Helen Garner’s Journey Into Footy and Family
Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, found herself unexpectedly drawn into the world of Australian rules football—not as a player, not as a commentator, but as a grandmother with a notebook in her pocket. What started as a way to spend more time with her grandson, Amby, became an intimate exploration of sport, family, and the fragile beauty of growing older.
It began with a simple question at the breakfast table. Garner, burnt out and unsure of her next writing project, asked if she could come along to her grandson’s footy training. Amby, already used to her directness, shrugged and said she should probably check with the coach. The coach, Archie—barely twenty years old—welcomed her with open humor. He told her not to worry about the boys noticing. “They’re fifteen,” he said. “They won’t care. They’re just boys trying to be men.”
So, notebook in hand, Garner slipped quietly into the rhythms of suburban footy. She perched on park benches, surrounded by skateboarders, trains, and construction sites, watching her grandson transform from boy to young man among his teammates. She saw awkward kicks, dazzling marks, moments of shame, and bursts of confidence. To her surprise, the game itself began to grip her. What seemed like chaos from the sidelines revealed itself as poetry—a shared language, almost ritualistic, that carried a community through the bleakness of pandemic lockdowns.
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For Garner, football became more than a sport. It became a lens through which to see men differently. Having spent much of her life fighting against patriarchal structures, she found herself studying the delicacy beneath male toughness—the way boys push themselves, discipline themselves, and sublimate their violent instincts into something structured, even graceful. “Football rises when the chips are down,” she reflected. “It sustains us.”
But this wasn’t just about football. It was about her grandson. Amby, the youngest of her grandchildren, was at a fleeting stage—still a boy, but already reaching toward manhood. Garner, aware of her own aging, her fading eyesight and memory, wanted to be close to him before time slipped away. Sitting quietly at training sessions, she became both participant and observer, determined to learn what drives him, what stirs him, and what kind of person he is when out in the wider world.
There were tender moments too—conversations about nerves before games, complaints about sore muscles, even talks about sadness and how people want to be remembered. In these exchanges, she recognized the fragile interior life of a boy who would soon be grown.
Helen Garner’s immersion in her grandson’s footy club wasn’t just research for her book The Season: A Fan’s Story . It was a love letter—to family, to the poetry of ordinary life, and to the fleeting, unpredictable ways that sport and memory entwine. Through football, she rediscovered joy, resilience, and the urgency of being alive.
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