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Cal Wilson
 As a ring-in to this sunburnt country of ours, Cal Wilson deserves a bloody medal. Moving here three and a half years ago from across the Tasman, Wilson recently decided to explore our most sacred of rites: Aussie rules football. Mind you, this quest was originally for the sake of ridicule and comedy but somewhere along the way something very strange took over and now she's a fair dinkum, true blue convert. But that's not to say that she's ready to forsake many of her astute observations and humorous findings without first sharing them in her latest show, 'Up There Cal Wilson'.
"It's about coming to live in Australia and realising that if I want to be truly at home here I have to have a footy team to barrack for," she explains, with genuine passion in her voice. "For here in Melbourne, as I could imagine it is in Adelaide, football is in the water, you know? It's such a massive part of the fabric of life here that I thought I better choose a team, and when I started to do that I thought there'd be a good show in it. And it's funny, but the more I got into it, the more I really got into it kind of thing; in that the more I found out about football the more I began to enjoy it," she enthuses, "which is quite weird for me because I'm not a sporty person at all.
"The whole show is about me choosing a team and all the different criteria I go through," she recounts. "Like who's got the best uniform or who's got the best team song or best players, all that sort of thing. And I also have little interviews with people and the show also deals with the history of footy as well," she continues.
"It's like that old clichˇ, in that football's a great leveller and I've been having some really great conversations with people I would never have thought I'd have anything in common with. I love that it's so inclusive, in that you get little girls and old nannas all going mental at the games, and that it's so family orientated. I mean, even if you say you don't know anything about footy and you don't like it you've still got a default team because it's much easier to say you barrack for someone rather than stop a conversation.
"But it's also a world of pain barracking for a team," she informs me, "It's like a shaky marriage where you can't get a divorce." Being a) female, and b) from New Zealand, I might have thought she'd meet with some pretty tough opposition from any diehards along the way. Quite the contrary.
"No, everyone was genuinely delighted, and Australians took it quite personally that I'd chosen their sport because as a Kiwi I'm supposed to like rugby union but I just can't stand it," she confesses.
"The thing I appreciate the most about football is you can see the skill involved, whereas with rugby it just looks like two teams of tractors fighting and even though it is skilful it doesn't seem that way. Only now," she opines, "I can no longer safely go back home because of my newfound love of your game."
Steve Jones
'Up There Cal Wilson' can be found at the Fringe Factory Theatre from Fri 9 March
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