Boroondara Literary Awards 2024

At the Hawthorn Arts Centre on 12 September 2024, the City of Boroondara, together with the Rotary Club of Balwyn, presented the 26th annual Boroondara Literary Awards.

Some may remember that I posted a similar blog entry last year about the 25th annual awards, where my short story ‘Don’t Go In‘ was lucky enough to win both the Third Prize overall, and the special Keith Carroll Award.

Well, it was a case of déjà vu in 2024, because my new short story ‘Expertise‘ won me the Third Prize overall and the Keith Carroll Award again!

The Awards competition, which was first held in 1999, provides awards in seven categories for children and adults. There are six categories for prose and poetry by young writers in three different age levels. The seventh award, the Open Short Story Competition, is open to all Victorian residents, and is given for short stories between 1,500 and 3,000 words in length. The Rotary Club of Balwyn provides the Keith Carroll Award for the best entry submitted in the Open Short Story competition by a Boroondara resident. (Keith Carroll, a writer himself, was Rotary’s driving force behind the launch of the Boroondara Literary Awards in 1999.)

The full list of 2024 awards can be found on the City of Boroondara website, and the published book of the winning works can be bought or borrowed from branches of the Boroondara Library.

‘Expertise‘

Here’s part of the judge’s report on my short story ‘Expertise‘:

“‘Expertise’ [takes] the reader on a wild ride with a protagonist who, from the start, effectively admits to poor impulse control then proves it with every roll of the dice.”

And here are the opening paragraphs of the story ‘Expertise‘:

I’m addicted to online shopping, for which – like everyone else – I blame the pandemic. Before the lockdowns, I seldom if ever bought anything online, but these days I spend most evenings, late into the night, trawling the internet looking for bargains.

The upside is that sometimes I do find bargains. One downside is that, more often than not, I wake up early because some stranger rings my doorbell, dumps a package on the porch, and then runs back down to his van parked on the street before I can answer the door.

That’s how this starts. The doorbell rings insistently, first thing in the morning, and by the time I struggle out of bed and open my front door, the delivery guy has gone, leaving behind two sealed packages.

[I will post the entire short story in this blog at some later date.]

Download the Short Story ‘Don’t Go In’

In October 2023, my short story ‘Don’t Go In‘ was awarded a couple of prizes at the 25th annual Boroondara Literary Awards ceremony; I originally covered the event in the blog post titled Boroondara Literary Awards 2023.

The winning competition entries in those awards were compiled in printed and electronic formats in the Boroondara Literary Awards Anthology 2023. Physical copies of the anthology can be borrowed from City of Boroondara libraries, and an electronic copy can be borrowed via this link on the Boroondara library website.

Or you can download a copy of ‘Don’t Go In’ here as a PDF file.

To download the PDF, click the link at the end of this post, and the PDF file will be copied to your download folder. (Check the Download icon at the top right of your browser window to view its progress.)

Happy reading!

‘Don’t Go In’ by Dennis Callegari  

(Except as permitted by the copyright law applicable to you, you may not reproduce or communicate any of the content on this website, including files downloadable from this website, without the permission of the copyright owner.)

Two Books About The History Of Books

Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
by Irene Vallejo (translated by Charlotte Whittle) Hodder & Stoughton, 2022

The Bookseller of Florence: Vespasiano da Bisticci and the manuscripts that illuminated the Renaissance by Ross King, Random House, 2021

I encountered these books separately and quite by accident, but together they draw a fascinating history of books, how they developed, and how they changed the world.

Of the two books, it is Papyrus by Irene Vallejo whose explicit aim is to show how the development of books has influenced how we are today. Papyrus is divided into two broad sections, ‘Greece Imagines the Future’ and ‘The Roads to Rome’.

‘Greece Imagines the Future’ — whose focus is the ancient Greek/Egyptian city of Alexandria — begins with the earliest stories in ancient Greece, recited from memory by itinerant entertainers such as Homer. The problem with these ‘winged words’ (ἔπεα πτερόεντα) was their reliance on fallible human memory. The invention of an alphabet was able to fix those “winged words” in physical form, but the true survival of those stories would need to depend on some way to transmit them. Papyrus scrolls.

Enter Egypt, the home of papyrus … and of Alexandria and its fabled Library. Papyrus made ‘winged words’ truly portable. But the Library of Alexandria housed the first attempt to collect a copy of every scroll in existence.

The second section, ‘The Roads to Rome’, continues the story at the point where the Alexandrian experiment fails. The citizens of Rome were never shy about admitting that they stole the physical and cultural treasures of the peoples they conquered. The Romans took the literary works of the Greek world, copied and distributed them, and tried to write their own works in imitation of the Greek experience.

But the Romans weren’t just imitators. They also pioneered the development of codexes (codices, if you like) — modern books, books with pages, books that made papyrus scrolls obsolete.

Which is a good entry into the second book on my list….

Vespasiano da Bisticci

Ross King’s The Bookseller of Florence takes one aspect of the broad history covered by Papyrus and illustrates it with the life of one influential citizen of Florence in the 15th century.

Vespasiano da Bisticci was not just a bookseller. He was an entrepreneur at the height of the Italian Renaissance who commissioned copyists, illustrators and bookbinders to find, copy and publish classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome for an eager 15th century market.

Vespasiano’s books introduced him to powerful figures in politics, philosophy, literature and art, in Florence and beyond. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, was the resident poet and painter for one of Vespasiano’s clients. Christopher Columbus annotated some of Vespasiano’s books in the 1470s while working in his brother’s bookshop in Portugal. Leonardo da Vinci’s father was the notary who transferred the lease on Vespasiano’s workshop and bookshop on the occasion of Vespaisano’s retirement in 1480, a retirement that was caused in no small part by yet another technological development — the invention of the printing press.

Some Trivia Gleaned From These Two Books

1. ‘Homer’ was not the given name of the ancient Greek poet. According to one source, his given name was Melesigenes because he was the son of a river nymph and the river Meles in Smyrna. The nickname ‘Homer’ itself is variously explained as meaning ‘blind’ (homeroi in Aeolian) or ‘hostage’ (homeros).
2. The word ‘miniature’, now associated with ‘small painting’, actually derives from the Italian word miniare , the word that Renaissance copyists used to mean to illuminate a manuscript in red.

Boroondara Literary Awards 2023

In a glittering ceremony held at the Hawthorn Arts Centre on 17 October 2023, the City of Boroondara, together with the Rotary Club of Balwyn, presented the 25th annual Boroondara Literary Awards.

The Awards competition, which was first held in 1999, provides awards in seven categories for children and adults. There are six categories for prose and poetry by young writers in three different age levels. The seventh award, the Open Short Story Competition, is open to all Victorian residents, and is given for short stories between 1,500 and 3,000 words in length.

In addition, the Rotary Club of Balwyn provides the Keith Carroll Award for the best entry submitted in the Open Short Story competition by a Boroondara resident. (Keith Carroll, a writer himself, was Rotary’s driving force behind the launch of the Boroondara Literary Awards in 1999.)

The full list of 2023 awards can be found on the City of Boroondara website, and the published book of the winning works can be bought or borrowed from branches of the Boroondara Library.

My reason for mentioning that here, of course, is that my own short story ‘Don’t Go In‘ was fortunate enough to be awarded both Third Prize overall and the Keith Carroll Award as well.

‘Don’t Go In‘

The premise of ‘Don’t Go In‘ is given in the opening paragraphs of the story:

You know this shop.

It sits towards one end of your local shopping strip. The double shopfront has a window furred by years of neglect and a recessed wooden-frame door whose paint peeled off ages ago. In the shop window, there is a cardboard advertisement for a brand of toothpaste that hasn’t existed for four decades.

Hanging off the old-fashioned doorknob is an ancient sign that says CLOSED. It has said CLOSED ever since you were a kid.

You walk past this shop one time too many, and the CLOSED sign now says OPEN.

[Once I’ve worked out the matter of rights and permissions, I may be able to post the entire short story in this blog.]

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Hemingway’s Library

It started with this photo, which was posted to a Facebook group devoted to the author Ernest Hemingway. The caption below the photo read:

Ernest Hemingway On Safari
KENYA – SEPTEMBER 1952: Author Ernest Hemingway writes at a portable table while on a big game hunt in September 1952 in Kenya. (Photo by Earl Theisen/Getty Images)

My attention was immediately drawn to the two books visible on the table. What books were they that Hemingway thought important enough to take with him while hunting big game? Could I find out? Some detective work was called for.

I put on my deerstalker hat and peered at the evidence through my magnifying glass.

To start with, the provided image was too small to make out the book titles. Just too blurry. So, Step 1: Use Google Images to find the biggest image available. That turned out to be an image that was about 2500 pixels square. I opened that image in an image editor. It was still far too blurry, but at least I could now distinguish the name of the book that was underneath: The Chieftain. The only book I could find with that title from the early 1950s was The Chieftain: A Story of the Nez Perce People by Robert Payne, first published in 1953 by Prentice Hall.

I couldn’t be sure if that was the same book on Hemingway’s table; all you can see is the title on its spine. Payne’s book was first published by Prentice-Hall in 1953 … yet the photo caption said the photo was taken in September 1952!

Maybe, I reasoned, Hemingway was given a copy to review (and maybe write a blurb for) before official publication. Maybe it was a different book. Or maybe the date ascribed to the photo (1952) was wrong. Normally, I’be inclined to trust archival data from an organization like Getty Images, but… check your sources!

As it turns out, Ernest Hemingway went on safari to Kenya only twice in his life: first in 1933, and then in 1953. I checked and double-checked that fact, but what finally convinced me was this article, Hemingway in Africa: The Last Safari, by Christopher Ondaatje. It said 1953, not 1952!

I’m sticking with that story. 1953! (Take that, Getty Images.) But it was the other book on the table that had me puzzled for longer.

It is quite a three-pipe problem…

…is what Sherlock Holmes said in the short story “The Red-Headed League”. He went on to add: “…and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”

Even at high magnification, you can’t read the seven-letter author’s name on the front cover of that book. The line drawing below looks like a man’s face, but which man? And the title of the book….

Signs Picdus
Signe Piedus
Signe Picpub

What?

I was stumped. “Signe” can be a woman’s name, so maybe that’s the protagonist’s name? A Google search yielded no good results. (Besides, the drawing on the cover is of a man.) Then I had an inspiration. Maybe somebody made a list of the books that Hemingway owned…. That’s a long shot, I thought.

Actually, everybody seems to have made a list of the books that Hemingway owned. Here are some of those people: https://jfklibrary.libguides.com/hemingway/otherresources. And one of those people made THIS list….

Don’t click on the link below unless you want to download the PDF!

https://jfklibrary.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=38785340

And there on Page 329 of the PDF was this:

6100. Simenon Georges, Signé Picpus, suivi de L’inspecteur Cadavre; Fé1ice est là; Nouvelle exotiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1944. k1 photo EH3568P

It turns out, Hemingway was a big fan of the writer Georges Simenon, and especially of his Maigret books. Signé is the French word for “signed”, and Penguin Books helpfully provided the following summary of the plot for Signé Picpus.

“When a fortune-teller is found murdered in her apartment, Maigret must find out not only who committed the crime, but why it was predicted in a note found earlier—signed by the unknown Picpus.”

And the timing is not a problem, either. Signé Picpus was first serialized in 1941 and first published in book form in 1944. And here’s a copy of the cover. Seem familiar?

At which point, Sherlock Holmes doffed his cap, extinguished his pipe, put away his magnifying glass, closed his eyes and scraped carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee.

Toasted in Glass

The book on the library display said Seven Deadly Sins (and one very naughty fruit). Its author is Mikey Robins, who is better known in Australia as a media personality and comedian rather than a writer.

I picked up the book on that basis but discovered that — while the book emphasises its humorous elements —  it is mostly a survey of little-known culinary information organised in chapters related to the classical ‘seven deadly sins’: gluttony, pride, lust, sloth, wrath, greed and envy. I particularly enjoyed finding out obscure pieces of trivia such as:

Charles Dickens was the first author to mention chips (French fries) in literature.  It happened in his 1859 novel, A Tale of Two Cities. where he describes “husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant drops of oil”. (See this article for some more details.)The term “Dutch courage” isn’t a slur on the bravery of people from the Netherlands.  Dutch courage literally refers to genever/jenever, which is a type of gin originating in the Netherlands. Miguel de Cervantes’ story The Glass Graduate, published in 1613, describes the glass delusion, a peculiar psychiatric disorder from the late medieval period, where people feared that they were made of glass and in danger of shattering into pieces.

My favourite piece of trivia from Seven Deadly Sins (and one very naughty fruit), however, is the origin of the after-dinner tradition of “the toast”.  These days, we toast somebody by simply raising a glass and drinking to honour them, but in Elizabethan times the custom literally required putting toasted bread into a glass of wine.

Shakespeare mentions it in his comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Falstaff demands of Bardolph: “Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in’t.”   According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Toast in its “drinking” senses originates in the practice of immersing browned or charred spiced bread in a drink, and after wishes of goodwill or health or other complimentary words are said about a person or persons (for example, newlyweds) in honor or celebration, the cups of wine, ale, etc., are clinked together in recognition or acknowledgment and are then subsequently sipped, or pounded (depending on the drinker)….

The common reason for adding toast to a drink was to make it more palatable with the spices on the toast, but it also supposedly lessened any bad odor. It is also said that the toast would soak up some of the bitter or acidic sediments in the wine. The bread wasn’t necessarily consumed by the drinker; it was often discarded after it flavored the drink and soaked up any unwanted sediments.

I thoroughly recommend reading (or listening to) Seven Deadly Sins….  And I intend to look out for more of Mikey Robins’ books.  But what about …the Very Naughty Fruit, you ask?  Well, you’ll just have to read about that for yourself, won’t you?

An AI Haiku for Christmas

2022 appears to be the Year that AI (artificial intelligence) became mainstream.

For a few months now I have been experimenting with various AI engines online to generate images like the one opposite.  Sometimes the images are impressive; sometimes they’re a real mess.  I probably will write a piece on the subject in the next couple of weeks.

But AI engines can be used for many purposes.  The media recently have carried several articles about the AI chatbot ChatGPT at https://chat.openai.com/chat. I thought I’d check it out.

The interface is very simple. You enter a string of text — it may be a question, a request or just random chat — and the bot replies.  Sometimes the reply is nearly human; sometimes it’s just confused.

I was chatting to ChatGTP last night, and after conversing with it on subjects such as space exploration, climate change and how to talk to conspiracy theorists, I turned to a more important subject. I asked the bot to write a couple of Christmas haikus.

I’ve mentioned haikus elsewhere before now (for example, here).  The simplest form of English-language haiku is this: a three-line poem whose first and third lines have FIVE syllables, and whose second line has SEVEN syllables.

Here are a couple of examples that the AI came up with. While they’re pretty good, you’ll note also that they’re very much alike. (Also, the AI can’t count syllables very well.)

Winter snow falls softly
Christmas lights twinkle bright
Peace and joy in hearts

Snowflakes gently fall
Families gather near the fire
Christmas joy abounds.

You may also notice that both haikus are northern hemisphere-centric, so I asked ChatGTP to write a haiku about Christmas in the southern hemisphere….

Winter sun shines bright
Christmas cheer fills the air
In the southern land.

I realized that ChatGTP bot still assumed Christmas was in winter.  I instructed the AI that southern-hemisphere Christmas happened in summer, and then asked it to try again.  It came up with this….

In summer’s warmth we bask
Christmas joy fills the air
Ice cold drinks in hand.

I predict that the Hallmark Christmas card space is about to become far more crowded.

My Very Own Mondegreen

Mondegreens are mis-heard song lyrics.

The name itself is a mis-heard song lyric.  As detailed in Wikipedia:

‘The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray” (from Thomas Percy’s 1765 book Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), and mishearing the words “layd him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen”.’

A famous mondegreen is from the song “Our Lips Are Sealed” by the Go Gos, where the song title is often misheard as “Alex the Seal“. The Wikipedia entry I’ve mentioned above describes quite a few more.

Until recently, I didn’t have a personal mondegreen — one I discovered for myself — but then I re-heard the song “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s, a song about partying on the beach, which contains the lyrics (or so I thought):

…
Twistin’ ’round the fire
Havin’ fun
Bakin’ potatoes
Bakin’ in the sun
Put on your noseguard
Put on the Lifeguard
Press the panic button
Here comes a stingray
There goes a manta-ray
….

It suddenly dawned on me that Press the panic button makes no sense at all — unless you’re terrified of stingrays. On a closer listen, “press the panic button” revealed itself to be actually:

Pass the tanning butter

I didn’t know whether to be happy or horrified. But now, at least, I have my very own mondegreen. How about that?

Gems of the Internet No.6: Video Downloaders

Choices.

Do you stream music on Spotify, Apple, Tidal or some other service — or do you buy hard-copy CDs or vinyl?  If you’re a traditionalist like me, you want to own your own copy.  Do you stream movies on Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney and Paramount — or do you buy DVDs or Blu-Rays? If you’re like me, you want to own your own copy.

When you find a short video on the internet — on YouTube, Vimeo or another video site — what do you do? If you’re like me….

I use 4K Video Downloader to download videos from the internet because it makes saving internet videos easy, and it does it without trying to piggyback other applications onto your device.

Like a number of other downloaders, you can use a free version of the program, or a licensed version. (I don’t need the licensed version to do what I want; the free version of the program gives me all the functionality I need)

4K Video Downloader is ridiculously easy to use, and the free version allows you to download up to 30 videos a day — a limit I’ve never come close to reaching.

All you need to do is copy the link from a supported site (in my case, usually YouTube) and press the Paste Link button in 4K Video Downloader. That’s it. Sure, there are a couple of bells and whistles, but I have seldom needed to use any of them.

But there are dozens of video downloaders out there, and you can find many of them with a simple internet search.  You may indeed prefer another program. But why do you need to download videos at all? you may ask. After all, if you found a video online once, you can find it there again, right? Maybe not….

1. Will the video always be online?
   For years, I’d been trying to buy a copy of Jerry Harrison’s Casual Gods album. Couldn’t find a copy anywhere. But YouTube has all the songs on the album, and now the entire album is downloaded on my MusicBee playlist.
2. Will you even remember it?
   I’ve just looked at my recent downloads and rediscovered a Banksy documentary that I had forgotten I’d seen.  I rediscovered a 1959 TV pilot where William Shatner plays Nero Wolfe’s detective sidekick. Your downloader can be your memory.
3. Just plain nostalgia.
   No longer do I need to go online every time I want to hear the opening tune for F Troop, George of the Jungle or Super Chicken. They’re all on my downloader playlist.

If you’re interested in checking out 4K Video Downloader, go here.
https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-videodownloader?r=free_license
https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-youtubetomp3?r=free_license
https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-stogram?r=free_license

I Go to the AFL Grand Final

Once upon a time, any football fan living in the state of Victoria — and particularly in the city of Melbourne — would expect to attend an Australian Football League (AFL) grand final at least once in their life.

That may no longer be the case.  First of all, the price of a ticket to the big game is far higher than most disinterested spectators would want to pay.  Second, the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG, or simply The G), the traditional home of the Grand Final, can hold “only” about 100,000 spectators.  That’s not many seats in a city with a population of four million people. These days, almost all the available tickets are snapped up immediately by paid-up members of the clubs playing in the big game, who get preferential treatment.

Be that as it may, this year I was one of the lucky few to get one of these:

Game Day

On Grand Final day, get there early to avoid the last-minute crush entering the MCG.  The game was scheduled to start at 2:30, so my son and I arrived at 1:00.  The park grounds outside the G were crowded with well-attended concessions and sideshows, but most of us just wanted to get into the stadium.

We found our seats. As expected, Q50 CC-6 (see above) is way up there with the Gods, but at the G that’s not too bad: what you miss in close-ups you gain in a wider view of the whole ground. (And, of course, you can always watch the big TV screen too.)

Pre-Game

I had often wondered why the AFL bothers with its pre-game musical spectacular on Grand Final day each year. After all, the main attraction is the big game itself, right?  Even if the entertainment was as successful as Lionel Ritchie in 2010.  (Let’s not dwell on the Meatloaf debacle of 2011.)

The epiphany struck me sometime between 1 and 2 o’clock. The point of the pre-game entertainment isn’t the musical act at all.  It’s to prevent enormous crowds from surging through the turnstiles only minutes before the first bounce of the ball.  Nevertheless, it’s important to make the pre-game entertainment entertaining enough to put those bums in those seats.

This year the Grand Final entertainer was the singer Robbie Williams, who was a really big name a number of years ago (everywhere but the USA), and still has the star power to draw a crowd.  And he knows how to play the audience. He started with a challenge:

“I’m going to be phenomenal, so you better be good!”

Making that statement takes great confidence in your ability to deliver what you promise, but it also makes sure that the audience is instantly engaged and ready to contribute.  And it’s a bit of a confidence trick as well, just as there is when a tradesman, on finishing a job, tells you that he wishes he could take a photo of his work because it was so good. The work may indeed be good, but the tradie would have said it anyway to persuade you that it was good.

Outcome: Williams delivered on his promise. He sang the hits that people wanted to hear, he celebrated the life of the late, great Shane Warne, and he sang Aussie legend John Farnham’s You’re the Voice as a tribute to Farnham, who had just undergone major cancer surgery.

The Game! (First Half)

Both Geelong and Sydney came into the Grand Final on impressive winning streaks — 15 games in a row for the Geelong Cats and 9 for the Sydney Swans — but the Geelong team had finished the regular season on top of the premiership ladder and went into the game as warm favourites.  That didn’t matter to the fans.  Both sides were well supported and their respective fan groups in allocated spaces formed a patchwork of blue/red/blue/red/blue. Local Geelong fans somewhat outnumbered the interstate Sydney fans (as expected) but the noise level didn’t reflect it.

The first quarter was an even contest for the first few minutes, but even then the signs for Sydney were ominous, because the players keeping Sydney in the game were not the team’s stars.  And then Geelong’s favourite son, Tom Hawkins, kicked the first goal and then the second.  Sydney fought back with a goal of their own, but after that came an avalanche of Geelong goals (worth 6 points) and behinds (worth one point).  The quarter-time score was 6.5 (41) to 1.0 (6).

Sitting with a group of Geelong supporters at quarter time was a festive occasion. (And, I presume, not so festive in Sydney sections.)  At such times, footy commentators start talking about ‘momentum shifts’ where a team that seemed down and out suddenly springs to life.  And to be fair, that sometimes happens.

The second quarter gave Sydney fans some hope.  Sydney scored the first goal and competed more effectively thereafter.  At the end of the quarter, the score stood at 9.8 (62) to 4.2 (26), with Geelong extending their lead by a single point.

Half Time

There was a bit more of a buzz at half time. Yes, Geelong was 36 points up but (as every commentator will tell you) what one team can do in the first half, the other can do in the second half.

The buzz was not reflected in the half-time musical entertainment.  AFL half-time entertainment is not like the Superbowl.  Performers have half an hour to bump in, perform for 15 minutes, and then bump out. Look, it’s not their fault. (You try entertaining an audience in 15 minutes when all they want to do is see the rest of the game.)

How to make it better?  Ditch the half-time musical act. Replace it with something sports-related.  They used to have the Grand Final sprint, where some players whose teams didn’t qualify for the match have a good-humoured 100-metre footrace. Bring that back.  Have a goal-kicking contest! A tug-of-war! An obstacle race!

The Game! (Second Half)

If Sydney was to win the game, they would have to start strongly in the third quarter.  Instead, Geelong scored another 6.5 to Sydney’s solitary behind.  By halfway through the third quarter, the game was essentially over.  If you were a Sydney supporter, you would be bitterly disappointed. If you were a disinterested football fan, your impartial interest would evaporate. If you were a commentator, you’d be straining to make it sound interesting.

But if you were a Geelong supporter, you’d be in seventh heaven.  The stress, the tension was gone. Our boys had done it. A year of uncertainty and anticipation, of ups and downs, of fearing disappointment … had evaporated.  A day of suspense was over. From that point, it didn’t matter if Geelong won by a hundred points or a single goal. We did it. Who cares what other people think about the game?

As the teams tired in the last quarter, the scoring evened out again. Both teams scored freely: five goals to Geelong, four to Sydney. If you ignored the scoreboard, you could enjoy the skills on display.  But, of course, there was no thrill of uncertainty left. Geelong fans were still ecstatic, and everybody else just wanted it to be over.

Soon enough it was. At the final siren, the score was Geelong 20.13 (133), Sydney 8.4 (52).

Post-Game

The PA system blared the Geelong club song, with Geelong fans singing along. And then the PA played the song again.  And once more. A presentation area was set up in the middle of the grounds. Teams, umpires and officials were thanked. Awards were given. A speech from the losing captain was followed by a speech from the winning captain and coach.

The official part finished, and then the winning team carried the premiership cup around the ground to present to their delirious fans.  Families and friends were allowed onto the ground.  At some point, the celebration would move to an off-stadium venue, but not yet. 

Outside the ground, premiership merch was sold, and the fans went away either happy or sad.  See you in six months’ time for the 2023 season.