In Search of Baseball in Cairns

Many Australian newspapers carry American sports scores -- Australians love just about anything to do with sports, although they find our baseball a little more boring than they do cricket. Nonetheless, in past years I've been able to keep up with the Chicago Cubs by reading the sports page in papers in Sydney, Brisbane, and Cairns.

So last year, while I was in Cairns, I happened to see a score: "CUBS 5, REDS 2." But after further review, I realized that they were referring not to major league baseball in the US, but rather to a local Queensland league, and the Cubs involved were not from Chicago, but from Cairns: The Cairns Cubs.

One of my projects this time 'round has been to find out more about this team, and to see if I could obtain some Cairns Cubs memorabilia. So, I began searching on the internet and calling around here, and eventually was put in touch with the president of the Cairns Baseball Association, who is also the general manager of the Cairns Cubs. They played a game yesterday, but the time conflicted with the cruise, so we arranged to meet today at his day job, a car dealership on the west side of Cairns.

Unfortunately, I learned after walking out there that he had not been able to get the caps after all. So, I am going to leave some money at the front desk of the motel, and he is supposed to drop by with the caps tomorrow. We'll see.

We did get to talk a few minutes before his duties called him away. He is a Chicago Cubs fan as well; says that they get to watch a game once in awhile over ESPN International. He seemed to be up on the injury report, knowing about Zambrano.

And yes, the Cairns Cubs lost yesterday, too.

There was one additional matter I wanted to write about from the reef cruise yesterday. It's somewhat unpleasant, but it's one of those inevitable conversations a US tourist has while in Australia. One of the boat crew sat with my senior and junior colleagues and I toward the end of the day, as we headed back towards port, just for some light conversation. Somehow -- I do not recall how -- the conversation turned to Aborigines. This is always a difficult topic; you can tell that it makes white Australians uncomfortable. She wanted to be sympathetic to the Aborigines, owing to the history between the two peoples, but I think she found it difficult. She lives in a neighborhood in Cairns that is nearby a housing complex for Aborigines, and she has had to take several security measures to prevent break-ins -- she said her house had been broken into by young Aboriginal men over a dozen times. Pretty soon, a few more of the boat crew joined in with stories of their own. Soon after that, it had really become a conversation among Australians, and I moved elsewhere on the boat, feeling quite uncomfortable with it all. A lot of the stories were not firsthand, and so I suspect were inventions or needed to be discounted, as they were essentially about 'a friend of a friend.'

I don't hear those conversations much from Americans. Perhaps it's that the folks I associate with know enough of my own history to know that I don't appreciate that kind of talk -- I like to think that Americans of all races are starting to realize that they are more alike than they are different, and that the racism of yesterday has landed in the dustbin, but I am pretty sure that's naive. But it's disconcerting to hear it down here.

When you see the Aborigines in the cities for the very first time, you know for certain that you are looking at a people that have been beaten down by this society. They look tired. Their clothes look shabby and ill-fitting. In a society that values fitness, the way that Australians do, the Aborigines stand out in their poor health. It's heartbreaking. It's all the more so that some otherwise very good people view them with contempt, however gently put.

But it's hard to be judgemental, too. I'm a guest here. Have you been a guest at a meal in a home where your host family has obviously been fighting? You don't know what to say, but you'd like it to stop. That's about the best I can do to describe it all.

We take the students to the Cock and Bull tonight for dinner. Tomorrow, we're off to Rainforest Station, up in the mountains.