Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond

Cecily Vlastuin, 59, Eltham North

Favourite all-time Richmond player
N/A (see below).

Favourite current Richmond player
Nick Vlastuin – “I guess I should really say Nick. He plays the game hard, he fights for the ball. He’s tough”.

“I knew nothing about Australian Rules football,” says Cecily Vlastuin, mother of Richmond footballer, Nick. “When watching junior football, I’d sit in the car with a friend, another mother, and we’d have a chat and a cup of tea and she’d try to educate me on the game. All I’d see is a lot of boys chasing a ball, burning off energy.”

All these years later, meeting Cecily at their family home in the hills of Eltham North, in the house Nick and his sister and brother grew up in, drinking tea, little has changed. Cecily says she still doesn’t understand the game that well. All a bit foreign to her, a puzzle. But she does appreciate the opportunities it’s given their youngest boy.

She also enjoys catching a train to the city to watch him play.

Cecily Margaret Vlastuin, 59, is not your typical footy mum, if there is such a thing. She has a science degree, majoring in chemistry. She’s been researcher, a technician, an administrator and a teacher. She was a country New South Wales girl, the second of four daughters (and one son) to a dairy farmer from near Gloucester, an inland town on the mid-north coast, rugby league heartland. She boarded at an all-girls school in Moss Vale, on a scholarship. Books were her thing. Not footy boots.

“I’m still trying to get my head around it,” she says, of this passion that grips Melbourne and wherever Australian Rules is played. “People everywhere talk about it and they idolise the players and suddenly your son is one of them. He plays in front of 85,000 people at the MCG and it’s just a home-and-away game. It’s like a religion.”

A midweek afternoon, and I catch a train to the end of the line, where from Eltham I cycle along Diamond Creek, smelling eucalypts and wood smoke, then climb a long hill with a pinch to the home of the Vlastuins. Cecily offered to pick me up from the station, but I thought to feel the lay of the land. Learn something from it. It’s steep, timbered, and when I arrive at their doorstep I’m puffed, and mindful of dripping sweat on their carpet.

Kookaburras laugh.

The idea is to write a mothers’ day story. The mum of a footy player, for this Sunday’s home game at the G. But there’s another story here, maybe more interesting. Besides, Cecily and Nick Vlastuin’s relationship sounds, well, pragmatic, strong-willed, maybe best kept between them.

“It’s probably been love-hate on both sides,” she says. “He’s been very difficult at times, and yet he’s lovable. And he would probably say much the same about me. We’ve grown to love and respect each other.”

On a fringe of Melbourne, their story is also about finding an inclusion into the city’s heartbeat. The greater family of football. It’s a story about how the game brings people together – mothers, sons, daughters, fathers, friends, families – around the grassed ellipse of an oval, our communal wishing well.

The Vlastuins, outsiders, they’re now in the fold.

Much has been written about Nick’s father, Chris, a Dutchman born into the former Dutch West New Guinea, who emigrated with his family to New South Wales when he was five. He’s an economist by trade, a statistician. Fathers of footballers are many things, but no others have co-authored a journal article titled ‘Production Flexibility and Technical Change in Australia’s Wheat-sheep Zone’.

Cecily met Chris when both were studying at the University of New England, in Armidale, on the NSW Northern Tablelands. They found jobs in Canberra. Then moved to Melbourne for his work with the Australian Wool Corporation, buying a house in the bush, in a place where they knew nobody.

Through junior football, Cecily was aware of this aloneness. “Unlike other kids, Nick had no family along to watch him, except his father doing the boundary umpiring,” she says. “He didn’t have grandparents and aunts and uncles coming to watch him play, he didn’t have that extended family experience and involvement.”

At most games at Eltham Junior Football Club (the alma mater also of Josh Caddy, and David Zaharakis and Marcus Bontempelli) he didn’t even have his mother. Her role on Sunday mornings was to take their eldest boy, Tim, to his games. He played for Research JFC. Two sets of friendship circles, two footy clubs, and parents torn two ways.

“I didn’t really know how good Nick was because I was always at Tim’s games. Other people told me how well he played, but not being familiar with the game I didn’t know what ‘well’ looked like. I had nothing to judge it on.”

Only when he made squads, first for the Northern Knights, then being picked up by Vic Metro and the AIS, did she see what football can become, and a possible pathway to the top. Then on the Gold Coast in November 2012, his name was read out in the AFL National Draft – pick No 9, Richmond – and the Vlastuins became a name on the lips of so many.

Back then, Cecily taught chemistry at Macleod College. “Suddenly I was almost put on a pedestal,” she recalls, describing how some students related quite differently to her once becoming aware she was the mother of Richmond’s gun new recruit.

The game has also widened the world of the Vlastuins. From junior days with home games at Eltham and Research (“both beautiful little ovals”), they travelled the hill country to Northern League away games. Diamond Creek, Panton Hill, Greensborough, Mill Park, Lalor, South Morang, as far as Whittlesea.

Since his debut in Perth, they’ve now watched him play in Sydney, Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Hobart (on a night where even an Eltham boy might feel the cold). Along the way, they’ve made friendships with other parents of players. “The Cotchins were really helpful when we first started and the Riewoldts, when they make it to a game, are loads of fun,” says Cecily.

“The Chaplins were so level headed and we get on really well with the Marics and the Griggs’ who are amazing. They drive from Ballarat and always come to the club afterwards. We don’t get home until one o’clock after a night game, goodness knows what time they get home.”

Thus, a community is made.

“Richmond is big on including the family,” says Cecily. “And being with the other parents has helped me in supporting Nick. It helps me deal with him in their disappointments, the bad losses or injuries, all the things the game throws at them.”

In his fifth year as a listed player, a young man as professional footballer, she says she’s come to learn of the role a parent can play.

“He’s got to have a space where he can just be, where he’s not answerable to anyone.”

“I can only imagine the pressures these footballers are under, at 21 or 22, because I’ve never been in that position. It’s such a public office. This is his job. If he just needs a space to be himself and offload, then that’s what families are for.”

In this regard, Chateau Vlastuin doubles also as a half-way house for their 25-year-old (turning 26 next week). Tim is in Townsville, working as a geospatial engineer in the Army, their daughter, Rachel, is on a working holiday in England with her boyfriend, and Nick comes and goes from share houses. “He bounced back home until he found another place,” says Cecily. “That took a good twelve months”.

This Sunday, Cecily and Chris will catch a train to Jolimont, walk to the ground and its game, knowing their son won’t be playing. They were there last Saturday night when he got injured, and Cecily says her “stomach turned” when he got knocked in the head, coming from the ground dazed, in the win over West Coast. It’s a maternal instinct. She understands the dangers, the rewards. Her only hope is her boy finishes his playing career in one piece.

“I’d like him to be intact at the end of it.”

They’re going to the game on Mothers’ Day because they know and understand the game is bigger than the individual, that all must pull as one to make this thing work. It’s what a team does. “It’s all about club support, it’s not just about Nick. He’s thinking team, so I’m now thinking team.”

I pinch a Dutch speculaas (spiced) biscuit before I go, sugary goodness. It’s dark outside. Chris offers to drop me at the station, but I’m happy to ride. It’s mostly downhill from their place.

A yellow moon rises through black trees, big and full, and my mind swirls with the conversation. A difficult boy. Good at algebra. Introverted. Growing into leadership. Mates with Tom Boyd. Surfing holidays on the Indonesian archipelago. A physics teacher at St Helena Secondary College (where Cecily works) who jokes he taught him everything he knows about a football’s trajectory. Reads the play well.

Air is cold in the hollow by Diamond Creek, and I think maybe all of us are a product of our families, but also of place. A caring, loyal, learned family. A place in tune with nature, the land, resilience.

Arriving home later in the night, an email awaits from Cecily. She writes:

“Reflecting now, I think he needed the friends/sense of community you spoke of. He got that in spades at school, through his various sporting pursuits, and now at the Club. He’s too much of a social animal to have a desk job! Footy is perfect!

He’s been true to his friends from those early days too, taking them on his footy journey. And I think they’ve kept him grounded. I’m so proud of the way he’s remained true to himself.

Cheers,

Cecily

Go Tigers! And big Tigery love to all the mums at the game this Sunday.

If you would like to nominate a Richmond fan who has a story to tell about their barracking please email Dugald Jellie with details: dugaldjellie@gmail.com

www.tigertigerburningbright.com.au