Australian Football

Located between Burnie and Ulverstone on Tasmania’s north west coast the small seaside town of Penguin takes its name from the colonies of fairy penguins which frequent the area. As far as football is concerned, the locality made something of a name for itself fairly recently as a regular and reliable producer of AFL talent, including Richmond’s Gale brothers, Brendon and Michael, Russell Robertson of Melbourne, and Justin Plapp of Richmond and St Kilda. Much more importantly, however, the town’s senior football club ‘the Mighty Two Blues’ has, for well over a century, provided local inhabitants with regular high quality exposure to the greatest of games. 

If the standard of football on display has declined in recent years - respected sports commentator Tim Lane once described Tasmania’s major football competitions, the SFL and the NTFL, as “really only fourth tier” [1] - it would be facile to measure football’s importance in purely qualitative terms. Football in Tasmania, perhaps more than anywhere else in Australia, has always represented a vital element in community life, and while the institutionalised rape and pillage carried out by and on behalf of the AFL and its clubs has inevitably undermined this state of affairs to some extent, the local football club retains a certain social significance which is quite independent of the perceived quality of its ‘product’.

With the exception of a one season stint in the newly formed North West Football Union in 1910, the Penguin Football Club, which was formed in 1890, spent the period until 1922 competing in various junior Leagues and Associations, winning a solitary flag in 1913. Between 1922 and 1937 the side once again participated in the NWFU, contesting consecutive grand finals against Latrobe in 1932 (won by 21 points) and ‘33 (lost by 51 points). In 1938 Penguin joined Wynyard, Cooee and City in establishing a new competition, the still extant Darwin Football Association; it reached the grand final in 1938, losing by 5 goals to Wynyard, but overall was unsuccessful.

The Two Blues rejoined the NWFU fold in 1945 when that competition reformed after world war two, but it would be more than thirty years before the side contested a grand final. However, once the breakthrough was made, albeit with a disappointing 32 point loss to Ulverstone in 1976, it seemed the monkey was well and truly off the club’s back. During the NWFU’s final ten seasons of competition between 1977 and 1986 Penguin emerged as one of the competition’s leading clubs, contesting five grand finals for three wins, a record that only Cooee could better over that period.

Prominent players for Penguin in this period included triple club champion Bill Fielding, dual winner Garth Barrett, Barry Valentine, Michael King, Chris Reynolds, Kevin Brown and Andrew Baldock.

Penguin entered the NTFL when it was formed in 1987 and have endured a somewhat forlorn time in that competition since, contesting the finals only intermittently, and managing an overall success rate in its first fourteen seasons of just 36.4%. In both 1998 and 1999 the senior side failed to win a single match. Nevertheless, as was intimated at the outset, success in football is not, or ought not to be, the be all and end all. For the 500 or so loyal souls who attend the Two Blues’ weekly outings throughout the winter,[2] while most would no doubt wish earnestly for a premiership, ultimately it is the club, and the game itself, which matter above all.

Over the past decade or so the Two Blues have undergone something of a renaissance, contesting the finals on a regular basis and finishing as losing grand finalists in 2011, 2013 and 2016. By contrast, the 2018 season was immensely disappointing with the Two Blues' tally of just 4 wins from 18 matches consigning them to sixth place on the eight team premiership ladder.