When 43 become one: Australia’s most merged footy club keeps the country spirit alive | Stuart Walmsley
Victoria’s rural-urban drift has forced mortal sporting enemies to join forces in Ouyen, diluting proud identities in the gradual contraction of rural football
Norm Vallance is having a day out at Ouyen’s Blackburn Park in north-west Victoria during Heritage Round – held every season to honour one of the clubs in Ouyen United’s creation story. The 101-year-old moves through the crowd, resplendent in blazer and tie, and poses for photographs in front of the ground’s famous totem poles with the steely gaze of a 300-game AFL veteran.
But Vallance only ever played one game, for the locality of Kiamal, which is now home to three people, some Mallee scrub and a cluster of abandoned grain silos. “I wasn’t much of a footballer, but I did a lot of mowing,” says Vallance, who still lives on Dingo Tank Road, just up from Kiamal’s old home ground, nine kilometres north of Ouyen.
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