Australia a country with no culture: David Gower

[Flem274*]

I don't know...Nate Myles headbutts his opponents all the time and he seems alright. Although you could argue that ****ting in a hotel hallway may have been the result of one too many head knocks.

Married Fiery as well iirc

/cricsimjokes

 

[Furball]

I don't know...Nate Myles headbutts his opponents all the time and he seems alright. Although you could argue that ****ting in a hotel hallway may have been the result of one too many head knocks.

Judging by his complete non reaction to getting punched by Gallen, I've come to the conclusion that Nate Myles' head is in actual fact a rock.

 

[the big bambino]

Married Fiery as well iirc

/cricsimjokes

Fiery? I know a cricket forum poster by that handle. He came from kiwiland. Bit of a troll and flame war legend. You couldn't be referring to that poster could you?

 

[Maximas]

wtf how did NFL enter this thread

That was me, sigh

 

[Backlash]

I agree with you that the administration of cricket over the last 5 or so years has been dire. Sutherland will be remembered as the man who banned beer snakes. He is a total ****.

After Sutherland's reign of terror is finally over he will be remembered for far more than that.

He will be the man remembered for helping to kill off Cricket.

 

[Howe_zat]

Fiery? I know a cricket forum poster by that handle. He came from kiwiland. Bit of a troll and flame war legend. You couldn't be referring to that poster could you?

He used to post here too. Until recently he posted at cricsim, where a lot of us do as well. He's a bit of a case study.

 

[fredfertang]

Top bloke is Fiery, if a little excitable - currently living in leafy Surrey, so he's one of ours now

 

[Furball]

Top bloke is Fiery, if a little excitable - currently living in leafy Surrey, so he's one of ours now

He's anything but a top bloke.

 

[Flem274*]

Fiery? I know a cricket forum poster by that handle. He came from kiwiland. Bit of a troll and flame war legend. You couldn't be referring to that poster could you?

That sounds like him.

 

[the big bambino]

He's anything but a top bloke.

If its the same chap (and I suspect it is) I can only agree with you.

 

[hendrix]

One thing that constantly amazes me about NFL is how bad they are at tackling as it actually isn't all that common to see a guy take down his opponent cleanly when attempting to tackle front-on - generally, it's a half-clip quasi shoulder charge that simply puts the guy off balance

Honestly, it's starting to creep into League and Union as well.

As someone else mentioned, it's the Sportscentre influence.

Having said that, here's how they're taught to tackle in NFL:
How to Tackle in Football (with Pictures) - wikiHow

Get your head ACROSS the ball carrier's body and in his path. If the ball carrier is going to your left, when you make the tackle he should be on the right side of your head. The opposite is true if he's running to your right. This will make him less likely to fall forward for an extra yard or so. This can make a huge difference on second, third and fourth downs. You will also be able to better hold the ball carrier next to you, making it harder for him to break the tackle. Again, keep your head up through this step to make sure you are not leading with your helmet.

i.e. the exact opposite of what we're taught in rugby.

I think part of the reason is that it's not a big issue for them if they run out into the touch line.

With rugby and league, a defender uses the touchline to shepherd the attacking runner, but with NFL that's pointless since all they have to worry about is going forward in any way possible and it doesn't matter if they run out because they retain possession.

 

[CWB304]

CWB, you have used a large number of words and remarkably self-righteous, condescending and overwrought rhetoric to say something that is completely useless, unoriginal and lacking any intellectual merit. Not to mention the quasi-racist, colonial-era tones of cultural superiority and a remarkable lack of any form of relativism whatsoever. Boas would be turning in his grave.

Petit bourgeoisie posting.

Sorry you didn't appreciate my post. Perhaps it was a little on the harsh side. The main point I was making is that, while of course every country has its chavs/bogans/trailer trash etc., in Oz it seems this sort of thing is very much in the public square, and part of the official "culture". Politicians, officials, public figures in general take pride in being boorish, oafish and bumptious. Basically uncouth. Think of someone like John Howard. And, speaking of Howard, or rather his entourage, where else but Australia would you hear of an official opposition party hosting a fundraising dinner featuring the following menu item: "Julia Gillard [Australia's Prime Minister] Kentucky Fried Quail: Small Breasts and Huge Thighs and A Big Red Box"? Pure misogyny of the most basic and hateful kind, which can hardly be passed off as the work of chavs/bogans who can be found in every country. These people are supposed to be your elites, for crying out loud! The place must be almost unbearable for anyone with delicate sensibilities, and every time I read such a story I recall what my exiled Australian friends (all but one of whom works in the arts) have said about living there.

Drawing attention to these aspects is neither racist, as some on this thread have foolishly claimed - despite my comments making clear that, despite my own affiliations, I have a lot more respect for say Chinese or Aboriginal cultural achievements than I do for those of the present day Australians of British Isles descent - nor "petit bourgeoisie" (sic). [Incidentally, you made a small grammatical errror there; I might be a petit bourgeois (masculine), but the class you're referring to, no doubt pejoratively, is the petite bourgeoisie (feminine)]. I'm just trying to draw attention to something which strikes me as unfortunate given all the good things Australia has going for it. I genuinely hope that this aspect of Australian life improves with time. It is potentially an amazing place, and cities like Melbourne and Sydney are, even as things stand, among the score or so best places to live in the world. But people shouldn't get so defensive about criticism, or stoop to playground taunts because they don't agree with what others have to say. When they react in that way that in itself is a sign of a lack of maturity and perspective. People in the UK regularly hear much worse things about this place, both from people who are from here and from foreigners, and they mostly couldn't give a toss about the misdirected criticisms while taking on board the ones that are accurate and/or well-intentioned.

 

[Tangles]

I spent time growing up in both England and Oz. England was all about Football. On the schoolyard, in school or on the streets it was the thing we always played to pass time. Cricket was considered in the same bracket as Rugger. Something the private school kids played.

In Oz it was always Cricket. Summer or winter with anything resembling a bat and a ball it was on. Hell a 15 min recess was an excuse to play some cricket. From my discussions with work colleagues from India it seems they have similar stories about playing cricket as kids all the time with whatever they had.

 

[Maximas]

Interesting Tangles, growing up in suburban Aus, it was entirely seasonal. If it was summer, we played backyard cricket until it was dark, while in winter we kicked the footy on the street till it was dark, occasionally played some basketball or soccer (especially during the 06 WC) for variety.

 

[fredfertang]

I'm going to send a link to this thread to Sky - would love to know what Mr Gower's reaction to it would be

 

[Furball]

I'm going to send a link to this thread to Sky - would love to know what Mr Gower's reaction to it would be

For those not watching the England v New Zealand ODI, Gower has basically admitted to doing a bit of trolling with his comments and that he finds the furore caused by them quite amusing.

He'd get a good chuckle out of it.

 

[BoyBrumby]

He's no fool, Lord Gah. Knew exactly what he was saying.

Might've been in the same profession as fred, Burgey, Jono, Mr z et al had talent not intervened; his undergraduate degree was in Law.

 

[zaremba]

I would like to place on record my profound sympathy to those of our more sensitive contributors who are experiencing such a deep sense of shock at this cruel racist onslaught. Likewise I'm sure that the Welsh are still reeling from the racist attack from Justin Langer in 2009, who similarly described the crowd at Cardiff as "feral" - Justin Langer's leaked Ashes dossier slams Wales crowd - Cricket Blog - Mirror.co.uk. It can take a while to get over these things - it's the internal scars that take the longest to heal.

Why would Gower and Langer say such shocking things? The generous interpretation might be that they have each been on the receiving end of endless and tiresome drunken abuse from the crowds in question. But I just can't buy that. To my mind, the far more credible explanation is that this is nothing more than racism and neo-colonialism, pure and simple.

 

[zaremba]

In entirely unrelated news, following his recent foul-mouthed Twitter tirade, David Warner assaults opponent after losing game of cricket.

 

[watson]

Gower was clearly trolling, and his misuse of the word "culture" is problematic. But there's more than a grain of truth to his comments. Which is why so many Australians have responded, rather than simply ignoring him as they would have had he not touched a nerve. The truth is that the majority of persons capable of making 'cultural' contributions - I'm talking about the major contributors, whose books are read, paintings admired, plays watched etc, by people from all cultures long after they're dead - tend to find Australia highly uncongenial, and leave. Which is why the country has made no major or even memorable contribution in the arts apart from the plastic art of the marginalized Aboriginal minority. Being an excrescence of European culture, and a peripheral and contingent one at that, I imagine it must be difficult for Australians to come to terms with the fact that Europeans are looking for something more than just 'their stuff' done badly, from such a potentially interesting continent.

Someone earlier posted a list of no-names and no-hopers (including Germain Greer :-)) and the poverty of the list kind of illustrates the problem. When you are forced to scrape the barrel in this way you really have a problem. Were my eyes deceiving me or was the lightweight TV pundit who reckons himself as a major thinker Clive James not mentioned rather optimistically by someone here also? Poor Australia, it really is the land of the living dead, "culturally" speaking (I'm following Gower's use of the term, even though I disagree with it). I have a few Australian friends and acquaintances here in London and most never return to the land of their birth which they find shallow and culturally uninteresting. They mostly left because they weren't particularly interested in sport, barbies, the beach, and other staples of the Australian way of life - in fact they mostly considered such as the Australian way of death.

I suppose the main problem is that this outdoorsy, unreflective lifestyle is not particularly conducive to the heroic internal struggles - alone but emboldened by a sense of being in some sort of cosmic competition with other creators for a share of immortality - without which cultural progressions are all but impossible. And, being distant from the cultural hubs of former times - it could be argued that there are no culture bearing areas today, as we've all been bludgeoned into submission by an American cultural totalitarianism of awful music, movies ,fashions etc, that, for all their aesthetic shortcomings, are made all the more disgusting for being economically driven. So in one respect it could be said that even a desert like Oz is no worse off than somewhere which once had a thriving culture - Paris say, or Vienna, or even London. All these places are now just dumping grounds for American trash posing as pop-culture, and the greatest extant culture, in China, has of course long-since been completely obliterated by the communists-turned-hereditary-capitalist-extractive elite who have enslaved a fifth of humanity.

I was actually intending to make a few short witty points but it seems I've rambled way off topic. Apologies ;-) Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that the number of outraged posts by Australians on this thread and elsewhere - I read some particularly cringeworthy comments in the Guardian the other day - suggests they would be better of in future NOT attempting to measure their society against some putative "world class" cultural standard, and not reacting defensively to such banter. There's absolutely no point. What we used to think of as "culture" is not part of life anywhere these days as it is no longer being produced, merely reproduced.

What Australians should do is to concentrate on eradicating the last vestiges of the ocker element which can defnitely still be seen - for instance in the last year or two I can recall reading about instances of harrassment of and violence against students from India, a rather shameful incident involving some female French tourists on a bus, and of course about the radio "prank" - the kind of prank, soliciting private medical information about a woman experiencing her first pregnancy, which probably only Australians would 'get' - call which led to the suicide of a nurse. This would help to ensure that anyone capable of writing say a worthwhile novel or play won't automatically head for the exit as soon as he or she is able to do so, as they tend to do now. When Aussies have finally tossed out the ocker element as a stereotype to be lived up to and even to be boasted of in the public square, then the "lucky country" might become, if not exactly cultured, at least a more congenial place to live in.

Brilliant!

But you've failed to appreciate CW is that 'ockerism' is not peculiar to Australian culture. Those of us who have sat in a taverna in Greece and listened to Brit's demand Fish n' Chips, and "none of that local muck" soon realise that there is not a lot of difference between Sydney's South West and England's North East.

Yes, Australia has enough sophisticated culture to get by. But unfortunately it's just not obvious to the eyes of European people used to seeing a Cathredral or a Castle on 'every corner'. It requires a little diligent searching.