KEY POINTS:
It was even harder than usual to find news of home in the Australian newspapers because of the acres of space devoted to an on-field contretemps between two Aussie rules boofheads.
Never mind the drying up of the Murray-Darling Basin, which will send fruit and vegetable prices through
the roof and endanger the livelihoods of many farmers (and which, if recent reports have any substance, is a foretaste of the havoc global warming will wreak on the Lucky Country).
Never mind the remarkable honeymoon of new Labor leader Kevin Rudd, whose bullying and shiftiness over his involvement with a television channel's contrived Anzac Day event had zero impact on his stratospheric standing in the polls.
Never mind that it looks increasingly as if John Howard, the suburban Machiavelli who has been a fixture of the Australian political landscape since the 1970s, has gone an election too far.
What gripped the nation was the fallout from a stoush over a tattoo. The tattoo in question - of a female face - adorns the left bicep of Fremantle Docker Des Headland.
As he tells it, during a typically spiteful local derby, West Coast Eagles midfielder Adam Selwood gestured at the tattoo and said, "I fed her last night".
Headland claimed he advised Selwood that the tattoo depicted his 6-year-old daughter, on which Selwood called her a slut and repeated his taunt. Headland then tried, with limited success, to knock Selwood's block into the Swan River.
At three-quarter time he called Selwood a paedophile and demanded that he be investigated for "sexual harassment vilification".
According to Selwood, he asked Headland, "What's that [expletive] on your arm? I was with a girl like that the other night."
The AFL's disciplinary tribunal effectively cleared both players, a decision that was hailed by some as showing the Wisdom of Solomon and damned by others as opening a can of worms.
Selwood walked because the three-man tribunal believed his version of events, risible euphemism and all. (Is "being with" a girl more fun than it sounds?) Having found Headland guilty of striking and wrestling, they let him off scot-free because of "exceptional and compelling circumstances" even though protocol and the player's poor disciplinary record demanded a three-match ban.
The Wisdom of Solomon school argued it was the most sensible way of resolving what was, in essence, an unfortunate misunderstanding.
Critics said it legitimised the defence of provocation at a time when football codes are coming down hard on retaliation on the basis that tit-for-tat is what causes one-on-one clashes to escalate into mass brawls.
What's more, given Headland lost his rag over something that wasn't actually said, provocation can now be in the mind of the retaliator, a development that will be welcomed by football-playing paranoiacs everywhere.
Common sense suggests that unless the female depicted in the tattoo is a hula-hula girl or what used to be called cheesecake, she's probably someone near and dear to the wearer.
By choosing not to find fault with what Selwood admitted saying, the tribunal is also effectively ruling that it's okay to claim you've had sexual relations with an opponent's wife, partner, or mother - or someone bearing an uncannily close resemblance to them.
Headland himself seemed to go along with this, telling the tribunal, "There are things you say on the footy field but there is a line. Kids is crossing that line."
Perhaps that's the dismal reality. This exchange between the garrulous Australian fast bowler Glenn McGrath and Zimbabwean trundler Eddo Brandes is often held up as a prime example of the dark art of sledging: McGrath: "How come you're so fat?"
Brandes: "Because every time I [insert vulgarism of choice] your wife, she gives me a biscuit."
A similar exchange with the West Indian batsman Ramnaresh Sarwan, triggered by McGrath's assertion that Sarwan had an unnaturally close relationship with his captain Brian Lara, isn't accorded classic status because Mrs McGrath was undergoing treatment for cancer at the time. Such is the murky etiquette of sledging.
No doubt the tribunal members were simply trying to come up with a nifty and expeditious solution and gave little thought to the wider implications.
There's certainly a yawning credibility gap between the weight the tribunal ascribed to Selwood's supposedly exemplary character and the millions of dollars in education programmes that the AFL has spent on trying to drag its players' attitudes to women into the 21st century.
If there's a lesson in this tawdry affair it's probably that sports administrators have to look at the bigger picture and see such incidents in a societal context. Professional sport's marriage of convenience with the mass media means that what happens on the field no longer stays on the field. It doesn't even stay on the sports pages.
