Australian Football was a different beast in the mid 80s. It was a time of feathered hair and biffo. An era before $9 cups of mid-strength beer and the Match Review Panel.Perth duo Mining Tax have released a video for the appropriately titled “Footy”, that looks back at the burly days of early AFL, when players like Mark “Jacko” Jackson, Bruce Doull, and Kevin Bartlett roamed the field and goal umpires wore ties.Taken from the 2015 release Degenerational Report, the video features spectacular stoushes, nude streakers and weird digital renders from an old AFL Umpire Accreditation VHS. But the synthy Kraftwerk like track also features lyrics “As you go to take the grab, You get the don’t argue instead, Going out of bounds now, Not hearin’ whistles in your head”, that suggests the song is also about the psyche of young Australian professional sportspeople in the modern era.As the 2016 AFL season nears watch the video below and read a brief interview with Alex Griffin and Mitchell Henderson-Miller about old school footy.Noisey: As West Australians are you Eagles or Dockers?
Mitch Henderson-Miller: Growing up, if pushed, I'd say I was a Dockers supporter. Maybe it was because my father supported them. Maybe it was because I wanted to support the "underdog"? But honestly, I just liked the fact they wore purple.Alex Griffin: Fuck the Eagles. Not individually, but like, spiritually.The editing seems to suggest that in the 80s players would take out their aggression on the ground whereas in later years it was in the club or street after twelve Asahi and a couple of pingers.
Mitch: Maybe it's a result of reduced privacy and a greater pressure placed upon these players to perform in the limelight in the current day, which may result in this aggression manifesting itself in spaces off the field where they think it won't be seen. But I think it's part of a greater problem of societal forces and masculinity.Alex: The game has changed so much! The whole World Series Cricket idea that the whole ground is for TV all the time shaped footy into like, a performance of violence instead of violence itself - I mean, what is a 'jumper punch' but kayfabing. So the violence goes somewhere. Being nostalgic for that violence is disturbing, but the weird sanitised postmodern sheen AFL has now is unhealthy, because you don't see the results of violence, just the glory of the threat of it. Parts of it have gone from like, morality play to hi-def porn in thirty years.History pulls awful shapes out of us all. Like the video is maybe also cause and effect with the impact on fans; if you have been led and come to believe that violence gets results, you're going up the rope pronto when you're backed into a social corner, and there'll be carnage, and it'll be on you. The problems around Australian masculinity are too deep to even dip a toe here, but AFL players are both products and producers of it, which is a hard position to be in. The cultures and privileges they are swept up in from like, 15, are pretty dizzying for someone who has barely half a frontal lobe formed. It's the stuff we don't hear about that's worrying.The video features Ben Cousins flipping the bird in an elevator. Cousins came to symbolise the excess and superciliousness of the Eagles in the late 90s and early 2000s. Do you think he was unfairly targeted by the media?
Alex: Ben is a neat synecdoche for a lot of things about not only the Eagles, but Western Australian culture over the last decade. There was this buoyant rise to predestined greatness as the son of a champion, a redemption narrative after the grand final loss, and a final triumph as a loyal one of the boys, still pulling his weight. His decline in the public eye even kind of mirrored temporally the fall in mineral prices that brought about the GFC and the end of the boom.I read his autobiography and the fact that he managed to pull off the double life for so long is incredible. It's much like the wilful blindness to reality involved in the mining boom.And like the WA economy now, he has to figure out the next step, without pretending the past hasn’t happened. His story mirrors our history out West in a big way, and the way he’s been treated by the media has mirrored the whole unreality the media out here treats everything. I think there are some journalists and police officers who might second guess their actions over the last decade, because he’s been a man in need of serious help for a long, long time. But at the same time, addiction isn’t funny or a metaphor for anything. Hope you’re getting there, Ben.'Degenerational Report' is available now.
Advertisement
Mitch Henderson-Miller: Growing up, if pushed, I'd say I was a Dockers supporter. Maybe it was because my father supported them. Maybe it was because I wanted to support the "underdog"? But honestly, I just liked the fact they wore purple.Alex Griffin: Fuck the Eagles. Not individually, but like, spiritually.The editing seems to suggest that in the 80s players would take out their aggression on the ground whereas in later years it was in the club or street after twelve Asahi and a couple of pingers.
Mitch: Maybe it's a result of reduced privacy and a greater pressure placed upon these players to perform in the limelight in the current day, which may result in this aggression manifesting itself in spaces off the field where they think it won't be seen. But I think it's part of a greater problem of societal forces and masculinity.
Advertisement
Alex: Ben is a neat synecdoche for a lot of things about not only the Eagles, but Western Australian culture over the last decade. There was this buoyant rise to predestined greatness as the son of a champion, a redemption narrative after the grand final loss, and a final triumph as a loyal one of the boys, still pulling his weight. His decline in the public eye even kind of mirrored temporally the fall in mineral prices that brought about the GFC and the end of the boom.I read his autobiography and the fact that he managed to pull off the double life for so long is incredible. It's much like the wilful blindness to reality involved in the mining boom.And like the WA economy now, he has to figure out the next step, without pretending the past hasn’t happened. His story mirrors our history out West in a big way, and the way he’s been treated by the media has mirrored the whole unreality the media out here treats everything. I think there are some journalists and police officers who might second guess their actions over the last decade, because he’s been a man in need of serious help for a long, long time. But at the same time, addiction isn’t funny or a metaphor for anything. Hope you’re getting there, Ben.'Degenerational Report' is available now.