The history of Australian Rules Football, its importance to the country and to Melbourne especially, is to be tested tonight at a Melbourne City Council meeting.
An application to demolish the Punt Road Oval stand — known for a few decades as the Jack Dyer Stand — is set to come before the council. The application is by the Richmond Football Club, who argue that the stand’s limited capacity is holding the club back. The Richmond board is now throwing its toys out of the pram and saying it will leave Punt Road if the demolition application is rejected.
Well, one doubts they will, but the application needs to be rejected in any case. The club is being a phenomenally bad public citizen by this bullying move, and immensely self-destructive of football’s history and a sense of continuity with its past.
The Punt Road Oval is about as close to a birthplace of football as one is going to get. The Jack Dyer Stand, built in 1915, is the concrete representation of that –- its elegant Edwardian brick and lace work has looked across the place where the road meets the river for more than a century. To simply destroy it, to destroy everything like it and imagine that football can retain its soul, is worse than hubris — it’s an error about how things matter and why we hold on to them.
Far from wanting to pulverise it, the Tigers should be honoured to be the custodians of it. The slick corporates who now populate the board should have some humility as to what they have inherited, and serve it as a sacred trust — not try and blackmail the city into giving up more of its heritage.
Following the recent threat to the John Curtin Hotel, and the greenban on it, surely there has to be some circumspection about a willingness to simply demolish the means of our connection to the past.
Melbourne City Council should reject the application, and so should Planning Minister Richard Wynne. If neither do, unions should greenban. The Tigers should use the expertise they can draw on and save the stand, as is undoubtably possible. We now return you to that election thingy…
AFL is no longer a sport. It’s a grubby exercise in corporate greed and monetizing cultural history and our (particularly Melburnian) sense of who we are. Damn the leeches to Hell.
The MCG and Docklands are the AFL’s temples to Mammon. The ties of the former to Melbourne’s past have long been built over and the soullessness of the latter is a suitable monument to what now lies at the heart of the game. Fair enough. If the game is now about money above all else, then such temples are needed.
Punt Road is different. It’s where my dad – now long gone – took me and my brother back when footie was played only on Saturday afternoons. Main game starting at 2:00pm, which gave the local players time to knock off work at the factory or shop, go home and grab a quick bite of lunch and their gear, then get back to the ground in time to change for the match. It’s what my grandfather used to drive his horse and dray past every working morning when he carted fresh fruit and veg into Melbourne’s Eastern Market. Even today, it’s part of the pilgrimage every fan makes from Richmond Station to the Gee – a nod to players and people and a way of life gone by. And for those who have migrated to this city in more recent decades, it is an integral part of the place you now call home.
Save Punt Road. It is part of all of us.
Aye. Lovely yarn Grae.
When I was thirteen I wrapped my leg around a goal post and spent four awful months flat on my back in traction in a public hospital adult ward. (Tough phase of puberty). Mad keen Tigers fan…through a friend of my dad Jack Dyer got in touch and throughout wrote me letters, sent me signed pix of all the stars, memorabilia, lined up ‘cheer up’ drop-ins from passing Richmond talent scouts…The very best of what VFL footy clubs represented back then.
Melbourne is a stupid backward gauche pretentious boring hick town that smells, obviously, but I don’t know of any city in the world that has nurtured any sporting code as such a brilliantly unifying part of its DNA and its soul. Saturday afternoon in Melbourne is uncanny, still. For Richmond to flatten this silly little anachronism as a matter of transactional choice would be like the Pope torching the Notre Dame. Or something.
How thoughtful of Dyer to bother with a young fan, it says much about him.
I well remember Jack Dyer, Lou Richards & Bob Davis late on Thursday nights on Channel ‘s League Teams. This trio commented – frankly, no holds barred – on the team selections for the following Saturday.There was great chemistry between them, very funny banter & disagreements. Them were the days.
Channel 7’s League Teams
The commercial for the show was 3 chimpanzees, the 3 wise men. knocking stuff down that’s old but really well made is another example of what in some circles would be termed as “progressive.” This mindset or excuse causes a lot of damage. Yet politically they probably lean conservative.
So when a progressive conservative wants to do something, it’s often the opposite of progress and conserving which suggests a political human relations maneuver, to take the meaning of useful nouns by opposing with an adjective remade to suit its new meaning for ideological or marketing reasons.
Probably propped up with some economic modelling conjecture that can read the future and put a monetary value on a sense of loss for those present and what can’t be seen later for others .
They had a sense of responsibility as to how they wanted to be portrayed , it was pretty honest., ahh beer , sorry., i sort of bombed this. .
It’s even better than I remember – & unencumbered by political correctness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20K9FMdorCE
Ah yeah…I grew up in a remote region of northern Vic and we had the ABC and channel seven. Thursday nights after footy training, with a luxurious take-away pie and chips, watching these avuncular old gods. Though for all their unwoke rough edges they presented a kind of gentlemanly masculine role model that in retrospect makes the later snickery-grubbery of say a Sam Newman seem even more obnoxious than gut instinct tells you it is.
Yep…Captain Blood’s gruff duty of care remains a super-treasured memory, zut. (You know what it’s like being an anxious, awkward, hopelessly idealistic and ambitious teenaged kid stranded in traction, real or metaphorical). Footy used to throw these reassuring rocks up by the dozen. You hope there’s still room for them. Boys need anchoring rocks, or they end up throwing them at the world their whole life.
Blimey! It’s only a dumb old stadium, but yep…makes you think/remember. Hope they have the sense to hang onto it :-/
Knowing absolutely nothing about AFL other than it’s tribal, I was forced to check Google Maps to see what the fuss is. What a wonderful icon that place is. The stand looks majestic and totally in keeping with the suburban and tribal vibe.
Resist the gormless, soul-less suits driven by return on investment. History, community, tribe, passion mean nothing to them. They are just automatons, programmed to count beans and compete amongst themselves for who has the wittiest personalised number plate and the fattest skiff. Stand strong against the concrete commandos, Richmond. They have no heart. Keeping that stand is the best return on investment a footy tribe could ever get.
Philistines. This is akin to proposing to demolish the Fos Williams Stand at Alberton Oval, there would be riots.
So if the Tigers say they’ll leave punt road they’ll … what … move to Tarneit ? Epping? Officer? What’s the game plan here?
A club needs its supporters just as much as the supporters need the club. But if the club reckons its support base is no longer Richmond fans who live in Richmond, maybe they *should* become the Tarneit Tigers and leave the punt road oval to local clubs who’ll love it
How about the Pilbara Tigers and if they don’t like moving there then kick them out of the League.
A related case study in rich history falling to corporate blandery is Essendon giving up Windy Hill for its soulless corporate ‘facility’ in Tullamarine. And guess what? The club has dived since moving there—a correlation Caroline Wilson was pondering in her recent footy coverage. The odd corporate type is fine on those boards but once they start to dominate, God help us.