Tassie Tiger beat the odds
Martin Flanagan | May 23, 2007 | The Age
DEREK Peardon has never been back to Melbourne since his career with Richmond ended in 1972. In fact, he's never been out of Tasmania.
About five years ago, I did an interview with Essendon coach Kevin Sheedy and asked him how his interest in Aboriginal Australia began. He told me there was an Aboriginal player from Tasmania at Richmond in his playing days called Derek Peardon. Sheedy said Peardon was a quiet man, but he'd made Sheedy ask himself the question: what's this word Aboriginal mean?
Earlier this year, I tracked Peardon down. It took a bit of doing. We met at a pub in Launceston, where he lives. Maybe because of the name, before meeting Derek Peardon I couldn't get another Aboriginal footballer, Derek Kickett, out of my head. In the event, there was a degree of similarity between them.
Peardon's features are smoother and his black hair, unlike Kickett's, is straight, but they have a similar largeness, not just physically, but in the sense that you intuitively know that here is someone with a story to tell. The difference is that Kickett is as quiet as an underground stream. At 56, Peardon is outgoing, engaging.
His early childhood was spent on the islands of Bass Strait. He has few memories of that time but one is living in a tent and eating wallaby, every part of it. Basically, his memories start around the age of seven when he was taken, together with his sister Annette, and put in different Launceston orphanages.
He's been back to the islands only twice since he was taken. Once was for a British documentary compered by Peter Ustinov. He's never watched it. When they landed on Cape Barren Island, he broke up and they kept the cameras on him. The same thing happened when he went to his mother's grave. He can't remember his mother. Until recently, he couldn't talk at all about his family, but, in 1996, Annette took him on a lap of the state, introducing him to members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, particularly old people who had known his parents. He says he got "bits and pieces" of his heritage from that.
Peardon was in the orphanage, in Launceston, by the time he was seven. His file says he and his sister spent a year with foster parents before that, but he can't remember that. The arrangement ended when police were called to the house by a neighbour because of shouting. His sister, who is older than Derek by 2½ years and always looked after him, says the people hit him. He doesn't remember that, either.
His sister was in a girls' orphanage on the other side of town but whenever he had a visitors' day she caught buses and walked to the boys' orphanage to visit him, always taking something with her like a packet of Minties.
Annette Peardon is now a spokesperson for the Tasmanian Stolen Generation and was prominent in the campaign to get Tasmanian Aboriginal remains back from British museums.
At the orphanage, if they were deemed to have been well behaved, they could play school football at the weekend; occasionally, they would go and watch the local senior club, City-South.
At 13, he made the Tasmanian under-15 team for a national carnival in Perth. He tied for the medal for the best player at the carnival. "Today I would have been No. 1 draft pick," he says matter-of-factly.
St Kilda was soon in touch with the orphanage. Peardon and the superintendent had a weekend in Melbourne at the Saints' expense. They were taken into the rooms after a game where he saw Darrel Baldock, another Tasmanian, lying on his stomach, back raked with stop marks. "He played centre half-forward and he wasn't that big, you know."
That night, the superintendent got a phone call from Richmond asking if Peardon would train with them before returning to Tasmania. He did. By then, a couple of other clubs were also interested. It fell to the board of the orphanage to make the decision. They signed him to Richmond and, at 15, he came to Melbourne.
"I was shipped off to this great big world. I could hardly put two words together." At 18, he played his first senior game. The year was 1969. Richmond would win the premiership that year. They had the Victorian centre line of Bourke, Barrott and Clay. Peardon made it into the team on a half-back flank; he played "nine or 10" games, did his back at training and dropped out. He made it back the following year, then did a knee.
In all, he played 20 games before returning to Tasmania. He's never been back. "Melbourne terrified me. I was used to being in an orphanage." He played in two premierships with City-South before his knee flared again. Thereafter, he played in the country.
You can look at Derek Peardon's life different ways. He seems to. A few days after I met him he was off to the islands mutton birding. For the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, mutton birding represents a major cultural practice, one that hasn't been broken by the island's non-indigenous arrivals and is a way of getting back to their land and customs. This was the first time Peardon had been. "Sad, isn't it?" he says with a shrug, as if to say there isn't much he could have done about it.
On the other hand, he came from a tent on the islands of Bass Strait to play VFL/AFL footy, something no Tasmanian Aboriginal person had done before him. "What are the chances of doing that?" he asks. "I reckon I beat the odds." And he has one other memory of his early life. The first footy he played was alone on the islands, kicking a rubber ball at a pine tree. When he went back to Cape Barren for Ustinov's documentary, he found the tree.
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