Lesley Hewitt

Helen Garner is one of Australia’s best known and well-regarded authors. Now over 80 years of age, she has just published a self-described “nanna’s book about football”. This new book, The Season, follows her youngest grandson’s season playing with an under-16s Australian Rules football team in Melbourne’s inner west in 2023.

At the start of the AFL 2025 season, it’s a timely read for both aficionados of the game and those who might wondered what fans see in it.

Garner, a devoted Western Bulldogs fan for over 20 years acknowledges that she doesn’t fully understand the rules and tactics of the game, so her book is not for those who want to know statistics, who kicked what, when and how. Instead, it’s about the game as a social ritual and the relationships between the boys on the cusp of manhood. She finds much to respect and love in their youthful masculinity.  The book intersperses vignettes from the Western Bulldogs 2023 season with her grandson’s under-16s team and how the boys work to and manage a season where finals appearances begin to emerge.

It’s also a book about growing old. Garner writes with honesty about her experience of ageing – not just the physical changes – but the fear of being alone and redundant as she watches her grandchildren move into adulthood. It’s an experience that all of us must grapple with as we age, when our roles change, when our children and grandchildren become adults themselves and when retirement beckons. How do we face these changes and how do we reframe our life’s purpose? Garner’s skills at observing people and their interactions, her clear and engaging writing style and her own honesty in revealing her own fears and concerns mean that The Season, as well as chronicling the 2023 football season, provides the reader with a gentle way to reflect on these issues in their own lives.

Garner herself describes it as a “life-hymn”, a book that is “a record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die.”

The Season was reviewed on Hepburn Radio’s 2nd Tuesday Book review and is available from paradise Books and from Hepburn Shire Libraries

 

Listen to the podcast of the 2nd Tuesday Book Review of “The Season” on the Hepburn Radio SoundCloud. There’s more on the podcast!

Lesley Hewitt is a local resident and currently an elected Councillor, who presents a monthly book review on Hepburn Radio.