Penguin Books Australia

"We've made the grand final.
 
Next Saturday we play Wangaroo for the Peninsula Junior Colts Premiership. The whole town is talking about it, it's the biggest thing to happen here since the second prize in the S.A. Tidy Towns Competition (Section B). Just shows what sort of town I live in. Hopeless.
 
Our coach, Mr Robertson, runs one of the two local stores. I call him 'Arks', behind his back of course, because he says 'arks' instead of asks and 'arksed' instead of asked.
 
'If I've arksed youse boys once I've arksed youse a thousand times, don't buggerise with the bloody ball on them flanks, kick the bugger up the bloody centre'.
 
Arks's son, Mark, is the captain of our team. He also says 'arks'. Mark has two sisters, both of them say 'arks'. It 's definitely in the family, this 'arks' thing. Arks's shop is the quieter of the two, it doesn't have much of a turnover, and the Pollywaffles are always stale. I buy mine there though, just on the off chance I can entice one of the Robertson family into saying 'arks'. It always gives me a thrill.
 
We've made the grand final and I'm the second ruck. First ruck is Carol Cockatoo. He's from the Point, an Aboriginal mission just up the coast. Carol is the best footballer in our side, probably on the peninsula. He's about the same size as a wheat silo. He also has quite a lot of facial hair – unusual in a fourteen year old. Once, during training, I asked him why he had a girl's name. He punched me. I never asked again.
 
The ruck's job is to follow the ball. When the first ruck gets tired, it's the second ruck's turn. Carol never got tired. Never. Even when the game was over he'd still be going – kicking the ball and chasing it, kicking and chasing. Often he'd be eating a pastie at the same time, a trail of tomato sauce dribbling behind. So I never did any rucking. I just hung around the forward line and hoped my mate Dumby Red would pass the ball to me so I could have shot for goal. If you kicked a goal you got your name in the Peninsula Gazette on Thursday.
 
Half of our team is Aboriginal, boys from the mission. We call them Nungas, it's what they call themselves as well. They're the Nungas and we're the Gunyas. We're the only town on the peninsula with Nungas in our team. Without them we wouldn't be in the Grand final, without them we wouldn't even have a team. They're incredibly skilful, but they infuriate Arks. He's all for directness, for going down the guts, for grabbing the ball and booting it as hard as you can. The Nungas, they just love to buggerise around on them flanks.
 
It's like they're playing another game, with completely different rules. The aim is not to put the ball through the big white sticks, not to score the most goals, but to keep possession, to make your opponents, and your team-mates, look slow and cumbersome. They zigzag the ball across the field, they kick it backwards, they handball it over their heads, they go on wild, bouncing runs. When the Nungas played like this, by their rules, we just stopped and watched. They never gave the ball to us, we weren't part of it, we didn't understand. Arks would be bellowing from the boundary line, his face getting redder and redder – 'Stop buggerising around and boot the bloody thing. Boot the bloody thing. For Chrissakes boot it!'
 
Eventually, when they finished buggerising around, when Arks face was so red you could see it glowing like a tail-light from the other side of the field, they'd pass the ball to one of us Gunyas, usually right in front of the goal, so we couldn't miss."