.
In other forms of gambling, where the odds are lower and where few skills are required – such as lotteries and poker machines – there are no prohibitions against women participating. Nor is there any longer any restriction against women patronising TABs.14 Where the simple and stated aim is to raise money, the sex of the sucker is unimportant. The various circumscriptions operating against women at racetracks are related to the aura that surrounds this sport, to the traditions and rituals that have come to be associated with it. These were devised and developed by men and have come to be regarded as a male preserve, and many features of racing, and even of racehorses, seem at times to be posited by the devotees as pointers towards some kind of ideal existence. This was made explicit when the chairman of the Brisbane Amateur Turf Club at the farewell ceremony for the champion Gunsynd spoke of the horse’s ‘courage, determination and guts and what an example it is to mankind’.15 The qualities he enumerated were those that, at present in Australian society, men rather than women are expected to strive for and so it cannot be concluded that he was posing a universal model. Rather he was simply stating the realities of horse-racing: it is a world inhabited overwhelmingly by men where the rewards and successes are invariably won by men.
A similar situation exists with football, that other sport that occupies a special place in the tribal life of Australian men. There are two quite different elements in football – playing and watching – and while women are physically excluded only from the former, the total configuration of both elements of the game is once again very much a male preserve.16 Only two kinds of football are accorded an integral place in Australian culture – Australian Rules and Rugby League. Other forms may engross thousands of people but have not been incorporated into our cultural mythology, probably because the other main games, soccer and Rugby Union, were not easily available to working-class Australian men and to elevate them to prominence would have meant denying a major premise of the egalitarian theory of Australian society.
The demarcation between the players and the spectators is an important feature of both forms of football; there is none of that unity between the teams and supporters of opposing sides that characterises British soccer matches. This separation receives its ultimate expression in the hail of beer cans that angry crowds direct onto the playing field whenever some incident or referee’s decision is found displeasing. Such aluminium ammunition indiscriminately injures players on both sides and reinforces the view that the battle is conducted as much across the picket fence as between the two teams of players: ‘there they are, the enemy, not the other mob but the watchers, the thirty thousand with violence in their hearts, tiny smoke-puffs everywhere’.17 Violence is part of the currency of football and this crowd hostility is but one manifestation of it. Nor will it be vanquished simply by prohibiting fans from carting ice-boxes of cans into the grounds. They may be deprived of their weaponry, but to dissipate the passionate impetuosity of an aroused crowd would require the entire rewriting of both football codes.
Many sporting writers argue that it has been recent attempts to prevent violent encounters between players that has led to a decline in attendance at football, particularly Rugby League matches in Sydney. The language employed by sporting writers provides ample evidence of the explicitly violent expectations in players and spectators that these games foster. ‘What does a Rugby League forward do,’ wrote Sid Barnes, ‘follow instructions from his coach or please the pacifists who are quickly killing the game? … the fans are unhappy for being robbed of a fair spectacle and League sinks even further into the pussy cat section of sports.’18
Despite the watchful eye of the referee, the fans generally are rewarded with at least several spectacular and illegal tackles, and each week the football toll mounts: multiple injuries, often including permanent paralysis, and several deaths a year all occur, to the apparent concern of no-one.19 When it was proposed in Sydney in 1972 that junior league games should be abandoned, this was not because club officials were worried by the evidence of eight-and nine-year-old boys battering bodies and brains before these were even fully developed. Rather the officials were concerned that junior league was draining the energies of these children, burning them out too quickly and thus depleting the ranks of those eligible for the big league.
Women are, by reason of their relative physical frailty and their conditioning to avoid violent encounters, unable to participate in this ferocious fraternity. But if they suffer no regrets about missing out on the bruises and broken bones, they have several reasons to feel deprived because of the male bonding entailed in keeping a football team in peak physical and emotional condition. Although individual men may star for a day or even a whole season, the team is pre-eminent and the greatest hero is allowed no special treatment. What the coach aims for is a moving machine of 18 (or whatever number) precisely integrated parts, a perfectly engineered, carefully coordinated and absolutely invincible team whose solidarity and group performance outshine any individual feat of brilliance. This precision and loyalty must be carefully nurtured and continually revitalised. The weekly clamorous communions on the playing field are the product of this rigorous conditioning:
‘I want you to think win, eat win, talk win (smacking his fist each time). From now. From the word go. Right?’ We nod agreement, mumble yair, yair, hypnotised in thirty seconds flat. ‘Our first game? Like hell. We’ve been playing together for weeks, and now? We’re run in, we’re ticking over smooth. We know each other – where to look, where to kick. We got youth, right? We got experience, right? We got skill and we got muscle. We’re going to bowl ’em over from the word go, knock ’em off balance. The Bears! (He shouts it, with his eyes shut, this is some mad revivalist meeting.) The Bears! The Bears!’ Yair! Garn! Grrr! We’re aroused, we make wild animal noises, snort and paw the ground, jump about, smack the fist.20
When this mad mass spills onto the ground, it is the consummation of a long arduous process whereby individual uniqueness has been fused into an unprecedented alloy. To effect this, team members have had to follow exacting club rules governing their dress, their demeanour and their social and sexual behaviour. Recently, coaches have begun to concede that sexual activity on the night before the Big Game may be permissible: ‘Sex on Fridays? “I’d say in moderation,” says [Ron] Barassi. “I wouldn’t be rapt in a single
player having a new sexual adventure on a Friday night but a married man wouldn’t lose any energy by it. With him it could be a regular thing and I don’t think it could do him much harm.”’21 Only two years before, one Rugby League official was quoted as saying, ‘As far as going to bed with Mum is concerned, after about Tuesday the boys cut it down. Their wives co-operate, of course’.22 It was perhaps never explicitly acknowledged or even recognised, but some deep psychological fear, a dread of emasculation – the subtle undermining of the team by drained energy expended on a woman – probably motivated this ban. Much of the high-pitched nervous energy, which was translated into brilliantly coordinated play during Saturday’s game, was, and undoubtedly still is, the expression of a shared sexual repression. It was one more thing that united the team, and was fostered from early in the season, and was compensated for after the grand finals by rewards ranging from ocean cruises to trips to Japan for the boys – without their wives and children of course.
Coaches try to ensure that the links between team members are deep, satisfying and sustaining. ‘Beer … is the team-spirit builder. Coaches make sure that players get around a keg one day early in the season to get to know each other “as mates”. “This mateship has been the secret of South Sydney’s success”, explains Sydney football writer Peter Frilingos. “They’re dead-set mates who have stuck together socially, and that has kept the team going.”’23 A sartorial solidarity is also enforced by coaches such as Melbourne’s Ian Ridley:
All my blokes are treated the same, regardless of ability. They all know they cannot wear beards or moustaches and that their hair must be no longer than collar length. I don’t think it’s healthy in our game to be otherwise. Too much hair makes players hot, sweaty and uncomfortable. And I don’t think it becomes a top-line sportsman to look like that … I make them wear the club jersey in training to build up their pride and I wouldn’t let anyone train with his socks down. Their boots must be clean. They must look the part.24
It is clear that much of the success of the league footballer lies in his ability to subsume his entire existence for at least half a year under the accommodating umbrella of the team; this is done at the expense of physical and emotional relationships with other men and women. The role of footballers’ wives is on the sidelines, cheering, probably with some bitterness since they cannot but realise that every success for the team is a setback to their hopes for conjugal enjoyment. They must acquiesce in having a conglomerate husband, a man who lives and breathes in an induced environment of competitive unity, who brings the rest of the team home, even to bed, with him, and whose inadequacies socially and sexually are to be endured as a necessary sacrifice to sportsmanship. One could conclude that it is the wives who have to be the good sports. Of course, to even suggest that a handsome, physically fit football player might be a less-than-perfect human being is tantamount to treason – a betrayal of one of the psychic props of so many Australian men – and few women would dare complain publicly. Their husbands are the objects of adoration and emulation for enormous masses of people who watch their weekly game and follow their careers with cannibalistic avidity. To question their manly credentials would undermine the self-assurance of the fans for whom vicarious identification with their on-the-field accomplishments is almost a mandatory part of Australian masculinity.
This identification is various and elusive and cannot be reduced to a single neat explanation, but what is significant is the extent to which men from diverse groups in Australian society merge to form a tenuous fraternity of football followers. Football is the subject of an annual lecture delivered by Ian Turner at Monash University.25 During a brief spell as football writer for The Australian, Max Harris attempted to bring literary elegance and semantic precision to describe the game of the big men of Australian Rules. The disdain many intellectuals feel for the activities of the masses does not so often extend to football, which secures often fanatical support from men one would not, from their pretensions in other areas, have suspected of harbouring a secret admiration for the game and the men who play it.
It is this kind of devotion, this mixture of intellectual appreciation of an intricate and skilful game and the sheer cathartic pleasure gained from watching others indulge in purposeful violence, that few women are able either to share or to understand. Women who watch football are seemingly motivated by less complex notions. They are there as sidelines supporters for husbands, sons or boyfriends, or as companions to devoted fans, or perhaps because they entertain secret sexual fantasies about one or more of the players. Rarely can women engage in the detailed technical discussions of rules, precedents and decisions, which are an important part of following the game. And any woman who thinks that by acquiring such knowledge she will be admitted to the fraternity is likely to be disappointed, for men cherish and wish to retain as a retreat this avenue of self-expression. It is part of the pub talk, the work-break chats and the other conversations men have in which they establish their clan credentials and strike up friendships with members of their sex. The woman who takes up this interlocution is likely to be resented for transgressing a sexual boundary, for intruding into the private and precious province of mateship, a precarious state of communality whose fragility is underlined by its antipathy to a female presence.
It is not just that men have their activities and women have theirs and that each sex can satisfy itself with the free and equal pursuit of its chosen recreations. Women have few areas of superiority of either skill or participation. Where both men and women engage in the same sport, it is invariably the men’s that has higher status and attracts more attention. The only exception to this, and it may be a transient one, is women’s tennis, which is currently enjoying immense popularity. But this is at top tournament levels and this kudos has not filtered down to the Wednesday afternoon tennis games that occupy many suburban women. And in any case, the popularity of women’s tennis has not prevented discriminatory treatment for female players. During the 1973 Australian Open Tennis Championships, the two women’s quarter finalists were forced to play on a rain-saturated court. One of the players, Julie Heldman, had to stand in a puddle to serve. The men’s singles match, which followed immediately afterwards, was transferred to a dry centre court. Ms Heldman protested about having to play in such conditions, but the referee would not move the women’s match. Both the women players told the press that women had had to endure second-rate conditions in earlier rounds when they had been expected to play without ball boys and with no drink facilities.26
Women’s swimming is also very popular, although it is not usually considered ‘more interesting’ than men’s in the way women’s tennis is. Women swimming champions are the subjects of immense publicity and have huge followings, but much of this admiration may be diffused nationalistic gratitude; after all, Australia owes its modest tally of gold medals from the Munich Olympics largely to its female swimmers. But even where women playing a particular sport enjoy fame and success, it is a very temporary phenomenon: once they have passed their peak they generally marry and, presumably, disappear into the suburbs never to be heard of again. By contrast, a large proportion of the male sports stars of former years manage to keep their names before the public by going into businesses, often those that deal with the equipment used in their former sport, or by acquiring jobs that ensure that their names, and the remnants of their former glory, are kept alive. With most other sports that both men and women play – cricket, athletics, basketball, hockey, baseball – the men’s game is considered to be superior.
Women do have other recreational pastimes where their talents are acknowledged to be superior, but these are invariably activities that, having been relegated to ‘women’s sphere’, are not things most men would care to show any interest in. Even when these skills are demonstrated competitively, they are not regarded as providing the kind of entertainment that draws crowds and evokes column inches of superlatives. Can we for a moment imagine 100 000 people packing into the Melbourne Cricket
Ground to watch the Moonee Ponds vs St Kilda cake-decorating championships? One reason for this, of course, is that many of the singular skills that women possess are considered to be part of their housewifely ‘duties’ and such skills represent the attainment of a degree of perfection that is neither demanded of them by the role, nor rewarded when it is achieved. A good housewife should be able to bake, to arrange flowers, to run up clothes for her children and to possess a modicum of skill in a myriad other areas. But if she should turn any of these into a craft to be pursued with loving skill and devotion, she is likely to be cruelly disappointed if she expects accolades to be heaped upon her. Contests of housewifely skills are parodied by those whose job it is to provide day-time stimulation to suburban housewives. An ironing competition held in Melbourne in 1973 evoked guffaws and cynical gibes from the reporters the radio stations sent to cover it. They devoted their attention to the single male competitor and passed on uneasily when one woman participant remarked that seeing she had to spend so much of her day ironing she felt she might as well have some company, and the chance of a prize, while doing it.
Women’s recreational activities are either disdained by men for their too close association with the mundane routines of domesticity, or for the amateur zeal with which they are pursued, or else men command the heights of skill and prestige in ‘female’ areas they consider worthy of their attention. Thousands of women play bridge, dabble in Cordon Bleu or Oriental cookery, design and make their own clothes, but the woman whose skills in any of these areas are such as to achieve public accord is a rare creature. Those men who choose to engage in these things usually elevate them to professional proficiency, underlining the distinction between their special prowess and the idlings of a mass of suburban women. There are of course many women who paint and pot, and sculpt and dye materials, with competence and professionalism even if they remain amateurs in the sense that they do not earn a living from their endeavours. Often their skills are recognised and praised – among their circle of family and friends and in the anticipatory eagerness of the adult education classroom. But for many, their little creative outpourings, all those landscapes and less-than-perfect pots, are the object of familial embarrassment, scorn or even mockery. Iris, the frustrated middle-aged woman in Thea Astley’s The Slow Natives experienced this: ‘She had been an Ikebana cultist for a while. “She can work at them half an hour before she achieves a climax,” Bernard used to say unkindly’.27