A coastal walking trail along Sydney’s eastern beaches clings to the cliff tops from Bondi Beach to Coogee. It is both spectacularly beautiful and staggeringly overcrowded with meandering tourists, who zigzag all over the trail, taking countless selfies and blocking the narrow path
I usually avoid the place at all costs.
Early one morning, against my better judgement, I was dragged by my youngest daughter to endure the walk.
I am glad I went.
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The sun was shining and the migration of the humpback whales was in full flow. In their tens of thousands they follow what is nicknamed the Humpback Highway, migrating between their winter base in Queensland, to summer in Antarctica.
As we walked, their spouts, flukes and tales would regularly splash the calm waters, close to shore.
As we reached the heights of Coogee’s southern headland the view was spectacular. On the edge of the panorama I noticed Coogee Oval, the home of Randwick rugby club. While not my club it was a venue where I loved to play and coach.
The words from a long dead rugby-playing poet jumped from the recesses of my mind.
“Cross bars and posts, the echo of distant bells,
The cool and friendly scent of whispering turf.”
As a schoolboy my headmaster and English teacher, Brother Bill Greening, would recite to us the poem Football Field:Evening. It was inspired by the poet John Alexander Ross McKellar’s late-night stroll across Coogee Oval. Its subject was simple, yet complex. Rugby and life.
McKellar was a poet, cricketer, rower and rugby player with the Randwick club in Sydney.
McKeller was also Brother Greening’s vision of the type of person a quality educational institute produced. A mixture of athlete, scholar, artist, philosopher and a citizen to lead in a just and compassionate society.
What was termed in our all-boys school a Renaissance Man.
As I gazed across the years of my life, remembering McKellar’s words written in the 1920s as I stood on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, I wondered how that vast swath of time had simply evaporated.
Time is perhaps the most precious commodity in human existence, yet it cannot be bought or sold. While seemingly infinite across the universe it is finite for every earthly creature.
Despite my earnest endeavours to educate myself, I have had zero success in comprehending a single concept of Albert Einstein’s teachings on time and quantum physics.
However, like us all, I have experienced time in many forms.
There are days when time seems to accelerate into the future. Those special days that flash by us as time disintegrates when we are engulfed in something that fascinates us.
And the exact opposite. Such as when in the depths of man flu, which is a slight head cold that only inflicts the male of the species, the clock grinds forward with aching slowness.
The life of a competitive athlete is not absolved from time’s unforgiving nature because eventually time wins every contest.
“Quick as the ball is thrown from hand to hand,
And fleetly as the wing three-quarters run,
Swifter shall Time to his defences stand,
And bring the fastest falling one by one.”
John McKeller is reported to have played a game of rugby on Coogee Oval and then adjourned to the joys of the clubhouse. That evening on his way home, perhaps slightly motivated, he walked across a deserted Coogee Oval. With the beach’s “moonlit waves beyond a murmuring surf” he found the inspiration for his Magnum Opus.
“I walk where once I came to grief,
Crashing to earth yet holding fast the ball;
The goals stand up on their appointed lines,
But all their worth has faded with the sun;
Unchallenged now I cross their strict confines;
The ball is gone, the game is lost and won.”
In a twist of literary fate, McKellar tragically died of pneumonia at the tender age of 28, months after composing that poem. Time for John, as for us all, was finite.
Lately I have been thinking a lot about time.
Recently on a crowded Sydney bus, a very polite young man stood up and offered me his seat. I thanked him, remained standing and told him with a smile, “I have never been so insulted in my life!”
As a great mate of mine puts it, “If life is a game of golf we are on the back nine. The trouble is you don’t know if you are on the 10th or 17th.”
The question is how much of this precious intangible stuff do I have left, and how should I best spend it?
“And now the teams are vanished from the field,
But still an echo of their presence clings;
The moon discovers what the day concealed,
The gracefulness of passing things.”
My daughter stood next to me in the sunshine, gazing out at Wedding Cake Island, crouched in the white surf off Coogee Beach.
“It’s beautiful isn’t it?” she asked. More a statement than a question. The ocean, the sky, humpbacks, family and an old rugby field squatting nearby.
It was all beautiful and not just the view. I was thinking about McKellar’s poem and my ancient teacher’s message. Life is a wonderful gift that should never be taken for granted.
So as we turned and began the return leg of our stroll I asked my youngest, “So how can I squeeze a few more drops of juice out of life’s lemon?” Failing to add that I have already tried to give it a good old crushing.
Showing zero interest in her father’s philosophical struggles, she quipped, “Just keep going.”
Out of the mouths of babes.
To strain and struggle to the end of strength,
To lean on skill, not ask a gift of chance;
To win or lose and recognise at length,
The game’s the thing; the rest, a circumstance.
