The A Team

Those accustomed to the dilapidated nature of English football grounds will be suitably awed by Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium. Maybe all football stadiums are like this now - plasma screens, airconditioning and inbuilt food stalls selling nachos. The beauty of supporting a team like Swindon Town is that it’s possible to believe that nothing has really changed much for the past hundred years.

Given the sunken nature of the Suncorp pitch, the ground resembled a leaky goldfish bowl when the Big Floods hit in January, retaining the waters which climbed into the first ten rows and no doubt seeped into the boys changing rooms. The first game back on the freshly drained and sandy turf was last week’s football game between Brisbane Roar and Gold Coast United - the last game of the A-League - and judging by the 20,000 strong crowd, with their faithful flags, Magnum Ice and $6 beers, you would be right in thinking that the whole ghastly catastrophe of the previous month had all just been some terribly messy dream.

‘Roar’, of course, sounds more like a breakfast cereal than a football team. They play in a sort of fluorescent orange; a dribbling vision of monosodium glutamate. Gold Coast United have a more boring name and possess an unfortunate affliction of having to play in the same colours as the Brazilian national team. But you won’t confuse the two: Roar win with a convincing 4-0 victory (the first of which is scored after three minutes), securing their place as A-League champions and not without a certain flair. Roar winger Henrique is particularly sprightly; he may be more Julian Joachim than Michael Owen, but he’s still the sort of ferreting annoyance to cause any defence an awful bother, while the fourth goal was a training ground tap in thanks to a napping Gold Coast who were already half way down the M1 by that point.

All of which concludes a triumphant season for the local Brisbane team, who finish top of the league and with a 25 game unbeaten run. That’s pretty good, considering they finished second from bottom last season. Brisbane Roar now go through into a ridiculous play-off situation to decide the overall A-League champions, which is something synonymous with American sports and thankfully unheard of in Europe. By this token, and despite an incredible season, a team like Central Coast Mariners (who finished second) could still possibly go on to nab the final trophy. As someone brought up to believe that points mean prizes, I find this a baffling concept. Regardless, Brisbane Roar will play Central Coast Mariners tonight, the first of two legs, while Gold Coast United play Melbourne Victory tomorrow.

I should make some horribly glib remark regarding the quality of the football being particularly accurate for someone already accustomed to watching Swindon Town, but then the English often forget just how lucky they are to have the best football league in the world. Not that the fans have any chance of watching it, of course. Thanks to a special discount designed to get bums on seats, we acquire six tickets for the game for only $60. That’s ten bucks each - around six English pounds. You’d be lucky to buy braising steak from Woolworths for that price.

But the A-League and football in general has a larger following here than you might think, particularly over the last few years, even enough to warrant a faction of noisy, aggressive fandom. We’re not quite talking the likes of Leeds’ Service Crew here - the ‘Den’ and the ‘Orange Army’ have a fair bit of disgraceful catching up to do in that regard - but their small legion of psychotics already have a small set list and an enthusiastic drummer, and that goes a long way. Bizarrely, they may even have a political agenda: a banner during the second half reads ‘Justice for the NT’ to the bemusement even of my Australian company. Perhaps a statement against social inequality in the Northern Territory? I might be wrong, but if I'm not, then I think Millwall fans could learn a lot from these hoons.

When Australians discuss the Big Things, they’re not always referring to issues like aboriginal land rights, or excessively right wing immigration policies, or Julia Gillard’s dress sense. They might be, of course, but more than likely they will be referring to Things of a much grander scale. Perhaps as an antidote to the boredom of long distance driving, or maybe as a result of all that vast, empty space causing eccentric country settlers to completely lose their grasp on normality, but a wonderfully pointless series of giant objects can be found up and down the land - hidden, mostly, but completely wonderful in their pointlessness.

Green-bashing nay-sayers may bemoan the elegant spinning wind turbines that charge across parts of the British countryside, but at least they serve a purpose. The same can be said for electricity pylons, telephone masts, satellite dishes. Ugly to some, yes, but indispensable to the way we live. Some Big Things are there just to be there: the Eiffel Tower, the Angel of the North, the Washington Monument may present nothing more than a minor threat to low-flying aircraft, yet their awesome artistic stretch and sense of identity never fails to inspire. But if you head north along the Pacific Highway out of Brisbane and into the Sunshine Coast town of Nambour, Queensland, you’ll find the type of monolith that quite defies all you thought you knew about the Big Things in life.

Because this is where you’ll find The Big Pineapple. Built in 1971, I’m not certain of its specific measurements, but I’m sitting next to it in the picture opposite and, as you can see, it’s pretty damn big. Pretty big for a piece of fruit, anyway. Many of Australia’s Big Things are merely promotional gimmicks - the awesome Big Prawn in Ballina, the Big Banana in Coff’s Harbour, a Big Hotdog in Radcliffe - but this grossly oversized fibre-glass construction sits outside a macadamia nut farm, which just doesn’t make any sense at all. Research reveals that there is also a Big Macadamia on site, but we arrive on a Sunday and we can’t get close enough to confirm this.

A sign on the gate reveals that The Big Pineapple is “closed for future changes”. While you ponder what sort of changes could possibly be required, I should add that it is possible for visitors to climb inside the pineapple and, peering through it’s tropical plumage, observe the nut farm, petting zoo and its surrounding environs like some kind of pioneering fruit Tsar. Once upon a time, there was another giant pineapple further up the road in Gympie - “the original,” apparently, presumably said with some menace - but this was quite upsettingly pulled down in 2008. You seriously have to question the merits of a place with such a spoil sport mentality, especially one with a name like Gympie.

But a similar fate that may befall this Big Pineapple, as the site is now under new ownership following a $533,700 bill from the Australian Taxation Office forcing the previous owners into receivership. It’s future is uncertain, which evidently explains why the place is practically off limits, bolted shut with desolate car parks (yes, there are two car parks) humming to the tune of bored boy racers performing handbrake turns across a stretch of empty bitumen. That’s right: the Big Pineapple might get the squash.

You probably won’t believe me, but at it’s peak, Their Royal Highnesses Charles and Diana popped in to The Big Pineapple to have a ride on one of their toy trains during a recce of the plantation in 1982. They were growing pineapples back then, too, presumably before an insurmountable expenses bill caused the humble Queensland farmer to diversify and flounder, struggling against the monetary force of their own fruit salad. Blimey, who would have thought that giant fruit could be so depressing?

The week long, biannual Lifeline Brisbane Bookfest - which takes place in a convention centre roughly the same size as Moscow - is much more than a place where fads go to die, although if pictures paint a thousand words, then this photo would presumably include much better words than those of Dan Brown's in The Da Vinci Code, which seems to have been so eagerly abandoned that the organisers had to give the book its very own section. There were similar drop off points for Pamela Stephenson’s Billy and Halliwell’s Film Guides from the 1980s. The target for Lifeline was to raise $1 million in funds for Flood Relief, and they had successfully made well over half their total just on the opening weekend.

The Bookfest is an epic, endless search for those with the time and the inclination, and I just adore second hand book sales. I love the nosey, sticky beak nature of it almost as much as the hunt for that rare find: from a books’ ghostly inscription (“For Mum, Merry Christmas, 1977”) to the odd surprise of finding some misplaced family relic, like the photograph of someone’s child in the goat enclosure of a petting zoo that I found in a copy of Bill Wannan’s Folklore of the Australian Pub.

And how cheap! In a week that the Borders book store goes into administration, there can surely be only small condolences for a store which charges such astronomical prices for products that could be obtained at a fraction of the cost on the internet. The death of the corporate chain will only make niche independent book stores more relevant. Just remember to really stock up next time.

Kiss My Yasi

On Wednesday, News.com.au ran this rather terrifying superimposed graphic of what Cyclone Yasi would look like if placed over the continents of the world. With a diameter of 250 miles (400km), the storm quite comfortably swallows the whole of England, the state of Louisiana, and half of New Zealand.

Furious gusts of up to 285kph - flattening the towns of Tully, Cardwell and Innisfail - somehow managed to avoid killing anyone, but certainly made an aggressive attempt. Quickly identified as a Category 5 cyclone, Yasi was more intense than both 2006’s Larry and 1974’s Tracy, the latter of which convincingly destroyed the town of Cairns and 71 of its inhabitants over the Christmas period. And that was a Category 4 cyclone. Category 5 is the highest you can get: “extremely dangerous with widespread destruction,” according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website, which over the past month has become the home page for nearly all Queenslanders.

Channel 7 cancelled their scheduling for another hysterical non-stop talk fest, whipping the winds into a further frenzy and giving Queensland Premier Anna Bligh an ample platform to reclaim her soap box. She earned it well and truly with her compassion and sentimentality during the January floods, where she actually broke down in tears during a press conference, inspired by the selfless nature and courage of those affected by the carnage. This is now referred to as The Queensland Spirit. You can even buy your own slice of The Queensland Spirit on three CDs, with all proceeds going to the Flood Relief Appeal.

Bligh was back like a rampant Rambo commanding the TV coverage with her well honed, Churchill esque rhetoric, as if she might be preparing to head north and physically wrestle with the cyclone from the state’s shoreline. This was no storm in a teacup, as Bligh issued her final warning: “You have to take this window of opportunity now. Do not bother to pack bags, just grab each other and get to an area of safety. People are irreplaceable. We shall fight this on the beaches. We will never surrender.” Yes, OK, I may have embellished that a little, but with such positive public support, surely Bligh couldn’t possibly fail to retain her premiership when it comes to next year’s state elections. Heck, you would believe she was practically running the country right now, making sour-faced Labour compadre Ms Gillard look like some form of robotic intern.

If such a thing exists as The Queensland Spirit, then surely it's very embodiment can be explained by a simple sign in a Cairns café which reads, ‘Kiss my Yasi’. So it might be an idiosyncratic mixture of both tenderness and bravado, of laughing in the face of adversity, and a sort of underdog mentality: like the Bulldog Spirit, but a bulldog in thongs and a singlet. It’s actually a media invention, mostly, purported by the likes of Channel 7, who threw caution to the wind and their sanity out the window with the sort of excruciating news coverage that could actually warrant the end of the earth.

Still buoyed by the horrifically captivating scenes of Brisbane’s monumental floods, the network went into full 24-hour disaster porn mode, reporting on news that hadn’t even happened and, then when it did, a complete loss of power guaranteed that the majority of it would be completely incomprehensible. At one point, nonsensical two-ways were broadcast via Skype and a reporter’s iPhone. With journalists clearly exempt from evacuation notices, the most anyone could possibly deduce from this garbled interference was that actually, yes, it was really very windy outside. “But just how windy is it?” and so on and so on and so on.

But it’s hard to take such excessive scaremongering seriously when members of the public are continuing with their daily routines in the background. Category 5 cyclones may be unique in their severity, but storms are not unfamiliar to Australia. We are now entering a tropical cyclone season. There is actually a specified season for this, and the Bureau of Meteorology are predicting more cyclones to follow.

Being English and completely unaware of what to do in this situation, you can be sure that Toxic Math is taking precautions. I’m told the safest place is the bath tub. But without one, I’ll just be standing in the shower until this whole thing blows over.

One of the reoccurring debates on Australia Day is the design of the flag - it's an annual patriotic sticking point, like having the Queen on a postage stamp. Modern consensus seems to suggest that the Southern Cross bit is quite alright, but what really gnaws on the public conscious is that Union Flag in the top left. I was a bit surprised at the extent of vehemence considering just how many Australians proudly fly the flag even when they’re not annually obliged to do so. I can honestly say that I have never felt the need to paint a flag on my face. Any flag, for that matter. Yet Australia Day passed in a sea of blue, red and white, seemingly proud of it’s symbolic gesture despite the design.

All of which links us back to the country’s colonial past and the significance of January 26 as the date when the first British fleets sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788 (and not when Captain Cook first landed in Australia, which actually happened in April some 18 years earlier). But what most Australians actually prefer to celebrate is the notion of not having to go into work, bolstered by a unified but jovial sense of celebrating their national identity. Which is why the day is traditionally spent around a barbecue, tucking into lamingtons, damper and assorted bush tucker, with the odd eccentric past time to boot: cockroach racing, for one, and even the odd thong-throwing competition. Sadly, I’m completely stumped to conjure up a British equivalent, other than eating fish and chips, at a bus stop, while it rains. On a Tuesday.

Australia Day is instead referred to as ‘Invasion Day’ by some, used as evidence of yet another aspect of marginalising the country’s indigenous population. Given that the oldest Aboriginal art in parts of South Australia are estimated to be around 40,000 years old, and that the indigenous population possessed the lay of the land for about another 20,000 years on top of that is food for thought especially to those who seem to regard Australia as a young country. I noted a greater sense of inclusion and compassion on the day in recognition of the country’s first Australians, but more can and should be done on all the other days. So perhaps a new flag is necessary, but one with a bit more yellow, red and black.

I will end on the results of this year’s Triple J Hottest 100, which is slowly announced over the course of Australia Day on the ABC’s flagship Gen Y radio station. And just what did those rebellious, pill-popping, know-all teen layabouts in their trendy sneakers vote for as the nation’s best record of the year? ‘Big Jet Plane’ by sleepy folk siblings Angus and Julia Stone. I know. Those crazy bastards.