Sport as we have known it in Australia over the past year seems ripe for interpretation in literary fiction. The tumult of this period has included doping investigations engulfing NRL and AFL clubs, complex scandals involving errant text messages in rugby union, scarcely believable images of ‘bubbling’ in pub toilets, and the confronting, heart-wrenching death of a young cricketer at the crease, along with the nation’s impassioned response to it.
All this invites discussion of things that go beyond the domain of sport and reflect wider questions of society, community, and even humanity. Surely sport and its culture is nuanced enough in this way for novelists to tackle.
But Australia lacks a tradition of novels with sport as a theme. There is a smattering of them, but nothing like their prevalence in British and particularly American literature, and strikingly few considering how ingrained sport is in our national discourse and collective psyche. The finest examples from other countries need not be laboured over here, but the richness of American literature’s fictive depictions of sport extends from recent works such as Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, about baseball, to 20th century behemoths John Updike (basketball in Rabbit, Run and golf in the short story Farrell’s Caddie), Phillip Roth (baseball in The Great American Novel) and Don DeLillo (American football in End Zone and baseball in Underworld). Jack Kerouac’s dreamily provincial descriptions of high school football still read evocatively.
Britain has enjoyed Nick Hornby’s ode to fandom, Fever Pitch, while a more recent addition to the canon is Will Buckley’s The Man Who Hated Football. Older examples include BS Johnson’s experimental 1969 work, The Unfortunates, along with Alan Sillitoe’s The Match and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Further contemporary novels include Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Matthew by Indian author Shehan Karunatilaka and Netherland by Ireland’s Joseph O’Neill – both about cricket. And all this without even touching on the vast well of sporting non-fiction.
The Australian novels that do exist are largely confined to individual sports. Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda, about a young swimming prodigy, is chief among them, as is Tim Winton’s Breath (surfing) and Malcolm Knox’s The Life (surfing again) and Jamaica (swimming again). The country’s most popular, tribal team sports and their cultures have been given scant examination in the nation’s fiction, with the exception of a couple of brave, intriguing contemporary novels about AFL: Catherine Harris’s The Family Men and Paul D. Carter’s Vogel Literary Award-winning Eleven Seasons.
The dearth of Australian novels about cricket was elegantly lamented recently by Simon Castles, though the sport made a significant appearance in Knox’s A Private Man. Knox is one of the most versatile figures in Australian letters. A former literary editor at the Sydney Morning Herald and current sports columnist for the same newspaper, he has written five novels and a slew of non-fiction works. The deployment of sport in his fiction is similar to that in Updike, DeLillo, Roth et al – as a departure point for a deeper understanding of universal mores and temptations and, like Updike in particular, poetic descriptions of physical motion.
“When you’re writing a novel you’re trying to say things that aren’t being said by others,” says Knox, “and in the course of my involvement in those sports [surfing, swimming, cricket], I thought ‘here’s something I can delve deeply into and write about in an original way’. I can say quite categorically that I wasn’t trying to make some sort of statement about the place of sport in our lives – if that’s there it’s a statement that’s made by the external context. I wrote about those subjects because they were vehicles for characterisation, plotting and all the things you do when you’re writing a novel.”
For Knox, the absence of the nation’s most popular team sports in Australian fiction is a result of the wider arts world protecting itself from the pervasive saturation of sport across other sections of society. Why, indeed, would a literary scene that has purified itself and identified itself by its rejection of sport, then take it up as subject matter?
“In Australia, sport has been such a dominant cultural force, that it transcends itself and is part of the broader landscape. I suppose that puts people who don’t like the fact that sport is so dominant on the defensive. If you’re part of a community that doesn’t like sport and resents the power it has, you’re almost trying to carve out a space that is specifically sport-free. It’s not just that it’s been overlooked, a statement has been made to exclude it.”
It is a debate that harks back to what Knox refers to as “that old Australian thing that you can go to the opera or you can go to the football, but you can’t go to both”. Patrick White memorably set out the battlelines with a comment in 1981 that sport existed to “distract our attention from reality” through the “soporific thud of the cricket ball [and] gladiatorial displays by steak-fed footballers”.
The reasonable view – and Knox’s opinion – is that that such a mutually exclusive division between the arts and sport is an anachronism. Yet maybe the damning of sport in certain quarters of the Australian arts community does linger, and is even understandable.
“The arts were a rejection of the simplicity of the sporting scoreboard and the lack of nuance in the recording of sport,” Knox says. “I think that view is ignorant of what sport is about – it’s far more complex than that and the human experiences at the heart of sport are very similar to those at the heart of artistic creation.”
Alex Broun is another writer with a foot in both the literary and sporting worlds. A prominent rugby journalist, he was media liaison for the Springboks from 1995 to 2000 and has worked in the same role with the British and Irish Lions and the Melbourne Rebels. As a playwright, his work has been performed globally, with the play 10,000 Beers among his most notable efforts, a darkly comic tale of an alcohol-fuelled tour undertaken by an amateur rugby club. The play met with mixed reviews in 2011, with Broun putting its strongest critical flayings down, again, to the arts community’s aggressive dismissal of sport.
“They didn’t like the positivity about that culture,” says Broun. “They wanted the play to just rip into rugby players, sportsmen and male culture, 100% of the time. They just wanted me to say that all sportsmen are bad, that all sport is bad. They embrace sport only when it’s being condemned.”
Another reason why so few novelists have taken to rugby league, union, cricket or AFL football may be purely commercial. Both Knox and Broun suggest that novels dealing with sport are given short shrift by many publishers. On one hand, says Broun, if an established novelist wrote a sports novel, “their regular readers wouldn’t read it and it wouldn’t sell”. And sports fans would not be interested for the simple reason that reading is an activity that is done in one’s spare time – and in their spare time, sports fans indulge in sport.
“I’ve come a cropper,” says Broun, “as others have, thinking that because you’re putting on a sporting play, people who love sport will come. They actually won’t come, because they’re watching the game, talking about the game or playing themselves. They don’t have the time or inclination to watch a play or read a novel about sport.”
A further, potentially decisive, explanation for the lack of sport in Australian fiction is the fact that sport and its culture is so dominant and so dramatic in Australia’s reality, that there is no need for literature to add to the discourse. Why address sport, something so widely dissected and criticised in other sections of culture, when serious literature might embrace issues and people that are underrepresented in public life. All that needs saying about sport – including its condemnation – is already being said through journalism and non-fiction books, thus there is not much left for the novelist to explore.
Knox admits he would have “little to bring to the table” in writing about rugby league, AFL, rugby union or even cricket, while Broun says, “One reason that people haven’t written novels about sport is that all the great stories are actually true. There’s very little left over, you’d have to write something fantastical.”
When Knox and Broun are asked to name some Australian sports novels, both initially draw a blank. But Broun points out that plays (and films) about sport are relatively plentiful. Aside from his own work, he cites David Williamson’s hugely influential The Club, Alana Valentine’s Run Rabbit Run, Brendan Cowell’s The Sublime and Sven Swenson’s The Truth About Kookaburras.
Despite the aforementioned struggles regarding getting sports fans to attend plays, the theatre seems to be one literary medium that has embraced sport, albeit in a small way. Perhaps this is down to the passivity of watching a play, compared to the discipline and patience required in reading a novel. Broun says, “If there’s no game on that night, someone who watches sport might sit down and watch a play or a film, rather than read.
“And there’s no way in the world someone who didn’t like sport would read a novel about sport, but they might watch a play if other people were going, and they’d heard it was good.”
The great Australian sporting novel is probably yet to be written, and there does not seem to be a great crying out for it from either the literary or sporting communities. There is no particular compulsion to express the modern Australian experience in fiction through sport.
However, a recent article by author Luke Carman emphasises the fact that many of Australia’s most exciting contemporary writers are emerging from Western Sydney. If the fecundity of this region endures, maybe rugby league (or for that matter, football or AFL) will rear its head in future works of literature. “Sport could sink us,” said White, a prescient foreboding, yet for some ambitious writer it may yet be the source of something revelatory.
