5000 shades of Canberra

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Canberra

CANBERRA is a collar-and-tie kind of town, a place of ominously ordered streets and somnambulating citizens, many of them politicians, civil servants, lawyers or academics, all of them sworn off any hint of conspicuousness. Even the students look scrubbed to a numbing respectability.

Round here you can wear any colour you like as long as it’s one or more of 5000 shades of grey. Rebels wear beige, of course.

Mercifully, the woeful, wounded warble of the sulphur-crested cockatoo rips through the institutional hum with irregular raucousness. And at least there’s a spark of something among the cab drivers.

“Sah - weave ya cumfrom,” one of them asked on Monday.

“Brisbane.”

“Brizzy, ay? Bloody stinkin’ hot, wan’nit?”

It was. But it was stinking hot in full-colour, not bloody room temperature in monochrome.

So the leprechauns were unmissable as they lurched about on Tuesday, all geeky sandals and ratty cargo shorts and billowing emerald shirts and mad hats atop scraggly beards and lively, smiling eyes, gurning at cafe menus as they went and frightening the horses. Not that something so rudely alive as a horse was seen on Canberra’s streets on Tuesday.

As morning melted into afternoon, they shambled towards the giant, upturned flyswatters yonder. Or were they giant representations of the sticks used to play lacrosse? Which is not a long way from the Irish sport of hurling.

Whatever. The leprechauns lurched towards the floodlight pylons of Manuka Oval to watch Ireland play SA - who not for the first time in this World Cup were the lesser supported team on the field.

But, unlike at the Melbourne Cricket Ground 10 days previously, when SA played India, there weren’t 86 612 lounged about the place. Manuka holds 13 550 and it wasn’t quite full on Tuesday.

For most of SA’s innings, Ireland’s supporters had nothing to celebrate. Then Hashim Amla hoisted a six into the crowd - and a leprechaun caught it.

Much joy ensued as he waved the silotar - that’s what the ball is called in hurling, don’t you know - like he had snatched a chunk of the Blarney Stone itself. They leapt. They laughed. They roared. They almost forgot to toss the ball back across the boundary.

In the grey out there of greater Canberra no-one dared make a sound, not even the cockatoos.