Aussie Rules

Original Haiku 🌵, South-Eastern Australia 2 Minutes

Warning: post contains generalisations, misleading statements, false attributions. It is basically bull-twang.

Australia is divided by an invisible line.

North of the line, in Queensland and most of New South Wales, people play rugby, a game that is not understood by, and is of no interest to, the people living in the rest of Australia.

In the rest of Australia (the southern part of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory) people play and watch Australian Rules Football, often called “AFL” or just “Footy”. Australian Rules is extremely chaotic game, brutal and graceful in equal measure.

I have previously posted a haiku I wrote about AFL football here, but writing haiku about the footy is a far from new idea. A haiku poet called Rob Scott, AKA “Haiku Bob”, has been doing it for years. He also helps organise a yearly AFL Grand Final Kukai which is basically a bunch of haiku writing footy fans, composing haiku and posting them to a shared thread, while they watch the AFL grand final. Things can get a bit ragged as the game goes on.

Here are a few of the haiku I contributed during the 2020 grand final (for context Victoria was then in the middle of a months long COVID lockdown, and no one was allowed to have guests to their houses to watch the game).

     The afternoon of
the first night grand final –
     bugger all to do.
     The Tigers win again!
watching a replay
     of last year’s game.
     The 2020 AFL grand final –
the 1st grand final he’s watched
     all by himself.

And to finish up here is a footy haiku I wrote in cricket season:

     the off season -
nothing to do
     but write haiku

Post Script: there was a rumour during the Second World War, when a Japanese invasion of Australia was thought to be immanent, that the government had a secret plan to abandon the rugby playing states in order to defend the rest of the country. This rumour has never been substantiated.

Read my other posts and haiku, here.

References:

The Footy Almanac, https://www.footyalmanac.com.au/author/haikubob/

The 2020 AFL Grand Final Kukai, https://australianhaikusociety.org/2020/10/12/the-2020-afl-grand-final-haiku-kukai/#more-13608

The Australian War Memorial, https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/encyclopedia/homefront/brisbane_line

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