The robins, magpies, crows . . . the history of Queenstown is told not only by its hills scarred by acid-rain. There’s also the feathered motifs emblazoned on footy guernseys.
On a misty morning this thought occurred to me when I saw a forest raven crossing the sky above the Queenstown Oval, “The Gravel” as the pitch is known.
I was on a trip to the West Coat that did not involve birds. As a footy lover, it was a pilgrimage of sorts to see the legendary gravel oval and take a symbolic mark on the hallowed ground. I couldn’t escape the birds though, first a party of yellow-tailed black cockatoos calling in the distance, and then a forest raven – which Tasmanians call the crow, of course – quartered the oval itself, looking down in the hope of picking over half-eaten chips, snags and pies.
Footy tells its own history of the West Coast, memorialised in the Queenstown Museum where a gallery is devoted to the local game, displaying trophies and photographs in black-and white and sepia of teams, faces from the past.
The long-gone Smelters Robins and Queenstown Magpies are there, their players grinning from the walls, the ghosts of communities also banished to history – Gormanston, Lyell, Crotty and Linda.
The Queenstown Crows remain, along with The Gravel with all its mystique, in part spurred by recent fame. It was in the news at the end of the 2024 AFL season when Chris Fagan, coach of the Brisbane Lions, lifted the premiership trophy and later brought it to Queenstown. Fagan after all had learned his footy on the gravel. And as the MCG siren sounded to close the final the footy commentators noted another connection with the rutted and rugged hills of Queenstown far away.
The siren, a feature unique to footy, is reputed to have been first sounded in the town. A siren was borrowed from the Mt Lyell Mines to signal the start and end of a game after the bell that was used could not be found, or perhaps could not be heard over the roar of the crowd.
All this, of course, would be lost on a crow looking for chips. But the crows and the black cockatoos have always been a vital backdrop to life In Queenstown, as vivid as the raw hills. They have seen the triumph, joy, and pain of a footy match, and that of the trials and tribulations of the mining community at large that embraced the game. And when the oval was still virgin rain forest, the songs and calls of raven and cockatoo would have accompanied the First Australians on their journeys over the eons in search of ochre and quartz, the hard rock to make tools, instead of copper, silver and gold.
The birdsong is an echo from Queenstown’s past.