Night Games

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

Night Games investigates issues of sex, consent and male bonding in the world of football. Anna Krien gives a balanced account of football's dark side and finds that much more work needs to be done to improve attitudes to women.

Anna Krien’s style of journalism could perhaps be described as ‘immersive’. She picks a controversial subject and drops herself right in, mixing with opposing camps, and tries to come to a more nuanced conclusion. She used this approach in her first book, Into the Woods, which looked at the vexed question of Tasmania’s logging industry. In Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, she examines the murkier side of Australia’s footy culture, one full of sexism, childish behaviour and outright bully tactics.

The book follows a rape trial, and the reader is pretty much invited to see this trial through the prism of the football culture that is described throughout. Football culture is pretty much a hermetically sealed universe that is a law unto itself. There are strange male bonding activities, a very bad attitude towards women, to the point where women are considered more as playthings than real people, and generally juvenile behaviour. As many interviewed in the book admit, this culture, with its sexism and boy-will-be-boys attitude, would be decidedly unwelcome in the mainstream.

What Night Games effectively shows is that there definitely is an attitude in football that is sexist. Furthermore, footballers might not even be aware that their behaviour is sexist. At the end of Night Games, when the young man who was accused of rape is asked by Krien if he ever indulged in trash talk about women, he said definitely not. But his girlfriend, who was sitting with him, laughed and said that he always talked trash about women when he was with his mates.

The subject matter of this book put me off. I thought, do I really want to trawl through Australia’s footy culture? But I couldn’t stop reading Krien’s account, and to her credit, I really think she does give a balanced, outsider’s look at the game. The take away is that football still has a lot of work to do to align itself with community standards, that its moral compass doesn’t always work and its attitude to women is very poor.

A last note: the book also does a terrific job of highlighting the achievements of women in the game. Especially the female sports journalists who put up with awful intimidation and bullying, but had the guts and determination to fight on.

Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, by Anna Krien. Published by Black Inc. ISBN: 9781863956017 RRP: $29.99

Quarterly Essay 45: Us and Them, by Anna Krien

Staff Review by Chris Saliba


Anna Krien’s Quarterly Essay on the relationship between humans and animals raises many questions about their ethical treatment, from animal testing to factory farming. Us and Them is compelling and well researched, without resorting to ideological positions. Krien weighs up both sides of the argument to provide a thoughtful, intelligent and considered essay on a complicated question.

Anna Krien is a breath of fresh air in Australian journalism. Her modus operandi is similar to that of George Orwell’s. The journalist tries to divest herself of any preconceived ideas and then fully immerses herself in the subject under investigation. What is experienced is sifted and analysed, then reported back to the reader. To make this sort of journalism successful, the writer has to be intellectually honest and devoid of ideological cant. This means complexity, admitted contradictions and a refusal to offer neat conclusions will feature in the text. For me, Anna Krien’s writings fit this bill perfectly. She offers fresh perspectives on contemporary questions without professing to know the answers.

Her first book, Into the Woods, investigated the Tasmanian timber industry. For this Quarterly Essay, the subject matter moves away from politics, economics and the environment to the difficult subject of the relationship between humans and animals. Krien’s essay doesn’t explore the ethics of animal treatment in a confrontational way, as a battle between animal liberationists and their opponents. Us and Them rather takes a subtle look at the contradictions and many hidden aspects of the human treatment of animals. Krien writes that we are all in an exploitative relationship with animals, the question is: how far are we willing to go?

The essay is divided into three parts. Part one deals with killing animals for food, in which she travels to Indonesia to witness Australian cows being slaughtered. Part two investigates the history of animal testing, interviewing surgeons who transplanted organs from pigs into baboons. The information in this section is really alarming, and the numbers of animals used in Australia today for testing is staggering. There’s so much we don’t know about that goes on in the name of science. If scenes of animal testing were broadcast they would surely have the same impact as the footage of cows being killed in Indonesian abattoirs. Part three looks at hunting, and describes the impact that humans have had on ecosystems. By culling dingoes, Australia’s top predator after humans, we create all sorts of negative knock-on effects down the animal food chain. Predators, it appears, seem to keep animal numbers in balance. Human presence in the environment has resulted in the extinction of an alarming amount of species.

The quality of the Quarterly Essays series waxes and wanes, but Anna Krien’s Us and Them is certainly a high point. Every page is intellectually compelling and deeply considered. Krien matches thoughtful research with lively in the field reporting. She doesn’t waste a word or a moment of the reader’s time, as she genuinely has a lot to say. This essay will stay with you for days after reading it, pondering the many ethical questions it raises.

Quarterly Essay 45: Us & Them: On the Importance of Animals. Published by Black Inc, 2012. ISBN: 9781863955607. RRP: $19.95

Into the Woods, by Anna Krien

Anna Krien’s Into The Woods provides a multifaceted investigation into the fraught and highly-contested debate on how best to exploit Tasmania’s precious forestry endowment. With a novelist’s skill, she describes the key personalities, conflicts and factual grey areas of a controversial policy area, making Into The Woods a thought provoking book that provides no easy answers.

Anna Krien is a Melbourne based journalist who has published in The Monthly, The Age and The Big Issue, amongst other publications. Her first book, with its rather Bambiesque title, Into The Woods, follows a style of journalism made famous by George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). The author immerses herself in her subject matter, body and soul, and reports back at intimate length. This is not a facts and figures journalism, gleaned from picking over reports, official investigations and inquiries. Here the journalist to some degree also becomes the subject: personal prejudices, doubts, failings and misgivings are all candidly disclosed. These admissions of the writer’s fallibility goes someway to giving the over all work a greater feeling of honesty.

Journalistic works of this type (the other great recent example if Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man), do not pontificate from on high, but rather crawl through the mud to bring a more realistic picture. Complexity, contrary views and the general clamour of differing voices that make up contentious issues are all given an airing. The book format, with its hundreds of pages, makes this type of writing possible, where time and patience are needed to tease out ideas and explore various intellectual avenues.

It seems pretty clear from the opening pages of Into The Woods that Anna Krien is by and large sympathetic to the activists that are trying to conserve Tasmania’s forests and stop the loggers. Nonetheless, Krien soon gets fairly impatient with the campaigning style and doggedness of the activists, especially when she is confronted with a pub full of knockabout men who are sympathetic to the loggers and hostile to the ‘greenies’. She decides that it’s the activists who need to be out in the pubs talking to the enemy, learning a few things, and not sitting up a tree.

Into The Woods does attempt to look at the big picture, despite its author’s obvious biases. Krien does a fascinating job of interviewing activists, leading politicians, scientists, forestry officials and loggers, trying to get a true picture of just how fragile Tasmania’s ecology has become due to the demands of its economy: logging and wood chipping. The picture that emerges is of a state that is divided down the middle between conservationists and loggers, with neither giving way. You get the picture of a state that simply doesn’t know how to function outside of this dichotomy.

If we’re to believe former Tasmanian premier Jim Bacon’s last minute call to activist and garden show host Peter Cundall, two weeks before he died of lung cancer, urging Cundall to never give up the fight against the big business interests that he claimed ran the state, then Tasmania is a plutocracy run by powerful money interests. During that phone call Bacon told Cundall that there was nothing politicians could do to stop huge companies like Gunns. The politicians were simply the hired staff at a lavish party where they served Tasmania’s precious resources on a platter to the greedy and all powerful corporations.

There’s much to commend in Anna Krien’s finely written book. Her intimate attention to detail and well rounded portraits make for fascinating reading. Krien has the novelist’s gift for pacing, timing, description and evocative use of language, making Into The Woods a must-read.

Into The Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests, by Anna Krien. Published by Black Inc., 2010. ISBN: 9781863954877