THE WORDS THAT FORMED ME

CHAPTER 9

What About Me

The gasps were what I remember. They did not come at the cricket club awards nights, where the people in the room already knew who I was, where I had been placed and how they had chosen to interpret whatever I achieved. They came later, at the district presentations, when somebody read out the season’s figures without first wrapping them in the club’s explanation of why they did not matter quite as much as they appeared to. Eight hundred runs in a season sounded different when announced to a room that had no need to preserve the judgement of the person who had placed me in the lower grades. For a few seconds, the numbers were permitted to speak before the gatekeepers could translate them back into something more comfortable.

I was already in my late twenties by the time I managed to get into grade cricket. That sentence sounds almost casual now, as though I had been delayed by traffic or had taken a wrong turn on the way to the ground. In reality, the road into grade had been narrowed years earlier by the Higher School Certificate result, the need to earn income, the demands of TAFE and the practical truth that sport had to take its place behind employment. Other players entered the system while they were still being described as promising, a word that carries a great deal more authority when attached to somebody young. I arrived after the age at which promise is expected to have become proof, and therefore entered with the strange burden of having to demonstrate immediately what others had been allowed years to develop.

Burwood looked at the player I had become and decided I was better used leading a lower-grade side. Roseville reached much the same conclusion, and later Sydney University also found value in placing experience, steadiness and leadership below the levels where ambition was supposed to be most visible. There was logic in each decision, which is what made the pattern more difficult to challenge. A man in his late twenties with employment responsibilities and no established grade-cricket pedigree could be useful guiding younger players, bringing order to a side and providing the reliability that lower grades often needed. The problem was not that the judgement lacked all reason; it was that the reason became a ceiling even after the performances had begun pushing against it.

I did what I was asked. I led the sides, accepted the position, turned up, scored runs and tried to make the team better rather than conducting a weekly protest about where I had been selected. When the opportunities came, I exceeded what had been expected, sometimes by a margin large enough to become embarrassing for the judgement that had placed me there. Yet the exceeding of expectation did not necessarily cause the expectation to be reconsidered. Instead, the achievement was absorbed into the existing story: I was doing well because I was an experienced player in a lower grade, rather than perhaps being in a lower grade because those assessing me had failed to see what I might do higher up.

That difference matters. One interpretation congratulates the system for placing the right man in the right role, while the other asks whether the system trapped the man inside its first opinion of him. Organisations are exceptionally talented at converting evidence against their decisions into evidence supporting them. If I performed poorly, the original judgement had been correct. If I performed well, the original judgement had also been correct because I was clearly suited to leading at that level. It was a selection policy with the intellectual advantage of never being capable of being wrong.

The trophies came begrudgingly, or at least that is how the presentations remain in my memory. Burwood and Roseville could not ignore seasons in which the run tally reached approximately eight hundred, because numbers of that size tend to make themselves inconvenient. The awards were handed over, the achievement acknowledged, and yet the atmosphere did not always carry the uncomplicated pleasure that should accompany somebody doing far more than had been asked of him. There was humour, qualification or the faint sense that I had somehow overdone the assignment. I had been sent to lead the lower grades, not to produce figures that might cause people to ask why I was still there.

Perhaps nobody consciously intended dismissal. Awards nights are full of banter, sporting humour and speeches delivered by people whose principal qualification is that everyone else took one step backwards when volunteers were requested. A remark remembered as diminishing may have been intended as affectionate, and I have no wish to transform ordinary club officials into villains merely because memory has retained the bruise more clearly than the joke. Yet repetition gives an experience a different weight. When the same sensation follows you through more than one organisation, it becomes harder to dismiss it as a misunderstanding caused by one poorly phrased presentation.

The district awards nights were different because the people hearing the figures were not invested in the club’s original assessment. They had not placed me in a lower grade, asked me to lead it or quietly decided the proper limits of my cricket. They heard a name, a grade and a number of runs, and the reaction came before explanation. The gasp was not enormous or theatrical, and I may now be giving it more unity than several separate moments possessed. What mattered was that the achievement briefly entered the room without being filtered through somebody else’s expectation of the person who had produced it.

That gave me a satisfaction the club presentations did not. It was not simply applause, because applause can be polite, nor was it the trophy, because the same object had already felt strangely hollow when presented closer to home. The satisfaction came from hearing surprise that belonged to the size of the performance rather than surprise that I had been capable of it. For once, the numbers were not being assessed against the modest role allocated to me. They stood in the open air and caused the response they had earned.

I can hear What About Me by Moving Pictures¹ somewhere inside that experience, although I cannot claim it was played at any of those presentations. The internal radio station has never felt bound by the historical requirement that a song must actually have been playing in order to become attached to a memory. It selects according to emotional relevance, occasional mischief and whatever filing system has allowed Mah Nà Mah Nà to remain readily available while more useful information disappears. In this case, the choice is almost too obvious. I did what was asked, exceeded the requirement and then wondered why the response still sounded like dismissal.

The question in the song has often been heard as a complaint from somebody ignored while others receive their share. That may be close to its intended meaning, but my relationship with it is less orderly. “What about me?” is not only a request for something not yet received; it is also the question that arises when what has been delivered is treated as though it does not count. It belongs to the person who has fulfilled the bargain and then discovers that the bargain was never going to be honoured in the way he understood it. The reward may be handed over, the name may be read out and the rules may technically have been followed, yet the person still feels absent from his own recognition.

This chapter could become a prosecution of cricket clubs, schools, universities, employers and every staid organisation that ever appointed a goalkeeper to protect a pathway from late arrivals. There is enough evidence to prepare an opening address, and the analytical Jeff would no doubt enjoy organising the exhibits. Burwood could be called, followed by Roseville and Sydney University, with the Higher School Certificate appearing as an expert witness for the defence of institutional certainty. The difficulty is that I would also have to enter the witness box. I accepted many of the roles, kept returning and became exceptionally good at disguising how much the dismissal mattered.

The pattern began well before grade cricket. The Higher School Certificate result did not merely produce disappointment; it created a void where income-supported or bursary-assisted academic possibility might otherwise have existed. My mark of 215 out of 500 became an official statement about performance at one point in time, then acquired the authority of a prediction about capacity. There was no financial cushion that allowed the result to be reconsidered through another year, a different pathway or a period of supported exploration. TAFE and employment took precedence because they had to, and the possibilities requiring money, time or delayed earnings quietly moved beyond reach.

I have called that result a manufactured failure. I do not mean that the marks were falsified or that people gathered secretly to prevent me from becoming what I might have become. The failure was manufactured because a narrow form of measurement interacted with circumstance, limited finance and institutional rigidity, then presented the outcome as though it had arisen entirely from the individual. The system measured what occurred under its own conditions and labelled the result as personal truth. Once the certificate had spoken, the rest of life was expected to accept its testimony.

The lost possibilities included more than university study. Sport, which had been a source of enjoyment and one of the few places where ability could be expressed physically rather than explained, also had to move behind work and TAFE. I think of it as the loss of park enjoyment, the simple right to play while the body was young enough and time still carried the illusion of abundance. Training, matches and development become harder when the working week owns the hours other players use to become established. By the time I could force a way back towards serious cricket, the game saw my age before it saw the journey that had made me late.

Age is one of the most convenient gatekeepers because it appears objective. A selector can look at a player in his late twenties and reasonably ask how much development remains, while looking at a teenager and imagining everything that might yet occur. Potential is therefore granted to youth, while the older newcomer must arrive already complete. The younger player may fail several times and still be described as learning. The older player must succeed immediately, and even then his success may be treated as useful rather than promising.

Money performs a similar sorting function while pretending not to be present. The young person with family support can study, train, recover from setbacks and remain available when opportunity appears. The young person who must earn income has to fit possibility around shifts, travel, fees and fatigue, then is judged against those who had the luxury of arranging life around development. Money does not purchase talent, but it purchases the time in which talent may be discovered, corrected and displayed. It also purchases the right to fail without having the failure become permanent.

That is where the anger from Dumbing It Down belongs in this chapter. It is not anger that I was not automatically recognised as the cleverest, best or most deserving person in every room. It is anger at systems that call themselves neutral while rewarding those already trained in their customs, and at organisations that ask for performance but resist reconsidering the judgement made before the performance occurred. It is anger at being told to prove myself, then watching the proof turned into another reason to leave me where I had been placed. Most of all, it is anger at the number of times I accepted that treatment as the reasonable price of being allowed inside.

The scream in What About Me therefore reaches beyond cricket. It belongs to everybody who has carried out the instruction, exceeded the target and discovered that the institution values obedience more comfortably than achievement. It belongs to the worker who takes responsibility beyond the position but remains unsuitable for promotion because the organisation cannot imagine replacing him where he is. It belongs to the carer whose reliability becomes the reason nobody asks whether the care is costing too much. It belongs to people who have spent years doing more with less, only to hear that those who began with more must have deserved the distance they travelled.

The world in which the rich get richer is not sustained by money alone. Wealth brings access, confidence, recovery time and familiarity with the rooms in which decisions are made. A person who has grown up around universities, professional organisations and established sporting pathways knows how to approach them without appearing to be asking permission. Somebody arriving from outside must first learn the language, identify the hidden expectations and decide how much of himself needs to be modified before the room will listen. By the time the bridge has been built, those who began inside are already several crossings ahead.

I became very good at building those bridges. The mind on one side of the gap moved quickly, connected ideas and saw possibilities that were not always visible to the people standing on the other side. The reality in front of me required those thoughts to be translated, slowed, softened or rearranged so they could be received without threatening the room. This was not entirely a loss. It later became one of my greatest professional strengths, allowing me to explain tax, business, risk and difficult decisions in language that did not make another person feel diminished.

The problem came when translation became reduction. There is a difference between making an idea understandable and making yourself smaller so that the people listening remain comfortable. I learned to hold back the conclusion, hide the impatience and allow the room to arrive slowly at a place I had reached much earlier. Sometimes that was wisdom and good communication. At other times, it was the continuing performance of a boy who had concluded that belonging depended upon keeping parts of himself out of sight.

Grade cricket repeated that negotiation in physical form. I wanted to play, and therefore accepted the grade, the role and the expectation placed upon me. I did not wish to arrive as the difficult latecomer declaring that the selectors had failed to recognise greatness before I had scored a run. The reasonable response was to perform, support the team and allow achievement to create its own argument. When the achievement came and the argument was still dismissed, the lesson was not merely that I had been underrated. It was that evidence does not always change a decision when changing the decision would require the decision-maker to admit the original view had been incomplete.

Burwood and Roseville may genuinely have believed leadership in the lower grades was the best use of me. There is honour in leading a team, helping younger players and contributing beyond one’s own score. I do not wish to reduce that work merely because I also wanted the opportunity to test myself higher. Yet organisations sometimes praise leadership when what they mean is that a competent person has become too useful in the place assigned to him. The compliment then operates as a lock, polished regularly and presented as recognition.

Eight hundred runs should have tested the lock. A season of that scale is not an isolated good afternoon or a fortunate series of dropped catches, although I am prepared to acknowledge that every batsman accepts charity when offered in the outfield. It represents repeated performance, concentration and the capacity to begin again after each dismissal. It should at least have reopened the conversation about where the player belonged. Instead, the trophy could be handed over while the underlying judgement remained untouched.

That was the dismissal I felt. Nobody needed to say that the runs did not matter, because the refusal to let them alter the story said enough. I had been asked to lead and score runs, and I had done both beyond what could reasonably have been demanded. The award acknowledged the statistical result while the attitude surrounding it denied the implication. I was celebrated for exceeding expectation, provided nobody expected the exceeding to change anything.

The district presentation temporarily removed that contradiction. The announcer did not need to defend a selection decision or maintain the delicate hierarchy of a particular club. The number was read, the room responded and I heard something closer to recognition. It may seem a small thing to have carried for so long, but people often remember the first time their achievement is received without qualification. The gasp said that the performance was unusual before anyone could explain why the performer should remain ordinary.

I suspect that is what I had been seeking in many rooms. I did not need constant applause, nor did I expect every accomplishment to produce a trumpet fanfare and a commemorative plaque. I wanted the thing achieved to be considered honestly, without being reduced to preserve somebody’s earlier opinion of me. I wanted the argument to move when the evidence moved. That expectation seems modest until it encounters an organisation whose real purpose is often the preservation of its own judgement.

The professional world later provided many variations on the same theme. Institutions frequently invited initiative while rewarding compliance, requested independent thought while remaining suspicious of conclusions not produced by the approved process, and celebrated leadership provided it did not disturb the established order. I could solve problems, improve systems and carry responsibilities others avoided, yet still encounter the subtle message that I had exceeded the authority attached to my position. The cricket trophy had simply prepared me for later awards presented with one hand while the other quietly returned me to my allotted place.

Service further complicated the question. I became the person people approached for advice, administration, intervention and rescue because I had demonstrated that I could be relied upon. That reliance brought satisfaction, identity and belonging, particularly when belonging without a function had always felt less certain. If a client, family member, club or community organisation needed something solved, I had a clear reason to be in the room. Usefulness became the membership card that no goalkeeper could easily revoke.

The card came with conditions I had largely written myself. I would be available, capable and calm, even when the problem had arrived late, the records were poor or the person seeking rescue had ignored earlier advice. I would convert anxiety into steps, complexity into ordinary language and looming consequences into something that might still be managed. In return, I quietly expected people to recognise the human cost of being the person who continually carried those things. Unfortunately, the expectation remained mostly inside my head, where it was filed with several other important documents nobody else had been invited to read.

Resentment collected beneath competence. It rarely appeared as an open refusal because refusal threatened the belonging usefulness had secured. Instead, it accumulated through each occasion when somebody remembered my capacity but not my condition, asked what should be done but not how I was managing, or assumed that the person giving reassurance had an unlimited private supply. The resentment was not always fair, because many people would have responded differently had I spoken honestly. They saw the version I presented and reasonably concluded that the structure was sound.

That is the sharper question raised by the song. Who taught people to overlook my needs? The easy answer points towards family expectations, institutions, clients, clubs and a culture that values men most comfortably when they are solving rather than feeling. The harder answer includes me. I became so accomplished at concealing need that being unseen was sometimes less an act of neglect than the successful outcome of the performance I had given.

I did not ask to fit in, at least not openly. I tried to make myself useful enough that fitting in would appear to happen naturally, allowing me to avoid the humiliation of seeking admission. The internal struggle lay between the person wanting recognition and the person who regarded the request for recognition as weakness. I would work harder, achieve more, explain better and become increasingly dependable, expecting the room eventually to understand what had never been stated. When it failed, I experienced the failure as dismissal rather than considering whether the room had ever been given the full information.

The cricket clubs had been given information in the form of runs. That is why the memory remains more irritating than situations in which I simply failed to speak. Runs are not subtle emotional signals requiring sensitivity and interpretation. They are entered into books, added into aggregates and compared across a season. When approximately eight hundred of them still failed to shift the underlying view, I learned that even measurable evidence can be ignored when it challenges a comfortable hierarchy.

Yet I must also ask what I wanted the clubs to provide. Was it promotion, respect, belonging, an apology for having underestimated me or some retroactive correction of the years lost before I entered grade cricket? No club could restore the sporting time consumed by work and TAFE, nor could a selector repair the HSC result or the financial limitations that had followed it. I may have arrived carrying claims much larger than the institutions could possibly settle. The award-night dismissal hurt partly because it touched every earlier occasion when performance had failed to open the anticipated door.

The analytical Jeff wants to separate those claims. He would allocate responsibility between educational systems, financial circumstance, sporting organisations, personal choices and the inevitable unfairness of time. He would note that late entry creates genuine selection difficulties and that lower-grade leadership is not inherently insulting. His analysis would probably be correct, thoroughly documented and emotionally useless. The human Jeff still hears the gasp at the district awards night and recognises how hungry he had been for a response unpolluted by prior expectation.

That hunger does not make me uniquely wronged. Almost everybody carries some version of the belief that they did what was required and were still overlooked. People watch the rich accumulate choices while their own margin for error becomes narrower, and they wonder whether hard work was a promise or merely advertising. They see positions circulated through familiar networks, opportunities described as open while the successful candidate seems to have been known before the advertisement appeared, and systems insisting on antiquated pathways after experience has already proved capability. Most assume the frustration belongs only to them because everyone else has learned to present competence as calm.

The scream of What About Me is powerful because it breaks that calm. It is not sophisticated language, but sophisticated language is often used to prevent the question being heard. We call it inequity, structural disadvantage, institutional capture or a failure of meritocratic mobility, then attend a seminar and return home with the original ache intact. The song strips the issue back to the person standing outside while decisions are made inside. It asks what all the policy language has failed to answer.

There is danger in allowing the scream to become the whole voice. Resentment can rearrange memory until every disappointment becomes deliberate and every success something stolen from hostile hands. It can turn legitimate anger into a permanent claim that the world owes recognition on demand. I do not want to become that person, nor do I believe every gatekeeper acted from malice. Many were simply enforcing assumptions they had inherited and may never have thought to question.

That does not excuse the assumptions. A process can be unjust without anyone involved waking with a plan to cause harm, and dismissal can occur through habit as easily as hostility. Burwood, Roseville and Sydney University existed within sporting cultures that valued established pathways, youth, known reputations and the orderly movement of players through grades. I arrived late and inconveniently capable, a combination that did not fit neatly into those expectations. Their failure was perhaps not that they disliked me, but that they did not allow the evidence to disturb the category into which they had placed me.

My failure was different. I continued to believe that exceeding expectation would eventually force recognition, even after experience repeatedly suggested that organisations are more flexible in their public language than in their private imagination. I kept doing more, producing more and carrying more because performance was the argument I trusted. When the argument failed, I did not always challenge the premise; I simply increased the volume of evidence. Eight hundred runs became the sporting version of working harder in the hope that an institution would one day develop self-awareness.

That pattern followed me into business and service. When a client ignored advice, returned later in trouble and required rescue, I often responded by becoming more useful. When an organisation lacked administration, I filled the gap. When family needed money, guidance or intervention, I tried to provide it before admitting that provision had a cost. Each time, competence solved the immediate problem and strengthened the expectation that competence would be available next time.

Eventually, the person performing the rescue begins to wonder who will come when he needs rescuing. The question may remain unspoken because rescuers are supposed to understand ropes, ladders and emergency procedures without assistance. It may also be hidden because asking for help risks changing the relationship on which identity has been built. If I am no longer the capable one, I must discover whether there is another reason for people to remain. That is a far more frightening question than any awards-night slight.

Depression knows how to exploit it. The Black Dog can take a missed call, a quiet week or somebody else’s distraction and turn it into proof that usefulness was the only thing holding the relationships together. It whispers that people remember the advice but not the adviser, the money but not the provider, the administration but not the person who sat late making it work. On better days, I know that interpretation is incomplete. On worse days, incomplete evidence has never prevented the Black Dog from issuing a confident report.

The answer cannot simply be to stop helping. Service is not an accidental burden imposed upon an otherwise reluctant life; it is part of who I became and one of the ways I expressed care. I have enjoyed solving problems, making complexity manageable and helping people move towards something safer or better. The mistake was not usefulness itself. The mistake was allowing usefulness to become the only language through which I believed affection, belonging and significance could be secured.

Nor can the answer be to demand retrospective applause from every institution that failed to understand me. Burwood cannot be required to reconvene an awards night, Roseville cannot revise the tone of a presentation and Sydney University cannot return sporting years already lost. The district gasp has already given the younger me what those clubs could not: one unguarded moment in which achievement was recognised at face value. Perhaps that should be enough, although emotional arithmetic is rarely so cooperative. A lifetime of being measured through expectation does not disappear because one room briefly heard the number clearly.

What can change is the way I interpret the question now. “What about me?” does not have to mean that somebody else must receive less so that I can receive more. It can mean that I must include myself among the people whose needs I consider legitimate. It can mean saying that I am tired before tiredness becomes resentment, or asking for care without first submitting evidence of usefulness. It can also mean refusing to accept dismissal merely because it arrives in the polite language of process.

I can acknowledge that leading lower grades had value while still saying that repeated performance deserved genuine reconsideration. I can be grateful for TAFE and the profession that followed while grieving the academic possibilities the HSC and financial circumstances removed. I can value the life built through work without pretending that work did not consume years in which park enjoyment and sporting development might have flourished. Gratitude does not require me to falsify the cost. Anger does not require me to deny the value of what came afterwards.

The line running through the chapter is therefore not simple exclusion. I was admitted to grade cricket, selected in teams, given leadership and presented with trophies. On paper, the system could demonstrate that I had been included. The wound lay in the quality of that inclusion, the sense that I had been admitted to perform a function while the evidence of greater capacity remained unwelcome. I had not merely wanted to enter the room; I had wanted the room to be capable of changing its mind.

That is what the district gasp represented. Nobody there knew enough about the internal club story to protect it, and therefore the achievement arrived without contamination. The sound may have lasted only a second, but it allowed me to hear what eight hundred runs meant when separated from the judgement that had preceded them. It did not restore the lost years or guarantee a higher grade. It simply confirmed that the performance had been real, substantial and worthy of surprise.

Perhaps that is all recognition ever truly provides. It cannot rebuild the past, but it can prevent the past from persuading us that what happened did not count. The trophies at Burwood and Roseville acknowledged the seasons, while the district response acknowledged the scale of them. One was an institutional obligation, and the other felt human. I needed the human response because too many systems had already provided the technically correct answer while leaving the person out.

I hear What About Me differently from that position. The song no longer sounds only like somebody demanding a share from people who have failed to notice him. It sounds like the voice that rises after service, compliance and performance have all been delivered and the person is still treated as though he should be grateful merely to have participated. It asks why exceeding expectations did not alter the expectation, and why an achievement could be rewarded while the achiever remained dismissed. Those questions are not childish merely because they are direct.

I also hear my own responsibility within them. I trained people to expect capability, hid the cost of providing it and often waited for performance to communicate needs it could never express. Runs could demonstrate cricketing ability, but they could not tell a selector what years of delayed opportunity meant to me. Advice could demonstrate professional value, but it could not automatically tell a client when the adviser was depleted. Service could show love, but it could not guarantee that the person providing it felt loved in return.

The bridge between the id and the reality in front of me remains under construction. One side wants recognition without having to ask, while the other insists that unspoken needs cannot reasonably become obligations for everyone else. One side remembers the dismissal, and the other calculates the practical explanations. My voice has emerged somewhere between them, not by resolving the argument but by becoming willing to state that both are present. I can understand the system and still refuse to pretend it did not hurt.

The world remains full of people who have done what they were asked, exceeded expectation and then been dismissed. Some are kept in lower positions because their competence makes them too valuable there, while others are denied late entry because organisations prefer predictable pathways to inconvenient evidence. Many have been told that their exhaustion is a personal failure rather than the foreseeable result of carrying too much with too little support. They look around at those who began with greater resources and conclude that everyone else has found a secret they alone have missed.

Most have not missed a secret. They have encountered a world in which wealth reproduces opportunity, institutions protect their first impressions and visible competence conceals private need. Their scream may sound like self-pity to those who have never had to justify their arrival. It may even sound like self-pity to the people screaming, because they have been trained to distrust any claim made on their own behalf. The question remains necessary precisely because so many people have learned not to ask it.

I did what I was asked. I led the lower grades, carried responsibility, scored the runs and accepted the trophies, even when the hand presenting them seemed less enthusiastic than the figures demanded. I exceeded expectations and then watched those expectations remain firmly in place. The district gasp did not undo the dismissal, but it exposed it by showing how the achievement sounded when heard without the gatekeeper standing beside it. For one moment, the room responded to what I had done rather than where somebody had decided I belonged.

That moment still matters because I am learning, even now, to allow my own assessment the same freedom. I do not need Burwood, Roseville, Sydney University, the HSC examiners or every later organisation to reconvene and announce that I was underestimated. I can recognise the work, the intelligence, the runs, the service and the cost without waiting for an institution to grant permission. That is not an attempt to award myself every trophy withheld by life. It is an attempt to stop allowing other people’s expectations to pollute the announcement.

The radio in my head will probably continue to ask, “What about me?” It may ask resentfully on some mornings, reasonably on others and with the Black Dog adjusting the volume when silence would have been kinder. I cannot promise that I will always answer wisely. I can only try to hear the question before turning it into another task, another achievement or another service performed in the hope that somebody else will understand what I have not said.

The answer is not that everything should have been about me. It is that I should have been included among the people who mattered while I was busy carrying, leading and solving for everyone else. I deserved neither automatic promotion nor exemption from the ordinary tests of ability, but performance deserved to be allowed to alter the judgement made before it. I did what I was asked, exceeded the expectation and too often found myself dismissed because the exceeding had become inconvenient. The gasp at the district awards night remains because, for once, nobody had prepared an explanation to make the achievement smaller.

Notes

1. What About Me was written by Garry Frost and Frances Swan. The version remembered here was recorded by the Australian band Moving Pictures and released in 1982 as a single from the album Days of Innocence. The song became one of the band’s best-known recordings in Australia and was later released internationally.