Almanac Travel: Old Dog returns to the town of his first senior flag, Lilydale in Tasmania.

Lilydale

 

Christmas sucks. Not for our kid, she loves it, so I love that part of it; the giving. But the roads suck, the beaches suck. The hoards suck. God, I loathe the hoards! Once a year, for two weeks they bring the crush of the city with them, the disregard for personal space that comes with it.
We had to return to Tassie for a bit this summer – some work, some adventure, so I went bum down, arse up through Christmas, busting my gut, buried too deep in the gullies to see any masses, then built a canopy for the ute using fencing wood and a hessian tarp, packed the family in and popped down two weeks into January.

 

   The Tassie roads were open, winding and sweetly empty, bar us. And footy training had started. No camping on those nights, I’d set the wife and kid up with a bed, so I could get a smooth run at sliding into old shoes, familiar faces. God, I miss the north-east mountains, and the Tassie Peninsular! Lilydale FC and Dodges Ferry. Birthplaces of the careers of Nankervis and Howe, and thousands of ripper lesser lights and twice as many country hacks like myself.

 

   *****

 

   The Lilydale FC has a simplicity to it – logging and dairy country, not a heap of money. You can’t buy loyalty, so you’d better breed it! Better inspire it. A good, honest, hard-working bush club playing in a city league against universities with money and numbers and youth leagues to draw players from. Defying all odds, forever punching above its weight. Belting out finals and Premierships.

 

   A club built around a community. A strong sense of mateship and footy culture.

 

   We got there a day early, finding Nifty, the 2-3-time premiership coach, doing some maintenance. You ripper. The current coach’s dad, Rocket, tending to two mighty sprinklers.

 

   It’s just sensational. The oval has a timber yard on one side, and rolling paddocks full of cows on the other. A shipping container painted blue and red, Demon colours, doubling as their Bay 13 bar. The Mount Arthur Hill. Everything’s rural, yet, the oval’s bowling green green. Soft and lush, level underfoot.

 

   “It costs a bit, but we’ll have these sprinklers going 24/7 for the next four days,” Rocket tells me.

 

   It’s a huge investment, and a wise one. It affords them one less recruit, maybe, but produces a surface that players want to train and play on. That you can hon your skills on. That projects the club it there to play football.

 

Back at Otway, the committee has been over-the-moon good with dragging the club forward with what little we have. They’ve built you-beaut new netball courts and rooms, managed to wrangle state-of-the-art light towers for the footy, spiffed up the changerooms, kept the club alive and kicking! The oval’s drainage is our next frontier.

 

   I’m jealous of the green sea in front of me.

 

   *****

 

   Corey “Knackers” Lockhart is now the Lilydale coach. He was just a kid when we played seniors together. He’s still in his mid 20s but doing bloody well. Age matters, but isn’t everything. He has old hands backing him up, without smothering him, and Statewide jets coming back to help full of Statewide ideas and work ethic. It’s a beautiful pyramid.

 

   “What have you learned?” I ask him.

 

   “There are a lot of voices. Listen to them, take in the good stuff, but back yourself,” he tells me.

 

 

Old Dog with Thane

 

 

   Thane is there, which makes me insanely happy. My first year at Lilydale, 2009, I had retired, and moved from the Otways, via the FNQ tropics, and figured there was only one way to get to know people, if not a local culture, so pulled the boots on again. That year, he won the senior premiership BOG medal, and I won the Ressies one. We got our photo together in the rooms on Sunday, back page of the newspaper, blurry eyed, happy. The Old Dog and the kid, jingle, jingle.

 

   15 years later he’s won everything that club has to offer. Is, in my opinion, its best ever player. Yes, there’s been some very handy AFL stars to come out of the club, but Thane’s mostly been there, grinding it out, through fair and foul seasons.

 

   You build clubs around humble, likeable blokes like him. He must be sick of winning premierships.

 

   Eventually, training’s done. I’m cooked, but gutted it’s over. It felt huge being out there.

 

   In the clubrooms I use Thane’s nickname. “Box, here was the spot!” I tell him of that photo. “Let’s re-enact it!”

 

   So, laughing like dickheads, no medals around our necks, we stand there grinning and someone takes a photo that makes no sense to all the younger players.

 

   That night, a handful of us go to the local pub, that was once the Swinger’s Arms – a windowless cinderblock bar, punch-ons, blood and best mates nursing wounds on Sundays. I adored it, but the word turns, as it should. Especially with becoming a family man. New owners have spiffed it up nicely. The club’s and pub’s rougher side just a memory.

 

   Two great men, Bert and Shagger, each long retired, have come from the city to say g’day. Both have brought their kids so Cielo has someone to play with. She has the time of her life, free to play and roam, from the oval, to the clubrooms, to around our feet at the dining tables. She plays with kids she’s never met, but thanks to like minds and football knows instantly. They squeal and get into trouble and act like best friends and happy dickheads within seconds.

 

   *****

 

   Eventually, I tuck Elena and Cielo into the cabin at the back and the handful and I drink in a beautifully renovated front bar, that eases onto a wide, lazy deck overlooking the town and mountain.

 

   It warms my heart to see the mix in there on a Thursday. Sure, this ragtag, improvised reunion has swelled the numbers, but there’s youth about, as well as barflies. A great local mix, drinking hard, doing it easy. I catch up with two of the Tuckerman brothers, a clan I absolutely WORSHIP! Who do everything right, with ratbag humour, laconic grins, the strongest sense of family. The old bottle shop drive-though is now a smoker’s section. It’s late now, but most of the blokes are still in work gear, skins covered in the grime of hard yakka. Everywhere I walk faces croon, “The Old Doggg…” and “I heard you were floating about…”

 

 

Ute on fire

 

   Somebody leaves, driving their souped up work ute, with Mad Max flames shooting out the front and rear, lazily down midnight fire season roads. Some blow-through cracks the shits over a pool game, and suddenly, it’s just me and Shawn Arnold, a local musician, drinking in the dark, the pub shut down around us.

 

   Small towns, small towns. It makes me feel insanely privileged. How lucky am I to know these people!

 

   *****

 

Big Nick’s not into crowds. He’s a tough boot with a massive heart and great, dry humour. I love the bloke. A mate for life. It’s that simple. We won two flags together, 12 years after I’d given up hope of winning any. These days he lives in a sweet little shack in the coastal hamlet of Bellingham. No shops, no pubs, just a wide, tidal inlet and long coastline. Just Tasmania.

 

   Cutting wood early in the back paddocks of the farm I’m working on, come arvo Cielo hops in the ute and we go to find him.

 

   There’s something, as you descend from the bush towards the coast, that vaguely resembles the shape of an old footy oval. Pioneer days, the place would have been a fishing town of some sort, with a jetty to export bush and farming produce. It would have been a good, hard club, no doubt. I squint, picturing the ghosts of it. Whalers, butchers, farmers, hardened fishermen.

 

 

Nick Venn and Cielo

 

 

   I never would have met Nick if not for football, but we talk about anything except football. It’s golden. We just cruise with my kid along the beach, looking for crabs, talking about everything and nothing. He gives her the pair of crocs she left last visit, two or three years ago. They’re tiny! Adorable! They were never going to fit anymore, but he cleaned and kept them.

 

   Eventually footy does come up. He mentions the speech I gave before the 2009 GF. “Give EVERTHING! Keep moving! SPRINT! And if you can’t sprint, RUN! And if you can’t run, JOG! And if you can’t jog CRAWL! But, by! All! Means! Keep moving!”

He loved it.

 

   Nobody picked up that I’d plagiarised it, almost word-for-word, from a Martin Luther King speech that still raises the hair on my neck.

 

 

 

 

 

   Watching the Grand Final replay with the team, somewhere in the chaos, alcohol and burnt out, frazzled hours of the days after, the game was deep into the last, we were 40 points up. An opposition player, one of their fastest, got the pill and was running away from me. Cooked to the bone, legs of pure led, I let him go.

 

   “You stopped moving then, Old Dog,” Nick grinned from the back of the room. Everybody chuckled.

 

   Skimming rocks, we remember it and chuckle again.

 

   I have to get the kid back to the farm. It’s only been a few hours, yet feels like weeks, in the best ways, slotting into old grooves with a great mate, who was once a ripper teammate. The mighty Nick Venn.

 

   It’s time to hit a farm in the north-west, then wind our way down south towards Dodges.

 

   I got to hang out with Nick, the Tuckermen, Bert, Shagger, see their kids, the footy team, meet girlfriends, wives. Go up the overgrown, rickety back tracks towards the top of the mountain, looking for myrtle beech to flesh out rainforest jobs, use logging tracks to swim off working days at the fishing village of Bridport with Cielo. To relive knowing a land from mountain valleys to coastal hamlets – and its people. To be forever grateful.
Thank you, Lilydale.

 

 

 

 

You can read more from Matt Zurbo Here.

 

 

 

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