If you can’t bring footie to the kiwis…

Despite living in Australia for nearly 30 years, I have only recently become aware of the Barassi Line. While I have known for years that the rugbies are east coast sports, and Aussie rules is a game of the South and West, I had no idea that there was a formal demarcation until just last week. So this blog is the natural place for me to think through the implications of this line.

First of all, the test of any scientific theory is whether it has explanatory value beyond the data used to define it. The figure below shows the Barassi line extended into the Southern Ocean. As it shows, the line clearly delineates the rugby-mad islands of NZ (both the main islands and the scattered volcanoes of the Campbell Plateau), from Tasmania-and therefore Aussie Rules- affiliated Macquarie Island. Rugby is king in modern day New Zealand, and this is exactly what the line predicts based on the present position of the islands.

 

Of course, it is unlikely that the whales of the southern ocean will play either code of football. They can neither catch nor kick. So in order to guide Australia’s soft power and cultural projection, it is useful to look at the extension of the Barassi Line on the other direction- towards Asia.

 

Once again, the Barassi Line has predictive value; It correctly assigns Japan, Oceana and the island of New Guinea to rugbylandia. Furthermore, the cricket-playing heartland of the Indian Ocean Basin is footie aligned. This is important, since Aussie Rules is played on a cricket oval. Should the Australian porting codes attempt to carve up China, the line suggests that rugby should go for East and North China, while the South is fertile ground for Aussie Rules.

Of course, while it is easy to fantasize about where the Australian football codes might spread to, cold hard science can predict what lands will travel to the football codes.  This is, of course, a geology blog. And the main explanatory theory of Earth Science for the last 60 years has been plate tectonics. And plate tectonics is such a powerful and wide-ranging theory that it explains not only earthquakes and volcanoes, and continental drift, but also code switching.

As previously mentioned, New Zealand today is a rugby haven. And I have no doubt that the Aukland area will always be. But New Zealand is not a craton; the country straddles a plate boundary.

Every year, the eastern side of the South Island, part of the Pacific Plate, slides approximately 38mm relative to the Australian plate. The direction of movement is to the southwest- towards the Barassi line.

 

Thus, we can predict that in approximately 16 million years, New Zealand’s southernmost village of Oban will cross the Barassi line as Eastern NZ slides southwards along the Alpine fault. This will not be a sudden change; it will take approximately four thousand years for a standard 165 meter pitch to completely cross from one side to the other. So by the time the north goalposts appear, the south goalposts will be as old as the Egyptian Pyramids are today. Never-the-less, I expect the rituals of football to endure as civilizations rise and fall around the pitch.

Invercargill, the southernmost substantial mainland city, will cross over 1.2 million years later. 4.3 million years after that, Dunedin will cross the line, and the Highlanders will be forced to leave Super Rugby for the AFL. The mighty Crusaders would have another 10.4 million years of super rugby dominance before they, too, cross over to Aussie Rules.

Now, to an aficionado of either major football code, this sort of change may seem outlandish, even on the geological timescales. But a lot can happen in 20 million years. For example, 20 million years ago, the Otago region of New Zealand now inhabited by rugby players hosted forests full of eucalyptus, casuarina, and hoop pines, while the wetlands were inhabited by crocodiles. The forest types were similar to those found in the Gold Coast Hinterland, very different to the dry tussock grasslands of today. So it is not so outlandish to predict that in a similar amount of time in the future, at least the football codes night re-Australianise.

It is not a question of if Aussie Rules will take over the southlands, it is written in stone. Continental drift may be slow, but it is implacable and inexorable. The only question is whether or not the 30 million seasons between now and Canterbury joining the AFL and increasing competition is enough time for St Kilda to win at least one more premiership.

How long do the wild geese fly?

 

Rockingham is a quiet beech suburb in southern Perth, Western Australia. Garden Island shields the beach from the surf of the open ocean. There is bulk cargo port a few km to the North, but the shallow water off Rockingham restricts these waters to small craft. And yet, this quiet, ordinary beach was the site of one of Australia’s most outrageous maritime escapades.

In April of 1876, six Fenians- Irish Nationalists imprisoned for resisting the British Empire- escaped the nearby Freemantle Gaol and rowed a longboat from the wharf to the whaling ship Catalpa, which was waiting off-shore in international waters. They and the whalers then sailed to New York City, and freedom. None of the six ever made it back to Ireland, where they were first arrested in the 1860’s. But James Wilson lived to a ripe old age of 85, and missed seeing the establishment of Free State by only a year. He died a free man after living in Rhode Island for almost 50 years.

 

It’s interesting that a jailbreak against the government has such a large and conspicuous memorial, dedicated by none other than the pandemic era Premier, Mark McGowan. In New Bedford, where the voyage started, there is just a simple plaque. New Bedford is a down-on-its-luck old whaling down in southern Massachusetts. It is about halfway between where I went to university and where I spent most of my childhood summer holidays. It is a very long way from Australia. So in a way, it makes me homesick in 4 dimensions. It is literally on the other side of the globe. But additionally, 1876 seems to be particularly far away in time at present. This was an age when American citizens, using ingenuity and courage, could crowdsource a plan that spanned the global ocean to embarrass the mightiest empire on the planet. And this space, standing on that quiet beach, the country of my birth becomes even more remote than the vast distance across the waves. In a sense, the land I grew up in seems as far removed as the age of brigantines and whalers.

Obviously, it would be easy to be nostalgic for the 1990s, or even 2002, the last time I lived in my homeland. But nostalgia misses the point. And in a sense, nostalgia is unamerican. The whole point of the American Dream is to create a better future. The past is not to be idolized; it is to be surpassed. And yet, all across the English-speaking world, there seems to be a timidity about building a better world.

The Fenians had no such qualms when they agitated for a Free Ireland, against one of the most prosperous countries in Europe. Our American Forefathers did much the same thing. A century earlier, casting off the colonial rule to become the greatest country ever. But recently the imagination required to seek out a better future seems to have eluded us. Where would the wild geese of today fly, and how high would they have to soar to get there?