Rohit Brijnath: Enjoying an Australian summer of flies, sweat and sport

House flies, bush flies, horse flies, fruit flies, hover flies, signal flies. Thirty-thousand species of them. Uninvited companions on my long walks, interrupting a friend’s golf swing without permission. Shrug, it’s the Australian summer and you’re outdoors where you should be.

The heat? Ah, mate, who cares. In the early 1980s, my friend, named Peter, called Tommy, now living in a town of 900 in the Victorian country, remembers freezing cordial overnight, grabbing his terry towelling hat (like Gordon Greenidge, he instructs me) and flying out the door in an age of no sunscreen.

These days Tommy’s out watering his town’s field. Other days he mows its grass. Everyone has a stake in the play. Visitors aren’t exempted. Last year he filled a roughed-up machine with paint and made me mark the boundary for cricket. I walked a crooked, swearing line. A day out, Australian style.

I’m back in Melbourne from Singapore for six weeks, arriving on Christmas Eve and leaving the day after the Australian Open final, and sport inevitably leaks into conversation. Play is more than a fundamental right, it’s a secular commandment. Once, late at night in a corridor of a Melbourne newspaper, I remember a quick-bowling fellow named Rod and a resulting broken clock. Everywhere competition flares.

Every year I try to sketch the Australian summer of sport. As if it deserves witness. In Torquay, a 2-hour drive from Melbourne, I wander to a field for my early morning sexagenarian shuffle. A young man handballs a footy ball against a post and then scoops it up as it lands and bounces awkwardly. His season is months away but he’s polishing that hand-eye dance. One year a footy player produces a line I’ll repeat forever. He says in pre-season he’s so fit, an instrument so tuned, that he finds it hard to walk. Always he wants to break into a run.

An ibis walks contemplatively. Trams rumble. Scullers cut through the river Yarra like a scalpel through skin. A coach on a cycle megaphones instructions. The air is inviting. It feels like a nation blooming.

Australia, notes the department of foreign affairs and trade, exports iron ore, coal, natural gas, wheat, copper but it is their sport which travels furthest. This year I missed the MCG where Shane Warne is a study in stone, yet commune as always with the statue of John Landy helping Ron Clarke.

As sport loses its manners, Landy’s act stands like a lighthouse, showing us the way. He stopped mid-race in the Australian mile championship in 1956. Went back to check on a fallen Clarke and forfeited any chance of a world record. Resumed the race and won it. Later thought the fuss over his act was unwarranted.

On a plaque are words taken from an open letter by the sportswriter Harry Gordon in 1956, who began like this: “Dear John, The fellows in the press box don’t have many heroes. Often they help to make them—but usually they know too much about them to believe in them.” Here was the exception.

Behind Landy’s statue is a field, on the right another, in front the Open courts. This vast land feels boundless and it beckons sneakers and sweat. Perhaps the empty spaces are not fully appreciated here, but those born to India’s suffocating urban spaces know it’s a privilege.

There’s a hard, glittering light to days when the sun glowers. Tommy says that on total fire ban days the cricket is called off in his area. Instead of driving far to play, people keep watch over their properties. The bushfires are merciless, described in a 2018 post on the Katoomba/Leura Rural Fire Brigade website as sounding like a freight train. In the city some mornings you can smell the country’s tragedy.

Every Boxing Day I seem to watch with the same people. India Pale Ale flows alongside frustration as the English team do what Rafael Nadal never would. Their play is absent of humility. Ricky Ponting is perceptive on TV commentary and when others occasionally stray into laddishness there’s Isa Guha to give it sophistication.

Peter Roebuck is gone and a retired Greg Baum writes intermittently, which is a pity for Mitch Starc’s bowling deserves their cultured pens. Bharat Sundaresan, who lives here, writes a masterful piece, “To be a brown man in a white game”, on race, Usman Khawaja and inclusivity. Fans flow on to the field when the Sydney Test ends and there’s a thrill in being allowed to walk on sacred grounds.

At the MCG, 94,199 on Day One. At the Open, record crowds. Sport pulls people here, as if it’s a reaffirming of identity. Anyway the only way to protect a sport is to come to it. Fans stay late as tennis players accelerate like fleeing pickpockets while diasporas take sentimental journeys as they hail those from the lands they left behind. “Laban” shout Filipinos at Alexandra Eala. Fight, they mean.

The Open is a commercial carnival, but not absent of soul. A tournament belongs to its present, yet they always acknowledge the past. Rod Laver comes, Tony Roche, Margaret Court, John Newcombe, history on tottering legs. Heroes in this land have a more normal shape. A friend tells me of Pat Cummins in a taxi line at the Open. Just another fan out in the summer.

At 7am I walk the dogs with my daughter, past rugby goalposts which rise into the pale blue. In my last week, I watch a young woman run between cones, a flying figure in yellow boots parting the green grass. I wander over to chat and she tells me she’s a player from the AFLW, the women’s footy league, and was doing a fitness test.

The dogs pant, the sun sharpens. We’re just two strangers of varying accents and age, tied together for a few minutes by the fine threads of sport. Summers never last but they always return.

Rohit Brijnath (@rohitdbrijnath) is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold.