To live & breathe the Red & Blue…
Nigel Dawe
Last week I took out my 40th consecutive membership of that team we love, the team of the red and the blue. But there’s a neat symmetry to it all, beyond the four unbroken decades of ‘paid up’ loyalty to a team that transcends religion for me, not to mention perennial meaning, salvation and hope beyond all faith and hope, in something very particular.
I was a 10-year-old boy living in Broken Hill when I scrounged up the money to buy my first ticket aboard the ‘ship’ (then captained by Robbie Flower) that transported me to the pure and un-obscure fantasy land of being a member. I’ll be 50 next year, no less onboard and just as focused and swept along by the fanfare of going for a team, and all that means.
And what ‘all that means’ is something I’ve easily spent more hours reflecting on, than anything else. “Beautifully preoccupied” by the Melbourne Demons is how I’d refer to my last four decades, “distracted to a fault” is perhaps how my family and friends might reference or attempt to unpack it.
But there’s the rub, and that’s what makes the unfeign-able facet or distinctive feature of all true fans: you being the focused adherent first, and the distracted everything else later. There’s a passage from Alice in Wonderland that I’ve always thought quite apt for at least attempting to explain this phenomenon: “A dream is not reality, but who’s to say which is which?”
I certainly can’t, and it’s something I’ve always been more than happy to admit. Because when it comes to the ‘world’ of the Melbourne Demons, it has been something so all-defining over the years, I’m really not sure where the full sweep of it starts for me, and where it genuinely never ends. One trait I’ve observed in myself though (and those that are right into anything in particular) is that we accumulate, albeit avidly collect developments or experiences, even those that weren’t directly experienced by us.
So instead of a mere 40-years of following the Demons, I’ve in fact simply inherited the 160-plus of them since the club was first founded back in 1858.
That’s why some of my favourite possessions, or ‘art-a-facts’ as I like to call them, are Melbourne related things that will always remain immediate, and dare I say – eternal, for me. They somehow directly link or connect me to the actual living moments when they each pulsed with the expansive vibrancy of something still fresh and new.
As such, I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at my original 1959 premiership-winning front page of the Sun newspaper, that announced: ‘Demon King is Back on Stage’ after we’d lost the previous year’s big dance to Collingwood (and what would’ve been four flags in a row had we have won in ’58).
Back to my actual lived highlights for the past 4-decades of barracking for Melbourne (a team named after a city who was named after a former British PM, whose wife had an affair with Lord Byron, and the one who famously said that the poet was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”).
Additional to this, I’ve sometimes wondered what if the capital of Victoria had been named after the PMs either side of this bloke, then we’d simply have the Wellesley Demons or the Peel Demons to cheer on; which just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But that’s history I guess, and as the old saying goes, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.” Anyway, I now digress…
In all honesty, seeing Jim Stynes win that Brownlow medal in 1991 is very hard to beat; and the long-awaited thrill of a premiership in 2021 is certainly not far behind; nor is the Greg Healy-led reserves premiership of 1993 (unusual I know, but most of my mates back then went for your clubs that were always winning flags) so this nice exception gave me a window to throw wide open and let the pure light of a premiership in.
As did the night ‘premiership’ cups of 1987 and 1989; who could forget seeing Robbie (that same club icon who used to sign his autographs with ‘Demons Forever’) hoisted above his beloved team by his teammates that night, out at Waverly in the first of those wins?
Receiving a personally written letter of thanks (for having first written a letter of support to him) from Neale ‘Reverend’ Daniher in the post season of 2003 is top of my personal pops. As is the 9pm phone call I received one night from the club back in mid-2001 saying I’d won our first Hall of Fame writing comp. Though I was initially convinced it was just a mate pulling my leg, and about to blurt a floral: “Bugga off”, before the club representative at the other end of the line assured me that it was ‘for real’, and that my 100 words about Norm ‘weak men don’t win premierships’ Smith had got me the gong.
I’m still not sure why they rang me so late, but that’s what I love about this club, we do our own thing in our own time, for our own unique reasons, and what you’d never expect of us, we sometimes outright charge ahead and do – or just simply don’t.
We are the only club in the world who plays a game that we actually created (to keep players of another game ‘fit during the months of winter’) and for that, we should all be eternally grateful, and ever-looking forward to the red and blue tinged promise of hope that resides at the heart of each and every season to come.
