‘Footy at the Gravel Is Cutting Edge Stuff’
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 would think they love every minute.
Cold? On Christmas Day it’s been known to snow on the peaks that loom over Queenstown. In winter, footballers regularly 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 force players to lie flat on the ground. On one occasion, the ball was reportedly blown beyond the goals and never 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 cannot cop a little hardship, you should head for a more genteel mining town, such as Cobar or Kalgoorlie, they say. Queenstown footballers epitomise toughness. Some would say they are mad. For almost a century, they have bumped, chased and tackled on the only gravel football oval in Australia.
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.
The 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 knees continue to be shredded and gravel rashes still break out on hairy chests. Trainers continue to scrub stones from wounds before daubing the skin with antiseptic to guard against infection. Some players go through an entire season with knee wounds that have failed 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 was 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 a far greater chance of infection than a few errant stones at Queenstown.
Murray Waller, who last year received an AFL award for 45 years of service to Queenstown football, said Rosebery Park was a bog. Sitting in the lounge at the Mount Lyell Motor Inn, which is owned by Alastair 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,’ he said.
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 while swathed in blankets in the lounge room of son Bill’s home, said the weather often forced 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 match had been postponed.
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 working 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.
