Oh we're from Tigerland
Stories of being Richmond
ZOE LAWSON, 16, BAYSWATER
Favourite all-time player:
Matthew Richardson - “He was just amazing. He had a lot of spark and fight in him. You never knew what he was going to do.”
Favourite current player:
Nathan Gordon - “I think I might be his favourite fan. He’s such a nice guy and he plays well, and he’s a good goal kicker.”
Zoe Lawson puts her arm around her great aunt – her mother’s aunt – by the fence at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and smiles, wearing her colours, and on this day at the football, like so many before and so many to come, her team and our code means something more than a game. It is about love and life and loss, and ways to find a place in the world.
The AFL’s Indigenous Round, showcased by Saturday night’s Richmond v Essendon Dreamtime at the ‘G’ game, is about recognition and acknowledgement, but it also about belonging. It is a kinship that comes with our type of football – a self-made pastime – shared by all who’ve been touched by the game.
Zoe Lawson is 16-years-old and lives with her grandparents (her grandmother, an old Fitzroy girl, bless her, barracks for the Brisbane Lions), and comes to the football each weekend with her great aunt, Bernadette, who once went for Essendon. That is, she’s a turncoat, but of the very best kind.
Theirs is a bond borne from grief. Zoe once went to the football to see Richmond games with her mother, Monica. She was a single mum, Zoe an only child. The two of them barracked each weekend, together, a day’s activity that helped forge a bond between mother and daughter.
Left to right: At Punt Road Oval after an open training session with her favourite player, Nathan Gordon; by the boundary with Captain Cotch.
Monica was a Tiger, but hers was also a broader love for the game. She was the inaugural president of the Mount Lilydale Old Collegians Football Club, a position she held for seven years, and at the time the only female president of a Victorian Amateur Football Association club. For her deeds, she received life membership.
But in 2006, Monica was diagnosed with cancer. Zoe’s life turned upside down. While coping with the disease, Monica wrote a children’s book about her experience, to provide guidance for families seeking to explain parental loss. She died in September 2007. She was 36-years-old.
One life ends and for another, their world fell apart, consumed by loss..
A young Zoe with her mother, Richmond fan and a lover of football, Monica Lawson (RIP).
The Christmas after Monica died, her aunt, Bernadette Wilson, hitherto an Essendon fan, wrote Zoe a letter. “I said I didn’t want to take her mother’s place, but I knew her love of football,” she explains. “So I said that for Christmas each year my present to her would be a Richmond membership.”
“Because she was only eight, I thought I’ll have to take her,” she says. “I wasn’t sure at the time whether she would want to go without her mum. But that was eight years ago and we’ve been coming ever since.”
From adversity, new friendships grow. Since the 2008 AFL season, Bernadette and Zoe have sat in the same seats together at the football, following the same game-day routines, parking their car in the same secret spot, sharing the same companionship and trust.
“It’s really nice for me to have someone who was so close to mum, who can enjoy something that me and mum enjoyed together,” says Zoe. “We’ve got a special bond. It’s a special outing we do every week.”
Bernadette concurs: “It’s just the two of us, sharing this time together. There are things I probably tell her and she tells me that we don’t tell anyone else.”
And how does she feel when her new team comes up against her old one? “I’ve still got a soft spot for the Bombers, but I don’t know the players like I know the Richmond players,” she says.
“I did a good job converting her,” says Zoe.
Zoe and her great aunt, former Essendon fan Bernadette Wilson, at the football, together, for the past eight seasons.
It was two of Zoe’s friends from school, Cody and Ebony, who nominated her story. As they wrote: “While her mother Monica was fighting cancer she wrote a book called Through Zoe’s Eyes, and in the book on the second-last page it reads, ‘Our favourite adventure was going to the football. We laughed and cheered and had lots of fun. We even stayed out late and had dinner in the city after games’.”
“It is still Zoe’s favourite adventure,” her friends say. “Zoe is one of the toughest and biggest Richmond fans we’ve come across. She says now she’s barracking for her and her mum.”
At the football, at the MCG, at half-time in the Collingwood game two weeks ago, I asked Zoe what football and what the Richmond Football Club mean to her. In these past two weeks of football dreaming, of these wonderful wins that lift the spirits of so many, of this shared euphoria of what a group of young men can do, and how so many others in the crowd are part of it, her words are beautifully grounding.
“I reckon it’s my second home,” she says. “It’s where I have a connection. It’s like an extended family to me. Footy is just one of the best things you can do. At school, everyone thinks I’m mad that I’m so in love with Richmond. But it’s just like an escape for me for all the stuff that’s gone on. I come to the footy and I can just enjoy it.”
Go Tiges!
And go Bernadette and Zoe, at Dreamtime at the ‘G’ together this Saturday night!
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
