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Sports

Aussie Rules Is The New Kale

Oh great, hipsters are into footy.

The torn piece of street art on Brunswick St has the title “Things I Love About Melbourne in Winter”. Only two things remain on the list: “the first crop of heirloom kale” and “watching footy at Edinburgh Gardens”. How is it that anybody in the world cares about these two things at once?

In my home state of Tasmania, Aussie Rules football is still largely followed by a traditional audience—tradies, middle-aged men cradling tinnies, and white collar workers, but almost everybody of white skin, with ripping colloquialisms and a tendency to abuse the umpire. Even though I'm about as passionate a footy fan as anyone, I still feel like an outsider when I head out to the small town of Evandale to watch my cousin play on Saturdays. I have long hair and I bring my own lunch to the game. I don't belong.

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But in Melbourne, the football crowd is much more culturally diverse, and the diversity seems to be growing at a rapid rate. There appears to be a renewed interest in Aussie Rules among the carefully dressed, craft beer drinking, arts degree owning folks of Melbourne. The hipsters (as they’re often called) are finding their place in the stands among the mechanics and Italian grandmothers.

Much of this struck me recently in Carlton North’s Great Northern Hotel, when I was having a boutique brew with my mate Bug. Bug is a plant science student at Monash. Since moving up from Tassie a couple of years ago, he’s managed to develop a near obsession with AFL. He's now a fan of the Western Bulldogs; a team aligned with the rough-and-tumble western suburbs of Melbourne. He may well be the least typical Bulldogs fan going. He speaks with scientific preciseness, and is overly apologetic and polite to a fault. But he bought a Doggies scarf from a $2 shop in Clayton and wears it to the weekend games, often alone except for a text on molecular biology that keeps him company at halftime.

It's not just Bug. My companions to AFL games in recent months have included the manager of a yoga studio, an erudite psychology student, a folk musician and an anthropologist who is in a panic over his impending two year employment in Indonesia because he knows he'll miss his weekly Geelong Cats game. All of these people are either new Aussie Rules fans or they have had a sudden resurgence of interest in the game.

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My own story is the same. My dad is a typical Tasmanian bloke, so I grew up in a sporting household. There was cricket all summer and footy in winter. Then I became interested in alternative music and poetry during high school, and I wasn't able to maintain an interest in these games. The two worlds didn't seem compatible. I spent a number of winters doing other things on the weekends, things that had nothing to do with sports, trying to forge an identity as a "cultured" person: reading second-hand books and drinking cheap wine. Now, seven years later, the game seems great to me again. It was a gradual process returning to Aussie Rules, but I went from from holding ironic Grand Final parties with my artist friends to slowly developing a weekly ritual of watching my team play at the local pub with my old man and an odd bunch of mates.

I suspect this is partially due to a change in attitudes towards being a man. Hipster culture tips its hat to traditional forms of masculinity—even if it is mostly superficial—with beards and leather shoes, as well as practical skills (such as rabbit butchery) becoming trendy again. Maybe it’s just a rejection of the 90s, where the ideal male was a smooth faced Dawson's Creek type, and while most young men in Australia will rarely see a rabbit, let alone dress and butcher one, it’s considered neat if we can pretend we do.

The AFL has also made great efforts to demonstrate that it’s a multicultural sport. Former roughneck Bulldogs defender Danny Southern recently gave an interview about his conversion to Islam, which happened after he retired from the game and spent some years in Egypt. He doubts that his faith would have been accepted back when he debuted in 1994. "Hopefully as a society we've moved on a little," he said.

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This public effort to make the game more inclusive visibly launched with programs to encourage Aboriginal players at the end of the last century. But migrants have a long history with the game, ever since Greeks, Italians and eastern Europeans arrived post-WWII and started following and playing the game, in such a way that surnames such as Jesaulenko and DiPierdomenico became household names. Football writer Martin Flanagan says that one of the Australian game's special qualities is the enthusiasm with which migrants adopt it. Nevertheless, there’s still work to be done as the AFL continues to make motions to include women, other races and homosexuals.

But it’s not like the game has become totally done its top button up and started waxing a silly moustache. This was highlighted when commentator Brian Taylor called a player “a big poofter” during the pre-game broadcast on July 12. Taylor's remarks show that there’s still a pretty big division between some of the old-school fans and the game’s new followers. In the Great Northern Hotel, two blokes at my side drank Carlton Draught and made disparaging comments about certain players, such as Dyson Heppell, with his messy-by-design blonde hair, who was considered 'soft' and 'girly'. In the same pub, I overheard two fellas speaking through similarly scruffy beards, talking about someone on their local team using "the 'n' word" in the changerooms. It was clear that there were a lot of tensions.

Two days after Brian Taylor's comment and misguided apology - in which he apologised to the player for comparing him to a homosexual, rather than apologising for using that type of language - the AFL released headscarves in the colours of footy teams. This gave some hope to my footy mad mates like Bug. It’s also a good thing that the multicultural appeal of the game still includes its traditional fans. I had a great chat with the blokes at the Great Northern the other day about all sorts of meaningless things – whether Essendon will make the finals and who's going to win the Brownlow Medal. We probably have some pretty divergent views on things of greater importance, but that's fine.

All of this makes it seem that AFL is going in a more inclusive direction, and even if that’s a purely commercial decision, it will slowly change the mentality of footy followers. My Dad is very firm about the fact that Australia is better off due to its migrants. There is no doubt that a combination of footy and food has informed this opinion, although he wasn’t too excited when I told him about the street art on Brunswick St. "I don't think I'd get too excited about the kale," he said.

Bert is a storyteller and bushwalking guide whose projects include writing about Tasmanian histories and craft beer, as well as "the peripheries of Aussie Rules". You can see more here.