Secrets of bush success

by PAUL DAFFEY

IN 1988, players from Kukerin in the West Australian Wheatbelt acted with unprecedented goodwill when they organised a merger with Dumbleyung, a neighbouring club that had folded. Kukerin was a titan in the West and a peer of the best country footy clubs in Australia. Many Kukerin supporters failed to see why their club, with its storied history, should take on the undistinguished mob down the road. The players' view was that all footballers need a home.

Kukerin-Dumbleyung ranks with any club in terms of outstripping its resources. Since 1989, the club of wheat farmers has played in every Upper Great Southern league grand final, despite facing opponents from large towns. Like most formidable country clubs, it is built on the rock of a few talented families. The most prominent in recent years is the Ditchburn family.

In 1981, Ross Ditchburn was coaching Kukerin and helping to run the family farm. Carlton coach David Parkin and recruiting manager Shane O'Sullivan tracked him down and asked him to play in attack. 'Mum cooked them a few scones and they took off again,' Ditchburn said. After an uncertain start with the Blues the next year, he kicked twelve goals in a match at Waverley Park, a record for that ground at the time. At the end of the season, he was a member of one of the most talented premiership teams in the game. One more season was enough. His father became sick and he returned to Western Australia to work on the farm and coach Kukerin. 'I thought I'd better go home,' he said.

Ditchburn coached for three years before stepping aside. He went on to kick hundreds of goals for another decade. His continued contribution indicates another reason behind the success of Kukerin-Dumbleyung. The club has a record of slotting senior players into the coaching role as seamlessly as a player might slip on a favourite pair of boots. In most seasons, the team contains two or three former coaches who take a backseat role. Strong leadership across the ground tends to draw the best from all players. 'There's always been good guidance, good coaches,' Ditchburn said.

Another reason is the club's refusal to pay. Every footballer to wear the Kukerin-Dumbleyung jumper does so at no cost. At one year's final, all players turned up wearing T-shirts that proclaimed: 'We breed 'em, don't buy 'em.' In recent years, more and more players have moved to Perth to work or study but still the club continues to shine because hometown sons drive more than three hours to pull on the cherished red, white and blue guernsey. It would be difficult to leave a club that is so accustomed to harmony and success.

The record of Kukerin-Dumbleyung, however, pales when compared with that of Beacon, a club at the desert edge of the Wheatbelt. The land around Beacon was settled in 1925 in an area where towns were placed 40 kilometres apart on a railway line. Beacon was the last stop. It took five decades before there were enough young families to sustain a club. The Bombers looked shaky even after reforming in 1976, winning three wooden spoons in a row, before Rod Shipway returned from Goomalling to be playing-coach of his hometown club.

Shipway was known as a fitness fanatic, a term inactive types use to describe anyone who walks to the mailbox, but in Shipway's case the description was apt. On off-training nights he did sprint work alone; his idea of a quiet Sunday after the game was to run 20 kilometres. At training, his team ran three kilometres to warm up before finishing the session with fifteen laps of Indian file, an exercise of sprinting and jogging. On other nights, he would organise a barbecue at one of a selection of farms that had a pool; the farm would be about 10 kilometres out of town. All the gear would be thrown in the back of a truck and the players would run for their dinner. Such tough conditioning enabled Beacon to leap from last to first with the addition of only Shipway and his former Goomalling teammate Alf Cummings. Shipway played in the centre. He described Cummings, who had long blond hair and no teeth, as a caretaker centre half-forward. 'We weren't blessed with talent; we were blessed with fitness,' said Shipway, who now works in a crayfish business on the coast. 'That's what got us over the line.'

In the twenty-four seasons since its breakthrough premiership, Beacon have missed only one Central Wheatbelt league grand final. The club's success reflects the talents of several families, such as the Miguel and Beagley clans, and the willingness of close friends to work together. All clubmen are expected to take turns on the committee, but no president serves longer than three years. The pact to share the workload is reflected on the field, where the combined effort of all players pitching in often sways tight finals. John Dunne, a former battling defender and a valuable administrator over many years, was one of many who said that isolation galvanises the club. 'The community spirit is fantastic, but it's got to be,' he said. 'If we don't put in, there won't be a community.'

Beacon is the last stop on the Bonnie Rock railway line, with cattle-station country only a few kilometres away, but at least there is a town. At Osborne, in the heart of the Riverina, there is no pub, no shop, and the school closed in 1972. Osborne is a club without a hint of a town, one of only a few around Australia to survive past the days when players changed under trees. Like Osborne, Victorian clubs Greta and Kalkee are based in a paddock rather than a town; both have reaped success in district competitions, but neither can claim the record of the Riverina club.

Osborne's most successful run kicked in during the late 1980s. A handful of families had always been staples in Osborne teams, with the Doig and Gleeson families high on the list. Syd Gleeson was captain of premiership teams before the Second World War. After the war, Osborne teams boasted as many as nine Gleesons in their line-up. In 1999, the premiership team boasted two Gleeson brothers, Matthew and Hayden, and five other sets of brothers. In the 2001 premiership team, eight players were grandsons of former Osborne footballers.

The success of the Osborne dynasties has given rise to what are known as the premiership trees. In 1970, when the club joined the Hume league, Osborne were known as the Tigers. Walbundrie already had that nickname, so Osborne grudgingly became the Cats. They never quite accepted the change, however. The matter came to a head before the two clubs were to meet in the 1991 grand final. Osborne supporter Graham 'Hookey' Gooden nailed a sign to a tree on Yerong Creek Road, outside the Osborne oval, declaring: 'You are now entering Tiger territory.' Then he nailed the same words to a tree by the road on the other approach to the oval. Hume league officials ordered the removal of the offending words. After Osborne won the grand final, Gooden replaced them with signs congratulating the club on its premiership. The next year, he added further congratulations for another flag. Before the 1993 grand final, he nailed up another sign: 'Here we go, three in a row.' It gave him a chuckle when a supporter added the word 'oops' after the defeat by Culcairn.

In subsequent years, Gooden climbed his ladder and reached for the signs with his paintbrush after most finals series, adding the year of success after every premiership. After the club had won seven flags in eleven years, the signs on the premiership trees were looking crowded. When asked the secret behind the club's success, Gooden gave much the same answer as most Osborne supporters. 'Garry O'Connell,' he said.

It is arguable whether anyone in Australia has more influence on his footy club than the patriarch of Osborne. O'Connell joined the club after he left the Christian Brothers College in Albury at 15 and returned to the family farm. He was elected on to the committee straight away and has remained a key administrator for six decades. He also played in several premierships during a long career as a key defender. His term as president began in 1979, when he was 52, and he is still going strong at 76 . He continues to organise working bees and raise funds. Over summer, his persistence on the phone snares prized recruits. When Shayne Weidemann, brother of former Adelaide defender Wayne, turned up at the Osborne oval to talk about his coaching appointment, he found O'Connell down a ditch. Watching the energetic father of eight helping to erect light towers impressed on Weidemann that he was among workers. 'Mate, it's a bloody unique club,' he said while working out his team in the sheds before a match against Walbundrie.

Just as O'Connell has never shirked work, his pep talks after the casserole dinner in the social rooms leave no players or supporters wondering about his expectations of them. The law is laid down on matters such as conduct outside the club and willingness to donate to charity. Even a stirring victory fails to distract O'Connell from greater goals. 'We don't stand for any bloody larrikinism,' he said.

This is an excerpt from Beyond the Big Sticks: Country Football Around Australia, photography by Ian Kenins and text by Paul Daffey. The book, to be published by Lothian Books, will be available around Australia in early August 2003.

Beacon's 2002 team holds aloft the many premiership trophies that the club has won in Western Australia's Central Wheatbelt Football League since breaking through in 1979. Photo by Ian Kenins

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