Australia's Spirit at the Crossroads – Time to Shake Off the Mud

At dawn, when the dew still clings to the grass and the grandstand sits empty, the ball lies where it was left the night before.

It has been fought over, kicked, booted, argued about.

It has carried the weight of pride and rivalry and the small, fierce hopes of men who believed the game mattered.

Then the whistle blew. The players shook hands. The referees packed up their flags. The crowd drifted home to screens and opinions and tomorrow’s talking points.

And the ball stayed. Mud-caked. Scuffed. Forgotten.

That’s when the cat appears.

Muddy, Battered, and Waiting for the Next Kick-Off

After a rugby match, the ball always gets left behind.

It doesn’t matter how hard it was fought over, how many blokes were carried off, or how much noise was made about what it all meant. Once the whistle blows and the crowd drifts away, the ball just sits there in the middle of the paddock – no longer important, no longer owned, waiting for the next match.

I was thinking about the rugby match yesterday – about how the ball sat there at the end.

After being fought over for ninety minutes, it was suddenly of no interest at all. The match had been played.

Then a chance remark from Redhead stuck with me.

“The ball is important in this, Monty,” she said, answering an American reader who’d asked what the ball was even made of.

And that’s really the question, isn’t it?

What are we made of?

Dusty Gulch Gazette – Special Edition (Front Page)

RUCTION AT THE GULCH OVAL:  SETTLED THE AUSSIE WAY

By Roderick "Whiskers" McNibble, Chief Scribbler & Rodent-About-Town
Dateline: Dusty Gulch, Queensland Outback - December 17, 2025

G’day, you mob of fair-dinkum legends - and any lurking stickybeak emus pretending they’re just here for the dust.

Roderick Whiskers McNibble reporting, whiskers still twitching from the sheer mongrel energy unleashed on the Dusty Gulch Oval yesterday. Red dust hung thicker than a pollie’s excuse, the sun beat down like a debt collector, and the Rugby Union clash that followed was so uncompromising it would’ve had Bruce Ruxton himself sitting bolt upright in Heaven, grinning and barking, "That’s the bloody spirit."

Mayor Dusty McFookit - fresh from publicly pondering how our sacred icons (Bondi Beach, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House) have been marinated in imported argy-bargy - decided enough was enough.

Let the paddock decide. 

Some men belong to history. Others belong to the national conscience. Bruce Ruxton was the latter.

He was mocked, caricatured, and dismissed as a relic of another age – but we didn’t care. We loved him.

Because Ruxton spoke with the blunt honesty of a man who had earned the right to speak. He did not seek approval, nor soften his words for fashion or comfort. He said what many Australians felt, long before saying such things became unfashionable – or dangerous.

A Second World War digger who stormed ashore in Borneo with the 2/25th Battalion, Ruxton survived the brutality of war and captivity and came home scarred, hardened, but unbroken. What the war did not take from him was his fire. That fire burned for the rest of his life – in defence of veterans, the ANZAC legacy, the flag, the monarchy, and an unapologetic Australian identity.

For decades as president of the Victorian RSL, Bruce Ruxton became a thunderous presence in public life. Loved by millions as the voice of the silent majority and feared by bureaucrats and cultural trendsetters alike, he was pure Aussie grit personified. When he died in December 2011, many feared that something irreplaceable had gone with him – the raw, defiant spirit of traditional Australia itself.

The Prime Minister Who Disappeared

There are many ways for a Prime Minister to leave office.

Some are voted out.
Some are removed by colleagues who insist it was “for the good of the party.”
Some retire gracefully and spend their remaining years explaining why everything would have worked if only people had listened.

And then there was Harold Holt, who went for a swim and never came back.

It remains one of the strangest moments in Australian political history – not because a man drowned (that happens), but because the Prime Minister of Australia vanished, leaving behind his clothes on the sand, a stunned nation, and a silence that has echoed ever since.