Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong

By James Button

As a boy, James Button fell in love with the Geelong Football Club. It was a family affair. But as the years wore on and the defeats and disappointments mounted, it became clear to him: his team would never win a flag. This book tells the story of his glorious mistake. Writing as a reporter, not primarily as a fan, James interviews hundreds of people to tell the story of how one organisation changed its culture, on and off the field. He relates not only the fortunes of the team over fifty years but of the town with which it is so closely entwined. And he tries to explain why so many of us, whoever we barrack for, are gripped by an unreasonable passion for football.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780522866162

Book preview

1994–

1

BARRACKING

I WASN’T BORN a Cats supporter. I grew up a long way from Geelong, in a time when place and distance still mattered. My primary school was in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, next door to Richmond, and at the age of six I followed the Tigers. To be exact, Chris Dick, Grant Buhlert and Robbie Colquhoun followed the Tigers, and I followed them. Those boys could hang off the monkey bars like fruit bats in their black and yellow jumpers. When one of them announced that Richmond had won something called a premiership, I swung on the monkey bars with them and shouted, ‘Yay!’

But a year or two later—I remember the exact moment—I was sitting in the back of our car with my friend Graham Heggan. Dad was driving us to school. I leant forward and said, ‘Dad, who do you barrack for?’

‘Geelong,’ he said. ‘Me too,’ I said.

So a fan was born, and bound. You can change jobs, cities, teeth, your house, your spouse, your life. You can even change your sex. But you can’t change your team.

For the next four decades, with my father and brother Nick beside me, I followed Geelong through thin and not much thick. We saw cave-ins and comebacks, feats and defeats. In the acrid haze of my father’s cigarettes we watched hope flare, be snuffed out, rise again. We’d hit the Geelong Road in full voice at midday, return at six in sullen silence. In 1992 Geelong was playing so well that we started to lairise and flew to a game in Adelaide. We were taunted by the local crowd and beaten by ninety-two points. That night we found ourselves marooned in Rundle Mall, three sad Cats in the Great Fish Cafe.

My father worked, then retired. My brother and I went to school, university, into jobs. I ended a long-term relationship and began another. My brother got married and divorced; my father got divorced, married and divorced. Everything changed—everything except Saturdays in winter.

At midday, earlier if we were going to Geelong, I’d drive to my dad’s house. Nick would be buried in the sports pages, Dad would be on the phone. As he talked, he’d point me to a piece of A4 paper on the table on which he’d scrawled an oval containing his current dream team. Nick and I would mock his selections, we’d argue, then we’d grab a few mandarins and head for the door. In the car, or walking to the ground, or sitting in the same positions we always sat—Nick hunched forward, Dad smoking, me marking the goals in the Footy Record—we’d resume our endless circling conversation. Not much about our careers, even less about those marriages and divorces, but a lot about the enigma of the Geelong Football Club. Would we ever win a flag?

Down the years the question shadowed us, a tagger we couldn’t shake. It might have formed in my head at the very first Geelong game I saw, against Collingwood. A friend of my parents had a spare seat in the stand at Victoria Park: ‘Don’t tell them you don’t barrack for Collingwood,’ she warned with a knowing grin. She needn’t have worried. When Trevor Price stab passed to Peter McKenna the stand was like a creature, roaring, stomping, demanding blood. As the slaughter unfolded I sat very still, only the whiskers on the sides of my nose twitching slightly. Who were these people? What was their savage appetite? Whatever it was, it was stronger than Geelong, stronger than me.

Or the question might have formed the first time I went down the Geelong Road, in the back seat of my friend Graham’s family Holden. Mr Heggan was a mad South Melbourne fan, though he still had the lilt of the Belfast streets he and his wife had left not so long ago. We drove past the western suburbs, the stink of Werribee, the flat fields, the refinery. The day was cold, the road flat, the sky featureless and grey, but I was alive to everything, and every mile was taking me closer to Kardinia Park.

It was Round Twenty, 1970; the winner of today’s game would make the finals, the loser would go out. We picked up the Heggans’ cousins, Geelong supporters, from their house right on the highway in Norlane, north Geelong. If we hurried we could get a seat on the fence. We sat near the goals at the Barwon River end, with the cypress pines rising behind us. The ground filled, the teams ran on, Geelong was kicking our way, and I was twenty yards from our great full forward, Doug Wade.

I had never been so close, never seen the drama of the goal mouth. Wade stood quietly, hands on hips, South’s John Rantall beside him. All at once Billy Goggin was running with the ball out of the centre and Wade was on the move. Crocodile fast over ten yards, he snapped the ball out of the air. His towering torpedo had the fans hammering on the fence. The ball went down the other end for a while, quiet returned, and Wade, hands still on his hips, turned and gazed at the crowd. He looked right at us. For a second he actually looked bored. Astonished, I realised that Doug Wade was a human being.

Geelong kicked five goals to one in that first quarter, but we had the wind. From there we faded, and lost. Was I imagining it, or did South want to win more than we did?

Back in Norlane we balanced dinner on our knee and watched the last quarter on the footy replay. ‘You only played one good quarter,’ Mr Heggan said to me. I must have looked upset because one of his relatives, a woman with the same Belfast accent, said gently, ‘We can still make the four.’ Even at age nine and given to magical thinking, I knew she was dreaming. When my mother opened the front door late that night I shouted, ‘We can’t make the four!’ and stormed off to my room, lying there in a rage as I heard her and her friend laughing.

A top side in the sixties, Geelong in the seventies went over the waterfall, just as I got in the boat. We gained a reputation as elegant but soft. Lou Richards called us the handbag side and the label stuck. In those years I read an article about Geelong’s sixties team. With so much ability it should have won more than one flag, the writer said. That throwaway line stayed with me. Did we have some fatal flaw?

If we did, there were times in my childhood I almost blamed my father for saddling me with it. We sat in the old Heatley Stand at Princes Park as Geelong tried to stop the fast-finishing Blues: ‘Please, Cats, hold on,’ I prayed. But Carlton goals rained down, the stand thundered to the rhythm of barrackers’ boots. I stared at my father’s set face, the jubilant fans all around us, and thought, ‘Do something, Dad!’ As the Carlton song hunted us out of the ground—‘We’re the team that never lets you down’—I felt infected by some hereditary strain of failure.

Melbourne people were often perplexed to hear which team I supported: ‘Whaddya follow them for? You’re not from there, are you?’ I’d trot out my line: ‘My dad grew up in Ballarat and went to school in Geelong.’ They’d nod, satisfied: the father and son rule applied to fans as well as players. But then they’d frown: ‘Can’t work out those Cats. So much talent. But they never quite get there—do they?’

‘Not yet,’ I’d agree. ‘But we will. We will.’

I had reasons for my flickering faith. In all the years I have followed them, Geelong has never come last, never been deadbeats. Even in the worst years, they could play a game of such grace and verve that success seemed a heartbeat away. Then the papers would go feral with feline metaphors: ‘Cats take the cream!’ ‘Fantasticats!’ ‘Purrfect!’ (I’m still waiting for ‘Pussies put in paw performance!’)

Equally, even in the best years, our form could resemble a printout of the oscillations of a nervous heart. The old cardiac Cats! I’ll never forget Peter Johnston missing an easy goal in a vital game and putting his hands to his head, the saddest gesture I’ve seen a footballer make. Or the two consecutive Preliminary Finals we lost to Collingwood by a fingernail, Peter Daicos bombing a freak goal late in the second one to shut the door. Or the last round of 1987, when I paced around the clock radio in my bedroom, door shut, while my housemates settled down for a pleasant Saturday afternoon drink. Playing at home and for a place in the five, we stayed comfortably clear of Hawthorn with just five minutes to go. ‘Geelong is in the finals!’ the hometown 3GL commentator was screaming. ‘The Cats are home!’

But we weren’t. We weren’t.

Ask any Geelong fan about these decades and they’ll all tell you the same thing: fans from other clubs treated us with pity or with scorn. ‘It’s the hoops on your jumper,’ said a friend. ‘They make you look chubby, cuddly, not tough.’ More troubling was the idea that the town was too soft on its players, that win or lose they were heroes. A Carlton friend, struggling to mask the satisfaction in his voice, told me about hearing Ray Byrne say on the radio that when he played at Carlton and Collingwood the players were made to feel humiliated after a loss. After a loss at Geelong, his third club, the players were still stars.

After the Hawke Government was elected in 1983, my father became a federal minister and our Saturday habits changed. Now we often went to Geelong at the invitation of the club. A blue-coated attendant would wave us into the car park, a doorman would wave us into the rooms. We’d sit in good seats on the wing, sometimes behind glass, and mingle with blokes in suits and club ties, or checked shirts tucked into white moleskins under a navy blazer and over RM Williams boots. I didn’t like it as much as going in the outer—we had to wear a jacket and it wasn’t as knockabout or as intimate among the three of us. But we learnt a few things. At half-time, while trying to balance a Footy Record in one hand with a party pie on a napkin in the other, we might have been a bit uneasy but we and the Geelong people could chat about the one thing we knew we all cared about: the fate of the footy club.

We met old players like Fred Wooller, Alistair and Stewart Lord, Ron Hovey and Neil ‘Nipper’ Trezise. Wooller, captain of the 1963 premiership side, was our favourite. ‘Here’s trouble,’ he’d say as we showed up. Tall, with laughing eyes, he was an ageing matinee idol, the Jimmy Stewart of Kardinia Park. He was so mellow it was hard to believe that he used to throw up from nerves before every game. Yet Wooller was troubled about the team. So were the Lord twins, who I could never tell apart. So was Hove, so was Nipper, so was the famous Bob Davis, who I might have shaken hands with but whose distinctive nasal voice I certainly overheard. You got the sense among these blokes that it had all been better back in 1963, or 1953, and that the trick was to rekindle that old-time magic, those faded dreams.

Among this crowd, or as we walked around the ground, or stood in a pack against the stinky urinals they once had on the western side, we felt some faint tribal difference. Was it city and country? Or something else? Geelong was our club but we didn’t know the club, nor the town. It was a place of squatters and battlers, blue blood and blue collar, and we were neither.

Too often we got back in the car for the drive home with the feeling that we would never win a flag fully confirmed. What would it be like, I wondered, to follow a premiership team? To get off the rollercoaster and onto the presidential cavalcade? At half-time in the 1991 Preliminary Final, which Geelong just lost to West Coast, we were sheltering from the miserable day in the covered walkway at Waverley. Someone yelled, ‘Conan!’ I looked up to see Hawthorn champions Gary Ayres, his resplendent mullet perfectly in place, and Michael Tuck. They walked as footballers do, with a sense of being watched. I took in their size, their smiles, their Hawthorn sheen. They were winners. They had a week’s rest before the Grand Final. They weren’t even getting wet.

Hawthorn beat us so often in those years—let me not count the ways. Let me not mention the terrible thrashing of Round One, 1990, or the two-point loss in the 1991 Second Semi Final. Let me not dwell on the 1989 Grand Final, a game I missed because I was living in New York and only heard the news when my father called, his voice mixing despair with laughter at Gary Ablett’s astonishing nine goals and his thanking God on the dais. Instead, let me tell you about the moment I was finally set free from my endless, hopeless craving to see my team triumph.

It was 1992 and we were playing the Hawks at Kardinia Park. We were top of the ladder and they were struggling a bit, at least by their own lights. Dad and I made the trip down, rugged up and buoyed up. We bought a Record and a pie and sat expectantly on the forward flank. And watched Jason Dunstall carve us to pieces.

The coach, Malcolm Blight, tried everything. He turned the team upside down: he put Ablett, the club’s most famous footballer, at full back. Dunstall still kicked nine. When he kicked his hundredth goal of the season a thousand kids in Hawthorn jumpers jumped the fence, swamped the security guards and raced across the grass, brown and gold flags fluttering above them. And in that moment something happened to me. I forgot my gloom and caught their glee.

‘It’s a bit exciting,’ I said.

‘It’s like a medieval pageant,’ Dad said.

I sat back and laughed. At last, life’s secret was clear, and I was serene. Hawthorn would beat us today. They would beat us tomorrow. They would always beat us. But it was time to let go. There was more to life than winning the footy.

‘Would all those not involved in the game please leave the arena immediately,’ said a huffy voice over the public address system, and we laughed again.

My enlightenment lasted exactly seven days, until a massive win over Melbourne: ‘Despair I can handle, it’s hope that kills me,’ John Cleese once said. Next week and the week after, all the way to the finals, hope soared. In the Grand Final, against West Coast, we were two goals up at half-time. Ablett kicked the first goal of the third quarter. We lost. That night I had to excuse myself from a friend’s dinner party and lie on her couch, I was so exhausted and jacked off with it all. We lost another one in 1994, and one more the year after. We lost four Grand Finals in seven years. The last was the worst. Once Carlton got an early run, Geelong players seemed to bow their heads. Did they believe the script was already written? As Dad, Nick and I left the ground and scurried across the Melbourne Cricket Ground car park, the song I had heard so many times at the end of games fired up again: ‘We’re the team that never lets you down, we’re the only team old Carlton knows.’

Was our side too individualistic, was the town too in love with its star players? I know that the fans’ love for Ablett was beyond reckoning. I sat in a Kardinia Park stand on a glorious winter’s day, when the crowd in the outer was speckled like hundreds and thousands and the man in the cat suit knocked off a policeman’s hat. In this carnival air the crowd even cheered Ablett’s practice shots at goal. ‘A lazy six today from the Pontiff,’ commentator Rex Hunt would later say. And as Ablett slotted another the old woman sitting next to me cackled with glee and said, ‘You wouldn’t be dead for quids, would ya?’

But Ablett retired, an era ended. We fell down the ladder, became a blue-collar side again. And we began to hear a whisper: Geelong was broke again. It might have to play home games in Melbourne. It might not even survive.

In 1999, during a nine-match losing streak, we were at an official function at a night game against Richmond at the MCG. AFL chief Wayne Jackson was on our table. My father, his grim look no doubt exacerbated by the game unfolding on the other side of the glass, asked Jackson what it would mean if Geelong disappeared and football lost its only regional club. Jackson’s answer was equivocal. We were not comforted.

The millennium was nigh. The new Brisbane Lions were rising; Port Adelaide had just joined the AFL. Every year the game was going more national. How would our club compete in this brave new world when it was not rich enough or smart enough, when it was too small and came from a town that was too far away? Was that the problem—the long road to Geelong?

2

‘WE ARE GEELONG’

PAST THE SMOKESTACKS, car yards, overpasses and panel beater shops, past the highway and railway that slice the town in two, past the dip in the road where trucks grind and snort before climbing the hill, is Kardinia Park. On this ground, the unlovely town of Geelong has produced some of the finest players and loveliest football the game has seen.

Generations of Geelong boys have gazed on that field and hoped one day to cross the fence.

In the 1960s, behind the northern goals, Ian and Bruce Nankervis stand on a box next to their father Clarrie, a printer at Ford. The crowd is jammed so tight that it sometimes pushes the young boys forward and they have to put their hands on the shoulders of the people in front of them. No one minds.

At the same end a few years later, a small boy, Mark Yeates, stands with his father John, who played for Geelong. The crowd is so tight that no one can leave and Mark, hemmed in by legs, has to piss into an empty beer can. He later watches amused, aghast, as a drunk picks up the can and starts to pour it down his throat.

At the river end a few years later, a St Joseph’s College boy, Tim Darcy, watches the game perched in a pine tree. On another day he moves along the terraces past a bikie he knows as Gronk, who has somehow managed to smuggle an 18-gallon keg of beer into the ground. Another Joey’s boy, Barry Stoneham, sits with his two sisters on the fence. When John ‘Sam’ Newman’s boot flies off, one girl jumps the fence to nick his shoelace. Some years later still, yet another Joey’s boy, Cameron Ling, sits in the grandstand every week with his dad, eyes glued to the game. All these boys would play for Geelong.

Andrew Bews, Geelong captain in the early 1990s, was married at Kardinia Park. Neil Trezise, captain in 1959, had his funeral there. During the riotous days of the Cats Disco under the grandstand, a few children were no doubt conceived there.

Mark Mahon, a boy from the poor northern suburb of Corio, fell in love there. He and his mate were thirteen, off the bus, shivering in lumber jackets and ugg boots behind the goals at the River End, stealing forlorn glances at a girl who often stood with her father beside them. Forty years later Mahon still remembers: ‘She had long, mouse-coloured hair, she wore a knee-length coat, she left a picture on my soul. I’d manoeuvre my mate so I could be standing next to her. And I never said one word to her.’

Vic Marles, whose father was Deputy Principal of Geelong Grammar and whose brother Richard is the Member of Parliament for Corio, remembers empty Saturdays during her teens in the late 1960s, when a cold wind blew over the city and there was nothing to do except go to the football. ‘We’d go and stand behind the goals and try and meet a few boys,’ she says.

Forty years later, in her last years of school, Emma Henderson from Corio and her younger sister Missy would go often to the football. They painted their faces with cat’s whiskers so they could buy child tickets because in their family money was scarce. They stood under the Ford Territory sign—‘the naughty corner’—where the air smelt of beer and dope and ‘blokes were so drunk you couldn’t believe they were following the game’. When Geelong kicked a goal everyone was drenched with beer in the uproar. Emma went to the football because ‘in Geelong it’s movies or shopping centres or footy. It’s a town where there is no aspiration, not much hope, and the football team is it—something to be proud of, to believe in, to give hopeless kids an aspiration.’

‘Football runs in the viscera of Geelong,’ says Deakin University Professor Chris Hickey. ‘If you live in Melbourne, you can find ways to avoid it. In Geelong you cannot.’

Pick up the Geelong Advertiser on a Monday morning and you’ll find three double-page spreads devoted to reports from every game in Geelong’s three football leagues, even before the paper gets to its coverage of the Cats. With thirty-two clubs playing, plus the AFL side and the Geelong Falcons side in the elite youth TAC Cup, Geelong has more football clubs per head of population than anywhere in Australia, says Ken Gannon, a former Geelong general manager and now an administrator with the AFL. The frequent movement of players between the local leagues and the Geelong Football Club gives fans the chance to watch some of the AFL’s best former players—a Matthew Scarlett, Brad Ottens or Joel Corey—running around on a suburban oval on a Saturday afternoon. After the game a fan can go to Geelong’s main cinema complex in Ryrie Street and see a movie in the Gary Ablett or Paul Couch Theatre.

More than any other AFL club, Geelong comes from somewhere. Collingwood left Collingwood long ago. Hawthorn is far from Glenferrie Oval now, and Adelaide is a South Australian state side. But Geelong lives in Geelong.

For more than 150 years, since the game was born, virtually every aspect of Geelong life has had a tie to football. Geelong is the only club in the AFL to have an Aboriginal name—Jillong, a word of the Wautharong people that means ‘a place of sea birds rising over white cliffs’, or ‘tongue of land,’ or perhaps refers to the bay. The blue and white hoops of the Geelong football jumper are said to represent seagulls soaring over the blue of Corio Bay. In the team’s early years journalists called it the Seagulls. While there are no tigers in Richmond or lions in Fitzroy, and certainly no saints in St Kilda, there are indeed seagulls in Geelong.

Football shapes the town’s economy—businesspeople say their tills tick along nicely when the team plays well. When Geelong people poured their money into Pyramid before the building society’s devastating collapse in 1990, their trust stemmed in part from the fact that one of its directors was a former football star, David Clarke.

In Geelong, football and politics are entwined. It can’t be a coincidence that many Geelong players—Graham ‘Polly’ Farmer, Doug Wade, Paul Couch, John Devine and Damian Drum, among others—have been approached to enter politics. Or that Trezise, who held the state seat of Geelong for Labor for twenty-eight years, was a former club captain. Or that when the Liberals made a play to hold power in the 1999 state election, a key figure in their plan was to get Billy Brownless, an amiable blonde who plays the buffoon on TV, to run for them in the safe Labor seat of North Geelong. Though he was bound to lose, they hoped he might pull in enough votes across the city to get Anne Henderson, another Liberal candidate, across the line in the neighbouring seat of Geelong.

‘But I don’t know anything about politics,’ Brownless protested to Jeff Kennett in the Premier’s office. Kennett replied, ‘Half my fucking cabinet doesn’t know anything about politics.’ But Brownless said no, then failed to turn up to a polling booth to hand out how-to-vote cards on election day. The Liberals lost Geelong by sixteen votes, and lost power in Victoria for eleven years.

‘Would Billy have swung nine votes at the polling booth? I think he might have,’ says Labor’s Steve Bracks, who became Premier after that election. And so it came to pass that Billy Brownless changed the course of Australian political history.

Politically, Geelong is divided. Up on the hills is the old money of Newtown and the new money of Highton; on the flat, working-class Norlane. Gordon Scholes says that when he was Labor MP for Corio between 1967 and 1993, Norlane voted two-thirds Labor, Newtown two-thirds Liberal. John Hyde, a premiership player in the 1950s and an ardent conservative, tells me about an article naming Melbourne, Hawthorn and Geelong as the three clubs with the most Liberal voters among their fans. Hyde gleefully showed the article to a member of his Newtown bowls club, ‘a rabid Labor supporter’. Yet Hyde’s own son, also John, became a Labor MP in Western Australia.

The religious tie is stronger at Geelong than at most other clubs, and not just because its most famous footballer, Gary Ablett, was a born-again Christian known as ‘God’. The football club’s last three presidents—Ron Hovey, Frank Costa and Colin Carter—have all been practising Christians, as have five post-war coaches: Reg Hickey, Bob Davis, Peter Pianto, Bill McMaster and John Devine. When Geelong wins premierships, the bells of St Mary of the Angels on the hill ring out the club song and the parish holds an ecumenical service to thank God. The priest, Father Kevin Dillon, follows the Swans but is a Geelong Football Club member all the same, and often uses football analogies in his weekly column in the Geelong Advertiser. The spire of St Mary’s was Geelong’s highest landmark—until 2013, when the light towers went up at Kardinia Park.

Is Geelong a country town? Locals often say so, but in truth it’s a long time since it was. It has suburban sprawl, shopping malls and high-rise towers on the waterfront with cafes serving Fair Trade macchiatos. More than a country town, it’s an industrial port, like Newcastle in England or New South Wales. Stand on the Esplanade on North Shore and you can almost touch the great tankers coming down the channel to berth at the Grain Terminal and carry away fertiliser or woodchips.

Geelong is Motor City, Geetroit. Ford has sponsored the football club ever since it set up its first Australian factory here in 1924. In 1956 Ford had 4500 workers, one in twenty of all people who lived in Geelong. Thirteen Geelong premiership players worked at Ford. They include club greats Joe Sellwood, Bob Davis and Billy Goggin. But now, Ford has gone.

Yet for all the changes, the country tie here is old and deep. As Geelong grew over a century into a commercial centre, the bush sent the town wheat, meat, wool and many of its finest footballers. The town sent back tractors, textiles and fertiliser, and before country football began its slow decline, many former League players, too.

In Geelong’s streets today the silence is still deeper and the warble of the magpie sharper than in Melbourne, with its constant background hum. Time moves more slowly in Geelong, says Emma Henderson: ‘In shopping centres, people stand on the escalators, they don’t walk.’ For eighty years, time has been marked by the statues of the Farmer and Son emerging on the hour from the clock tower of the T&G Building on the corner of Moorabool and Ryrie streets. When Geelong plays in the finals, the statues come out draped in blue and white.

The ghost of a country town also lingers in the familiarity of nicknames. People like to show they know each other. Winding up a coffee on Pakington Street with Andrew Bews, I say that I’m going to interview a Geelong player from the 1950s, Ron Van T’Hag. Bews grins: ‘Shano’s dad. Shano and I played under-19s. Good bloke, Shano.’

At the football club Bews is ‘Bewsy’, though his second nickname is ‘Rat’, as I remembered when his former teammate Tim McGrath—‘Bluey’—sent me a phone contact for him under that name. Another teammate, Garry Hocking, is ‘Buddha’. He got his name from the still way he sat while watching TV as a boy.

The former president of the Geelong Past Players Association is Brian Brushfield, but call him ‘Brushy’. The current president is Ray Card—call him ‘Swap’. Jenny Chatt was a PA to coaches in the late 1990s—call her ‘Have a …’ Current player Corey Enright is ‘Boris’, because as a boy he was always bouncing a ball, like Boris Becker. Former player Joel Corey has a name made up of two first names, so he needed a surname, therefore ‘Smith’, then ‘Smithy’. Barry Fowler, one-time club minder to Gary Ablett Senior, is simply ‘Chook’.

The nicknames spill into the town itself. Geelong’s best-known cafe and shopping strip is Pakington Street, but everyone calls it ‘Pako’. No one in Melbourne calls its main streets ‘Collo’, ‘Lonno’ or ‘Lygo’ but to older Geelong people, especially, their Swanston Street is ‘Swanno’ and Separation Street ‘Seppo’. Fishermen’s Pier restaurant on the waterfront is ‘Fisho’s’, the old St Augustine’s Orphanage in the suburb of Highton was ‘Orpho’s’. I even heard Gippsland described as ‘Gippo’.

Among Geelong people there are just two degrees of separation, the locals will tell you. At the footy club it’s one. After hearing in umpteen conversations that so-and-so ‘is married to my cousin’, you start to see the club as a vast and intricate family tree. Here’s one branch of it. Stephen Wells, Geelong’s recruiter, grew up opposite Kardinia Park. His older brother Greg, who played for Geelong in the 1970s and was later an assistant to coach Malcolm Blight, has a son, Phillip, who is friends with Luke Primus, whose brother Matt played for and coached Port Adelaide after being rejected by Geelong. Their father Keith Primus, an electrician, taught his trade to Bruce Nankervis, who played for Geelong. Bruce’s daughter Jodi has a child with Matthew Scarlett, a recent Geelong champion whose father John also played for the club. Still following?

Keith’s wife Christine is the third daughter of Geelong’s legendary coach, Reg Hickey. When Hickey came to Geelong in 1925, he boarded with businessman Vin Brushfield and his family. Vin’s son Brian played for Geelong in the 1960s, while his daughter Pam married Fred Le Deux, a player in the 1950s. The Le Deux’s daughter Jennifer, who died in 2015, married Jack Hawkins, a star in the 1970s; Jack and Jennifer’s son Tom plays for the club today. Brian Brushfield is also a cousin of 1960s player Terry Callan, whose nephew is married to a daughter of another teammate, John Devine, whose son is married to a niece of former Geelong president Frank Costa. And so on, unto the generations …

Geelong is an aspirational town, and the football club has often served those aspirations. Three men who spent their working lives down at the wharf were Bob Threlfall, Les ‘Fatty’ Giles and Frank Gartland, all unionists with deep allegiance to working-class solidarity and life. Their sons rose one way or another through the football club.

Threlfall’s son Rob became the club’s chief financial officer. Giles’ son Greg ran a Geelong bar and restaurant that thrived on the presence of footballers, and later joined the club’s board. Bob Threlfall was also friends with Roy Stoneham, who worked in the wharf’s pay office. Stoneham’s son Barry became a great Geelong player in the 1980s and ’90s, then ran a kebab shop and a bar in Geelong before taking a manager’s job at a computer support company in Melbourne.

Frank Gartland’s son Bob grew up with no money; his mother made him a Geelong guernsey from an old jumper and a bed sheet. One day he saw a Geelong College boy of about his age on a bus. He could not take his eyes off the boy’s blazer, shiny shoes and embroidered cap: ‘I didn’t think poorly of him. I wanted what he had,’ he says. Bob Gartland became one of Geelong’s leading real estate agents, and sent his son to Geelong College. In 2007 Bob joined the football club board and is today its vice-president.

Geelong is a practical, mercantile, money-minded town. But many have not made money. The Census shows that Geelong is poorer, older and less well educated, with more unemployment and one-parent families than Melbourne, or Australia overall. It’s also whiter. Only a quarter of Geelong people have both parents born overseas; nearly half of Melbourne people do. The proportion of Indigenous people in Geelong, though, is twice as high as it is in Melbourne.

In terms of population diversity, Geelong and Melbourne began to part in about 1975. After World War Two, nearly all the migrant groups that came in large numbers to Melbourne—Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Macedonians and Poles—also came to Geelong. These communities produced footballers like Paul Vinar, Peter Riccardi and Spiro and Tony Malakellis. But as Geelong’s factories began to close from 1975, the next waves of migrants—Vietnamese, Chinese, Indians, Lebanese—did not come. The big migrations to Melbourne brought new businesses, restaurants, students, workers, ways of living. They broke down old class divisions, or at least made them harder to read. But Geelong, lacking this influx, remained stuck in its class divide. Richard Marles MP for Corio, says Geelong has areas of urban disadvantage that are as significant as any in Australia. One of these, the suburb of Corio, is separated by nothing more than railroad tracks from one of Australia’s most elite private schools, Geelong Grammar. Few cross those tracks.

Class divisions have once or twice run through the football club, an organisation mostly run by middle-class people in a working-class town. Yet class in football is hard to read; the game can be a great leveller. A more significant factor in the club’s history is the smallness of the town and the density of its networks. On the surface it’s a family club, everyone beaming for the photo. Yet close ties can stop people from being candid; Geelong at times has been a club of whispers. Behind the door, this family has sometimes torn itself apart. Or is it that no institution is ever really a family, whatever it claims?

Tim Darcy is the godson of Geelong legend Bob Davis. Darcy’s father Kelvin was the jogging companion of the famous ruckman Polly Farmer. In 176 games, Darcy played his heart out for the club, but none of this spared him when the call came that ended his career in late 1994. Darcy was so shocked he had to walk out of the pizza place to make sure he had heard properly: ‘It wasn’t the decision,’ he says, ‘it was the way it was done. It was like someone ripping the heart out of you.’

The man who sacked him, football manager Garry Fletcher, had also been sacked that day and was told to sack Darcy as one of his last jobs. What’s more, Fletcher’s own son Daniel had been delisted as a player the same day, pulled off a bus as his team prepared to leave for an end-of-season trip. Fletcher’s wife Denise told me she has hated the club ever since. Joan Trezise, wife of Neil, who in the 1970s saw savage feuding on the club’s committee, says, ‘Football is a game played by cannibals.’

Yet what is the mystique of football that, even when it devours people, they cannot let it go? Two years after