Almanac Footy: Ovals Old Dog played (and trained) at that no longer exist

 

Ovals Old Dog played (and trained) at that no longer exist

 

Everything shifts. I’ve played at a lot of ovals over 43 seasons, across the eastern board. Many are now gone, a part of history, some even faded into the land. Others, after years of being dormant, have been brought back to life, either as secondary, junior ovals, or as new entities. A lot of this may not be accurate, but we play with an oval ball, and this is not history, just my telling of it. 

 

   ******

 

As a kid, my school played all its footy on the No1 Oval next to Princes Park. The school was as multi-cultural as it gets, working class, ethnic, but the middle class were just starting to swamp the place. I’m not sure the school still has three teams running on it.

   Every lunch and recess, as in every – summer, winter, sideways rain or heat – a core group of us would make our own oval in the park on the other side, pick teams and let rip! Six or sixty of us, every nationality, we didn’t give a damn!  

 

   Gianpiero Settepani, Stephen Barone, Joe Seratori, Vince Prestigiacomo, Gery Walsh, Foad, Mohamad, Peter Turner, Me, a Zurbo, whoever, from wherever…  

 

   The commission flats gangs would sometimes join in, making it less fun, more violent, but so what? That rolling patch of grass was an oval to us. An. Oval! Full of history, and “Do you remember that game when…” and legends, and a Grand Final on the last day of each term. 

 

   With the new demographic, a few kids occasionally play soccer on it, if anything. Never footy. 

 

   It’s just grass now, gone.

 

   *****

   The Ramsden Street Oval was a thing of working-class wonder, where I played my first senior game at 15. Down a dead-end street, it was surrounded by a timber yard, a junkyard, and a toxic creek rimmed by a twenty metre wide brace of blackberries. When a goal was kicked at the junkyard end, the scrawniest player would be nominated to jump over and get it, dodging the three or four rottweilers, scampering back over while everybody laughed like drains. There was no time-on in the reserves, and sometimes the seniors needed to stop the other mob’s run-on. If our mob were two points up deep in the last, the call would go out; “Kick it to the creek!” The blackberries always chewed up a minute or three. Once, the ball even made it over the berries and floated away. 

  

It was a tatts and knuckles league. The Young Christian Workers formed it, ironically, to give the troubled and troublesome something to occupy them. Yet the rough nuts proved too much to handle. The church gathered us into teams, then bailed, leaving us to our own. 

 

   That team and league, that once spread out, in various divisions, over the city, and its way of life, are now gone. Two Broadmeadows clubs, West Ivanhoe (the Hell’s Angel’s footy team), Flemington Rovers (oval in the middle of the commission flats, mostly crims on parole), Reservoir, so on…  

 

   I have no idea which ovals remain.

 

   ***** 

 

   I played in the Amateurs for many years. A very solid organisation, built, mostly, around 100-year-old, elite colleges. I am sure most of their ovals are going strong. In the top divisions, anyway. When my club sunk down to E-Div for a year, there were plenty of knuckle-dusting, working-class clubs, happy to knock your block off. Dovedon, Riverbank, Hampton, Willy YCW….Sometimes wonder how many of them are still kicking on?

 

   *****

 

Otway Oval after a game

 

   Otway Districts are nestled in the foothills of the ranges, on a small, tree-lined oval tucked behind the one-pub township of Gellibrand. Bush footy at its finest. We are the conglomerate of pioneers, loggers, spud and dairy farmers, hard people from hard lands, that cover shipwreck coast, cold, wet ridges, and rolling inland valleys and plains. 

 

   So much of that way of life is now gone, too. Entire townships, communities, and footy teams with them. Rotted away by time and change. So it goes. 

 

Otway Oval

 

   But Otway remains. 

 

   We spent several years in the Heytesbury-Mt Noorat League, that ran the highway between Colac and Warrnambool; dairy and volcanic plains. That league was the wild west! We were the wild west. Rough nuts from the mountains, roaming backroads, every game a distant adventure. Logging tracks and ridge pubs. 

 

   When the league folded, its teams scattered. We, and Simpson, re-entered the respectable CDFNL. Some never quite got that far. Scotts Creek made a bad bet and were absorbed by South Purrumbete (with the best jumpers ever!), who folded just before the league did. A few of the other teams merged to keep going in the Warrnambool comp. I was sure the Noorat oval would be gone by now. The township was never big, there are so few people left on the land.

 

   Everything about that oval was romantic to me. The way you had to turn off the highway, and pass under the old bluestone train bridge, as if going back through time, then drive along the most wonky, patchwork road, towards the most oddly cemeterial town. A straight strip, with a little school, a pub, old weatherboard houses, like a line, drawn in front of an old volcano. 

 

   I took my kid to the carnival there this year, to find it looking an absolute treat! New clubrooms and all. I strolled with my little girl through the animal shows and overpriced rides, while walking through memories of hard games in mud. 

 

   I’ve since been told they merged with Terang. That’s fine, too. Keep the dream alive, boys. Do whatever it takes! Keep building your own history, rather than letting the past fade. 

 

   *****

 

Carlisle River oval

 

  Once or twice a year, when Otway’s small oval got too muddy, we would play down in the inland valley town of Carlisle River, (one of the clubs that merged to form Otway), to give our oval a chance to heal. I ADORED it!

   Just getting there was the best! Winding down never-ending dirt roads, from the ridge, through cold, wet, foggy towering mountain ash and messmate, with their Myrtle Beech and tree fern rainforest gullies, waterfalls below, no one else for miles, to lower braces of grey gums and ti tree, to the most beautiful, rolling inland valleys, snaking past tree-covered hills to the horizon, to a township cast adrift from the rest of the district, just hanging on.

 

   Basic, brick changerooms, a wide oval, bush and sky everywhere, old farmers, rotary hoes and massive haybales on the back of their rusty utes, watching from behind the goals, rollies lost in their thick beards.

 

   ‘Play on!’    

 

   It took a lot to shift an entire club for two games of the year, and the netball courts were no longer up to scratch. Sadly, it hasn’t been used for footy in years. 

 

   But the cricket club got the cows off it, brought it back to life. When you drive by it looks like a footy oval again, waiting…

 

   Many a dinky little cricket club has kept old footy ovals, and their stories, alive.

 

   *****

 

   One of the grounds that formed Otway, Ditchley Park, still sits on the side of the ridge behind Beech Forest. The last stop before dense ranges and logging coupe tracks. Where, before cars, the old steam railway that fed the logging would say; “Everybody out.”

 

   The white picket fence is still there, the hazy view over all of eastern Victoria continues to take my breath away. The small rise on the outer wing, where the wild horseman would gather, that age’s Bay 13. Back in the day, they would play in fog so thick nobody knew if a goal had been scored. In snow a few times each year, lining their jumpers with spud sacks. 

 

   Cliffy Young was a potato farmer from that town. Spuds were huge, every second farm, workers scratching away. It made sense to use the sacks to stay warm.

   A club of the land.  

 

   For several seasons Otway would do a pre-season run or two up at Ditchley Park, just to remind the townies what the club was about. And to bond, a mini footy trip. Ditchley was of lands we represented. An alien environment to many of them. I hope we bring that back one day. 

 

Otway Districts FC in the early 90s

 

  *****

 

   We played against Princetown, tucked into a wetlands flat behind the 12 Apostles. It was bleak for them towards the end. The President, a good man, going up to the coastal lookout above to cliffs, to shepherd’s-hook international surfers into making numbers in the twos. Germans and Swiss running around, no idea about this weird, new game, dealing with Artic winds so strong the full back would kick out, only for the ball to be blown back over his head for a point. They had their flags, their good times, but things usually end rough. 

 

   When they folded, it saved us. The Mahoney and Ferrari families coming to Otway just when needed. Great, community people, who got involved right down to the grass roots.

 

 

  

These days, the oval is the centre point of a caravan park.

 

   Otway would play against Forrest, a tiny town nestled in the hills half-an-hour behind Apollo Bay. Fitzroy colours that suited the mud, and men from the wood mill – tough, hard-headed, clear-eyed, old school bastards like Hendo, who’s nose pointed in four separate directions. Loved playing against you, mate.  

 

   The club was already struggling. When the mill shut, that was that. They had won a flag, which was beaut, but most of the team came from Geelong. There was no-one left with the energy to run it. The oval’s still there, now riddled with rabbit holes, I’m told. 

 

   Cut into the hills behind town, it was always a joy to wind along tree-lined roads to its gates, that would peel back to a flat, green surface in the middle of the bush. An oval now a part of the folk-law of its district, like the coal train sealed in a mining shaft that once went through a mountain, now only visible by the small, rusty flow of water that escapes the few inch gap at its base. 

 

   History, kept alive by those who lived it. 

 

   *****

 

   South Colac’s oval felt more like East Colac, until it moved to, I dunno, West Colac? Where it thrives today. Their old oval, between the railway overpass and the lake, is now used for the Royal Show once a year, and for grazing sheep. 

 

   Royal Shows, carnivals, swap-meets, so many forgotten ovals, and their communities, coming back to glorious life once a year.   

 

   Pirron Yallack’s oval, when it merged, became the Stoneyford Cricket Ground. A think of diligence and love. A circle of lime green in the middle of rolling, dry summers. 

 

   When Beeac merged, their games were shifted to Irrewarra, leaving a fading oval in the shadows of newly built clubrooms.  

   *****

 

   I trained two or three times on one former oval in Melbourne, with a beaut, old school, condemned grandstand, and a Scout Hall down the far end. Imagine the stories from the 1930s, men in suits, ladies in lace with umbrellas in the sun, the Scout Hall the centre of the town’s social life, the grandstand packed for not just footy, but show horses, track meets as big as Stawell Gifts, end of war celebrations. There would have been a coal railway leading to factories, each with their own line. Factories with a team each in a Wednesday league, when the workers clashed; tougher, rougher than the footy they played again on Saturday. 

 

   Now, the oval was just a glorified back lot, between bigger parks, and a sea of houses and apartments. Good for bocci and, maybe, frizbee-throwing dog walkers. 

 

   *****  

 

   I played several practice matches, and a few sneakies under fake names in NSW and Qld. As far as I know, those ovals are still going strong. One of them, in a coast town, has taken off! No longer a fringe thing, their Aussie Rules community has grown to a point it has divided the township between itself and rugby – one pub each!! The club is booming! The coast! Soon, they’ll need another oval. Not every story is doom and gloom. 

 

   *****

 

   There were a few ovals further up than Port Douglas, where I played for the Crocs. A day’s driving north, the barge that took you across the Daintree River, 4-wheel driving over river after river, to where I was tree arboring at the Tip. New Mapoon, Bamaga, from memory. Did my pre-season on them, even had a run with a handful of the Suns. Scorer’s boxes busted up twelve ways to Sunday. I like to think more and more people will live up that way, where English is often a 3^rd language – Indigenous crew, Islanders. That these ovals will be dusted off, used as they were intended. Become beacons of the Top End and its communities, which I loved. 

 

    Not reclaimed by the vines and termite hills.

 

   A part of me wishes I’d stayed, tried to start something up. Played footy at Weipa, and Tiwi Island, like Coburg’s Tom Goodwin is doing now. Immersed and never came back. A part of me always will. 

 

   *****

 

   When I played for Curra Swans in Townsville, they were struggling. Their oval right next to some mob in Richmond colours, who were a powerhouse. I loved the Swans! The working-class lads, the heat, tropical frogs all over the cinderblock changeroom walls. It felt like there were too many teams for one city in a Rugby state. I worried for them, but I am an idiot. At that standard, in an army league, where players come and go, all it takes is a handful of gun recruits to turn a ship. They won a flag a few years after I left. 

 

   I think most ovals are still intact. 

 

   *****

 

   In NE Tassie, I played for the mighty Lilydale FC! Next to a paddock and a wood mill, under Mt Arthur, where it sometimes snowed. From out in the middle, if you squinted hard, you could just make out, 2/3^rd up the mountain, a clearing with a small cabin in it that was my home. 

 

   We were in a no-man’s league. Small, one pub, dot towns, up into the ranges, and down to a remote coast. Ringarooma, buncha thugs! Their oval was on a rise, over the most brilliant plain. It was odd, like a pontoon, poking up over a brilliant flat, with mountains on every horizon. A good place to get bashed!

 

   Branxtholm, a ripper club, built into the side of one of those mountains. Small oval, kids running wild, green jumpers with yellow lightening down each side. The predominant colour, the exact same as the grass! All I could see were 36 electric bolts running around! I remember watching one Under 12s game, the roaming maul down the other end, two forwards and one back, bored, grabbed the plastic goals, (and one behind post) and used them as air guitars, until the ball crossed the wing again.

   The sun would sink below the mountain just as the senior game was ending, giving off streaks of light, dropping a natural curtain on footy for the day.

 

   Winnaleah was the best. Pies colours. Lots of pride. Half way along the winding road up and over to St Helens, there was simply the smallest left hand turn-off as you went over a rise, nothing more than a street sign, road between paddocks, one car wide. Yet when you followed it down, there was a township in the valley. A weatherboard house with a big VB sign that made do as the local pub, tiny streets with old school ops shops, and even older ladies manning them, an oval down in a hollow, PACKED, full of BBQs and locals being local and Premiership cups in the rooms, and noise and life!

 

   When that league folded, so did all those clubs. Then, or soon after.

 

   Lilydale went into a Launceston based league, then went up a division, then another. A powerhouse for such a small town, always punching way above its weight. Sometimes it feels as if success is what’s keeping them hanging on. 

 

   But it lost something, too.

   In the old league, every other club was away from the city. Launceston was an alien thing. Each home game, the rooms would be wall-to-wall with a function – old crew, young, their parents, farmers, the whole community, the young, the old, dancing, strings cut, being free, kicking on to afterparties all over the district. It. Was. Magic!

 

   Playing in town, with its nightclubs and bars, took the players away from the community a bit. Even if, football wise, the club went from strength to strength, to strength. 

 

   *****

 

   Playing down south of Tassie for Dodges Ferry, when work was too long, I’d have to train at Port Arthur. A beaut little oval, with the one set of floodlights, surrounded by trees, kangaroos and wallabies, even wombats, keeping the grass down, the sound of wild surf riding every kick. 

 

   They folded during my time down there. It reached the stage the few who bothered to show up on a Tuesday would run a lap through the icy cold, then go into the rooms and hit the piss. 

 

   I wish they never buckled. It would have been an honour to play down that far south, for such a remote community, on a peninsular where convicts were taken to die, lost.   

 

   The publican there said, towards the end, the club was propped up by townies from Sorrell, and Hobart, who took their game-day pay and pissed off. Such a familiar, shit song. Those type of recruits are the death of any club. The pub is a warm little cave with booths and wood and a ripper little fireplace, a shelter to the harsh weather. From another time. I would have flown the flag in it after every home game. Tried to rally the troops!

 

   But who knows? Maybe the club simply drank at the club. In those small rooms, as the trees bent and snapped in sea storms. Playing cards, cranking tunes!

 

   Either way would have been a win-win.  

 

   I’d train on the Nubeena and Dunalley ovals, both now merged with since-built schools. It’s odd, as if the footy came 100 years before education! Both are lovely communities. There’s a small, local league waiting to happen down there. I hope the footy comes back.  

 

   There’s a whole league that runs up that coast from Sorrell, with no juniors or reserves, just seniors, which is golden! Whatever it takes to hang on. 

 

   There’d be others, but time rolls on. The ones I’ve remembered are the ones I’ve remembered. 

 

   *****

 

   A young bloke from SW Victoria has started a web page based on former footy grounds. It’s a ripper, done with love of the game, its history and stories. He travels the minor leagues, watching the forgotten teams, listening to the ripper yarns, giving them a voice, moments in the sun. And, on his journeys, does clips about the ovals and clubs that once were. Imagine the ghosts he must see, walk with, invoke! The dust he must stir in old timers. His life must be filled with other people’s bitter sweet memories.

   Former ovals define us, and our shifting, changing land.  

 

   What a fortunate bastard! But he’s proof you make your own luck. Nobody asked him to do something so grand!

 

Dedicated to Andy Munro.

    

More from Matt Zurbo HERE.

 

 

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