Caster's revenge: The war on Australia

So, we’re at war with Australia again. As usual it is about sport. The conspiracy goes that it was Australian athletes who challenged Caster Semenya’s gender. They are the ones who accused her of being a man. Apparently after seeing the size of her shoe. Caster’s story has been hotly pursued by the Australian press, with the Brisbane Times calling her a “gender bender” and the Sydney Morning Herald writing in its weekly sport wrap-up: “Usain Bolt is a freak of a man … perhaps Caster Semenya is too.”

Now all is fair in love and war. So I am not going to go on a massive tirade about how the Australians have struck below the belt. How they forced Caster’s poor old granny to have to come out and defend her granddaughter in the press. Imagine that: your nana having to verify you are a girl. Awful stuff. From a young age, we were taught not to hurt girls and to respect our elders. The Australians have broken both these rules. But like I said I’m not going to go into that.

Nor will I discuss the fact that Australia has a long history of men dressing up as women.

From members of Ned Kelly’s gang to Dame Edna Everage to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to Ja’mie, Aussie men love a dress. So there is a good chance that when they see a girl who looks a little like a man, they naturally think she must be a man. But I’m not going to go into that.

I’d rather focus on our revenge. How are we going to stick to the Aussies? How are we going to put the knife in where it really hurts? What is the sacred ground for the Australian that must not be trampled on?

Is it their native animals? Should we start eating kangaroos, emus and koalas as a big F-U to our Antipodean cousins? Should we be frying up big ‘roo steaks and making emu curry? Or should we start prank calling their emergency services with mundane requests like how do you fix a DVD player? Or should we go around putting glue on Australian public toilet seats to give them a moment to sit and think about what they have done? Or should we release giant flesh-eating pigs onto their land to cause chaos and pandemonium? All of these sound great, but unfortunately the buggers have beaten us to it. They’ve already done it themselves. They eat the kangaroo and the emu, hell they’ve even considered eating the koala. They’ve made the prank calls, stuck the glue on the dunny seat and there are pigs in the outback that will eat a man alive.

But let us not be discouraged, there are two places we can hit them and hit them hard. Sport and beer. These may not be as creative or ingenious as gluing people to toilet seats, but Aussies are obsessed by them. So let’s start with sport.

Sport is the mainstay of the Australian psyche. They love it. So much so, if you asked a group of Aussies who was the greatest Australian to have ever lived, there is a good chance one or two of them would mention the name Phar Lap. If that name sounds a little strange to you, don’t worry, it is the name of a racehorse. Yes, a racehorse. A nag, a filly, a four-legged beast. Phar Lap was Australia’s wonder horse, winning 36 races out of 41 starts.

The Melbourne Museum website states: “He was hero when a hero was most needed by the Australian people”. Now, I’m not sure about you, but I don’t know any other country in the world that would include a racehorse on its list of most notable citizens. But the Aussies do. Either they are short on real heroes or they love sport.

I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt and go for the last explanation. Aussies thrive on sport and, in fact, on any sort of competition — I remember once watching the news in Sydney just after the Tsunami hit South-East Asia and heard the reporter say: “It is official. Australia is the world’s most generous nation. We have donated more money than any other country to the Tsunami fund.” They then pulled up this chart to show how Australia was doing in the international generosity stakes like it was the ICC cricket rankings or the medal tally from the Olympics.

I am sure they even sold it like that to Parliament. “Fair dinkum mate, if we act quick and chuck ’em a couple a bucks, we can win this thing.” Unfortunately for the Aussies, two days later Japan doubled the figure and that was the last we heard of that. The Australian news put a self-imposed ban on the generosity chart. After all, a loser, even a generous loser, is still a loser.

Sport is our sure-fire game plan for a cold and callous revenge. Problem is, we are already doing that. We’ve made the Aussies our bitch on the pitch so many times in the last year it isn’t as fun as it should be. And now the whole world is even getting in on the act. This weekend they lost the Ashes to England and were beaten by the All Blacks (again). For a nation that normally sits at the top of the world sport rankings, they are doing remarkably badly. They are coming last in the Tri-Nations, they are third on the IRB rankings, fourth in the ICC Test rankings and third on the ICC ODI rankings. South Africa, if you are unaware or just unpatriotic, is sitting first in all of these.

So what now? What’s left? Do we just gloat in their misery? Or can we go further? Of course, we can. There is one game left. One game that the Australians hold dear to their hearts, so dear in fact, they don’t let anyone else play it. Australian Rules Football. Played on a cricket oval, the game is a strange mix of basketball, rugby and the village people. The players are famous for dressing in the smallest shorts and tightest vests. A fashion choice that many Australian men have embraced beyond just the field. With player names like God (Gary Ablett) and Buddha (Garry Hocking), this is the closest thing the Aussies have to religion. For them, footie is fully sick. And here we have the chink in their armour.

We need to get righteous on this hallowed game of theirs. We need to form our own Australian rules team. We need to break the bank on this one. All hands on deck. Action stations. This is not a drill. Between all our sport teams we have enough players, enough brawn and enough brain to take their game away from them. I have sat in the MCG (the home of AFL) and watched the rabid fans baying for the blood of the other team, screaming at the umpire. I would love to see Katlego Mphela or Morne Steyn boot the final nail in the Australian sporting coffin. I would love to hear the final siren blown on this all-Australian game. The deafening silence of the crowd as a foreign team takes away their last prize. I want to see this game changed from Aussie Rules to Saffa Rules. And I want it today.

But we don’t have to stop there. Time for the roundhouse. The knock-out blow. Beer! Beer is what the Aussies drink when they are watching sport. It’s what they drink when they are not watching sport. In fact, they drink it whenever they are awake, even sometimes when they are asleep. Aussies dig beer. But it is not their love of the golden nectar that I am thinking about. Rather, it is the world’s love of Australian beer that has got me thinking. Here’s my plan

Beer is a passport to a nation’s culture. When you drink it you get to taste who they are. Which is why most people are a little suspicious of us when they taste Castle Lager. Anyway, the Aussie beer that the world knows and loves is Foster’s. For most of the planet you couldn’t get a more quintessential Australian drop. But the beauty of Foster’s is not that Australians never drink the stuff (they prefer something with a bit more guts) but the fact that South Africa is about to own it. Yes, my friends, it is soon going to belong to SABMiller. And with it will come the keys to Australia’s foreign reputation.

Now I’m calling out to our brewers here, it is time to be patriotic, it is time to answer the call of duty. Screw your profits, you’ve made enough already. You need to turn this lager into dirty dishwater. When someone sits down to a frosty pint of Foster’s, I want it to be like licking the sweat from the inner thigh of an Australian farmer after a day of hard yakka. I want that drinker to be thinking: “Christ! What kind of backwater cesspit is this place that produced a beer like this? We need to put them on some sort of terror alert. They must be in the axis of evil!”

Yes, Mr SABMiller, you can do it. You can make this thing happen.

PS, I’m sorry I said those bad things about Castle Lager. But it really is a rubbish beer.