Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Another boxing daze for Perth

There was further deluge this morning at about 3am. So much rain for a summer December. However not all that unusual. It doesn't mark the end of the world. I remember getting a gleaming new Swansea bike for Christmas when I was nine and it rained that day. It would have been about 1954.

Swansea was a Fremantle brand. The company had it's workshop where the northwest corner of the Myer department store now is. The other main brand was Malvern Star. The sort of people who bought them were probably the ancestors of West Coast Eagles football fans - living in limboland because they have no readily identifiable local origins.

The Eagles have just come back from South Africa. They went there at the end of the season because it seemed like a good idea. Now they're suffering from culture shock. Life here in Perth isn't so bad after all.

When I was at our local flea market on Sunday someone was selling a swag of framed photographs of Eagles players. Maybe a dozen in all. They had done a clear out of their prized collection of stars. Maybe they had taken enough disappointment from all the scandals and decided to switch over to the Fremantle Dockers? Nevertheless, it seemed a cruel fate for the images of the once high and mighty players to end up en-mass and unsold amongst the junk at a flea market. Such is life, as former Eagles player Ben Cousins stated to the world with a tattoo across the six pack of his solar plexus earlier this year.

This reminds me to mention that the Western Australian champion boxer Danny Green had a win in a much hyped match a couple of days ago. Mr Green is a good looking lad as boxers go, but he has some fearsome tattoos, especially a set which run right up the inside of he right arm and into his armpit. That's going a bit too far. It must have been very painful. Maybe worse than a CIA waterboarding?

A bit of the match was rerun on the TV news last night. It looked a bit wishy washy because Mr Green's Slavic opponent was reluctant to risk have his equally good looks messed up. At one stage the referee had to urge him to get in and actually start punching at Mr Green. Yawn! Boxing fans get what they deserve.

I wrote about the lead up to one of his matches last year in 'The big fight..." on 17 May 2006. That was against the angry Aboriginal Muslim Tony Mundine. It seems Mr Mundine would like to have another go at Mr Green because he lost his last fight with him. Now that Mr Green is truly "the man" he's keen to keep it that way. No point risking getting mangled by Mundine too soon. Mr Green is a family man. His wife was due to have a baby on the night of his latest pugilistic encounter.

When I was a kid I had a friend Ross whose dad was a champion boxer called Maurice Cairnie. Mr Cairnie's boxing career ended before I met him. He may have been a welter weight. I remember as a gentle, kind man - not at all like the scary tattooed boxers we see on TV these days. Mr Cairnie acquired respect during WW2 when as a merchant marine 4th engineer he was one of the few survivors from the Australian Hospital ship Centaur, which was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine near Brisbane on 12 May 1943. The event became marked as an atrocity because hospital ships were supposed to be sacrosanct.

© MMVII Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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