Whaddarya? David Slack epitomises the thinking, egalitarian, inclusive and creative half of New Zealand society that has always been so feared and despised by the hyper-masculine, woman-hating, anti-intellectual, Rugby-worshipping half. How we Kiwis have made one nation out of two such mutually hostile traditions was the subject of David's "Salon" spot at Ika Seafood Bar & Grill on Tuesday night.
ALL NEW ZEALANDERS must live with Rugby. There is no
possibility of escaping, and absolutely no chance of ignoring it. Rugby, love
it or hate it, has exerted, and continues to exert, a tremendous influence on
the way New Zealand presents itself to the world. It has certainly left its
mark on David Slack. In the “Salon” spotlight at the Ika Seafood Bar &
Grill on Tuesday night (25/8/15) the professional speech-writer, author and
broadcaster proved how impossible it is to discuss New Zealand’s brutal national
game without, at the same time, discussing the nature of the society which
supports it – and oneself.
Slack was born in Feilding, a small town in the Manawatu,
that could easily have been the setting for Greg McGee’s extraordinary play
about Rugby, Foreskin’s Lament. The sort of town about which these lines
from the play could have been written:
“This is a team game, son, and the town is the team. It’s
the town’s honour at stake when the team plays, god knows there’s not much else
around here.”
The frankly fascist implications of the statement “the town
is the team” need little elucidation. It was Mussolini, after all, who came up
with the slogan: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing
against the state.”
Slack’s description of his Fielding contemporaries as
“knuckle-dragging sons of the soil” speaks eloquently of a young boy made to
feel like an “exile” from his own country. Growing up in Fielding, Slack’s
subversively divergent personal priorities (he read books!) would elicit from
his peers, over and over again, the single, brute interrogatory: “Whaddarya!”
“Whaddarya!” is, literally, the last word of Foreskin’s
Lament. Its electrifying effect produced by McGee’s inspired inversion of
the word’s usual purpose. Instead of drawing attention to the “other’s”
difference – and so confirming his or her exclusion from the team/town/nation –
the word was hurled back in the audience’s face. “Whaddarya!” was McGee’s
defiant challenge to a country that was already, in 1980, gearing up to welcome
the Springbok ambassadors of apartheid.
1981 – and all that. The Springbok Tour cannot be avoided in
any honest discussion of New Zealand Rugby (unless, of course, you are the
Prime Minister). It was as if both sides, Pro- and Anti-Tour, had contrived to
line up and scream “Whaddarya!” at each other for 56 days of utterly
uncharacteristic political passion. For Slack, and the tens-of-thousands of
others who opposed the Tour, the issue was whether or not the more open and
diverse country that New Zealand was becoming would prevail, or, be smothered
to death in the fascistic headlock of all those “knuckle-dragging sons of the
soil” who wouldn’t have hesitated to affirm the slogan: “All within Rugby,
nothing outside Rugby, nothing against Rugby.”
After 1981, it seemed that the two halves of New Zealand
could never be brought back together. Rugby became a litmus test. If you were a
fan, then you were morally reprehensible: a “Rugby thug” who was also, no
doubt, a racist, sexist, homophobe. In the new New Zealand that was rapidly
taking shape there could be no place for such people.
But, of course, there was a place for them. As the hero of Foreskin’s
Lament reproves the liberal feminist character, Moira, following one of her
diatribes against the piggishness of New Zealand’s Rugby culture:
“This is the heart and bowels of this country, too strong
and foul and vital for reduction to bouquets, or oils, or words. If you think
they’re pigs, then you’d better look closer, and get used to the smell, because
their smell is your smell.”
Remove Rugby from the New Zealand equation and we no longer
add up.
Slack has written a delightful history of the childhood game
of “Bullrush”. In it he celebrates the “teamlessness” of the game, and the way
people remember it with smiles and laughter. This, he seems to be saying, is
the true essence of the Kiwi character; the way we really are before the “town”
turns us into emotionally-stunted sacrifices to the mud-splattered god, whose
only gospel is “kick the shit out of everything that gets in the way of winning
the game”.
But that just won’t do. And, in his gloriously meandering
address, Slack more-or-less conceded as much. Yes, New Zealand is about the
anarchic individualism of Bullrush, but it also about the fascism of the First
Fifteen. We are, if I may borrow that most overused of Rugby phrases, a game of
two halves. And at some point over the past 34 years, almost unnoticed, those
two halves have become one again – at least when the All Blacks are playing.
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 26 August 2015.
