BLOOD TIES
THE SUNDAY AGE, 2/4/1995
As another football season begins, the game's hardest man, Jack Dyer,
makes a nostalgic return to Richmond, the place he called Struggletown.
By Peter Wilmoth
As another football season begins, the game's hardest man, Jack Dyer,
makes a nostalgic return to Richmond, the place he called Struggletown.
By Peter Wilmoth
Part 1
. . . We wind into narrow little lanes featuring quaint Australiana cottages . . . These tiny alleys were once shiny with beer and sometimes blood. . . . It's now poverty chic; it used to be just poverty.
We ease around the corners. Jack Dyer looks out the window at the Richmond where he was once king. "No one knows me in Richmond any more," he says. "Just there at the football club." His old-fashioned hat - a "grey bludger", he calls it - is perched on his head and Dyer leads us into the heart of Richmond and up on to Richmond Hill.
. . . Jack Dyer and Richmond. Rarely has the connection between a person, a place and an era been so strong. Driving through Richmond with Dyer is like going on a guided tour of the desert with Lawrence of Arabia. It's like taking a huge leap over 60 years to some sort of understanding of what this place was like, what it meant to young men and women who struggled here in the Depression when, it is said, all they had to look forward to was watching the Tigers. Schoolchildren who hate history should be here right now.
Finally, we're in Docker Street - a wide, elevated boulevard from which you can see the Bryant & May chimney reaching over the disused match factory. Jack Dyer introduces himself to a young woman., maybe 20 years old. She knows who Jack Dyer is, and invites him into the house he lived in for 40 years, where he brought up his two children, where he would sit on the verandah and watch the police raid his next-door neighbour.
"You've got it looking lovely," Dyer tells the young woman. "I did what I could here, but I was no carpenter." At 82, he is still a big man, walking in large purposeful strides. . . .
Inside the Richmond changing rooms, a conversation with Jack Dyer about half a century of Richmond is heavy with the power of oral history. He's such a weighty figure it's as though history already owns him. . . .
Sitting on a massage table, Jack Dyer talks about his life. Around us the lockers have been freshly painted, Tiger yellow. He's arrived clutching a bulging scrapbook. "I brought this in case you were one of the young cadets," Dyer says. He says his memory is going a bit, mainly for people's names, but otherwise he's fine.
He's so old now it's almost a shock to meet him. Underneath his hat I didn't recognise him at first. It's as though he stayed at a certain age for about twenty years, frozen in time with his jug ears and kindly face. And then, in the past few years, he suddenly became an old man.
A few years ago, Jack Dyer was still in the public eye, still doing his idiosyncratic football calls for 3KZ, still staying up late to appear with Lou Richards and Bob Davis on 'League Teams'. Still a cult figure. Still quoted. "Spaghetti marijuana", "...his arms reaching up like giant testicles", "French Riverina", "Things aren't the same now there are five teams in the Four". "He made a great debut today and an even better one last week." Not being able to pronounce DiPierdomenico. A much-loved figure with a beautiful rhythm to his speech, the poetry of the imprecise, only partly conscious of why he was so loved.
And then he kind of slipped away. No more radio, no more TV, even interviews and appearances are rare. "I'm a refusal man," he says. "I don't like going out much."
Yet today he gives me three hours, enough talk to tire a man half his age. And the best place to start is how he came to be loved in Richmond and feared elsewhere, how he made his name in a place to which, according to Janet McCalman's Richmond history 'Struggletown', "the Depression came early, finished late and damaged the physical and social fabric of the suburb for decades to come".
To understand the tribalism of inner Melbourne in the 1930s - enemies were made across borders that today we hardly bother to pinpoint - it needs to be understood that football was the one and only escape from the grimness of life on the breadline. The Depression of the early 1930s has hit Richmond harder than almost anywhere. Twenty-eight percent of the men in its workforce were unemployed. Families who couldn't pay the rent were sometimes turned out on the street. Often there was not enough food . . . .
Richmond stuck with its own. "It was a sort of a closed shop," Dyer says. "We were locked in. The Yarra that side. Punt Road that side. North Richmond and Victoria Street the other side. Anyone came over to us from Collingwood, they were out the moment they crossed Victoria Street. And they took it a bit like that in those days, too, those young fellers who had nothing to do, they'd drive them back again.
"That seemed to be their enjoyment, not that I was mixed up because I wasn't like that.
"There were a few scoundrels, but if they wanted to fight they'd go over to Collingwood and get it out of their systems, then Collingwood might come over here and get it out of their systems. There wasn't much to do, there was no television, that's why there were so many good footballers around. But there were mobs in Richmond, Carlton, Collingwood, sometimes they'd get overenthusiastic and challenge each other and they'd all meet on the corner of Lennox Street, all into it.
"I kept away, didn't want to fight. If you started a fight you never knew how it was going to finish, there were pickets pulled off the fence and everything, you'd be walking home and all these fence pickets would be strewn around."
[to be continued]
