Places we play

by PAUL DAFFEY

THE bar at the Tanunda Oval in the Barossa Valley is surely among the wonders of the football world. Built beneath a grandstand of lumpy bluestone, it features honour boards the length of the room and memorabilia cabinets filled with old footy boots and yellowing programs. Most strikingly, though, it features a wine list. Many football clubs struggle to provide heavy and light beer, let alone a blackboard listing the local drops.

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The Queenstown oval in western Tasmania is like nothing else in football. Known as The Gravel, for the good reason that it's the only gravel oval in Australia, the ground at the heart of the famous mining town has hosted matches for more than a century. Photo by Ian Kenins.

Around the ground, pine trees offer shade under which bottles are uncorked and picnic baskets unloaded. Two hours before the senior match, there is a festive atmosphere and few remaining car parks. Tanunda on a sunny day appeals as one of the leading grounds in Australia for watching the footy.

In northern Queensland, the bar in the Port Douglas clubrooms offers a languid contrast to the jostling verve at Tanunda. High ceilings and louvres allow the breeze through, which keeps supporters cool. Outside the bar, a wide verandah offers a view across the oval to the Great Dividing Range, which continues down the east coast to the Grampians in faraway Victoria. Around the ground, a ring of tropical trees protects spectators from the beating sun. Amid such tranquil splendour, you would never guess that the ground was built on a rubbish tip.

Visitors to the Rosebery oval in western Tasmania once thought the ground was built on a sewage farm. Pipes beneath the oval drained water into the Stitt River, which runs behind the ground. This river was the main outlet for the town sewage. Sometimes the river flooded, and the water, bearing sewage, was pushed along the pipes before settling beneath the oval. The term 'foul conditions' had strong resonance at Rosebery. Opposition players would walk off after the final siren and discard their shorts in the river.

The problem was averted when sewage was sent into waste dams, but this had little effect on the condition of the oval during the 2002 season. While most of the mainland was parched by drought, more than 2300 millimetres of rain fell on Rosebery over 221 days, prompting milk-bar owner Judy Mackerell to keep a rainfall chart by the counter to satisfy the questions of saturated tourists. Rosebery residents live in the shadow of Mt Reid, the wettest place in Tasmania, and expect a life of moisture. But the precipitation of 2002 struck them as excessive. 'It was depressing,' said Mackerell.

At the height of the football season, rain fell almost every day. Players sank to their shins in mud and umpires battled to find a spot on which to restart play. The condition of the oval increased pressure on hydro-electricity operators to stop seeding clouds with chemicals that induce rain. The practice of seeding keeps dams full and cuts hydro costs, but in an area already ranked among the wettest in Australia, it's no good for football.

Locals report that Kevin Sheedy once described the Rosebery oval as the most attractive in country Australia. They say Sheedy made the claim at a sportsmen's night in Burnie after visiting the Rosebery oval earlier that day. Sheedy can't remember making the claim, which is unsurprising considering his extensive travels as a football evangelist over four decades, but he does remember that it was a beautiful ground. The valley of rainforest gums in which the Rosebery oval is nestled would support any claims of beauty; six inches of stinking mud would not.

About 50 kilometres south, the Queenstown oval is like nothing else in football. Known as The Gravel, for the good reason that it's the only gravel oval in Australia, the ground at the heart of the famous mining town has hosted matches for more than a century. Mainland tourists stop to spoon a sample of the ground into small bottles to take home. The visitors are fascinated by the sand and loam surface, which enables the oval to withstand rainfall that would float Noah's ark.

Rex Powell played on The Gravel for two decades after the Second World War, in the days when it was still laid with silica from the smelters. Now a gatekeeper at the ground on match days, he said working bees used to be held to comb the surface for larger rocks, but mostly the ground was left to its own devices. Players accepted the inconvenience of scarred skin as the price to pay for a surface that provided true bounce in all conditions. 'You'd always lose a bit of bark around your knees,' Powell said, 'but that never hurt anyone.'

Even if The Gravel is under water two hours before a match, you can be sure it will be ready for action by the first bounce. Games are held during a cycle of five minutes sunshine, five minutes drizzle and ten minutes downpour. The hills surrounding the ground are often capped in snow, even as late as December. Sulphur emissions from the gold and copper mines have denuded the hills of growth. There is little comfort to be found at The Gravel, or anywhere around it.

The custodians of the ground, the Queenstown Crows, a club that was formed from the remnants of the west coast competition in 1993, now face resistance from some opponents. Several clubs in the Burnie region believe The Gravel is a health hazard. In recent years they have pushed for the oval to be laid with grass. Some players refuse to play there. The Crows exacerbate the problem by hurling opponents into the crunchy surface, sorting out the fearless from the faint of heart in a ritual that rates poorly in the hospitality stakes.

After the match, trainers move from player to player with a wire brush and a bottle of Friars Balsam. Stones are scraped from elbows and knees before disinfectant is applied. Some Queenstown players spend the entire season with weeping sores. No sooner does a scab look like healing than it sticks to the player's trouser leg. If the scab does survive until the next match, it's usually knocked off in the first quarter. No wonder the west coast of Tasmania is known for breeding tough footballers.

Just as the Queenstown oval is known as The Gravel, the oval at Derby in north-east Tasmania should be known as The Slope. Tourists stop to take in the rickety grandstand and the glorious view over the valley towards the town. But invariably they find equal wonder in the gradient of the oval. It's going too far to say that the Derby oval should be set up as a ski-run, but only because it receives too little snow.

Derby had a ground within a trotting track on a bend in the Ringarooma River before a mining company diverted the river through the ground after the Second World War. The company promised a new oval to match the one that now had a river running through it, but fell some way short of its promise. One of the mine's stone dumps, high on the hill on the other side of the river, was levelled off. Dirt was spread across the stones by piping water onto the hill and washing the dirt down. Goalposts were then erected. John Beswick, a former Derby centre half-back and member of state parliament for two decades, admitted that the oval made a mockery of the company's promise. 'Mining was king in Derby in those times,' he said.

A grandstand believed to have been at the trotting track since early in the century was shifted to the new football ground, where it offered a lofty view over the valley. You could stand on a saucepan and the view over the valley would still be magnificent, but Beswick was eager to point out that the steep drop never affected a result. Both teams, after all, kicked downhill for two quarters. Besides, plenty of goals were scored against the gradient. 'You got used to it,' Beswick said.

The closure of the main mine in Derby after the Second World War prompted a gradual decline in population until the football club folded in 1972. Local farmer Ron Hayes bought the grandstand and the oval - or he thought he was buying the oval until he was informed that the law would prevent him. Stuck with a grandstand, he stored hay in it. After several years, he sold the grandstand to the cricket club for $100 because he wanted to avoid possible liability for a visitor losing a foot through the floorboards. The Derby cricket club, aiming to return the stand to its considerable glory, held many working bees for more than a decade before lack of players forced the club to fold in 2001. The future of the Derby grandstand, which some Tasmanians regard as a state treasure, remains unclear.

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