The editor of this publication is a footy tragic. He’s from Adelaide, and South Australians are just as besotted with the game of Australian football as the rabid Tasmanians. It’s something about being on the periphery and, so, feeling disregarded.

The said editor has commissioned me to write a series of articles about Tasmanian football as he is completely convinced that Tasmania should have its own AFL team, as I am. In the light of the Premier’s initiative about a stadium – but without commenting on the idea – I feel moved to make a start on the stories. Here follows the first one – some of my childhood memories of Aussie Rules football in Tasmania.

I was born in 1951 at “the Alex” near the corner of Hampden Road and Sandy Bay Road, Hobart, about a mile and a half north of Queenborough Oval, and I was brought up about a mile and a half south of the oval in Lower Sandy Bay – near Fahan School (where I went to kindergarten). In my childhood, we had a tennis ball in our hands all summer and a footy in our hands all winter. Boys and girls. TV didn’t come to Tasmania until 1960, so we didn’t look inside for entertainment – we went out and played, and played, and played. My mother would ring a bell when I was supposed to come in for dinner, and I would yell out “ten more minutes”. It became a catch-cry.

Footy and cricket were played on the dirt road that was Fisher Avenue, and then, when the road got sealed, cricket was on the concrete footpath – which may have improved my off-side shots as the on-side was a hedge – you just couldn’t hit it there. Kick-to-kick footy was still in the middle of the road; we just had to retire to the footpath when a car came along. But that didn’t stop us, we did it tirelessly, endlessly. If it wasn’t raining we were kicking a footy or playing cricket.

It was really very Ginger Meggs, especially as the bush was only a short walk away from the top of the street – but there was a catch. The paddock at the top of the street was occupied by a savage Jersey cow called Rosemary. Rosemary was the milk supply for the boarders at Fahan school, but she was a brute; a huge, ten-foot long beast with horns worthy of a Texas Longhorn; and a temper to match. She once got my (older) sister, Janet, and me stuck in the lower branches of The Pine Tree for an hour or so, while she kicked over our billy and trampled our camp-fire. The Pine Tree was a prominent radiata a short, but stiff, walk up the hill at the top of the street. It was on the track of a telegraph line leading up to Mount Nelson. We would go there often for a “good walk”, to admire the view of the Derwent and to boil the billy. As I say, very Ginger Meggs.

Back to footy. In those days Sandy Bay had a team in the TFL – the (southern) Tasmanian Football League. There was also an NTFL (Northern Tasmanian Football League) and an NWFU (North West Football Union). More about these arrangements in a later article.

. . .

On Saturday afternoons when Sandy Bay was playing at home – that is, at Queenborough – I would head for the ground which was about a twenty-minute walk. As I approached the ground, and turned the corner and started up Mt Nelson Road, excitement would build because you could hear the rumble and then the explosion of the crowd when someone kicked a goal in the seconds. You worried that you were missing something, that you might even miss the kick-off.

That rumble of a big footy crowd as you approach the ground is one of the most exciting things in my experience. It’s like hearing an orchestra tuning up – but much, much bigger and more tantalising. You know you’re in your seat at the concert hall and, to an extent, you know what’s going to happen. But outside the ground at a footy match – back in those days – you didn’t know where you were going to get to sit (or stand). And (which hasn’t changed) you didn’t know the outcome. And you cared. And you still do. That is the beauty of a sporting competition: it is a drama in real time that actually matters to the audience.

We kids used to sneak in to the ground by tunnelling under the macrocarpa hedges on the Mt Nelson Road side of the ground. We then perched in their tops and used them as a very convenient grandstand. The macrocarpas (or their descendants) are still there, but you couldn’t sneak in now as they are ringed by a Cyclone fence.

Once in and ensconced in our tree-top grand-stand, we would wait for our heroes. Sandy Bay wore a sky-blue jersey with a white seagull on the chest and white shorts. Whenever I saw them, they all wore white shorts, because I only ever saw them “at home”. The convention was that the home team wore white shorts and the away team wore black. So nuts about the footy team was I that I got my mum to sew the Sandy Bay seagull onto a favourite jumper.

When I was very young, the hero of Sandy Bay was Scott Palfreyman. He was tall and he was glamorous. I remember that he used to clear his nasal passages by blocking one nostril and snorting out the other on to the ground. I thought this terribly sophisticated. Scott died tragically young but his younger brother, Brent, became a great footballer and, even more so, a great cricketer and very important in the administration of cricket in Tasmania. As a 16 and 17-year-old aspiring cricketer in the lower grades for Sandy Bay, I used to have to face him and the other first grade fast bowlers in the nets at Queenborough.

Tasmania was so completely Aussie Rules that rugby was hardly played. I once saw the Tasmanian rugby team face the Haka and then get strewn around the field at Queenborough by the All Blacks. You could track the path of the ball by the trail of broken Tasmanian bodies who had attempted to stem the tide.

. . .

Back, again, to footy and earlier in my childhood. One Saturday I was not up in the hedge but down on the fence at the river end of the ground. The Seagulls were playing the New Norfolk Eagles and our full back, “Tank” Nicholls was up against a very young, very talented, full forward. As the name implies, Tank was not a particularly agile footballer but he was strong. And he could drop-kick the ball to the middle of the ground when kicking off after a behind. This day he was struggling against this talented, skinny kid – so he ran him into the point post about ten feet in front of my eyes. The kid didn’t get another kick all day.

But he got a few after that. He went to Victoria, bulked up over time and became one of the greatest forwards of all time. His name was Peter Hudson, and he averaged six goals every time he pulled his boots on, kicking weird, wobbly, flat, up-country punts that were, somehow, deadly accurate.

An evangelical pastor in Hawthorn once posted a bill-board outside his church with the question “What would you do if Jesus Christ came to Hawthorn?” Some wit wrote on it, “Shift Hudson to the half-forward flank”. That’s how good he became – that skinny kid from New Norfolk that I saw at Queenborough Oval all those years ago.

James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.