Night Games
June 2013
Anna Krien / Black Inc.
The morning after Collingwood’s 2010 AFL Grand Final win, Sarah Wesley contacted police to make a complaint of sexual assault against a number of the team’s players following events at the South Melbourne home of team member, the late John McCarthy. Collingwood’s legal machine was swiftly engaged, the players were interviewed and investigated, and a familiar scandal-hungry media storm ensued. Footballers involved in pack rape was on the agenda again. Months later, the only person charged over the complaint – with rape – was a young amateur footballer, renamed here as Justin Dyer, who was not associated with the club.
It’s inside a Melbourne courtroom at the end of Dyer’s 2012 trial that Anna Krien begins Night Games, her second full-length work of journalistic non-fiction. As the jury returns its not guilty verdict, Dyer breaks down in tears and Krien, who has been following the trial day by day, trying not only to build a picture of Dyer, but also of Wesley, who only ever appears through testimony and by video link in a closed court, emerges from the court ‘inside out’, uncertain whether the verdict was the right one but nonetheless falling into the embrace of Dyer’s grandmother. ‘Well,’ she writes with typical wryness about her own feelings, ‘there goes my objectivity’.
The truth is that Krien is all about objectivity. While there’s little doubt that her sympathies lie far from the male-dominated cultures of Australian football, she goes out of her way, as she gives a gripping account of the trial, to make balanced sense of those cultures, and the difficulties they face in coming to terms with attitudes and practices that have either condoned or remained silent on the sex ‘games’ that players play, that reduce women to being sexualised ‘team-bonding’ objects, the centre of the ‘gangbang’ where consent sometimes seems to matter for very little.
Effectively Krien positions herself – and the reader – as a privileged extension of the jury; her feelings on whether or not Dyer is guilty sway and swing as witnesses appear, and as arguments are made by both prosecution and defence about the reliability of witnesses, about how far the complainant might have invented details, about the ‘grey zone’ that makes it legally unclear when it is that a rape has occurred. Krien also gets to tell what she hears when the jury is sent for out recess as legal arguments are made about the admissibility of evidence that might breach a very narrow set of legally defined events that restrict all argument to the South Melbourne laneway where the alleged rape occurred, rather than the house in which Sarah Wesley initially claimed she had been assaulted.
Krien’s style, a recognisable signature now, following her first book Into the Woods, and her Monthly Essay Us & Them: On the Importance of Animals, is one of intelligent listening. Once again she has managed to present a riveting and disturbing set of stories, voices and arguments that are not structured into a polemic, but that nevertheless draw a clear case for cultural change. They operate as a welcome opening, sometimes a provocative one, into discussion, debate and reform.
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