Hugh Boyd did the footy rounds in the sixties, starting with Prahran where he was born and playing for and coaching eight clubs in Victoria and Tasmania. One was Campbell Town in Tassie’s north-east. There one day, he saw a grizzled veteran from Tunnack line up and deliver a bone-shaking shirtfront to a skinny 16-year-old on the wing.
“He hit the ground like a sack of spuds,” Boyd said a while ago, “and to my amazement he took a deep breath, composed himself, and got on with the game.” If anyone attended to him, it would have been a goal umpire, multi-tasking.
AFL boss Gillon McLachlan announces a team for Tasmania.Credit: AFL Photos
Boyd thought then and there that the stripling would make it. Looking back, he regarded him as the best 16-year-old he ever saw. His name was Brent Crosswell, and he became a footy great. If there was a Norm Smith medal in the fabled 1970 grand final, he would have won it.
More particularly, Crosswell was a Tasmanian footy great, a name to sit alongside Baldock, Hudson, Hart, Richardson, Greening, Riewoldt … the list goes on.
Why remember this now? Because when a licence for a new Tasmanian team in the AFL was formalised in Hobart on Wednesday, footy recovered a bit of its soul. For most of footy history, no place embodied that soul as much as Tasmania.
This is not to be wistful about the erstwhile violence, nor to live in a sepia-toned past, but to celebrate what was good and should have been timeless about footy the Tassie way: the resilience, the centrality of the game in the culture, and the fact that the island state could produce so many exceptional players from so small a population.
Darrel Baldock
There was nothing of this fabric in the places where the AFL has relentlessly and expensively pursued expansion and – despite Gill McLachlan’s rhetorical claim that wherever the AFL goes, footy flourishes – there still isn’t much. That’s not to say the AFL should not have looked to new horizons, but that it was a mistake to make out that the game could have expansion or consolidation, but not both.
“Today, we close the loop,” said McLachlan. But the gap in it was AFL-made. We were told that a Tasmanian team would be a financial drag on the competition. We were conditioned to think that because the sums didn’t add up, the soul would either have to fend for itself or be sacrificed. We were numbed by the numbers. Meantime, that list didn’t go on; it began to peter out decades ago.
We had the US held up to us as a model of how to run sport viably, but a part of that model also was hidden from us. In the US, there’s a gridiron team called the Green Bay Packers who come from a town half as big as Hobart and have won 13 national titles. Former commissioner Colin Carter made a point of this in his 2021 feasibility study on a Tasmanian AFL team.
We rejoice in Top End footballers and their light feet and distinctive skill set, yet hardly ever dwell on what might be called the classic way Tasmanians play the winter game.
“(Former premier Peter Gutwein) refused to take no for an answer,” said McLachlan, without specifying who was saying no all this time. But suddenly on Wednesday, a Tasmanian team was all the AFL’s idea. Suddenly, the time was right. Overdue and right at the same time, said McLachlan. It’s worth a try when your next mortgage payment falls due.
Richmond’s Royce Hart kicks for goal.Credit: Photographic
But being the AFL, it could not recover its soul without insisting on its pound of flesh. This was the extravagant new stadium that the AFL would not pay for, but made a condition of the issuing of the licence. With their hands bent up behind their backs, federal and state governments obliged.
The present stadium at Bellerive holds nearly as many as the planned capacity of the new stadium and could have been redeveloped at a fraction of the cost. When the AFL’s new monument to itself is finished, there will be three AFL-standard stadiums in Tasmania, amounting to one seat for every eight Tasmanians. In Victoria, it’s one for every 35. Go figure.
Ian Stewart in action.Credit: Fairfax Photographic
As far as can be ascertained, Tasmanians are happy about their new team, less so about the stadium. When McLachlan spoke of standing with premier Jeremy Rockliff in his office looking down at Macquarie Point and imagining the spectacular floodlit view on a Friday night five years hence, he seemed oblivious to the fact that quite literally, this is not most Tasmanians’ view.
Tasmania is unique. It’s the smallest state, but also the most divided, between north and south, for one, and in its affections for the mainland. This will make for complications as the new team takes shape, but they also help to give the place its character. What cannot be disputed is that it was a great footy state, and can be again.
Tassie’s cold – of course it is. In fact, it’s the point. In such a vast nation, climate necessarily helps to mould the way footballers play. It means footy is national, but not homogenous.
From different parts of the country come different characteristics. We rejoice in Top End footballers and their light feet and distinctive skill set, yet hardly ever dwell on what might be called the classic way Tasmanians play the winter game.
This underscores the fact that a national Australian Rules competition without a team from Tasmania always felt incomplete, in fact wrong. But it was a wrong we’ve been habituated to gloss over. It’s about to be righted.
As for Hugh Boyd, there’s not much in the archives about his footy career, but an authoritative source says he once won a medal for best-on-ground in a representative match despite the fact that his direct opponent slipped away to kick a few late inconsequential goals. That opponent was Darrel Baldock.
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