THE ASSIGNMENT:
Australian Rules Football
In Bruce Beresford’s satirical 1980 film The Club, a young Tasmanian player named Geoff is recruited to play for a professional Australian Rules Football team. This pricey hire causes friction between players and with the club’s dysfunctional coach, owner, and board. The film mostly takes place off the field and explores the darker side of the sports industry, where backroom wheelings and dealings highlight toxic masculinity, backstabbing, and increased commercialization of sport. Additionally, the film features the shortest shorts, luxurious moustaches, and larger than life pompoms.
Screen The Club with a close circle of friends. Then craft a project centered around any themes addressed by the film.
THE HUXLEYS
A SPORTING GLANCE
Will Huxley, 2023
The smell of grass tickling the back of your throat, sweat dripping down to the small of your back. Orange slices sizzling on the sidelines. Sun streaking down, ultraviolet rays, temporarily blinding you. A frantic woman darts along the side of the field, limbs akimbo. Her anguished war cries only muffled by the jeers being hurled at you from the pack of boys glaring across the simmering, testosterone-soaked playing ground. Penetrating your effeminate stance with a Lord of the Flies frisson. Her teeth bared, her long socks straddling her calves and her tweed skirt hitched above the knee for ease of her mad dashing through the Thermos-cradling parental wasteland that sidled the playing field. In a stroke of tragedy this competitive nutcase cheering you on in a violent mantra of tactical nonsense happens to be your very own mother, ex-sporting champion still holding steadfast to the unequalled glory of athletic combat. Your heart racing in a morbid spiral of self-doubt. Wishing you could sink deep beneath the earth and lay side by side with the beetles, worms and dark solace of the underworld. Instead you battle the bright hostile trenches of the sporting arena, which your awkward sprouting body twists and creaks in a frenzy of uncoordinated paranoia. Staring at your muddied shoes, dreaming a world away as balls and boys rush by you, the scent of desperation, cheap deodorant and resentment momentarily brushing your wet fringe from your miserable brow. Sport is your mortal enemy. And the world won’t listen.
Growing up in a country that values sporting achievement above all else is a real struggle, especially when you are a creative, shy queer kid searching for kindred spirits. Loving music, art, fashion and the dark underworld you perceive as your eventual artistic salvation. You are at odds with the athleticism and competitive fervour that threatens to swallow your painfully slow struggle to adolescence. The sun your nemesis, gym class your tormentor. Each brush with team sports sends you to a further realm of hell. Ostracised, picked on, humiliated. You never asked for this pathway to pathos.
As queer people we struggle to ever feel included in this bizarre cult of sporting mania. The pages of papers filled with a never ending parade of athletic atrocities. Flicking through the channels of our TVs teething with terrifying feats of athleticism and glory. Grown men’s only acceptable avenue for emotion, elicited from the failings and fancies of their beloved lust-fuelled sporting adulteress, the team, the boys, the real men.
You feel like a giant abstraction, a lurid obstacle to motion, a lurching horror of cubist proportion. A creature from the black lagoon slowly eeking its way to the pits of hell. Your mind and body a world away from the general competitive malaise of the dreary, homogeneous masses that chant meaninglessly from the courts, fields, and warzones of the sporting dysphoria that haunts your progress as an alternative free thinking artist. Or so you thought.
This project seeks to find a way to capture the alienation, humour and abstraction that you face as a figure in turmoil with this sunburnt country, Larkins looking for a fair go, a Guernsey and a winning streak. It captures how the struggle is real as an uncoordinated and uncooperative queer prisoner.
When your artistic pursuit is of very little importance to the culture around you, you must find a way to reconcile these disparate paths and put the art back in the sport. Perhaps your art will be celebrated, tolerated or even appreciated once its thrust into the ferocious floodlights of the playing field. A performative way for queer people at odds with sports to feel like they can ‘play’ figuratively, creatively and physically. Allowing the ridiculous feats of fashions on the field to be at one with your gloriously bent vision of the world. The Dadaist notion in full athletic prowess. A giant sequined ball lunges for the ball. Art imitating sport. Finally at peace with one another.
Garrett Huxley, 2023
Sport was compulsory for 12 years of schooling in Australia when I was growing up. I spent 12 years of my life trying to get out of every sporting activity possible.
Sports highlighted my differences and any effeminate traits I had, making me an easy target for playground bullying, which also lasted for 12 years. I was too busy thinking about music, my hairstyle and probably liking some of the boys that were good at sports.
It all came to a head for me mid-high school. Up until now we had always participated in teams where I could hide. This was different. We were individually ordered to Hop, Skip and Jump into a sandpit. One by one, the students were called up to take their turn, while the remainder of us sat by the sidelines as an audience. The female names were called softly, Jane, Johanne, Kelly. The boys were called by surnames as if we were in an army drill: BAILEY! CHESTER! HAINES! We were called out in alphabetical order. I began to sweat and feel like I might burst into flames as the short, stocky, toad of a PE teacher was quickly approaching the H’s.
And there it was, “HUXLEY!” I froze as all eyes landed on me. Again, “HUXLEY!” The pressure was on, my inner body temperature felt like 100 degrees. I was in the unwanted spotlight.
“I’m not doing it, sir.” Did I really say that?
“HUXLEY! GET DOWN HERE NOW!” he bellowed.
I stood my ground. “I am not Hop Jump and Skipping into the sandpit.”
The rest of the class were in disbelief, I could hear whispering, laughing. Someone beside me said you are making this so much worse for yourself. There was an electricity in the sweltering summer air. It was a good show, the stand-off between this militant toad teacher and the class weirdo, or Poof as I was more commonly called.
“HUXLEY GET DOWN HERE NOW OR GET OFF MY OVAL!” He was bright red with anger by now.
I took the second option by walking away from the class, the sandpit and the teacher from hell. Besides, it wasn’t his oval.
In a stroke of defiant genius, I was now banned from every sporting activity for the remainder of my schooling life and sent to the library. This was the best outcome I could have imagined. They knew nothing about punishing a kid like me. I could read, listen to music on my Walkman, not mess up my hair, and not be publicly humiliated any longer.