New Helen Garner book The Season uses football to create a tender portrait of youthful masculinity
Garner has found international acclaim in her 80s, with the recent reissue of The Children's Bach and This House of Grief in the US. (Supplied: Text Publishing)
"Beyond a certain age women become invisible in public spaces," Helen Garner wrote in her 2016 essay, The Insults of Age.
While it's hard to imagine anyone ignoring Garner — one of Australia's most respected authors — she leans into the invisibility of old age in her latest book, The Season, an account of her grandson's season playing under-16s football in Melbourne's western suburbs.
Garner — a Western Bulldogs fan of 20 years' standing — developed a renewed appreciation of AFL during Melbourne's lengthy COVID lockdowns. She writes early in The Season:
"[AFL] made me feel lucky to be alive … I saw that it's a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry. It revives us. It sustains us."
For Garner, football is "men's territory" and, in her deeper engagement with the sport, she began to perceive men afresh: "I started to glimpse what is grand and noble, and admirable and graceful about men."
A portrait of masculinity
In The Season, Garner uses her "invisibility" to gain entry to a world that would normally be off limits to her.
"I'm trying to write about footy and my grandson and me," Garner writes in The Season. (Supplied: Text Publishing)
Out of lockdown and at a loose end, Garner asks her grandson, Amby, if she can come along to training. She meets with the coach, a 20-year-old uni student named Archie, who gives her the green light to write about the team.
She becomes a "silent witness" to the U16s Colts training sessions and games. The boys, in their youthful arrogance, pay her no mind as she shivers on the sideline, leaving her free to observe and take notes.
On one level, The Season is a book about football and the distinctive Victorian reverence for the game. Garner makes much of the sport as a social ritual: where other social institutions like religion have eroded, football persists, offering a sense of community, connection and belonging.
"Football is sacred," a stranger at a bar tells Garner. She is in full agreement.
But her latest book is also a portrait of youthful masculinity.
Teenage boys often get a bad rap in public discourse, frequently depicted through the lens of toxic masculinity. Garner paints Amby and his friends in a different, more flattering light.
Her grandson is thoughtful, sensitive, brave and beautiful, "trembling on the cusp of manhood".
But then, she would say that; she's his grandmother. Garner dispenses with anything resembling objectivity in her affectionate study of her youngest grandson, who is the star around which the narrative spins. Family members are defined by their relationship to Amby: Garner's daughter and son-in-law are referred to as Amby's mum and dad respectively, rather than by their first names.
Garner lives next door to her daughter's family – including the young Amby – in Melbourne's western suburbs. (Darren James)
She offers other brief sketches of men throughout.
Stiff-legged septuagenarians kick a ball in the park in the fading light; Amby's punk-loving brother improvises "an enchanting, light-footed, delicate melody" on the piano; a plumber blinks back tears as he reveals a tattoo memorialising his now-deceased pet dogs. Taken together, these portraits present a positive version of masculinity in contemporary society.
'A little life-hymn'
At moments in The Season, Garner can't help but reject the silent witness role, occasionally casting it aside in her grandmotherly desire to worship youthful potential.
She promises herself not to become "a servant or a fan" at the start of the season, but she's soon reverently presenting the boys with half-time oranges, in thrall to their physical prowess.
For all her passion, she remains adamant that the rules of the game are beyond her – despite the time she spends watching, reading about and discussing the sport. Her avowed ignorance works in the reader's favour, allowing non-footy types an easy entrée into the world of ruckmen, "torps" and tackles.
Garner's forays into gender essentialism work less well.
She often points to inherent differences between men and women: ribbing boys for their carelessness, wondering if "pinching is sort of girly", and at one point reflecting on her son-in-law's love for football: "How deep it goes in men, this bond, this loyalty."
But footy fandom is not the realm of blokes — the sold-out crowd at the 2024 AFLW grand final makes that abundantly clear.
However, there's more to The Season than just men and footy. This is also a book about growing older.
Garner writes with disarming honesty about her experience of aging: not just the physical signs — the slowing body and loss of hearing — but the fear of becoming redundant and forgotten.
Footy steps in to give her purpose and lift her out of her low moments. Every morning, she flips straight to the footy pages, revelling in the poetic language she finds there.
Crafted in Garner's sparse and evocative prose, The Season is a love letter: to football and the communities it creates, to Melbourne's western suburbs, and especially to her grandson and his family.
Garner — who describes her book as "a little life-hymn" — says it best: the book is "a record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die".
The Season is out through Text Publishing.