(4) SUNDAY 4TH MARCH - REFLECTIONS OF BRIEF STARDOM AND THE SPECTACLES OF VOLLEYBALL

  I open my eyes to the beige roof of my car for a second night, completely washed with mosquito bites. The night was too hot to sleep with the windows up, and the trade for airflow from protection against insect annihilation seemed to be worth it in the strain of the early hours. 

It was not. 

I am achy. Is Ross River Virus still a thing? I also have certain vivid images in my head, vast and uninterrupted, definitely Coleridge-esque. Almost as if Sammy had never been disturbed by that bloody person from Porlock. They may have all been a dream, but the memories go something like this: I'm playing onstage with my writing classmates and five or six unknown kids. We are on a large stage fronted by four musical virtuosos with over one hundred elderly people (perhaps not elderly, but at least 92.7% were 50+) rapt with our performance. I was at the rear of the stage in a raised and prominent position, and had been entrusted with a subtle yet crucial aspect of the performance: the atmospherics underlying the complex arrangements of the numerous sophisticated orchestral pieces we put on for the crowd. I don't recall exactly the instrument I was playing, but I can for some reason muster without difficulty the smell of rain and pictures of a killer on the road. 

And, remarkably, I remember volleyball. 

It was a great spectacle. I was lonely, surrounded by a large crowd. The Australian women's volleyball duo were playing the German equivalent. It was loud and booming. The vibe of the place was familiar but somehow different. I was in Shepparton, but where was the orchestral music and speeches? Where was the art? And the cows . . . nowhere to be seen. 1.

The organisers of this match had given the microphone to some half-tranquillised cretinous troglodyte. It was like he was trying his best to be the prime begetter of obnoxious and racist behaviour amongst the crowd, a crowd already drunk and rowdy and terrifying and not needing to be any more excited than it already was. In my vision I watch three Australian youths rip an Australian flag from the rear of the grandstand and begin waving it over the heads of a couple who're visibly supporting the German duo. The German supporters turn and ask the youths to put the flag back but get nothing even close to a positive response. 

I realise the youths are undoubtedly spurred on by the ruthless capitalisation of German stereotypes by the ape-like announcer: 

The Germans, so stone cold and cool out there right now. 

Right there's another ice cold point by the Germans.

One for the Deutschland right there. 

Ohh . . . Cool, calm and collected by the Germans on that rebound right there. Nice guys. 

Give it up for the Aussies!!! 

I begin to sober from my sleep and feel happy with the comfort of knowing I have never actually played onstage and embarrassed myself in front of one hundred people. I also feel glad to know such jingoistic rowdiness only exists in the nightmares of goodhearted Australian sport fans, and that such rude nationalistic behaviour is not a common trait of Australians when in contact with far away foreign cultures . . .

1. I cannot explain where this photograph of a cow in volleyball attire came from.