The late Jim Francis was once asked how best to describe the fearsome football presence who was Bob Chitty.
Said Francis: “There used to be an old saying around Carlton - ‘Don’t hit Chitty with your pickaxe, you’ll blunt your pickaxe’”.
Sadly, few old timers are still around to wax lyrical about Robert Mainwaring Chitty. But Wagga Wagga-born singer songwriter Andrew Mueller is one keeping the flame aflicker by way of “Bob Chitty’s Blues” – a tune which has its genesis in the sunroom of Mueller’s London abode and now features on The Blazing Zoos’ newly-released album “Chocks Away”.
Curiously, Mueller is a Geelong supporter who reckons he’s still three years away from recovering from the 1995 Grand Final.
So why Chitty?
“I knew who Chitty was, and was familiar with the story of the 1945 “Bloodbath” - not least because my grandfather was one of the returned servicemen in the crowd - and I’ve a memory from somewhere of him telling me about seeing South’s Ted Whitfield pulling his jumper over his head so he couldn’t be booked for trying to thump an umpire,” Mueller said.
“But I didn’t know about Chitty’s brothers. I was doing some research for what will hopefully be my next book, which necessitated looking into VFL/AFL Grand Final history a little deeper. I think it was at the Blueseum site that I first found out about what had happened to the rest of Chitty’s family during the war, and then I read the available books around the subject, and looked up a lot of old newspapers online.”
The tale that truly fascinated Mueller related to Bob’s brother Peter Chitty, the only recipient of the Changi Brownlow Medal for best player in the Prisoner of War competition.
“The idea for the song came partly from that, and partly from Martin Flanagan’s great story on 1945, which suggested that one of the reasons for the on-field violence was that most of the players hadn’t served, but a lot of the crowd had, and the players felt they needed to prove something.” Mueller said.
“The assumption of the song is that this pressure must have weighed especially heavily on Bob Chitty, who was clearly regarded (and who clearly regarded himself) as a warrior – and not without reason, in the context of a football field – but who has to contend with having four brothers who’d been the real thing.
“The Blazing Zoos are a country-ish band, and there are a lot of country songs concerned with being a man and what it means, so it seemed a good fit in that respect. I also liked the fact that it’s such a peculiarly Australian story: I still haven’t found the quick way to explain it to British audiences.”
The Blazing Zoos. (Photo: Supplied)
For Mueller, the process of researching and writing proved personally cathartic. As he said: “I’ve learnt from being a journalist that writing anything is first and foremost an attempt to explain it to yourself, and I think it’s much the same with songs”.
So what conclusions had he drawn? Was Bob Chitty a hero, villain or both?
“Though Chitty’s story is (obviously) fascinating in and of itself, it’s made more so by the fact that he was such an ambiguous character – both hero and villain - and it does seem fitting that he went on to play Ned Kelly in a film, dreadful though it apparently was,” Mueller said.
“I mean, he was clearly more than just a knuckle-merchant – two club best and fairests, two premierships (one as captain), fourth in the 1941 Brownlow count, and up among some all-time, any-club greats in Carlton’s team of the century, none of which are honours which accrue to the out-and-out biffer and brawler.
“But he was also clearly that player – and every team should have one – who embraced and enjoyed the role of designated bad guy. So the short answer is: he seems to have been heroic in his villainy.
“Peter Chitty, however, strikes me as almost a comic-book definition of a folkloric Australian hero, to the extent that it seems genuinely weird to me that there isn’t a statue of him somewhere.”
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO "BOB CHITTY'S BLUES"
Note: The Blazing Zoos have existed in some shape or form since 2006, having been assembled in the first instance in response to an unlikely invitation to play at a beach festival in Albania. Since then, they've made two albums, 2010’s “I’ll Leave Quietly”, and the brand new “Chocks Away”. Career highlights include opening for Drive-By Truckers in Amsterdam, for Corb Lund & The Hurtin’ Albertans in London, and (as of the current album) accidentally co-writing a song with Jerry Chesnut, one of Nashville’s most eminent elders and composer of “A Good Year For The Roses”, among many others.
