You have to love the sway footy and cricket have on Aussies. Everyday sport fans, politicians, corporate captains, all are happily and totally addicted.
Healthy enough pastime, generally, notwithstanding the barrage of gambling adverts holding it all together. Quite the juggernaut, really, and evolving powerfully in response to our demographic changes.
Just look at the T20 spectator numbers last couple of weeks. Almost matched the monster crowds of AFL finals. Miles better than what Test cricket can do, bar Boxing Day that is. And you can forget Sheffield Shield.
Maybe it’s why the MCG, that historic hallowed home of our sporting gods, is up for a $1 billion revamp of its Great Southern/Shane Warne Stand.
Been 30 years since the stand’s last revamp. Nothing else at The G’s had a refit since the 2006 Commonwealth Games. Things have to be getting a bit creaky.
The latest moves are backed by a $2 million Spring Street-funded business case. Not even part of the election campaign, if you can believe that. Even the Opposition’s offering nominal support. Pollies know where their bread’s buttered.
Smart looking thing it is, by the renders. Which is all very good, and a long way from the brutalist grey bunker of the original Great Southern Stand.
Which I mention because of its connection to Geelong.
Not to our own stadium – which at this point in the election cycle might normally be receiving more cash, if it wasn’t already in the middle of a $142 million refit – but to a bloke called Arthur Purnell.
Strikes me as a bit odd Purnell’s not better remembered. After all, he designed the original Great Southern Stand. And the Olympic Stand. He’s also responsible for the advent of that Aussie fixture, the household garage – better known these days as the man cave.
Arthur Purnell
Those contributions alone should propel him to Aussie legend status, up there with Geelong’s Lew Bandt and his ute, Gilbert Toyne’s clothesline, James Harrison’s fridge and Charlie Brownlow’s Medal. This from our UNESCO Creative City, by the way. And Australia’s only such city at that. Just saying.
But it hasn’t happened. Maybe because Purnell spent a good bit of his career designing public buildings in China. But he did plenty of domestic work here, too.
Curious bloke. Geelong College and Gordon-educated, he pulled together Chinese cricket matches and Aussie Rules footy teams, the Shameen Sharks and the Canton Kangaroos, while resident with the Celestials. He trekked about the countryside during the Boxer Uprising and fooled about with opium – allegedly, of course.
He took kangaroos to China, collected Chinese calligraphy, ornamental chopsticks, Japanese postcards, matchboxes and coins. One time, he and his mates mistakenly took a cobra’s hissing for a raccoon before launching into a tug-of-war with the thing when it took a crack at his head and dug its fangs into his hat. Alcohol was involved.
Purnell held secret meetings with Sun Yat Sen, had a suspected mistress – a singer named Li Ling, and possibly others – and met up with architecture giant Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago. One of his kangaroos, named Max, wound up as a circus boxing kangaroo. Others wound up in the pot when Guanghzou experienced a shortage of fresh meat.
Work-wise, he designed a prize-winning customs house, a power station, some of the earliest reinforced concrete buildings in China, and a cement factory –more than a dozen are still standing.
Much of this we wouldn’t know if not for Geelong-bred architect/lecturer Derham Groves, who’s studied, detailed and published much about Purnell.
Great man himself, the redoubtable Dr Groves. He’s an expert on Sherlock Holmes, pulp fiction, Hopalong Cassidy, Browning’s poetry, Melbourne’s Iranian kebab shops and Aussie letterboxes.
He’ll also regale you on anything from the architecture of high-heeled shoes to murder forensics, the history of Australian TV and yet another Geelong legend, Happy Hammond.
He’ll tell you Purnell, back home, designed the Clifton Springs Golf Club, a grandstand at Footscray’s Western Oval, the Rosebud Yacht Club, Ballarat’s Regent Theatre, along with a string of woolstores, retail stores, a greyhound racetrack at Tottenham, swimming pools, ice rinks, car showrooms and racing stables.
And lots more again, although evidently nothing, to this scribbler’s knowledge, at Kardinia Park.
An edited version of this story appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 15 November 2022
