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.