Sea Eagles’ rainbow Disconnection
ABOUT twenty years ago in New York, Hugh Jackman saved my life. We were walking across 7th Avenue in the direction of Broadway, where Hugh was starring in The Boy from Oz, a biographical musical based on the life of the Australian songwriter and performer Peter Allen.
Thirty hours earlier my film crew and I had caught an eastbound 747 out of Sydney to LA, where clearing Customs with a truckload of television gear in the wake of 9/11 was a long and painful process.
We missed our New York connection, so by the time I caught up with Hugh Jackman I was travel-weary and jetlagged.
My road sense was still on the other side of the Pacific and I completely forgot, when crossing the street, that American traffic comes from a different direction.
I stepped in front of a fastmoving yellow cab.
Hugh, who was match-fit from the rigorous demands of his song-and-dance gig, saw it coming and adeptly snatched me by the collar from the jaws of death. The taxi flashed by, just clipping my foot, but there was no harm done.
I told Hugh I owed him big time and he agreed.
Had I seen it coming this week I might have repaid that debt to the Sea Eagles superfan with a bit of advice: “Hugh, don’t do it. Don’t wear the Manly pride jersey.”
But too late. He had already done it, as had his Hollywood mate Chris Hemsworth. The actors had both agreed to photo ops promoting Thursday’s game.
Inadvertently they became poster boys for one of the NRL’s nastiest bun fights since Israel Folau.
In his photo Hugh Jackman is pointing at the Gotcha4life logo on the jersey, which represents a NSW not-forprofit outfit promoting mental health in local communities. Undoubtedly a good thing.
But that’s really ironic now because Hugh’s good cause was totally subsumed, and the Manly community bitterly divided. The football club was suddenly in crisis, consumed by controversy and outrage as seven of its best players decided to stand down from the big game against the Sydney Roosters rather than wear the rainbow jersey.
Nothing to do with Hugh really. He wasn’t there to promote inclusivity and diversity (though I’m sure he supports it).
In this case he was just the happy, smiling famous face wearing the jumper and promoting mental health.
Underneath the Gotcha4life logo on the jersey was a double line of rainbow colours, repeated in the midriff and then at the hem.
To my innocent eye it is so discrete you could miss it.
But in fact, the rainbow line marks the place where the rigid moral intolerance of 19th century Methodist missionaries collides with 21st century Australian virtue signalling.
In choosing to save souls in the Pacific Islands, the Methodist missionaries fleeing the dirty, grim world of the British Industrial Revolution picked a lovely spot in which to preach the fierce word of their god.
The Pacific was already paradise enough, but the missionaries sought to improve it with god-fearing lashings of Protestant sexual guilt.
For those no doubt wellintentioned Methodists, the notion of any relationship more Greek than English was certain to be abominated for all time. But anthropologists, like the great Margaret Mead, have recorded plenty of unchurch-like activity going on in traditional Pacific society.
In 1928 in Coming of Age in Samoa she writes: “Romantic love, as it occurs in our civilisation, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusive, jealousy and undeviating fidelity, does not occur in Samoa.”
That was grist to the Methodist mill. They were really a miserable fun-hating bunch of moral straighteners and regulators.
In the Pacific Islands there was so much innocent human pleasure to destroy. No argument. For the missionaries, it was their way or the highway… to hell.
I suffered years of Methodist Sunday-schooling in the outskirts of Launceston, and I can tell you gentle Jesus rarely got a look in. In the fierce heat of their fire and brimstone was shaped and tempered the hardest forms of intolerance.
I came from a home full of books and went to a school where science and literature were taught.
I feel very sorry for those Pacific Island kids. With little separation of church and school, they heard only the voices of Old Testament bigotry.
So, those Manly players who refused to don a rainbow shirt this week were hardly to blame, nor to be so harshly judged. With names like Aloiai, Tuipulotu, Olakau’atu and Koula, they might know no better. Since childhood, doctrinal intolerance has been drummed into them in the name of God.
Their dilemma, but not their fault, is that Pacific Islanders and Australian-born Pasifika people are so crucial to the NRL game. They might appear physically to be so well built for the rough and tumble of rugby, but at the same time, culturally many are unprepared to participate in completely unrelated postmodern deliberations on human gender and changing sexual proclivities.
Nor should that ever have been expected of them.
It was always unfair and careless of Manly to put these young men in such an invidious position. They soon became the whipping boys of the monsters of social media, who by comparison always make the terrifying Methodist preachers of my childhood look like models of moderation.
Although I lived in Sydney for more than a decade, NRL was always an alien game. As an outsider it took me a long time to realise why the play stops and starts so much.
But it certainly stopped for
Manly on Thursday night. Without the seven players who boycotted the match, the Sea Eagles lost 10-20 to the Sydney Roosters.
Those Methodist boys made their point. Manly can’t win without them. Next season they say they will play wearing the jersey so long as they are consulted. We will see.
Meanwhile, I remain bemused by how there could be so much wasted time and anger about a few lines of rainbow colour when the most visible feature of the Sea
Eagles’ jersey are giant white letters proclaiming an online gambling site called Pointsbet.
The operators of that reprehensible business must be relishing the publicity.
Every news outlet in the nation has been giving them free promotion, as inadvertently did Hugh Jackman.
Meanwhile, the Australian Psychological Society warns how “the high level of accessibility and the ease at which money can be spent” has resulted in online wagering being now the fastest-growing Australian gambling segment, with more than $1.4bn punted online every year – often by those who can least afford it.
Have we missed a real story here?
Or is this just my childhood Methodism showing?
For decades, when it was still a force in the land, John Westacott was the legendary executive producer of 60 Minutes. He was often in trouble for intemperately expressing what were frequently quite sensible opinions.
He hadn’t changed when I rang him in Sydney this week.
“For f---’s sake why do football clubs want to posture and present themselves as social engineers? Their spokesmen can scarcely string together a line of English and the players are even worse. Just tell them to keep it to themselves. Whether a bunch of incorrigible boofheads hate gays or don’t, does it really matter?”
Clearly Westie wanted to get it off his chest: “Mate, these are blokes, half of them, who have been kicked in the head at least one time too many. There are serious things going on in the world. We are lurching towards World War III over Ukraine and the traditional media, taking their cue from the loonies on the internet, are obsessing over things the ordinary punter doesn’t give a stuff about.”
I asked my old boss: “Westie, you were always generous with public advice. What would you prescribe now?”
“Well, I would take the players out on the field and tell them to stop wasting our time and to concentrate on their core business,’’ he said.
“I’d explain to them, ‘See those sticks up that end? All you have to do is kick the ball in that direction. And when a bloke comes out at half-time and blows a whistle, then you have to kick the ball in the other direction.
“It’s that simple.”
It was always unfair and careless of Manly to put these young men in such an invidious position. They soon became the whipping boys of the monsters of social media.