Not your stereotypical Melbourne supporters Meet these Dees fans

No AFL supporters are stereotyped more than Melbourne’s, yet some of the great characters Martin Flanagan has met in football are Melbourne supporters. With one profile each day in grand final week, he tells the stories of a handful of them.

Charles Lane played football for Melbourne reserves in the 1960s. He went from there to Claremont in the WAFL. He played against “Polly” Farmer, one of the greatest players of all time, and tells a story of tackling Polly with all the force he could summon “because that’s what you did”. Both players clattered to the ground. “He didn’t say a word to me, he didn’t even look at me. His eyes never left the ball.”

Charles Lane with the nomadic Barabaig people of Tanzania. Inset: Max Gawn celebrates a goal in the prelim final.

In England studying agriculture, he became interested in agricultural aid to the Third World. This led him to Tanzania, where he observed that a nomadic people called the Barabaig were being dispossessed of their lands in the same way that the nomadic people of Australia were.

The Barabaig, who had a fearsome reputation, had a cultural practice of rewarding those of their number who killed enemies of the tribe, be they animal or human, with livestock and “girlfriends”.

Charles Lane lived with them for two years, organising a legal defence of their lands and travelling to Canada to agitate politically against the Canadian corporation supporting the Tanzanian government turning the Barabaig’s land over to wheat farmers.

The result was him having a price put on his head. In 1999, he returned to Australia with his wife Jane Tewson, a no less remarkable character and the subject of my last book, The Art of Pollination.

Charles is a shrewd observer of sport generally. I appreciate our conversations because of the perspective he brings. Three years ago, we were watching a Demons game together on TV and I said, “What would the Barabaig call sport?” He thought, then said smiling, “hunting elephants”.

I said, “Did you ever go on an elephant hunt?” He looked surprised that I’d asked. “I couldn’t keep up with them, not for four days in the bush, on the run, eating berries.”

They would chase the elephants until they tired and one of them turned and charged. He said, “the moment when the elephant turned and charged, that was the moment. That was the elephant they could spear.” Was it dangerous, I asked. He shrugged, “one or two of them probably wouldn’t come home”. And we went back to watching big Max Gawn and Nathan Jones and the other Dees chase a leather ball around a ground with a white boundary line around it.

Martin Flanagan is a journalist and author who writes on sport, Australian culture and the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia.Connect via Twitter or email.

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