Michael Green

Writer and producer

On Cue

In Community development, The Big Issue on

In the boozy heart of Aussie pub culture, Michael Green finds a sober, tactical sport and community of rising pool stars.

Saturday

The game begins with an ear-splitting ca-raack. Players burst through the shot like policemen shouldering a door. The balls scatter. Twenty-two pool tables are aligned in a hall in suburban south-east Melbourne and at 10:30am, the frames begin. Competitors bend over their shots. Chins on cues, eyes hooded in shadow. We’ve entered the Whitehorse Club open singles eight ball championships. There’s $10,000 at stake.

Alec ‘Ace’ Evreniadis is here to win. The captain of the Australian pool team hasn’t flown from Adelaide just to make up the numbers. Steve Tran hopes to win too, but he’s not so bold as to say it out loud. Last weekend, Steve won the Melbourne Metropolitan Pool League ‘champion of champions’ trophy. Kolbe Poole, the aptly named three-time Victorian female champion, is here from Ballarat and aiming for the top 16.

Pool, or eight ball, is Australia’s pub game. Snooker and billiards are too complex. We choose reds or yellows, bigs or littles, stripes or solids. You know it: the beer-stained distraction in your local bar, where the balls drift sideways, the cues curve like bananas and nobody agrees on one shot or two.

Today, sure, they’re playing pool, but not like we do. Here, the best manoeuvre the balls with surgical precision. Every week, more 10,000 Australians play competitive eight ball. Each state and territory has teams, clubs, divisions, leagues and associations that make up a peak body. The Australian Eight Ball Federation runs annual national titles. This year they’ll be held in Launceston at the end of October. It’s a global game too. Our national over-50s team recently won the world crown.

The Whitehorse is an Italian social club set back from a six-lane suburban artery. Inside, behind pink curtains, players deliberate among the rows of green felt and low yellow lights. The playing floor is stocked with both wooden and denim-clad legs. It’s early but the bar and the greasy bain-marie are already running hot.

Today, 180 entrants – from teenage to old age – will play all day in a round robin on their allocated table. They’ll be cut to 128 for tomorrow’s knockout for the cash. Steve and Kolbe drew the same group, on table eight. Ace is around the corner on table one, the big game table, set apart from the rest. The crew from Pool TV, a Friday night prime-time show on Melbourne’s community Channel 31, has set up their gear and bright lights.

Kolbe is pool by name and by passion. Her partner, Jamie Stevens, is also a state player. She’s five-and-a-half months pregnant and bustles around the table without discomfort. The 29-year-old wears big hoop earrings and does her hair in a high, sporty ponytail. “I’m extremely competitive,” she says. “I hate to lose.”

Her first two frames go poorly, but she’s optimistic. “Hopefully those are my losses and that will be it.” She sips a can of cola through a straw and says her opponents so far, one of them Steve, are the best in the group.

Entrants and hangers-on cuss and banter while they watch. Clanking stubbies and clicking balls add to the din. The organisers call instructions from their desk: “Greg Daffy, table three. The Daff, to table three.” Bottles pile up on benches.

It’s a man’s game. One player tells me that although all types play, “you don’t really get a full cultural mix”. The stereotypical player is “a white, suburban male who’s into having a good car and a job. A conventional, wholesome, white dude.” And with that, comes booze. It’s an occupational hazard for a game held only in licensed venues. Mid-afternoon, a red-eyed man kicks over three chairs after a loss.

For Kolbe, breaking the mould is a blessing and a curse. “A lot of guys don’t rate women in pool,” she says. They get careless, and that helps her pick up a few frames she might otherwise lose. “But then, I don’t do as much practice as I should do. You get to a certain level and you don’t need to put in as much work. Whereas, with the guys, if they drop off for half a second then they’re not going to be making their state side anymore.”

Fresh from a comfortable win, she is playing a young man from Albury with glam-rock hair and tattoos up his arms. Six balls down, she methodically pots them all. To win, she has an easy black over the corner pocket. And misses. Ashen-faced, she concedes, shakes hands and paces away from the table.

Meanwhile, Ace and Steve calmly dispatch their opponents. Frames roll rhythmically on: the click of the cue on the ball; the clack of ball on ball; and the thud of the ball in the pocket.

The best players barely miss. Like chess, they plan tactics well in advance and lay traps for adversaries. They strike the ball crisply and it courses straight and true. Between each shot they chalk their cues meditatively, without paying attention to their hands.

Eight ball, despite the booze, is a logical and rational domain. With a measure of skill, strategy and application, problems can be solved. Each player, while they take their shot, controls their own destiny. In the end, it’s all about black and white.

But today is not Kolbe’s day. She wins her final frame, but after two more losses, it’s not enough to qualify. “I got myself intimidated after I missed the black over the pocket. It hasn’t been the same since.”

Sunday

Competitors carry their cues in long, thin cases. Ace, wearing black dress pants and polished black shoes, is the slickest in the room. “I’m feeling good,” he says. Yesterday, he was tense from the flight and a long practice session.

There’s a hold-up while the organisers clash with their old computer. Tough-guy banter continues to flare around the hall, even though no one is boozing this morning. Ace, also known as Ice Man, secures a position in quiet corner, slips his headphones over his smooth, bald head and waits.

Steve Tran strolls in late. He’s a small, laconic man who has arranged his life around eight ball, and he knew there’d be a delay. The 34-year-old lives with his mother and works the early morning shift in Australia Post’s mail sorting room. Each night, he drives to competition or knockout tournaments around the city. “I’m single. If you’ve got a partner or you’re married it would be pretty hard to play full-on pool five nights a week.”

Each round is a best-of-five-frames knockout. First up, Steve draws Tracy Givvons. “She’s all right,” he says, chuckling. “But she plays with a different set of balls.”

“Go Trace,” a woman calls from the other side of the room. Trace wins the toss and stands up to break. “Watch me tear him a new arsehole!” she declares, to general mirth, and then doesn’t pot a ball. She shoulders Steve he passes. “If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em up.”

Steve rests one hand in his front pocket and chews gum as he weighs up the winning shots. “I reckon his cue’s bigger than him,” Trace says, drinking a stubby of Carlton. “Before I started playing big tournaments, I’d always go watch Steve play. My favourite person to watch.”

Nobody kids with Ace. Called to table three, he places his two cues – a thicker tip for the powerful break and delicate tip for general play – with a water bottle and hand towel on a chair nearby. Serious and scrupulously fair, he brushes the table down before play, and then comfortably accounts for his opponent. He doesn’t lose a frame through the first three rounds. Click, clack, thud, they keep rolling in.

The 40-year-old owns two poolrooms in Adelaide. “It’s what I do, basically. That’s what I’m here for.” He has big dreams for eight ball – maybe it could even turn pro. “We all believe it’s a sport that could get on mainstream TV, you know. Some people think ‘oh well it’s just a game, you put the balls in the hole with a stick’, but there’s others that just love it. The challenge of it all.”

On table two, Steve has struck trouble. He stands back from the table, arms folded, and watches the final black roll in. A floppy-haired long-shot has beaten him in three straight frames. Later, he debriefs with a friend, Joe. “I didn’t have the run of the balls. At all.” On a spare table, they recreate the exact specifications of his bad luck. Joe commiserates. “It wasn’t your day mate, that’s all. It wasn’t mine either,” he shakes his head.

As the rounds go on, the crowd thins. Steve stays to watch and mingle. That’s the reason he plays, he says. It’s his scene. “I just go to have some fun, meet some people, catch up with friends.”

Kolbe is still here too. She’s playing in the ‘blonks comp’, for non-qualifiers and first round losers. “They’re really good weekends. It is a bit of a community; we’ve got our own little ‘families’ here and there.” Pool is a low-tech pastime, a hand-written letter among the spam of video games and poker machines. Another night, in an inner-city club, a history student tells me the pool hall is his ‘third place’. We pass our lives in our homes and at our workplaces, he says, but need somewhere else to give us a sense of community.

The sun is setting and Ace is still in the race. In the fourth round, he wins 3–2 with cool, clutch shot-making. “Next round now,” he says with a shake of the head. “Only two to win to get into the final.”

The last eight players draw their opponents in front of the Pool TV camera. Ace draws Terry Bond. It will be best-of-seven on table six. Bond has short, white hair and a barrel stomach that hangs well over his belt.

The national captain goes two frames down. In both, he had a shot on the black. Small crowds now hush around each of the quarter-finals. Some Italians from the club are watching, impressed. Ace is looking tired, but then wins the third briskly. It’s only 7:30pm but feels like midnight.

From the break, Ace sends the white ball rocketing off the table. With a two-shot penalty, Bond pots out. Next frame, tension builds. Ace sighs and peers at the angles as his opponent rolls the balls in. That’s it. The black goes. Losing hurts. “He played well. He didn’t give me any second chances,” Ace says, flat. He puts on his jacket, buys a bourbon and calls his wife in Adelaide.

Most frames end quietly, contrasting the riot of the break. Few balls are left on the table and the black rolls in softly, inevitably. It’s over now for Ace, Steve and Kolbe. In the final, Robbo beats Scary 5–4. He wins the money. It’s 1:00am by the time the Pool TV crew clear off. “If you lose, you lose,” Steve says. “Until next time.”

photography by Michael Green

Global cooling

In Community development, Environment, Social justice, The Age on

A new project is turning our old white fridges green.

At the Phoenix Fridges warehouse in East Brunswick, two long rows of fridges face-off like football teams before a big game. On the left, a refurbished line-up is clean, efficient and ready to run. On the right, the dusty, sticker-covered new recruits will soon face their ultimate test.

But unlike a footy game, this eco-friendly scheme always returns a win-win result.

Phoenix Fridges, co-run by the Brotherhood of St Lawrence and Moreland Energy Foundation Limited, aims to curb the appetite of our power-hungry refrigerators. To do it, they collect unwanted appliances and retrofit them to improve efficiency. Then, the recycled goods are resold in the Brotherhood’s opshops.

The scheme is not only a plus for the environment, but also lends a helping hand in the community. Last year, while learning how to fix the whitegoods on the job, three refugees completed six-month traineeships and TAFE certificates in electrotechnology services. This year, the number of traineeships is set to double. The program’s other important social benefit is that low-income families gain access to cheap second-hand fridges with lower running costs.

Bruce Thompson, Business Program Coordinator at MEFL, says Phoenix Fridges offers a strong practical step for cutting electricity use. The fridge devours more energy than any other appliance. “It is responsible for about ten or 15 per cent of a household’s greenhouse emissions,” he says.

Thompson encourages people to buy a new fridge if they can afford it. “From a greenhouse policy perspective, it is really good to buy a new one. They are about 70 per cent more efficient than a fridge you would buy 15 years ago.” But there’s a catch. Over a third of Victorian homes have a second fridge: people tend to put their old unit in the garage and use it to store drinks. “So instead of saving 70 per cent, they’ve increased their energy consumption,” he says.

That’s where Phoenix Fridges comes in. The project has been in full swing for over a year. In that time, it has collected more than 5000 old refrigerators – almost one hundred per week – across metropolitan Melbourne. The free pick-up zone now stretches as far as Mt Eliza.

When the chunky donations arrive at the workshop, electrical engineer Noe Cuellar and his trainees assess the efficiency and quality of each one. They send approximately half the machines to be scrapped.

According to Thompson, this is a crucial part of the process. “We want to manage the project so that we are returning good fridges back into circulation to make them affordable for low-income households,” he says. “But we don’t want to send the energy hungry ones back,” he says.

Before the cast-offs are sent for metal recycling, their dangerous refrigerant gas is captured from the pipes. “A kilogram of the old CFCs in a fridge… is equivalent to 8000 kilograms of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in terms of its global warming equivalent,” Thompson says. If you put your old fridge out for hard rubbish collection, he says, the pipes are likely to break along the way and release the harmful gas.

For those fridges that make the cut, where necessary, Cuellar and his team replace seals, thermostats, filters and compressors, and add insulation. He says that, on average, they cut energy use by between five and ten per cent.

Each unit is fitted with a sticker listing the appliance’s energy consumption, carbon emissions and running cost per year. Cuellar says that customers appreciate this extra information, as well as the improved performance. “We’ve found that people love the fridges,” he says. “They find them really cost effective.”

Thompson acknowledges that Phoenix Fridges doesn’t create five-star efficiency in the old units. “We can’t do that,” he says. “But we are improving them or rejecting all of the bad fridges that are in that second-hand market.”

With climate change upon us, and so many energy-gobbling fridges still clogging our homes, we all need to get in on the action. It’s a perfect match.

To organise a donation and collection, call 1300 366 283. 

Picking up the pieces

In Community development, Environment, Social justice, The Age on

A Melbourne organisation is offering a second chance for people and products.

Every Tuesday morning at 9.00 o’clock, Nathaniel Davies goes walking. With his curly brown hair poking out from beneath his ‘Green Collect’ cap, he wheels an old Australia Post trolley onto Little Collins Street. He’s glad to be at work. “It gives me a chance to meet people, get some exercise and get out in the sun. But I even enjoy it when it’s raining,” he says with a smile.

Green Collect is a social enterprise: a not-for-profit organisation that provides recycling collection and other environmental office services to businesses in the city. To do it, it hires and trains people who have previously faced barriers to getting work.

The trolley wheels rattle as Davies weaves through pedestrians on the way to his first stop, TRUenergy, on the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth streets. Today, his route will lead down as far as King Street and then back via Little Bourke Street and Melbourne Central, stopping in at 23 bars, restaurants and offices along the way.

The softly spoken 32 year-old began working for Green Collect in 2004. Before that, he had been unemployed for three years. “I’m happier now. I’ve grown in confidence and I’m more comfortable with people. And I like that we’re doing good stuff for the environment,” he says, as he rolls up at Melbourne Central tower, to visit the offices of BP Australia.

This is where Green Collect began, back in 2002. “Someone at BP had a concept of employing people on the margins through some kind of recycling enterprise,” says the organisation’s cofounder and CEO Darren Andrews. “So we put together a team to run a pilot…and at the end we were able to show that the collections can subsidise someone’s wages and provide meaningful work.”

Green Collect now collects recyclables from over 200 businesses across the city, from cafés to corporates. For an annual membership fee, it picks up corks, bottle tops and aluminium, as well as e-waste like computers, mobile phones, printer cartridges, batteries and CDs. Altogether, eight people work on the collection, sorting and delivery to recycling plants.

The Green Collect office, off Little Collins Street, is small and cluttered with papers and gathered recyclables. Andrews, 36, waves his hands excitedly as he talks.

“We’ve had some staff who’ve come in and rebuilt their confidence and then gone onto full-time work. We see it as offering pathways to sustainability, creating employment for people and also making it easy for businesses and staff to take the environmentally friendly option.”

Andrews is tall and fit, and used to be a landscape gardener. “For a really long time I had a sense of connection between the community and the environment,” he says. But he “wanted to do more” and returned to study a Bachelor of Social Science-Environment at RMIT. He and his partner, Sally Quinn, run the organisation together, sharing the work so they can spend time with their two young children. “We try to maintain that ethos to balance work and life and our community connections,” he says.

Back outside, Davies is pushing his trolley along Swanston Street. One basket is brimming with corks. He parks under a tree on the footpath and heads upstairs to The Lounge. After starting the job, he changed his household habits and now always recycles. “I even have a little Green Collect bin which I take in every so often, with corks and printer cartridges and things I use at home,” he says.

A funky young waitress with an angular haircut calls out hello as she charges past on the stairs. Davies moved to Melbourne from Wangaratta only six years ago and he’s made some good friends through the collection rounds. He claims he’s still no man about town, but grins as he says, “I know a lot of people in the city now, from all different walks of life.”

The collections are having an impact around the offices too. Early last year, Clayton Utz became Green Collect’s first corporate member (now there are 22). According to the law firm’s Operations Manager, Jason Molin, it was a popular decision. “It’s been well received that they’re not just another mob out there pushing sustainability but they’re looking at long term unemployment and social benefits as well.” He believes the law firm’s involvement with Green Collect will not only change habits from nine to five, but also “beyond the four walls of Clayton Utz”.

That’s just as well, because climate change is promising a long list of challenges. Luckily, Green Collect isn’t short on ideas. It also runs green office audits that help businesses reduce their energy, waste and paper use. Next, together with Baptcare, Andrews and his team are set to launch “an ethical and environmentally kind op-shop” in Brunswick, and they’ve even got funding to develop a small-scale biodiesel plant.

Andrews laughs off the idea that he’s building an empire. “We’ve got grand visions of doing something simple. We’re about creating sustainable options and we invite people to be involved. It’s for the good of each other, for community and for the planet.”

Just before lunchtime, Davies rattles back towards the office to drop off his loot. Ever vigilant, he stoops and picks up a discarded soft drink can from the footpath. He’s more a listener than a talker, but he’s keen to find the right words to describe Green Collect. “I don’t know how to make it sound important, but it is. It’s totally changed my life.”