A Very French game in Australia: Bill and Alma are into Pétanque

(Last updated Sept. 13, 2011)

Yes, I know, as sports go it can’t be called very strenuous. But it’s fun nonetheless. Since arriving in Australia we’ve been playing Pétanque, a game originated by the French in which people stand around with a glass of good wine close at hand on a Sunday afternoon and, after much fanfare, lob a heavy steel ball (about the size of an orange and weighing 700 grams or so) toward a little rubber ball about 10 meters away on a hard-packed fine gravel pitch. As opposed to just being bowled, the ball (or “boule” as we call it) is lobbed fairly high so that after a short roll it will come as close as possible to the “cochonnet” (or small rubber “jack”). Two or three balls are tossed by each player, and opposing team players try to “shoot” your boule away with a high, hard toss that occasionally sends players scattering for cover. The idea is to end each round with as many boules as possible closest to the jack and thereby win anywhere from 1 to 6 points towards the 13 points needed to win a game.

Pétanque is a very social game, vaguely similar to bocce in the sense that conviviality is a big part of it. One major attraction is that many vineyards in the region hold weekend Pétanque tournaments characterized by much wine tasting and socializing while the game is played. Typical of the tournaments we occasionally rock up for in a vineyard in northeast Victoria’s King Valley, where we’ve lost to some pretty good experts during the three weekend tournaments in which we’ve competed there, but we always have fun anyway. Usually about half the players are French-born Aussies, who tend to be best at it. But the nice thing about Petanque is that you can take it as seriously as you want (on our very first two outings at the St. Kilda Sports Club’s annual winter competitions we were pitted against a couple of national champions—and lost, naturally) or not overly seriously. But in a recent competition at our club, I ended up the top-scoring player, and in another contest he went undefeated against some very high-ranking players from the Dove Petanque Club, so maybe there’s a bit of improvement there. But the idea is to bring a picnic basket and a bottle of wine and have fun, while meeting some other fun-loving people, and that’s what we mostly do.

We’re members of what we think is a great Pétanque group—the Camberwell Petanque Club--which has 76 members and is growing. I’m president of the club, and also president of the state of Victoria’s Pétanque league, which has more than 700 players statewide. I’m also the creator and editor of our club’s website, “The Camberwell Petanque Club Piste-up” (that’s a somewhat rude play on words). You can check out our club’s website at www.pisteup.com and see that it’s all good, wholesome fun (well, wholesome to a point). We moved in December, 2011, to a beautiful new clubhouse that used to be used by a ladies’ lawn bowls club. We converted the bowling green to gravel pistes used in pétanque and our club already has become the envy of pétanque clubs in the state of Victoria.

Here are some photos of our club in action, as well as a few shots taken at other Petanque outings we’ve had: