WA Footy 101: The Sandover map which reveals WA’s footballing treasures

Get a map of Western Australia. Draw a straight line between Pemberton in the deep south-west to the gold centre of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. That is the Sandover Medal line. In a remarkable geographical quirk, nearly a quarter of all WA’s Sandover medals were won by footballers who came from towns at either end of that 650km line or within a few drop-punts of it. And they range over nearly a century from 1921 when Tom Outridge emerged from Coolgardie to win the inaugural medal, to 2017 when Haiden Schloithe made Katanning a dual Sandover town. In between those bookends, stellar south-west products Bill Walker won four Sandovers, Barry Cable three, and Phil Kelly and Stephen Michael a brace apiece. Some players were born in the towns where they are nominated; others, particularly those from farms or the smallest hamlets, were born elsewhere but are associated with the place where they grew up or spent their early adult lives. The former category includes Kelly, who was born in Pemberton but grew up in Busselton, while the second category includes New Zealand’s most famous Australian footballer in Walker who was born at Huntly on the North Island but grew up on the family farm at Narembeen. There is little surprise that the two ends of the line were so prolific, with the Goldfields and south-west two of the most productive football regions in the State. But it is indicative of the extraordinary strength of Goldfields football in the early part of last century that seven winners in the first Sandover decade came from there. Those early winners include two certified WA champions in Outridge and George Owens, both ruckman who towered over opponents as much as they did the game itself. It remains an anomaly that neither player is in the Australian Football Hall of Fame despite records of brilliance and longevity that stand against the best in the game. Outridge played 27 State games – second only to Graham Farmer’s 31 - after moving from Coolgardie at 16 to pursue his football ambitions. And seven-time East Perth premiership player Owens, who was voted overwhelmingly in a Statewide newspaper survey in 1946 as the best player in the first 60 years of WA football, came to Perth as a child after spending his early years at Kalgoorlie. Boulder then supplied West Perth winners Harold Boyd, Jack Rocchi and Ted Flemming while the third member of the club’s medal-winning half-back line, Jim Craig, came from Kalgoorlie. Steve Marsh started the most prolific premiership-winning career in modern WAFL history by winning a flag at Kalgoorlie as a teenager while Gordon “Sonny” Maffina was yet another Boulder success story. The focus turned to the south-west in the decades after that pair’s success with John Todd’s victory as a 17-year-old, an age record that has not been approached in nearly seven decades since then, marking the turning point for the Sandover line. Walker and Barry Cable were WA’s two pre-eminent rovers in the 1960s, each winning three premierships and regular State selection, and it was fitting that their tussle extended to the Sandover leaderboard. Walker won four times between 1965 and 1970, a period in which Narrogin-born and bred Cable won twice and came second by a vote on three other occasions. Cable added another medal in 1973 in between stints at North Melbourne. The decade before football’s expansion into a national league proved another fruitful period for south-west products. Katanning’s first winner Alan Quartermaine triumphed in 1975 in an unprecedented count in which East Perth players filled the first three positions, his team-mate Kelly soon won two in a row then Kojonup’s Michael did likewise. Then Lake Grace farmer Mark Bairstow pre-empted a solid career at Geelong by winning the last medal awarded before the arrival of West Coast transformed the WA football landscape.

WA Footy 101: The Sandover map which reveals WA’s footballing treasures

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