Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond
EMILY CHUON, 26, POINT COOK
Favourite all-time player: Ivan Maric – “He’s a quiet achiever. He’s got this steely determination. And he’s probably the only man with a mullet I find attractive.”
Favourite current player: See above.
“Sport brings people together,” says Emily Chuon, whose Richmond story is as young and old as her family’s history in Melbourne. “The game gives me a reason to see my uncle and his wife, and to go to friend’s houses to watch a match, even if it’s not Richmond playing.”
Football is family; it’s a community of strangers, a company of hope. Ours is a city of barrackers, wearing our colours and all wanting for the beauty of the play. In our everyday lives, is there anything as free-spirited as singing the song at game’s end? We are never alone with the football. Tiger love is all around.
Two seasons ago, at Etihad Stadium, two school friends from Mac. Robertson Girls’ High sat behind me. One was Vietnamese-Chinese Australian; she wore a Bulldogs scarf and was completing a doctoral thesis in biomedical research. The other was Emily Chuon, of Cambodian parentage, in Tiger colours, and she told a story of belonging I couldn’t forget.
Last week, in splashing winter rain, in the lowlands of Tiger town, we met again to talk football, and a migrant experience, and the social inclusion that might come with Melbourne’s home-grown game. For Emily, football was a way into a culture, into a family, into a way of life.
“When I was growing up the biggest teams were Essendon and Collingwood and everybody either loved James Hird or Nathan Buckley,” she says, of her school days at Laverton Primary. “I wasn’t really sure what to say or how to contribute. I just knew that my family followed Richmond.”
Family photo album #1: A Ieng family gathering, circa early 1980s, with Phanat sitting on Emily's mothers' lap, and one of his older brothers offering judicious sibling football-fashion advice.
Her family, on her mother’s side, were refugees from Phnom Penh, fleeing the Cambodian-Vietnamese War and Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime, and this is where her uncle, Phanat Ieng, 34, picks up the story.
“We came to Australia in November 1980 and our first accommodation was in East Melbourne,” he says. “Not knowing anything about football, my family picked the Richmond Tigers because they won that year.”
“Ever since, it’s been 35 years of pain,” he laughs.
Phanat was born the youngest of 10 siblings in the Phanat Nikhom refugee camp in Thailand, after which he was named. His eldest sister, in 1975 before the outbreak of war, arrived in Melbourne as the first Cambodian exchange student to Australia. “She lived with a family who were involved with the Lions Rotary Club, and they sponsored our family to bring us across.”
His football allegiance was shaped by those of his older brothers, whose first contact with the local game came in the Yarra Park Primary schoolyard, beside Punt Road on the rise of Richmond Hill. “One of my brothers wanted to participate in the sport when he was growing up, but he had no idea of the rules and how to play it,” he says.
“One summer he went to a training camp, and he actually became really good. He was the shortest bloke in the team and they put him in the midfield. They made him captain.”
The fervour passed along the family tree, long after his family moved from temporary housing near the MCG to a childhood home in Maidstone, west of the Maribyrnong. “No one really followed Richmond at my primary school in West Footscray in the late 1980s,” says Phanat. “Most of my mates followed the Dogs.”
But once a Tiger always a Tiger, and Phanat tells a remarkable story of a Saturday afternoon as a 10-year-old, when he packed his lunch and took a dollar for ground entry and made the long walk alone to the Western Oval. Richmond was playing and he had to be there. He remembers finding a low grassed hill and likeminded supporters, and watching Brendon Gale playing in his first season.
Left to right: Family photo album #2: Phanat lying the ground (quite possibly wearing a Collingwood beanie!) with one of his four older brothers in the colours his family now holds dear; Tiger family: Phanat and Karen with their 18-month-old Cavoodle, Neo ("we almost called him Dusty").
“You wouldn’t let your children do it these days, but once I was at the ground I could be friends with anyone,” he says. “So long as they wore yellow and black.”
Now days, Phanat goes to games usually with his Hong Kong-Chinese wife, Karen Lee, and Emily, and occasionally two other teenage nieces and nephews. “We’re trying to get them into the Richmond family. They’ve been to about six games, including the Elimination Final against Carlton, but they’ve all been losses. They’re not really as keen as us.”
Born in Richmond’s last premiership year, Phanat is one of the oldest of a generation of Tiger fans never to have experienced the wonder of his team winning a Grand Final. But it’s not stopped him barracking, and when he talks about the on-field attributes of, say, Brett Deledio it’s a long conversation that ends only when his niece intervenes.
“My uncle knows the team really well,” she says.
I ask Emily and Phanat whether either has ever been subjected to racism at the football in the crowd. No, is the shared answer. “It’s one of the best things about the AFL, and Richmond,” says Phanat. “You are part of a family and it doesn’t matter where you come from.”
Nor does it matter for how long you’ve barracked. Put on the colours and you’re one of us, and you always have been, and surely you always will be.
Emily’s football story, for one, only really began four years ago when she started her first job, at a large plumbing firm. “It’s a very male-dominated industry,” she says. “One of the only ways you can really bond with your co-workers is through football, and that’s how it happened.”
On the couch: Neo, on game day, when the Tigers play.
So needing a conversation-starter on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons – and all the times in-between – she knew in her heart there was really only one team she could go for. Her mother’s brother, and his older brothers, had steeped her in the folklore, in the shared storytelling, and in the loyalty of our football.
“She had no choice,” says Phanat. “If she said she was going to barrack for Carlton there would have been issues.”
Go Tiges! And go Emily’s extended Cambodian Tiger family!
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
