“Get your hands off him ya dirty piece a ‘Rat shit”, spits a stout Stawell man. The Aararat player looks up sharply and gives him a savage finger, provoking another apoplectic spray of beer, invective and hotdog. An old bird nearby is half-serious when she gives it back to the bug-eyed and red-faced Stawell bloke: “Shut up or I’ll split ya in half and beat the shit outta the both a ya’”.

There’s a big turnout of around 1,500 today at Stawell’s home ground, Castrol Stadium. You might know it as Central Park – that unlikely stage every Easter for the world’s sprint stars. It’s been the scene of many a nasty scrap between these teams. Aararat and Stawell have always agreed on one thing: they bloody well hate each other. These days it’s a residual sort of emotion, with its reasons, even if the details have been forgotten. There have been just enough spiteful little spot fires around the ground today to keep everyone cranky at everyone else, on both sides of the fence.

It’s easy to believe it should always be this way. You want to believe it. There’s not much left of that much-lamented “tribalism” that used to get even the most determinedly uninvolved locals anticipating a game. These two towns in Victoria’s Wimmera, only 20km apart, formed football teams in 1874, only 14 years after the start of the gold rush. Each town considered itself superior to the other. Each was as xenophobic as any newly formed group jealous for its budding identity.

According to the official history, there were three teams in the district then: Aararat, Stawell and Asylum. You read right. Asylum consisted of “lunatics and attendants”. These days people complain about striking a team of lunatics. Back then you’d expect it every second week! And they were the real thing. The club never kicked on. I think the inmates just sort of went their own ways. It’s a shame. A team of jokers like that sure would have made today’s draft system interesting.

Back in those days, football seemed to be the way country towns engaged in war. Newspaper reports emanating from one town or the other didn’t hold back either, accusing the opposition of “blackguard displays” and “unseemly behaviour in front of women”, or local fans of “assuming bellicose attitudes”. Fighting words, those. One Aararat reporter was even moved to break into verse to describe the bias of the umpire, who, apparently, was

To Stawell’s virtues very kind

But to their faults a little blind.

Ouch! It takes an irate journo to strike out blindly at his own readers like that with bad rhyming couplets. But what of those rampant “bellicose attitudes”? Well, they occasionally tipped over into the real thing – bellicose actions. Many a match was preceded, interrupted, or followed by riots in which punches, eggs and “road metal” were thrown.

As I said, the details of this enmity are rooted in a long-forgotten time, but there’s a sort of obligation to carry it on, like the Hatfields and the McCoys, or Sarajevo. After today’s seconds match, two opponents trudged off together. The kid from Aararat said, “Nice bit of biffo out there in the second quarter.” “Yeah.” replied the Stawell kid. “Just like the good ol’ days, wasn’t it?”

*

It’s accepted now that bush footy teams have much bigger battles to fight than football games. In June, the Victorian Government launched an inquiry into the deteriorating, disheartening state of bush footy. Seven blokes in suits will go around to all the clubs and hear about unsolvable problems. They might as well just front the Worldwatch Institute and launch an inquiry into the state of the planet. What can a bunch of middle-aged parliamentarians from Victoria do about globalisation, public liability insurance, competing interests, drugs, or drought? Or that creeping, corporate sameness that seems to be lovingly embracing us all? It’s not just about money; it’s not even about a bloody weekend diversion. It’s about meaning. Maybe the rivalries aren’t as intense any more, but people still want to find identity and meaning in the small places where they live. A footy club is a place to make and renew stories; to keep the fabric together.

John behind the bar was president once, but he tired of all those “healthy” practices that guarantee a club’s survival: BAS statements, insurance premiums, endless spruiking for men and money, ceaseless fundraising. Perpetual marketing. “Every chance you’ve got you’ve gotta try to raise funds”. Insolvency and the taxman forever threaten. Sure, a business plan is good practice, but clubs seemed more relaxed places when they weren’t regarded primarily as businesses. A club’s “health” depends on all this compliance for the same reason an Iraqi foot soldier’s “health” depends on doing what his barmy boss says, or Australia’s “health” depends on being America’s friend. Because the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about. You can’t be “unhealthy” and expect to be entitled to live at the same time – not without threat, anyway. It’s simply a contradiction.

It all seems a bit much just for a bit of fun on the weekend, but they all agree its better than having the kids disappear in a cloud of dope, or climb into a bottle of bourbon. That’s why they keep backing up year in, year out, no matter what it takes.

*

The boys out there can’t afford to let off too much steam. Old enmities are good marketing, but too much biffo will repel the mums and break the tenuous family connection. Already too few sons follow their dads into football. And besides, with all these club mergers going on, today’s enemies might be sharing tomorrow’s bed. Country leagues are full of more hyphens these days than a Sloane Ranger’s diary. Fifty teams have disappeared in 20 years. Fifty little identities.

But that’s change for you. Mark Antonio, who played over 300 games for Stawell, laments the loss of professionals like teachers and cops, who made up the teams he played for in the 70s and 80s. But his dad Frank, and uncle Jack, who lined up for Aararat in the 50s and 60s, played with millers, farmers, miners, loggers, woodcutters and shearers, in the days of myth and legend. When wool cost a pound a pound.

Says Frank: “the fellows then were very fit and strong, and they hit hard. They’re more athletes now.” Ed Pianta, who played against Frank and Jack for Stawell, remembers local legend and 1944 Essendon Best and Fairest Perc Bushby, spreading his colossal arms like a bloody albatross and holding back five opposition players as he shepherded Ed to the goals. Five men!

Bush footy derives its identity from tales of the extraordinary that precede Achilles Jones booting bags of chaff barefoot, or Billy Brownless hoiking balls over silos. The half-true is, after all, half true, and rooted in the real exploits of impressive physical specimens, impervious to pain, who’d make today’s evenly-muscled, banana-munching gym rats at the elite AFL level feel as though they’ve never really entered the world of Real Men. Why, even the kids would have pillow fights with 180lb bags of superphosphate! But that was then.

You can tell men from that era by their hands – heavy, thick, meaty, unsubtle and housebrick-hard, with palms the texture of rhino hide. When they played, a backhander – the lightest weapon in a man’s armory when you consider what one of those bell-clapper fists might do – with one of those cudgels would knock a man rotten. No amount of gym work can hew a hand with unyielding fingers like that; only tireless years of labour, begun so young that they come to look almost graceful propelling a pick through hard rock, or turning an immovable cold steel nut, or hurling a hay bale. If most of those blokes never made the top level it might have been because of those insensitive hands. Who knows? Even now, they’re scarred and scabbed, as they envelop mine in a mercifully benign grip. Those hands won’t stop working until the day their owners die.

*

Daryl Leslie’s nose probably met the back of a few of those hands when he played in the 50s and 60s and his mitts no doubt introduced themselves to a few of the probosci around him today in the members’ pavilion. He’s got a son in each team today. Trent’s the Stawell captain and Adam plays for the ‘Rats. That wouldn’t have happened once, family members in different teams. Daryl’s just finished watching his daughter play netball next door. That’s a relatively modern necessity, too. Netball also shares the bed, and clubrooms, and playing schedules.

Adam’s tagging Trent, and “their mother’s not real happy.” The story’s made the local rag. He’s surprisingly eloquent, so don’t get Daryl started on the AFL. He reckons they’re greedy. “The only avenue to AFL is through the under-18s. Only two kids out of 200 might make it. By the time a 14- year-old gets to 18 and goes through junior squads, they’re that burnt out they don’t come back to country football. And if they’re going to grab our kids, then they should give back by getting some of the established footballers who leave the game to come back to the bush. Behind the glass coach’s boxes there’s 10 or 15 ex-players who could be out promoting the game in the bush. People are leaving the bush, so there’s no point the government just doing an inquiry into bush footy.”

*

Aararat have had the better of Stawell lately, but not today. Stawell won a “bruising encounter”, as the local papers will no doubt put it. And they’d be right. After a decent delay to allow for bar sales, the speeches and presentation of the Perc Bushby Cup begin. Perc had coached both sides, and his bony, benevolent, scarred presence never seems far away. Not all of the players drink beer, and hardly any partake of a sausage sanger. “Now they all want pasta for tea and drink Powerade”, says John. “A couple of blokes’ll come back from the AFL and tell you what you’re supposed to do.”

Some of today’s opponents are workmates, and a lot don’t come from either town. They’re united by a common cause: the survival of their game – the game of bush footy. But it’s changing, and it will continue to change. It may even enjoy a resurgence, as commuting to and from Melbourne becomes easier, and urban professionals who increasingly seek country life look for ways to let off steam on the weekend. Of course, it won’t be the same. And a lot of employers might put their foot down about them risking time off work for football injuries.

But some things don’t change, even if the drink they share might be full of electrolytes and the rivalry is friendly and there’s not a handful of “road metal” in sight. As the evening goes on, the players all agree on one thing: they bloody-well hate Horsham.

Many thanks to local historian Michael Spalding, who sourced contemporary newspapers for the historical accounts.

Published in Inside Sport, August 2003