JUSTIN LANGER: How driving to watch a grand final showed me that sport is helping country towns survive

Last Saturday I drove from Perth to Bencubbin and back with my eldest daughter Jess.

We left home at 10.30am, assigned Jess as the DJ, and got on our way.

Jess’s boyfriend, Jack, was playing in the Central Wheatbelt Football League’s grand final so I was quietly excited — not just about spending the whole day with Jess and watching footy in its rawest form — but also for romantic connotations of spending time in country WA.

Past, happy experiences of “the best pies in the world” at Kirup Bakery or picking up bags of apples from Donnybrook on the way to Tommy and Joyful Muir’s farm in Manjimup are happily engrained into my soul.

Spending weekends with friends, talking to the cows, riding the four-wheelers around the farm, catching yabbies and marron, bonfires, fresh air, long walks, home-cooked meals, chopping wood, ‘talking rubbish’, burning grass trees. Simple. Wonderful. Peaceful.

Back to last Saturday.

Three-and-a-half hours driving north-east. Straight roads, big sky, fields of yellow canola running all the way to the edge of the world. Beautiful.

But what got me wasn’t the distance. Or the isolation. It was the silence. The desolation.

We went through a couple of towns on a Saturday afternoon and didn’t see a single person. Every shop was shut. Main streets empty. Verandas with nobody under them.

Ghost towns.

Everyone I spoke to this week gave me the same answer as to why this was the case and I will come to that soon.

We pulled in for fuel and the bloke at the garage, probably in his 60s, made me a toasted ham and cheese sandwich. He’d moved up from Perth not long ago.

“Couldn’t afford the city anymore”, he told me.

He had bought himself a nice house for $130,000 and now lives closer to family. He looked like a man whose maths had finally added up, helping him with his choices in life.

A hundred and thirty grand.

In a State and country where we talk about the housing crisis every day of the week, this sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Then we got to the football.

The ground was packed. Cars parked along the fence. Kids, dogs, eskies. Grandparents and locals in fold-out chairs who have watched this fixture for 50 years.

The sausages sizzled in the background, the afternoon teas were fresh scones and cakes, and the canteen was in full throttle. As was the bar.

The footy was great to watch, apart from the two ambulances that carried Jack’s best mate Sam to hospital with a terribly dislocated elbow, and another young bloke who was knocked out cold running into his own ruckman.

Afterwards in the Bencubbin changing room, where they were celebrating their first premiership in 13 years, the noise and fun was something I know so well.

After beating the very proud Kalannie FC — who had won the four previous grand finals — the atmosphere was intoxicating.

There were three generations of the same families. Women who had run the canteen, taped the ankles and played their own netball grand finals at the same venue. Little kids getting a taste of what their futures might feel like. Old fellas with wet eyes who weren’t about to admit it.

Nick Gillett, whose family has farmed out there for generations, had supplied the room with kegs of Harvest Lager brewed from their own wheat. It was the best wheat beer I have ever tasted.

As we joined in the changing room celebration, it struck me that this was where everybody was.

The towns were empty on a Saturday because the crowds had simply moved, for a few hours, from one paddock to another, just one with a scoreboard on it.

And it wasn’t only Bencubbin.

The same weekend, as Josh Kempton’s ‘Bush and ‘Burbs’ wrap in The West recorded, Narrogin beat Wickepin by two points to end an 11-year drought, and the Augusta Abalones beat Busselton by two points on the final siren to win their first flag in 30 years. Augusta’s president said cars started parking around the oval at five o’clock on the Friday afternoon.

“This weekend, the Hills, Avon, Great Southern, Great Northern and Lower South-West seasons will come to a conclusion, with some of the State’s strongest leagues to stage their grand finals later this month,” Kempton documented.

I spoke this week with Bencubbin men Tony Sache and his son Adam.

Adam lives in Perth now. He could easily have let the club go. Instead, every week or so, he rounds up a few of his city mates and they make the long drive back to play.

Nobody asked him to. Nobody pays him a commission to rustle up the troops. He does it because he understands what the footy club is holding together.

That’s leadership.

Turning up. Bringing people with you. Talking your mates into supporting something important. Ringing the young bloke who has gone quiet, to make sure he is at training or available for selection on the weekend.

That last one matters more than most people in the city may realise, because farming as I am told can be lonely work.

Picture a Wheatbelt grain grower at harvest.

Up before dawn. Long hours alone in the cab of a header. Weather he can’t control. The uncertainty of fertiliser and diesel supply they can’t control. The hope of a great crop to pay the bills. A bank they answer to. Interest rate increases that affect us all. A farm his grandfather once cleared, and he’s terrified of being the one to lose it.

He loves it. But love doesn’t stop the silence getting in and the pressure growing.

Saturdays are the one day that a farmer may be shoulder to shoulder with other people. Someone asks how the crop’s looking. Someone notices he’s not himself. Someone sits with them a bit longer than usual. Someone smiles and listens or tells a yarn that makes them laugh.

Every farmer I spoke to this week told me the same thing, almost word for word. The sports clubs are all about ‘community first’. And community means the footy club, the netball club and the hockey club.

More so than ever our regions need these outlets.

As the bigger farms buy out the smaller ones, the population drops. The school comes under pressure. The teachers leave. Then the doctor goes, and the dentist. “It’s all about the numbers.”

My great mate Tommy Muir, a lifetime farmer whose family roots in the Manjimup district run deep, put numbers on it.

“Once, a big farm was 1000 to 4000 acres,” he told me. “Today, they’re more like 50,000.”

The official figures agree. Western Australia has lost around half its specialist cropping farms since the turn of the century.

The whole Shire of Mount Marshall, more than 10,000 square kilometres, now holds fewer than 500 people.

I have just spent months in Lucknow, India, where more than 150 million people share one State. Then you stand in Bencubbin at four o’clock on a Saturday and hear nothing but a crow. The contrast is stark.

This isn’t a story about failure. Our grain growers are among the best on earth, producing more food with fewer people than ever.

But every farm that gets absorbed is also a family that leaves. A player who isn’t on the list. One less person to notice when a mate has gone quiet.

Nick Gillett told me they now rely heavily on backpackers to do the work.

“We can offer good money, a house and a car,” he said. “But it’s hard to get anyone to come out here. The lifestyle is great. We just can’t get them.”

Think about that alongside my mate at the garage.

In the city, people can’t afford a roof. Out there, farmers are offering a roof, a wage and a set of keys, and still can’t fill the job.

That is not a housing problem, it’s a people problem worth discussing.

My Aunty Susie and her husband Bamus, live in Tincurrin. Their life is there and they tell the same story. The farms are bigger. Some of the towns are smaller.

“But the sporting clubs give us and the kids an outlet,” they said. “Long may they continue.”

All week I have been thinking about a farmer standing on Saturday night with a glass of beer made from his neighbour’s wheat and his arm around his son.

About the volunteer men and women in towns like Bencubbin, Narrogin and Augusta who kept their clubs alive long enough for that moment to happen.

But I then realise it’s not the premiership moment that really matters.

Instead, it is every moment of joy and relief these clubs bring to our farmers and beyond, who need them as much as everyone needs their community to flourish and stay healthy.