Gabba gabba hey: a photo essay

Six bucks doesn't buy you much these days. A small McArse value meal. A warm can of beer at the Big Day Out. Half an hour with Amy Winehouse. Basically, a lot of nasty skank you wouldn't wipe your arse with if you were desperately short of bum fodder.

In the summer of 2003/04, however, six bucks could buy you a whole lot more than any of that.

It could buy you a shirt like this.

Yep, that's a genuine six bucks' worth of glorious 100% nylon. An eyesore, a fire risk AND a danger to shipping all in the same garment. AT LOWES!

There's only one thing you can do with a shirt as absolutely stellar as that. Buy a stack of them, get a bunch of your mates together and go to the cricket.

As we did.

You may remark on the particularly stellar ensemble sported by the famous Dawso (above left), wearing his example off-the-gut and tsuzjing it up with Ruggers, footy socks and microwave pizza...

...the latter being his particular remedy for the rock 'n' roll motherfucker of a hangover he'd managed to inflict upon himself the previous evening.

Dawso did have an excuse, though. He'd driven up the afternoon before from Farmadale for our flatwarming and had seen off most of a carton of barbed wire singlehandedly across the night.

Not a fuck were any of the rest of us volunteering to help, not with Actually Drinkable stuff in the Old Chateau Dodgy Brewhouse beer fridge downstairs (concealed behind the profoundly offensive 'Colour Chart' poster adhered to the front of same.)

And there wasn't much sympathy from Your Correspondent either. The 16th of Jan was the last day of my PhD, the last day of my four years and one day in the lab. Not that any of that one day was actually spent in the lab, not once the uni bar (then the Red Room, now the Second Degree) opened. Cruel and evil people bought cruel and evil drinks - the Doc's top tip: while the idea of black Sambucca shots and Strongbow Dry may repulse on their own, combining them depth-charge style does not serve to make them any less revolting - and good times were had by all. I think. Next day, Jan 17th, was our flatwarming for the new place at Mitre St. And Jan 18th was the Australia-India ODI. Having been responsible for coming up with this woefully over-optimistic and liver-punishing schedule in the first place, Your Correspondent wasn't getting much sympathy either.

If not sympathy I did at least have empathy for Dawso. I'd been pretty hungover on cricket missions before and it's not a fabulous way to start the day, crammed into a swaying bendy-bus nose-to-armpit with a bunch of other pre-loaded game-goers as it charges headlong down the Gabba busway. At the test in November it'd been midway through the middle session before I could look at a warm cup of XXXX Gold without blanching. They hadn't invented THIS IS SPARTAAAAAA yet so I was at a loss as to what to bellow at myself in order to harden the fuck up. Then again at the best of times Your Correspondent struggles to look at anything carrying a XXXX logo without feeling ill.

With certain exceptions.

For his part, Dawso went into the smallest room at Mitre St and bellowed for Hughie, Ralph and Bert. None of them turned up, not that we had tickets spare anyway, so we decided to fuck off to the game.

India won the toss and batted. Craigos lost the toss and had to get the first round in. While the Injuns proceeded to paste the impotent Australian attack across the perimeter hoardings, we set about trying to assemble the biggest beer snake in the history of the world. Or at least our row. We were assisted in our quest by our neighbours for the eve, the Symmos.

No, not him. Though he'd have helped had he known.

Them.

Our man Tem (above with the Symmos) joined us from the Gold Coast, a late call-up to the Team Yobbo train-on squad. Entirely by chance he'd turned up in a nearly-matching, almost-as-awful shirt as the rest of us. We didn't know whether to celebrate or mourn this development, so we kept on drinking.

Although the narrow confines of Gabba Zoo Section meant finding somewhere safe and unkickoverable to put down your beer made for a few awkward moments.

Haydos got a hometown hundred in Australia's dig. Unfortunately by this stage we were chasing more than three times that, largely thanks to Brett Fucken Lee bowling a bucket of gutter slop disguised as right-arm-over and being hit for the best part of a century himself. In his last over, as he'd closed on three figures with not a sniff of a wicket to his name, the crowd began to chant 'Bi-chel, Bi-chel, Bi-chel..." He took a wicket with his final ball, to resounding ironic applause and further chants of 'Now fuck off and let Bichel back in the team you fucken useless New South Wales cunt'. Which, I'll admit, was vaguely hypocritical considering Your Correspondent is also from NSW, and is quite possibly also a cunt, but I wasn't prepared to recile from my comments then or now.

Anyway, Straya fell short by twenty-odd, not that we gave much of a toss by this stage in proceedings, and we toddled off to do battle with the bus queue. By this time Dawso had found his second through eleventh winds and seemed to have drunken flashbacks to rugby bus trips with the mighty Yamba Buccaneers, leading the tribe through hearty renditions of such classics as 'A Man Came Down From The Coconut Grove'...

...and that great standby of the drunken bus trip, 'I Wish That All The Ladies'.

I WISH THAT ALL THE LAY-DEEEEZ
(echoed) I wish that all the ladies
WERE HOLES IN THE ROAD
Were holes in the road.
AND I WAS THE DUMPTRUCK
And I was the dumptruck
I'D FILL EM WITH ME LOAD.
I'd fill em with me load.

To their credit, most of the other sweaty Gabba escapees on the bus seemed amused. Those who weren't horrified at least. And it was an improvement on a previous post-cricket bus trip, where Moff's mate Petersen hung his arse out the window for half the length of the CBD.

I WISH THAT ALL THE LAY-DEEEZ
I wish that all the ladies
WERE WAVES ON THE OCEAN
Were waves on the ocean.
AND I WAS THE SURFER
And I was the surfer
I'D RIDE EM WITH A MOTION.
I'd ride em with a motion.

Reasonably tame. Heard worse at school camps. (Made up worse at school camps.) And then he lost us with one we'd not heard before:

I WISH THAT ALL THE LAY-DEEEZ
I wish that all the ladies
WERE COWS ON A FARM.
Were cows on a farm.
AND I WAS THE FARMER...
Um, where's he going with this?
I'D FUCK EM WITH ME ARM.
(gallery loses it completely)

The evil look in Dawso's eye tells you trouble is brewing. The look in Craigos' just tells you three days on the piss was Time Gentlemen Please and it was time to fuck off home. So we did.

To drink more piss.


So THAT's where my fuckin' liver got to.

The Doctor is OUT.