At home on the Queenstown gravel

by PAUL DAFFEY

NEVER let it be said that they're a bunch of softies on the west coast of Tasmania. Every season footballers from the mining town of Queenstown battle through the most inclement conditions in Australia but, if you listen to their tales or watch them plough through bursts of sleet, you'd think they love every minute.

Cold? It's been known to snow on the peaks that loom over Queenstown on Christmas Day. In winter, footballers often look up to see the rocky slopes, stripped bare of vegetation by sulphur emissions from the mines, capped in white.

Windy? At the Gormanston oval, over the hills to the south of Queenstown, gales sometimes forced players to lie flat on the ground. On one occasion, the ball was reportedly blown beyond the goals and through The Gap, never to be seen again.

Wet? Queenstown has an annual rainfall of more than 250 centimetres; Melbourne, by contrast, receives 120 centimetres in a particularly wet year. Queenstown old-timers such as Rocky Wedd, a 98-year-old who began playing in Gormanston 80 years ago, claim that rain always fell sideways on the West Coast. "It used to rain for six weeks on end in the old days," he said.

West Coasters are proud of their durability. If you can't endure a little hardship, you should head for a more genteel mining town, such as Cobar or Kalgoorlie, or cop out completely and move to the city.

Their footballers epitomise this toughness. Some would say they're mad. Every year for almost a century, Queenstown players have bumped and chased, tackled and burrowed on a gravel football oval.

The Gravel, as it is known, was laid with silica until 1969, when smelters were still in use. Silica served as a cleaning material in the smelters. It was gouged from a hillside, on the other side of the creek from the football ground, and put through a screen.

Those rocks that failed to pass through the screen were kept for use in the smelters. The smaller rocks were used to surface the oval. Some of these smaller rocks, however, remained large enough to wreak havoc on knees and elbows.

Football clubs would occasionally hold working bees, in which players would pore over the surface and pick out the potentially damaging orbs, but mostly The Gravel was left to its devices, an object of pride that separated West Coast footballers from all others. Rex Powell, who played on The Gravel for two decades until 1963, said Queenstown footballers loved their ground because the ball bounced truly in any weather. Storm clouds could pile in from the Antarctic, but it was still possible to bounce the ball and let fly with a drop kick.

"You'd always lose a bit of bark around the knees," he said. "But that never hurt anyone."

In recent years, the surface has been laid with sand and loam. Old-timers claim it's like a carpet but, even without the silica stones, knees continue to be shredded and gravel rashes spread out across hairy chests. Trainers continue to scrub stones from wounds before daubing the skin with anti-septic.

The anti-septic is necessary to ensure against infection. Sometimes it fails to work and players are forced to pop anti-biotics. In most cases, players avoid infection but put up with knees sticking to their trousers all week. The scab is usually ripped off before the next match. Some players continue through an entire season without knee wounds managing to heal.

Yet, ask any Queenstown footballer about the danger of The Gravel and he'll tell you that the ground at Rosebery, 50 winding kilometres north, is far worse. Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy reportedly said that Rosebery Park is the most picturesque ground in Australia. Set deep in a valley, flanked by trees as old as Tasmania, its beauty is undeniable.

But the surface is conventional turf, which Queenstown football people believe is ridiculous in their climate. They're vehement that the mud and slush at Rosebery bring far greater chance of infection than a few errant stones at Queenstown.

Murray Waller, who last year received an AFL award commemorating 45 years of service to Queenstown football, said Rosebery Park is a bog. Sitting in the lounge at the Mount Lyell Motor Inn, which is owned by Alistair Lynch's father Graeme, Waller said the stench at Rosebery was enough to deter any footballer. "You'd come off the ground and throw your shorts straight in the river."

Waller recalled only one occasion when The Gravel resembled a river. In the 1960s, a match was delayed half an hour while several inches of floodwater receded. "It was a typical downpour for the West Coast," he said. "But during the match you could still bounce the ball and do drop-kicks."

Rocky Wedd, who was interviewed swathed in blankets in the lounge room of his son Bill, said the weather often did force delays earlier this century, before the drainage was improved. The bell at the Empire Hotel would ring at midday and a flag would be run up the pub's flag-pole to indicate the postponement of the match.

Rocky and Bill recalled the glory days of mining and football, the two elements that held the town together. They praised the management of Mount Lyell, which employed almost 1700 miners, far exceeding the 250 miners now employed in Queenstown.

Mount Lyell executives organised buses to run their workers from the mine to the football by noon for the reserves and another bus to run miners to The Gravel by 2pm for the senior game. Workers were entitled to take time off from work to participate in all legitimate sporting events.

Now, miners work 12-hours shifts, rather than eight hours, and taking time off for sport is a distant memory. Every week, the Queenstown Crows Football Club is depleted because shift-work stops a handful of players from pulling on the boots.

For coach Glenn Johnstone, dealing with unfriendly shifts is part of the turf - or gravel, as the case may be. "You understand that when you take the job on," he said.

Until recently, training started at 7.30pm to accommodate the miners who finished their shifts at 7 o'clock. Day shifts now end at 6.30pm, but miners sometimes struggle for motivation after working 12 hours underground.

Friday night shifts also pose a problem. Johnstone is among those who work every third Friday night and gain three hours' sleep before heading off to the footy.

"Funnily enough, I think you concentrate more when you're tired," he said.

Last weekend, Johnstone was missing two or three senior footballers because they were working on Saturday. But at least every player who was available had a game.

Early in the season, Darwin Football Association rival Yeoman was unable to field a reserves team for its fixture at The Gravel. Somerset also told league officials that its players don't want to mix blood and stone.

The matter came to a head in May, when the Queenstown-based Western Herald reported that competition officials were unnerved by public liability insurance fees. The future of The Gravel was in doubt because the ground was deemed too dangerous. The town was outraged. How dare anyone try to force Queenstown footballers to play on grass! West Coast shire mayor Darryl Gerrity assured constituents he was confident that The Gravel would be in use next season, but the matter remains unsolved.

If The Gravel is to become The Grass, Queenstown will lose not only a chunk of its heritage, but a tourist attraction. Karon Courto, who lives in the old curator's cottage behind the goals at the Gormanston end, regularly receives knocks on the door from travellers asking details about this strange stretch of dirt and whether she might have a spare bottle in her cupboard.

It's not uncommon for the travellers to spoon a handful of the sand and loam into such bottles and take them home for display. "If I had a dollar or 50 cents for every bottle, I'd be rich," Courto said.

During the week, Courto keeps an eye on the ground, flicking on the lights when she hears teenagers racing their cars around the bike track that surrounds the oval, or doing wheelies on the centre square. If the octane fun gets out of hand, she calls the police.

On Saturdays, she sits on her front step and watches the match. In the late 1980s, local forward Kerry Bryan kicked a goal that sent the ball sailing through her front door, but not even driving rain drives her indoors. She prefers to set her umbrella against the storm rather than watch the game from her sitting room window.

"You don't get the atmosphere," she said.

Last week, Courto saw Queenstown show its thanks to South Burnie for fielding its full complement of teams by pounding the Hawks into The Gravel at every opportunity. In the first round, South Burnie kicked 13 goals in the first quarter and defeated the Crows by more than 100 points. At quarter-time last Saturday, the match was evenly poised.

In addressing his players, Johnstone reminded them of their decided advantage. "We've got one thing in our favour: they weren't born and bred here," he said.

The coach later admitted that a slice of his tactics included working the Hawks over. "In the past, if we've got into them early, they folded."

But the Hawks refused to fold. Early in the third quarter, they even threatened to run away with the match. They were more skilful, and certainly faster, but less committed. The afternoon featured rippling tension, as the Hawks tried in vain to move clear of the gritty Crows, who threw sinks and fridges and everything in reach at their opponents.

The Queenstown supporters in the "can bar", high up on the wing, began to fear that the Hawks would withstand the assault and defeat the Crows on The Gravel, an unthinkable achievement until recent years. "Maybe the other teams are working this ground out now," said one supporter.

On the opposite wing, Queenstown supporters screamed support as five minutes of sunshine followed five minutes of drizzle and 10 minutes of downpour. "Grab them. Chuck them on the ground," said the fans, who ranked highly on the scale of vocal support.

The Crows followed instructions and threw the Hawks into the ground until they were battered and bruised and barely tottering. Midfielder Allan Seen kicked the goal to put the Crows in front and the home side held on to win by five points.

South Burnie coach Richard Townsend was proud of his players. "You know you've played when you come down here," he said.

Hawks ruckman Adam Nicholls, sporting a Mohawk in the style of England soccer captain David Beckham, admitted to ankle injury, but said it was no fault of the ground. Teenager David Smart, who in the second quarter picked up a rock at half-forward and hurled it to the boundary, missing this reporter by a metre, was pleased to get over his first game at The Gravel.

"It wasn't as bad as everyone said it would be," he said.

The South Burnie trainer attacked his players' knees with a wire brush and Friars Balsam while the club prepared itself for a three-hour bus trip back to the north-west coast. Some players said the bus trip was among the highlights of the season.

In the Queenstown rooms, players poured beer on Todd Stevens, who was celebrating his 100th game, and lapped up another victory due, in large part, to arguably the biggest home-ground advantage in Australia.

The Crows have a few more games at home, with an outside chance of making the finals. At the end of the season, the centre square will be cleared away to reveal a cricket pitch, tourists will continue spooning dirt into bottles, and sport will continue to be a strong part of the fabric in Queenstown.

The only question is how much longer sport will continue to be played on the cherished gravel.

australianrules.com.au

Disclaimer