General News
9 January, 2025
Summer sports reading: Keeper of the memories
By ANDREW MOLE NEED a fact checked at Bears Lagoon Serpentine Football Netball Club? Want to know who kicked that match-winning goal, or who was 19th man in the 1992 grand final, or who scored the most goals in any given season of those golden years...
By ANDREW MOLE
NEED a fact checked at Bears Lagoon Serpentine Football Netball Club?
Want to know who kicked that match-winning goal, or who was 19th man in the 1992 grand final, or who scored the most goals in any given season of those golden years on the netball courts in the ’70s and ’80s?
Maybe you can’t remember who was the club president, secretary, or coach, and you want to know.
Then you want Joan Tuohey.
She might not have been there in 1945 when the club played its first season, but she wasn’t far behind – she was born in October the same year.
Which helps explains why being part of Bears Lagoon Serpentine isn’t just a calling, it is embedded in her DNA.
It is also embedded in her home. Or, more accurately, burying her home.
When talking about her passion for club paraphernalia, Joan admitted something she was looking for might be on her couch, or maybe the table – except she wasn’t sure which piles of boxes, books, paper, and pictures was hiding the couch or table.
Not to mention the rooms in her house sacrificed to the history of the club and the whole competition, from life-long stories to life members to the earliest post war days of the club to the current digital demands of the 21st century.
And expanded to also take into account the Heathcote and District and Bendigo football/netball leagues.
Joan, however, remains unperturbed, by all that stuff out there in cyberspace.
“I’m a bit old school,” the sprightly septuagenarian confesses. “I see a computer as nothing more than a useful typewriter, although recently I have been picking up the teams on the iPad a bit – otherwise I simply do everything by hand, the way I have done it since 1972,” she says.
That also being the year she married Brian, who also bleeds indigo and gold and who even today remains a bit of a sporting presence in town (he was a member of this year’s Serpentine Division 3 bowls premiership side – a game a bit more his speed these days).
He would go on to be president of the Loddon Valley League, a role currently filled by their son Simon. Daughter Emily, who now drives one of the Boort school buses and lives on a farm with husband Anthony Holland (they also run the East Loddon Woolshed venue), was also a long-term Bears netballer.
The Tuoheys are a family steeped in Loddon Valley lore, and few people – let’s be honest, no other people – know as much about it as Joan.
She is famed far and wide for her famous ‘this is your life’ style productions for those receiving life memberships or similar league honours; she is the go-to girl to make sure no one’s 50th or 100th or whatever game milestones are missed, and she has been in the prayers of countless players for her insistence on getting team photos of as many teams as she can – regardless of whether they win a premiership or not.
“Over the years the number of people who would say to me, with some disappointment, ‘we never got a team photo’,” Joan explains.
“They are great memories and that’s why I try and get all the teams to take a photo,” she says. Joan is also not afraid to suggest things could be better planned and/or organised.
Such as this year’s club celebrations to mark its 1994 flag. “They won in 1992, in 1994 and again in 1995 – wouldn’t it make more sense to have a 1990’s reunion and wrap it all up in one big event,” she wonders. Mind you, she has a point.
Just look at the netball. If you celebrated flags for that side of the club, you would be having reunion parties every other week. Between 1974 and 1982, the As, Bs, Cs and juniors took part in every grand final going and only lost about four of them.
It hardly comes as a shock that Joan is a life member of the club and the league, or even that Brian is as well – keep your eyes on Simon in the years to come.
“I had just pointed out Justin Laird was playing his 100th the other week, I know at the end of the season I will gather up all the footy books and file them and I’ll still do most of it by hand,” she laughs.
The only concession Joan makes in the depths of a northern Victorian winter is where she bases her operations. It also helps explain the chaos on her couch (and surrounds).
“That room in the clubhouse is so cold, I am much happier here working at home where it’s warm and snug, with the TV going – although I never get to see what’s on it, I am too busy,” says Joan searching out more information at home.