Latest Posts
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FootballWhen football’s Bad News Bears of Belize took on the Mennonites
The Junior Coach’s prayer Lord, hear me now, for I have forever changed my stance! No longer, Lord, will I scowl like the Devil at mothers and fathers with angry parent syndrome. No longer will I feel more righteous than thou – for I am a blasphemer. Forgive me, oh Lord. What would I know? I ain’t no parent. I could never ...
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Australian RulesThe small, strange canon of Aussie Rules songs just got bigger with “Bob Chitty’s Blues”
FOR all that Australian Rules football is played, watched, discussed, argued over and thought about, it resonates surprisingly little in the wider culture. There are some poems by Bruce Dawe. Barely a box set of films – “The Great MacArthy”, “The Club”, “Australian Rules”, one scene of “Funny People”. One great work by Sidney Nolan ( 1946’s “Footballer”), and the “Bush Footy” ...
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Sport 1How Waleed Aly tried to rope-a-dope Muhammad Ali and failed
When we write about people, we talk about the times that shaped them and the experiences they’ve had. How else do we begin to understand these complex figures — especially those who’ve lived through eras we haven’t? Time is everything, and to give context to that time is important. The decisions and paths we take in life are governed by the social forces and ...
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Australian RulesFootball: The Great Deradicaliser
Paris is no stranger to terror attacks. In recent memory we have had the awful events of the “Charlie Hebdo Shooting” and the “Paris Attacks” which included the horrendous massacre at the Bataclan. Images of these terrorist acts were broadcast live around the world and shared on social media. Instantly, we were reminded of a movement that wanted to disrupt the order ...
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Australian Rules 6Cummeragunja: The Aboriginal football team that opened the eyes of White Australia
In the 1930s, Sir Doug Nicholls was one of only two Indigenous player plying his trade in top flight football in Melbourne. But he did not come out of a vacuum, he was the product of a profound Australian Rules football legacy forged by the incredible exploits of a remarkable Aboriginal mission team. It is a story that should be better known ...
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Pop CultureSo you want to be a rock ‘n’ roll star: The guide to DIY music
How’s your drive-time commute? Enjoying pushing the pedal to the metal as “Life in the Fast Lane” oozes its pus fueled mediocrity through your Clarion speakers? Still jerking off to that Chiko Roll billboard? Did you ever stop to think about the surroundings that symbolise your life? A tad mediocre? Come on man, don’t be a wanker. Dig this. Legend, joker and ...
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FootballTwo seasons of Melbourne City: Still a pupa, but not as poop
When Melbourne City made their debut in October 2014 I took the David Attenborough route and described them as Melbourne Pupa FC. For those of you who didn’t read the article or need a biological refresher – a pupa is the stage of an insect’s life when it undergoes the transformation from larva to imago. For example, when a caterpillar (larva) turns ...
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FootballA Pissant Fairytale: How a City of Chokers became a City of Champions
Prologue With a population of just 1.7m – nearly a million fewer residents than the next (4th) most populous Australian state, Western Australia (2.6m), it probably isn’t too surprising that South Australia struggles to make an impact economically. South Australia is growing at a far slower rate than its bigger siblings, and it suffers significant losses to interstate migration annually – from July ...
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FootballWho will be The Biggest Choker? Shoot Farken’s A-League Grand Final Audio Preview
Who will become the first team to lose three A-League Grand Finals? That is the question on everybody’s lips. Choking honours will be on the line this Sunday evening as the two best footballing teams in the A-League meet at Adelaide Oval in the ultimate conflict. Who will prevail and condemn their opponent to ignominy? Guillermo Amor’s premiership winning Adelaide United or ...
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Pop CultureTrout Mask Replica: Our 8 Step Guide to appreciating an “unlistenable” masterpiece
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky Deep in the semi-fashionable Woodland Hills of Los Angeles, an inconspicuously disheveled rental property once lay in ruins. Today, the house is a most unremarkable renovated relic of a bygone era. But there are ghosts. Freakish ghosts. Ghosts of a conductorial nature, shrieking a ...
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Pop CultureMusic for a dumbed down world: Why RATM’s Evil Empire still matters
I don’t know what I was so ashamed of. For some reason I couldn’t spit out the words, “I… I really love Rage Against the Machine.” The dreadlocked cliche glared at me from behind the table. I thought it was with contempt, “Yeah, they’re cool. They have a good message.” The cliche caught me by surprise. For weeks all I had heard ...
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Football 4The dad who taught his daughter how to kick a football in the last days of Yugoslavia
My father Petar taught me a lot of things, a truth universally acknowledged by pretty much everyone in our inner circle. Before he passed away at the excruciatingly young age of 36, dad taught me – amongst other things – how to do the multiplication tables LIKE A BOSS, to always wash my face with cold water in the morn, how to ...
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Australian Rules“Who do you barrack for, Tony?” A Timeless Tale of Australian Naturalisation
Station Pier in Port Melbourne was the first point of entry for hundreds of thousands of Australian immigrants seeking a better life in the The Lucky Country. One hundred years ago, during the bad old days of the White Australia Policy, what was predominantly an Anglo-Saxon influx also incorporated the odd member of the “Dago” variety aka a person of Southern European ...
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Football 2Soccer is small, football is big: The cultural dissonance of promotion-relegation in Australia
AFL franchise club Greater Western Sydney won the “wooden spoon” in its inaugural season of 2012 and then again in 2013. A few years before that, in the 2008 and the 2009 seasons, the oldest AFL club, Melbourne, also finished last on the ladder for two years running. Upon joining the then VFL (now AFL) from the rival VFA competition in 1897, ...
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Pop CultureThe Case For and Against The Hateful Eight
The Hateful Eight, the eighth film by Quentin Tarantino has divided critics and movie goers alike. Here at Shoot Farken we have decided to put Tarantino on trial. We invited two of the smartest film commentators in Australia, who had very different reactions towards the The Hateful Eight, to present the case for and against the film. Presenting the case “against” is ...
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FootballStop The Flares! FFA proposes to swap children detained in Nauru with A-League troublemakers
Shoot Farken can exclusively reveal that Football Federation Australia (FFA) has approached the Federal Government, namely the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, in a desperate bid to finally rid the A-League of the dreaded flare lighting element. Yesterday afternoon, FFA CEO David Gallop paid an urgent visit to Canberra to meet with the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Peter Dutton. ...
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Pop CultureWould you like some prophecy with your coffee? An excerpt from the novel GRIND by Ed Vukovic
We are proud to present an excerpt from Grind, the recently published novel by Shoot Farken alumni Ed Vukovic. Grind is available as a Kindle edition and it can be purchased via Amazon. A brief description of Grind by the author Ziva’s love of coffee is double-edged; by ‘reading’ coffee, Ziva predicts the future with chilling accuracy, but always as a service ...
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Pop CultureRemembering David Bowie: I am still not very sure he is at all dead
The way David Bowie left us last week was in keeping with his way of life; graceful, uncompromising and shrouded in mystery. Very few knew he was ill, let alone dying. So when it happened it was like having the wind knocked out of one whilst an essential organ was simultaneously removed. I, like many others, hoped it was a hoax. Through ...
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Pop CultureI went to see Taylor Swift and she was great – but us “Wogs” do it better
I was never a Taylor Swift fan. Me? A fan of Taylor? Pfft, please. I’m 30 years old! In the words of Cher Horowitz, as IF. Recently, though, I found myself at one of her sold-out Melbourne concerts. So how did I get to this point? Last year, my husband Igor and I were on a long-haul flight back to the motherland when I began to peruse the in-flight entertainment, as you do. Decisions, ...
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Pop CultureRIP Lemmy: Last of the Wildmen
One of the last wildmen of the rock ‘n’ roll frontier is gone. He packed up his four-stringed axe, smoked a final fag, downed a quart of poison and kicked down the door to Valhalla, all to the strains of his band’s garage rawk rendition of Louie Louie. Motörhead singer and bass player Lemmy Kilmister might have been killed by death but ...
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FootballA Season at Le Havre: The Story of Harry Novillo the Hare and Riyad Mahrez the Tortoise
Harry Novillo woke up bleary-eyed on a fine, early summer morning in Melbourne. He switched on the television, then walked into the kitchen to make his bowl of café au lait. The sounds of a football match being played half-way across the world on Monday night, in the unremarkable English city of Leicester, filled his apartment. Bowl of milky coffee in hand, ...
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Pop Culture 1Zwarte Piet: Coming Face to Blackface with a problematic Dutch tradition
Once a year, my parents would take my brother and I to Adelaide to visit our relatives. Often we would stay at my father’s parents. Early in the mornings, when we were four or five, we would run in to my grandparents’ bedroom and jump onto their bed. Each morning while we stayed there, my grandfather would tell war stories about his ...
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Australian Rules 2The Shoot Farken Guide to naming and shaming Australia’s Sporting Hooligans
On September 12, 1885, the Fitzroy Football Club (merged with the Brisbane Bears to become Brisbane Lions in 1997) hosted the South Melbourne Football Club (Sydney Swans since 1982) in a VFA (Victorian Football Association) match at the Brunswick Street Oval. Seven thousand people were in attendance. What follows is the report of court case resulting from disturbances during and after the ...
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Football 1No Amor for the new King of the Pissants
Ser Gio Syrio was not the type of man to let circumstances affect his performance. He approached his duties as a knight of the Pissantguard with vigour, regardless of whether the battle appeared favourable or grim. But even he could not deny the pallor that had set over the Southern Kingdom since the sudden, shocking demise of King Josep. The warning his ...
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FootballClogball: Remembering the Dutch football clubs of Australia
If you think the Dutch have never won a World Cup you’re mistaken: Holland won a World Cup back in the 1950s. Huh? More than 1.25 million European immigrants poured into Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s, including 100,000 from the Netherlands. Football was a major way for the different migrant communities to express themselves: by the late 1950s several Italian, ...
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FootballThe Red and Black Bloc Massacre
The big day had arrived. It was stinkingly hot. The mercury had brushed 40c earlier in the day in Sydney’s West. RBB (Red and Black Bloc) stalwart, Rob, hopped out of his car. He found himself in unfamiliar territory. He checked with his phone to make sure he was near the right place. The starting point of the RBB’s march to Garbage ...
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FootballThe Sincere and Sexy Football of Eduard Malofeev’s Dinamo Minsk
As a child, some things leave a bigger impression on you than others. These things often go on to become a template for how you measure and view other things that come in their wake. These early impressions can shape and colour our views all the way into adulthood, possibly staying with us for the rest of our lives as some sort of ideal against which all else ...
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FootballNo Pyro, No Party! My journey into the secret world of flaming hot smoking orange chuckable things
Tribune of Troof journalist Peter Rofl with a Shoot Farken EXCLUSIVE. “Stop the boats!” We hear you cry. But alas there is a greater menace lurking in the very midst of our beings, ready to shake our civility to its very apple core, rotten as a worm burrowing its way to the heart of our Great and Good Society. “THEY will never ...
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FootballIf you build it, they will come: Turning Hindmarsh Stadium into a Field of Dreams
In the movie Field of Dreams, a farmer played by Kevin Costner hears a voice say “build it and he will come”. For some odd reason he decides that this means he should rip out his cornfields and make a baseball diamond in their place. Fast forward a bit and he gets visited by some ghosts and things get a bit weird… ...
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FootballDutch Football by the dunes: Escaping carnival chaos to watch Quick Boys
I took the bus from Leiden to Katwijk. Crowds filled the streets: amusement rides, fried food stalls, donut stalls, games machines, a ferris wheel filled the sides of roads. The Dutch had defeated the Spanish in 1574, keeping them out of Leiden and ending the 80 years war. For their efforts the people of Leiden were awarded a University by the King. ...
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