Rugby World Cup Road Trip: Adopt an Aussie

Aussie supporters should stick together. Photo / Matt Johnson

How better to gauge the nation's Rugby World Cup mood than put a man in a campervan and tell him to get lost?

Matt Johnson checks in from his beloved hometown: Wellington.

Aussie-Bashing was rife in Wellington. Along Lambton Quay, two Kiwi pensioners had just given someone in a Quade Cooper jersey his first indigenous wedgie.

Local shopkeepers tried to stage an intervention - but it was too late. The poor guy's green & gold daks were hanging off him like a lycra foreskin. Several more lay in tears nearby, their maths homework in shreds. Outside the Beehive, Police were responding to reports that a Koala bear had just had his lunch money taken.

Things were spiralling out of control.

Thankfully Alison Mau was there to call for calm. I didn't know Ali well, but I'd watched her tackle other hard-hitting issues in the past: like why you have to change your clothes so many times for a Woman's Day cover-shoot, or starting WOMBAT: a charity for TV weather girls having trouble finding New Zealand with their pointers.

She'd also been followed around by a creepy guy in a Corolla Stationwagon.

Having once been a creepy guy in a Corolla Stationwagon, I felt her pain.

But if Australian fans were feeling anything in Wellington this weekend, it was this: sheepishness. Baaaa. Like us, the 'Bashing' debate had given rise to a shared revulsion of one simple quality: preciousness.

Industrial, Gollum-levels of it.

I've read Proust. (My favourite part is when Tintin and Proust decide to take a ride in that submarine shaped like a shark). I've also spent time with an Australian abroad. On neutral ground. A street-brawling Buddhist from Queensland who not only believed in reincarnation, but wanted to help some people achieve it as quickly as possible.

Both on the bones of our arses. Bonded by sarcasm and, if not exactly a shared heritage, than by one that shuns pretense and sophistication. No short order in Paris. The only time things ever got strained was when you were helping him out of a fix - and he would manage to start giving you advice in the middle of it.

How Australian is that?

They are great people. Their rugby honour-roll is littered with class, from the Ella Brothers to David Pocock and back again. They have given the World Summer Heights High, pregnant-looking pace bowlers with handlebar moustaches, and hard-hitting documentaries about the financial crisis like Mad Max. When the Rugby World Cup seas are trawled by the twin tankers of hype and hyperbole, Muppets from both sides of the Tasman are always going to get caught in the driftnet.
The only thing that defines our smallness is how important they become to us.

Australians have their (prodigious) sporting achievements buried in cock-sureness.

Kiwis have their (slightly) more-specialised sporting achievements buried in insecurity.

Either way, we are neighbours. We can peek over the fence and see burned-out cars in both our backyards. And if England or France repeat their previous antics, we will be buried together.

* Follow Matt across New Zealand at his RWC Road Trip blog or on twitter @KeaKaharoadtrip.

* And bid for an (almost) romantic night for 2 in the Kea Kaha-Mobile... check out our Trade Me Herald On Sunday Charity auction Herald on Sunday Charity auction online.