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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-05-27 Daily Xml
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COUNTRY SPORTING CLUBS

Mr BIGNELL (Mawson) (15:37): I rise today to talk about country football and, for that matter, netball—those community sports in regional areas are so much a part of the fabric of society. I will talk today about the Glencoe Football Club, where I played my one and only game back in 1976 as a nine year old.

Mr Pederick interjecting:

Mr BIGNELL: Others in my family had much better records. We moved to Adelaide the following week, so I played only the one game, but I did get my participation medal at the end of the year, which I still have proudly at home I was down at Glencoe on the weekend for the celebration of the centenary of the football club, the Mighty Murphies, a team with a potato as its mascot in reverence of the local potato farmers of the area.

Mr Pederick interjecting:

Mr BIGNELL: It is great potato country down there. It is interesting. I got the book, entitled Murphy's Lore, which goes through the history of the club. I had no idea that so many of my family members were involved. I knew they were not much at football, but they played valuable roles and became life members. My grandfather, Henry Kennedy, is a life member, and I said, 'Well, you must have been on the committee?' No; he just stood for 40 years on the gate and took everyone's money as they came in, under the pine trees where he could not even see the game. It did not matter how wet it was down there: he took the money off people as they came in and wished them a good day. That was the sort of sacrifice they would make.

On the other side of my family, my grandparents, Lindsay and Susie Bignell, were also given awards at the club because they gave the land out the back of their general store when they sold that back in the early seventies to build the clubrooms on. It is interesting to go back even further. If you go back to 1911, my great-grandfather was a secretary of the club, and the captain of the club at that time was the grandfather of the member for Mount Gambier. In fact, the member for Mount Gambier's father, grandfather and two of his uncles also played for Glencoe.

As any of the members here who come from country areas would know, the footy club—and the netball club for that matter—is so much more than just about the sport. If there is a death in the community, it is the footy club and the netball people who get together and cook the barbie and go out and do the working bees to help the family that has been left behind. When there is a bushfire, it is the footy club boys and the netball women who are out in the trucks, and the CFS these days is also out there, then the rest of the community comes together, usually at the footy club, to make the sandwiches. That is what it is all about; it just ties the whole area together.

I really want to pay tribute to Craig Childs, the current president of the Glencoe footy club. Along with Kathy Finniss, he did a magnificent job in getting together the weekend celebration. It was great to take my 97 year old grandmother there. She sat there all day on Saturday and everyone called her Nan Bignell. Even though she was my nan, she was everyone's nan. They said, 'We could always hear you yelling out from the sidelines. You were the only voice we could hear. We really appreciated the fact that you would always put on the pie and pasty nights for us.' She said, 'Well, I always thought there were plenty of sponsors for the A grade and B grade, but the future of any footy club is the colts and the senior colts, so I always supported them with the pie and pasty nights.'

One of the great speeches was from the 1949 premiership coach, Bill Wundersitz, who was there on Saturday. He is now 98 years old. He told some fantastic stories. He said that the boys used to go out and have a big pre-season game at Beachport. One of the locals with a big truck would clear all the logs off the back of the truck and the whole team would get on the truck and they would drive from Glencoe to Beachport.

There would be grog on the truck on the way back, and on one particular day one of the fellows got a bit of motion sickness—as you do with a big log truck moving side to side—and he was feeling a little unwell. There was a bang on the top of the truck cabin and the driver was told to pull over because 'so-and-so has lost his teeth'. They turned the truck around and went back. All the boys were off the truck, looking around for the teeth. Someone said, 'Here they are, they're over here.' The fellow went over, picked them up, put them straight back into his mouth, got back on the truck and they proceeded back to Glencoe.

Bill said that he wishes footy was like it was back then, when people played the ball and not the man. Peter Ey was also there. He was picked up as a 21 year old and became the captain coach in 1965. At the age of 23, with much more experienced people in the team than him, he led Glencoe to premierships in 1966 and 1967. It was great that he could make the trip from Bundaberg where he lives now. He also told a great story. He said that in the days when everyone was a farmer and they would come in to play footy, a guy said, 'I saw that guy with his shirt off. He had muscles on his guts.'

Time expired.

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