July 23, 2026 — 5:00am

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Where shall I start? Where can I end? The gods have given me so much to cry about.

But finally, after years of torment, it is hip to be Homer. Not even Prometheus, the god of forethought, saw that one coming.

An epic tale of Homer’s Odyssey is playing out on cinema screens and in Australian politics. Illustration by Matt Davidson

You’ll see at the top of this column a ponderous byline, complete with roman numeral. It’s the name I was given at birth but have rarely used, other than to apply for passports and complete tax returns.

There is good reason for this. When I was a boy, the only Homers I knew of were my dad, his dad and a character in a kid’s picture book who spends the whole story protesting, unconvincingly, that he isn’t a pest. Then The Simpsons came along and killed the name for a generation.

Occasionally, my formal name has broken into public view. A while back, former AFL chief Andrew Demetriou, having taken issue with something I wrote, ridiculed it on radio. This made him, in the wry observation of one colleague, the first Greek to have no appreciation of Homer.

Once in a while, an anonymous social media account with no love for the classics will cite it as mocking evidence that I am an imposter. I don’t have the heart to tell them my employers realised this years ago and for reasons beyond the wisdom of Athena, continue to provide me a paycheck.

Now, thanks to the filmmaking genius of Christopher Nolan and his box office titan The Odyssey, Homers the world over are partying like it’s 799BC.

Whether such a man – purportedly a blind poet from the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea – ever lived in flesh and blood or was invented to give authorship to an ancient tradition of oral story telling, is a question scholars have argued about for centuries.

This Homer is less concerned with conundrums from antiquity than the epic story unfolding in the demos of Victoria, where 12 years after their exile from Spring Street, the Liberal Party is attempting to complete a long and eventful journey back to power.

There is no heroic Odysseus in this tale because, in a twist to the well-known story, party room cannibals have every couple of years tended to eat whatever captain is steering their ship.

Matthew Guy, whose decision to linger too long inside the Lobster Cave angered the sea-god Poseidon, sailed into ferocious head-winds at the last state election and sunk with most of his crew into the churning waters.

A one-eyed giant, Peter Dutton, sealed off the state party from any glimpse of electoral appeal and kept them imprisoned for years, firm in his belief that gangs of brigands were roaming the streets of Melbourne and local villagers were too scared to make a restaurant booking.

John Pesutto, having bravely fought the Sky News Scylla – a monster whose six heads respectively bear an uncanny likeness to Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt, Rita Panahi, Chris Kenny, Paul Murray and Rowan Dean – forgot to plug his ears with beeswax and followed the siren song of Moira Deeming to his political demise.

Brad Battin landed on the Island of the Lotus Eaters and gorged himself on the deliciously ripe crime statistics he found there. While the fruit tasted great, he discovered to his horror that he’d wasted an entire year in the same press conference, repeating the same grab, oblivious to the passage of time.

Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops could have been lifted straight from a Liberal Party spill meeting. “He ripped them limb by limb to make his meal, then ate them like a lion on the mountains, devouring flesh, entrails, and marrow bones, and leaving nothing.”

Jess Wilson, after persuading surviving crew members to lash her to the mast of a listing ship, charted a course home only to discover the Coalition’s electoral heartland had been taken over by uninvited house guests wearing orange T-shirts.

We still don’t know whether Wilson will outwit her rival suitors or perish like her preceding captains. She is so far the only Liberal leader to hear Deeming’s haunting melody and survive but opinion polls, like the gods, can be difficult to read.

The moral of this tale, if there is such a thing in state politics, is for the suitors in the orange T-shirts.

One of Homer’s recurring themes in The Odyssey is the importance of xenia, the ancient Greek concept of hospitality. It carries a two-way obligation to provide shelter, food and protection to visiting strangers and for guests not to abuse their welcome. To fall short on either measure invited the wrath of Zeus himself.

One Nation founder Pauline Hanson has recently returned from a luxury hotel in Sicily, the Mediterranean island that, while unnamed by Homer, provided the setting for some of Odysseus’s toughest trials.

Hanson’s proposed treatment of new arrivals to this Pacific island – she told Seven’s Spotlight program during her European sojourn that she loves the idea of mass deportation – has always fallen short of Zeus’ standard.

It is not clear whether Odysseus would fit into One Nation’s matrix of preferred Australians. As Homeric scholar Emily Wilson notes in her 2017 translation of The Odyssey that inspired Nolan’s film, Odysseus is both a war hero and mass murderer (tick, tick), an athlete and disabled (checking NDIS eligibly), a colonial invader (another tick) and a homeless migrant (please explain).

“Reading The Odyssey with fresh, curious, and critical eyes may help us not only rethink our assumptions about people in the past, but also break down some of our modern distinctions and assumptions,” Wilson writes.

The Liberal Party has been in opposition longer than it took to fight the Trojan War. Victorians will need curious, critical eyes come November, when they vote on their return.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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Homer E Le Grand V – Chip Le Grand leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper’s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years’ experience.