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Brisbane Broncos rugby league player Karmichael Hunt kicks an AFL football during a Brisbane Broncos training session at Red Hill Thursday, July 30, 2009. Hunt will play out the rest of the 2009 NRL season before commencing his AFL playing career in May 2010 on a three year contract. AAP Image/Patrick Hamilton
One of the worst offences a hack can perpetrate is to jump to conclusions on the basis of a single coincidence. However, the twin departures of Berrick Barnes and Karmichael Hunt from two traditional Brisbane-based sporting teams does leave me wondering what the hell is going on?
What’s happened to Brisbane?
A Red leaving for New South Wales’ green-backed pastures is hardly a new phenomenon but how on earth did we get to a situation where a leaguie would defect to AFL of all things?
And in Brisbane?
Like most things that have happened in Brisbane in the last fifty odd years, I blame Sir Joh.
A child of the eighties, my upbringing in and around Brisbane was spent, whether I knew or cared, under the long standing Premier’s watchful eye.
There was a certainty about his presence, attributable in hindsight to the gerrymander system helpfully put in place for him by the Labor party and thanks to which he held power for 19 years.
I was more bewitched by another certainty in my life. Rugby League stood alone on Queensland’s sporting horizon, like a drunken uncle dominating the barbeque.
Wally Lewis, Cannon Hill’s great champion, could have shot a member of Terry Lewis’ corrupt police force in broad daylight and gotten away with it such was the love the city held for the man.
AFL played the villain’s role in the small world of 1980’s Brisbane. I recall my father only half jokingly issuing forth the golden rules upon which I could faithful rely to guide my journey into manhood;
Number One, never hit a woman.
Number Two, never play Aussie Rules.
To associate an effeminate nature with the southern game seems odd to foreigners I’ve met, many of whom have been keen to learn more about the kicking game they’ve seen late at night on ESPN.
Certainly to Americans the lack of padding seems to stamp the game with a certain level of manliness however the same assumption never struck home to league men of my father’s generation.
Living in London, absent as it is from both AFL and rugby league, news of Hunt’s switch was both strangely familiar and yet gave me the feeling it had been transmitted from outer space, so absurd would it have once seemed.
Change is afoot in the over-grown country town.
Not the thunderous, Bastille-sacking change of revolution but the slow, restless thud of children kicking footballs to a slightly different beat.
And what does Sir Joh have to do with it? Well his abolition of the ‘Death Tax’ in 1978 was but one of many successful strategies Bjelke-Peterson employed to invigorate interstate migration into Queensland.
The lure worked a treat on many Victorians who flocked, like departing residents of Ramsay Street, to Queensland’s sunnier climes bringing with them bushy moustaches, a stale watery beer and Aussie rules football.
Well, that’s how I remember it.
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