The Footy Almanac is happy to support regular contributor Andy Thurlow as he releases and launches his latest book, The Hugamug Club. We previewed his book recently on the site. Andy has provided us with a few excerpts to give us an idea of what to expect from his latest offering. Details of the book launch by Dr Steen Olsen, also featuring John Harms in conversation with the five central figures of the book, appear below.
Brian Schwarz was a champion footballer for Sturt, playing in three SANFL premiership teams under legendary coach Jack Oatey. In this first excerpt, Brian tells us a bit about Oatey and his methods:
During those years, Sturt had a brilliant player list and also a wonderful coach.
Coach Jack Oatey was a stickler for training skills. He emphasised teamwork and helped us understand the game of football as a working operation. Jack used handball as an effective offensive weapon, developed ‘checkside rucking’ where instead of hitting the ball forward and making your players have to turn towards goal, you ruck the ball down to a player running through. And he got us to practise the banana kick which is used a lot now.
He was like a general who could strategise and yet he was also a personal coach who knew how to get the best out of us. He knew what buttons to push. He would come up and quietly give you advice about the player you were standing.
Jack was also a brilliant orator. He never hesitated or searched for a word. It was there. He really motivated us. If he ever got angry, it was never with the group. I remember some of Jack’s addresses. On the eve of the 1968 Grand Final, he gathered us together and said, ‘I believe in you guys. I have faith in you.’ He used religious type language like we were his ‘disciples’.
He was also a lot of fun too. He would playfully tease me about my faith by saying, ‘Tell the guy upstairs to turn the water off — the oval is muddy enough.’
There were many Christians in our team. John Halbert was a committed Baptist, and I remember him telling my mates and me not to have any more than one beer after winning an important match.
Brenton Adcock and Keith Chessel were committed Christians too, Keith working for the Bible Society. At one game when we were just a few points behind, Rick Schoff took a mark within easy goal kicking distance. A normally reliable kick, he shanked it out of bounds. A minute or so later, Keith Chessel marked the ball in almost the same position. Rick Schoff yelled out, ‘If you kick the goal, I’ll go and buy a Bible.’ Keith did, and so did Rick.
I understood more of what I had learnt from Jack when later I did some coaching of my own.
In those days none of us were full-time professional footballers. Many needed time off work to train on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I would also train on Mondays by myself. I didn’t work with weights, but I remember John Halbert and Jim Tilbrook using them. A lot of the players were manual workers anyway. I did push ups, and I still do them. After the games we never went for ice baths, or wading in the sea, or any of those ‘cool-down’ practices. I once had a massage, but it left me so tired, I decided to never have one again.
In 1994 I conducted Jack Oatey’s funeral. There were two services, one for the family, club officials and players, and another at Unley Oval for the public. I conducted the private family one. Jack’s son Robert had been at the funeral I had conducted for Fos William’s son Anthony and asked me to do Jack’s. This was harder for me because I was so emotionally involved.
Amel Manyon was born in Sudan. The story of the struggles of her early years there and her eventual migration to Australia where she is now a minister of religion in the Uniting Church tradition is little less than miraculous.
My husband James tried to contact us from Kenya where he was in exile. He wanted to return to Sudan, but it was too dangerous for him. After three years we could communicate with each other only by telegraph, the means of transmission used by the army due to the country’s poor or non-existent communication network.
In 1997 a political arrangement called the Khartoum Peace Agreement was made between the Government of Sudan and various militia leaders in southern Sudan which allowed freedom of movement, so James was eventually able to take that opportunity to return to us in 1999.
On his return he again took up journalism but got into more trouble with an article he wrote against the government militia who were killing a lot of people. Once again he needed to leave the country, but this time he couldn’t get a visa.
I was pregnant with my last son, my fifth child Pal, who was born in March 2000. I had a good connection with some people who were working against the government. I typed their documents, as I could type in both English and Arabic and they trusted me. This group were not prepared to send James to southern Sudan where he would probably have been arrested, but instead they organised a passport and visa for James to escape to Egypt. Like I had done before him, he had to travel to Wadi Halfa to collect his documents and then board a boat to Aswan in Southern Egypt, finally taking a train from Aswan to Cairo.
Once in Egypt my husband James registered with the United Nations as a refugee. He stayed in Egypt for three years, applying to different embassies for political asylum.
During that time, he worked in a pharmacy as a cleaner and a delivery person, earning 300 Egyptian pounds a month, which is the equivalent of 30 dollars Australian.
Finally in April 2002, the Australian Embassy accepted him as an immigrant and then they faxed us invitations and papers for medical checks. This sort of thing never happened to anybody we knew! Nobody ever received an invitation to leave Sudan! And so nobody believed me! I had difficulty believing James!
As incredible as this invitation was, we were not really sure we wanted to go anywhere. My children and I were now quite settled in Khartoum. We certainly didn’t want to return to Egypt to join my husband before flying to Australia. I thought Australia was too far away.
However, despite our reservations, we did all the paperwork, and now I needed money for flights to Egypt. The college were wonderful and donated money to cover this, plus some cash to cover extras.
Next, we needed exit visas, and the Sudanese Government had a rule that a woman could not leave without permission from her husband. But my husband was not with me. He was considered to be a rebel and the authorities insisted he come back. So, I prayed to God. If it was His will for me to go to Australia, then so be it.
There was another problem in that we were taking my sister’s daughter with us. She needed permission to leave but had no parents to give that permission. Also, my relatives wanted to take her from me. She was 18 years old, beautiful, had finished school and would fetch a fine dowry in marriage.
So, I needed to get an exit visa for her first and get her to Egypt quickly. I went into the immigration office to do that, knowing our chances were poor because she needed permission to leave from her father who had died.
Fortunately, everyone there was watching football! It was the 2002 World Cup and in the Round of 16, Senegal, an African country, beat Sweden 2–1 to make the quarter finals. Senegal was the first African team to make World Cup finals. The woman on the desk was distracted by the excitement and stamped my niece’s visa quickly without asking too many questions.
The next day, when we took my sister’s daughter to the airport, they were replaying the match, and she got on to her plane with little fuss. I knew it was God at work and that everything would work out.
The following week it was my family’s turn to fly to Egypt.
When I went to get our visas, Senegal was now playing in the quarter finals against Turkey. Again, the official was so distracted that he checked my invalid documentation quickly.
However, my credentials were still unacceptable as I still did not have official permission from my husband to leave, so the next day at the airport, when we approached the lady checking people on to the plane, I was worried because she was being very thorough, officious and rude.
When it was my turn to show her our paperwork, she was called away. Her replacement was talking about soccer with another official and not at all interested in looking carefully at any documentation. So we received permission to board the aircraft … only to discover that it wasn’t there!
There had been a dust storm in Port Sudan so the plane to take us from Khartoum to Egypt was stuck there. The flight was cancelled, and the airport officials gave us a meal and told us that no-one was leaving the airport until the flight arrived. Everybody was unhappy to have to sleep on airport seats, but I gave thanks to God. I am happy to sleep anywhere and, if we’d left the airport, we would have needed to go through all the checks again. At 5 am the next morning, we boarded the plane and flew to Egypt. God at work!
And by the way, I continue to love soccer and often watch it!
Five months later we were on our way to Australia. My husband and I came to Australia with the daughter of my eldest sister who had died, as well as my sisters-in-law’s daughter, and my five children.
Robert Voigt was another seminary student who played football for Sturt. But, like Brian Schwarz, his first parish appointment to Mt Isa meant the end of footy and the start of his real calling in life. Mt Isa was something completely different but pivotal in his development.
The year I started at seminary was also the first of two years I made it into the league squad at Sturt. On 21 August 1965, I played my first league game and went on to play 18 more. Rick Schoff gave me my first game. He got injured at centre half back, so I took his place. I was mostly a stand-in for injury. When Bruce Jarrett got injured, I played full back. When Malcolm Greenslade was hurt, I played full forward. They were such a great team that I couldn’t break in. Once Jack Oatey took me aside at grand final time and said that if only I had more experience (I was only 19 at the time), I would be in the team. If it had been any team but Sturt, I might have had a permanent spot in the team.
I played on Fos Williams when he played his last match for Port Adelaide. He was built like a brick on skinny legs, and he thrashed me. He just knocked me out of the way.
When the Unley Mall opened, they had an evangelist coming and they asked a few Sturt players to form a musical group for the event. Brian Schwarz, Daryl Hicks, Keith Chessell, John Noack, Terry Short and I were that group. Either Terry or Keith was on a T-box, a one-stringed bass. I was tenor and we sang ‘Little David, play on your harp’ and songs like that. People loved it.
In early November 1971 I was told that the church was sending me to Mount Isa, Queensland — a mining city of 26,000 people with an average age of 25. At first I couldn’t even find it on the map. I wasn’t thrilled, but we never thought to question the church or refuse to accept where we were placed.
After spending some time at Loxton with my parents and with Sadie’s parents, we left at 1.30 am one morning in early January 1972 for our trip to Mount Isa in our new green Ford Falcon XY.
It was a beautiful trip to Brisbane, which was only halfway to Mount Isa. There had been a cyclone around Townsville a few weeks before and there was flooding across Queensland, so when we got to Longreach we checked with the local police, who reckoned there were no problems in getting through. Five kilometres north of the town we struck a dirt road, which would go all the way to Boulia. The road was muddy, had deep ruts from the road trains and was covered in water in places, requiring detours. We teamed up with a ‘bushie’ from Western Australia who was travelling with two dogs. He helped us poor, totally useless townies in so many ways. We had to traverse many boggy patches of road, and we had to cross around thirty flooded tributaries of the Diamantina River. They were a scary and exhilarating couple of days. It was a one-lane bitumen road from Boulia to Mount Isa, but it looked fantastic to us.
The manse was behind the church on the main Barkly Highway, opposite the mine where copper and silver were extracted and smelted. The church property was built on mine tailings and after we left, they bulldozed the entire church plant because of the toxic soil and rebuilt elsewhere. Later we had to have tests for lead poisoning.
We learned an amazing amount in this first parish. We loved living in Mount Isa, except when we had to go anywhere. The trip home was 3,000 kilometres one way. The people were generous and because we were so isolated we enjoyed many meals together, including Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We made good friends.
I consider going to Mount Isa as another major event in my life that helped to shape me for future ministry. I had to relearn how to be practical in my preaching, flexible in planning anything and open to all kinds of people. I also had to be willing to learn, as I also served the Finnish people and their congregation at times, and to be more reliant on God as I faced all sorts of new situations in my first parish and in extreme isolation from the rest of the Lutheran Church of Australia (LCA).
When making my very first home visit, to a nominal member, I learned a valuable lesson. In the early afternoon I knocked on the door and then knocked again. After what seemed like a long time a man finally opened the door, looking like he’d just woken up. ‘What do ya want?’ he asked. I explained that I was the new Lutheran pastor in town, and I was visiting church members and friends. ‘You’re a bloody parasite and a waste of space,’ he yelled and slammed the door. I was a bit shocked, but later a member explained to me that I must always check the window before knocking on doors in Mount Isa. When workers were on night shift, they always had a sign in the window to say, ‘Don’t disturb—on night shift—sleeping.’
There were many Finns working in the mines at Mount Isa. They had their own Finnish Church and, at times, Finnish pastors. I got into some trouble with them at a Finnish wedding. They took a pietistic view about what pastors could and couldn’t do. It was an overbearingly hot 43° at this wedding and, at the Finnish Club reception, Sadie and I were placed by ourselves on the head table. We were thirsty and had nothing to drink, and we watched as jugs of beer were taken right past us to the 400 guests. After a while I asked for a drink, and they said they would bring us a lemonade. But it didn’t arrive. So I just grabbed a passing jug of beer and found 800 Finnish eyes watching as I drank my beer. The Finnish people wrote to the President of the Lutheran Church in Queensland and formally complained about this behaviour, and I had a ‘please explain’ letter from my President.
We were at Mount Isa from 1972 until 1975. I have always claimed that I learned more in four years at Mount Isa than I could have learned in ten anywhere else!
And there’s a lot more in The Hugamug Club, including the story of the dyslexic, up front, nothing held back Yank who eventually served his ministry in Australia; then there’s the 90-year-old elder statesman and Patron of the Club who was what they used to call ‘a grandpa student’, a mature age secondary school student who, a decade after leaving school, felt the call to be a pastor and embarked on the long and arduous journey to attain his goal.
A review of The Hugamug Club will appear on the site next week.
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