For An Ex-magpie, Alice Is An Affair Of The Art
The Age
Wednesday July 18, 2007
Words never really have been Rupert Betheras' thing. He prefers to let his paint brushes do the talking.
RUPERT Betheras, a member of Collingwood's 2002 grand final side, was back in Melbourne this week. Rupert is living in Alice Springs and working for Gerard Neesham's Clontarf Academy, which successfully uses football as a mechanism to keep Aboriginal kids at school. The work was only one reason for him going to Alice Springs. The other is his art. He says he's trying to establish himself in art now like he established himself in footy 10 years ago.Rupert always has been different. He's a former graffiti artist. At school, he was told by a teacher not to bother with art classes because he was a footballer. He went home and that night did his first painting. Around the same time, he came across a book on Aboriginal culture that struck him as being "so Australian". At 18, he headed across the Nullarbor Plain with his girlfriend in a car with no spare tyre. The girlfriend was Aboriginal, from the Northern Territory.In 1996, he played with WAFL club East Perth and did well in the grand final on Chris Lewis, a name that has its own unique place in Australian football history. Lewis was perhaps the last Aboriginal footballer to cop full-on racism on the field. While in Perth, Rupert saw names being drafted, OK kids he had played against and was as good as. He came back to Melbourne, and got picked up by Collingwood. As a player, he was a fraction slow but he was stylish in a certain way and, as they say nowadays, "tough as". Rupert had no fear, or not of the things ordinary mortals avoid. Safety he abhorred. Deadened him inside.He's difficult to interview, even though I have known him a while. In manner, he is polite but contained. Ask him a question, almost any question, and he sucks in air, his brow knits and he'll attempt a reply that doesn't amount to anything much, or he'll stop and think again. Words are not his thing. Action and art long have been his means of expression. I ask him if he thinks Geelong can win it. "Who's going to beat them?" he says, his face briefly animated. He has an unflattering view of West Coast, but then most of his judgements on footy that I've heard are tough.I once sat beside Eddie McGuire at a Collingwood game in which Rupert played. We talked about Rupert who, as a character within the game, was seen as being a bit out there. "It's funny," said Eddie. "When Rupert plays well, we play well." About half a dozen Collingwood players came to the opening of an art exhibition Rupert had in Richmond last year. He showed me a painting of a crooked red circle in a dirty white setting. It didn't have a title. "That was when I got cut," he said. He meant cut from the list by Collingwood.He was 28 when that happened and thought his best football was ahead of him. With the money he had saved from the game, he went to Brazil. From Brazil, he sent me an essay he'd written comparing the ritual of certain initiation rites in South America, the knowledge before you embark upon them that you will face your spirits and demons, with preparing to play football in front of 90,000 people.He was back in Australia about a month when he heard in the media that Michael Long was walking to Canberra to demand the Prime Minister pay some attention to the accumulating crises in Aboriginal Australia. After leaving Collingwood, he had played in a premiership with Darwin club St Mary's, which meant he knew the Long family. He rang Alan Thorpe, a Koori who played with Footscray in the '90s. Thorpe was with Long. "Thorpie said, 'Come up'." I ask Rupert the first thing he noticed when he got there. "Longy was in pain." He grins. "I said, 'Get him a skateboard'." The effect of Long's multiple knee injuries can be seen even when he is walking to his car. "He just powered on through," says Rupert. "He led us." Last year, at the Long Walk celebrations, they read out the names of the dozen or so who walked with Michael Long on that now famous occasion. Rupert's was one of them.Rupert returned from Brazil with a beautiful young Brazilian woman named Olivia, with whom he is now living in Alice Springs. He went there for the job (he knew Neesham, having done a pre-season with the Dockers) and for his art. Rupert has had more than his share of personal tragedy in his life, including the death of a brother and a best friend, and his early paintings were violently, not to say bloodily, expressionistic - strong colours, often clashing. He's had three shows now, the most recent in Alice Springs at the gallery of Ian McAdam, brother of AFL footballers Gilbert and Adrian McAdam. He is having a Melbourne exhibition next year.In Alice, he calls local footy for an Aboriginal radio station and says the AFL's next frontier is harnessing the talent of the tall players from the bush, the ones "who are six feet four and run like Adam Goodes".I ask him how things are in the Northern Territory, given what we're reading in the papers about the gross social dislocation in Aboriginal communities there."If you read the media down here, you think, 'What's going on up there?' But then you come down here and you think, 'What's going on down here?' " He means the lack of awareness among city people about the severe environmental problems facing the planet. Rupert shrugs and we move on to the next subject. He says he'll be back in Melbourne next year.
© 2007 The Age