‘Gypsy’ Lee a footy legend who gave me a gift for life

Graeme “Gypsy” Lee in 1966 at the national carnival. He captained Tasmania, came third in the Tassie medal (behind Barry Cable and John “Ragsy” Gould) and was named All-Australian.

This is MARTIN FLANAGAN’S eulogy for Graeme “Gypsy” Lee, the first footballer with Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage to play VFL/AFL, delivered at Gypsy’s funeral on Thursday.

When Gypsy asked me to speak at his funeral, he said, “If you go on too long, I’ll kick the lid”. If I look a bit distracted at times today, it’s because I’ve got one ear on the coffin.

In 1968 I was 13 years old. I was attending a boarding school in Burnie that’s been in the news a lot these past few years. It was not a happy place. It was not a happy time. Then something happened that changed my life forever. East Devonport won the premiership.

I already had an interest in the game. Schoolboy footy in Burnie back then was so very good, six kids from my time going on to play VFL/AFL. Playing schoolboy footy, I saw qualities that were otherwise absent in my life. I saw grace – athletic grace. I saw skill and daring that took my breath away. But I never got into the local men’s footy. It was less obviously athletic, less graceful, relied more on muscle, was accompanied by lots of growling and harsh male voices. Then East Devonport won the premiership.

In my experience, the premiership which best compares with East’s win in 1968 was the Western Bulldogs’ win in 2016. I wrote a book about that and Gypsy agreed – at one level the two premierships are the one story. Gypsy had connections to the Bulldogs’ 2016 win. One was that Luke Beveridge’s grandfather Jack Beveridge, who won three premierships in the late 1920s playing for the mighty Collingwood team known as “The Machine”, also won a premiership with the Launceston Football Club. But it was Gypsy Lee who was chosen as captain of Launceston Football Club’s team of the century.

East Devonport were one of those abject, bottom-of-the-ladder clubs known as easybeats. To add to their peculiarity, they had a jumper like none I’d ever seen – bright strawberry red with a big blob of white on top and socks to match. In the six years before 1968, they were last five times and second-last the other time. Enter Graeme “Gypsy” Lee. Two years earlier, Gypsy had come third in the best and fairest at the national carnival, a competition back then for the very best of the best footballers in Australia. He’d been named All-Australian. He’d captained Tasmania at that carnival and won the Lefroy medal for the best Tasmanian player. In 1968, the year of which we speak, Gypsy was runner-up in the Wander Medal for the best player in the North-West Football Union. He was in his full maturity as a footballer.

Allan Jeans, who coached St Kilda to its sole premiership in 1966 and then coached Hawthorn to three more, described Gypsy to me as “a very good player”. A skill of the game in the 1960s was kicking drop kicks. Not everyone could do it with one foot. Gypsy could kick drop kicks off both feet. He speared them low and hard so they travelled 50 metres or more quickly.

Graeme Lee in action for St Kilda against Fitzroy. He played 18 games for the Saints in two seasons (1961-62) before returning home

All Gypsy wanted as a kid was his own footy – he was a footballer to the end. Last year, when he was in hospital in Launceston, I asked him if it was true he could kick drop kicks off both feet. Yeah, he replied, tapping his right thigh for emphasis, “but I was better with the right”. He had speed, skill, balance. He was a fine overhead mark. A wingman/forward at St Kilda, he played as an under-sized centre-half back for East Devonport, attacking at every opportunity, skimming through the centre of the ground, dispatching low raking drop kicks off either foot to leading forwards. He singlehandedly gave East attacking momentum, putting opposition defences on the back foot.

East Devonport won the last five games of the season in a row to sneak into the final four. That in itself was remarkable. They played Cooee in the first semi-final at Ulverstone. Cooee, a Burnie club, was a powerhouse of coastal footy. They had a Collingwood coach and a ruckman from Collingwood reserves. First and last, Cooee were hard. I found them grim to watch. I liked the way East played, they had lots of individual character, but, in my heart, I didn’t give them a chance.

With my brother and father, I go to the game. East skips away early, Cooee wrestles their way back into the contest. I remember the knot in my belly during the last quarter but in the end it’s not even close – East by 17 points. In the press, Gypsy says it’s their best win of the season. The press lists East’s best player as Graeme Lee.

Two weeks later, in the preliminary final, they play reigning premier Wynyard at Burnie’s West Park Oval. The previous year Wynyard played North Hobart at Burnie in the State final, one of the most notorious matches in Australian football history. “Is that the one,” people around Australia have asked me, “where the goalpost got pulled out?” Yes, I say, that one.

In 1968, Wynyard were the minor premiers. Young and fast and skilful, they were led by an old football prophet called John Coughlan. Another strand to the drama of the day was that in football terms Gypsy was from Wynyard. Up by 27 points at three quarter time, Wynyard kick the first two goals of the fourth. People start leaving the ground. East’s dream looks over – a lot of people have invested in that dream, including me, but now it looked as if we would be returning to that drab world we inhabited before East started its run and our imaginations sprang open and fabulous footy visions started pouring through.

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But just as all seems lost, a brawl erupts with Gypsy at its epicentre, an all-in brawl, the first I’ve seen. It happens right in front of me. I watch East forward pocket and second rover Wayne Duggan politely make his way through the milling crowd until he found his direct opponent, Wynyard back-pocket Kayden Edwards, whereupon they both adopt a fighting stance and proceed to trade blows. It was like there was a certain etiquette that had to be followed. The brawl amounts to a tremendous commotion and in the altered mood that follows it, East bangs on seven goals – the last, at the 28-and-a-half minute mark, giving them a mythical, one point victory. The press lists East’s best player as Graeme Lee.

The feeling in the aftermath is like that which followed the Bulldogs’ victory in the 2016 AFL preliminary final over GWS in Sydney. East had won five in a row to even get to the finals, they beat Cooee when few thought they could and now they’d had a miracle win. It was as if another force was at play. In 1968, I’m seeing it all for the first time and I’m falling in love with the game in a way that will make it a life-long fascination.

Graeme Lee in action for East Devonport against Ulverstone in Tasmania’s North West Football Union competition.

Then I hear the shocking news: Gypsy has been reported for striking by boundary umpire Sid Singh, an incident arising from the brawl. I now know that Gypsy did indeed start the brawl – how do I know? – he told me – but at the time no-one believed more in Gypsy’s innocence than I did. East going into the grand final without Gypsy was unthinkable. Watching East without Gypsy would be like watching a Clint Eastwood movie without Clint Eastwood….

I had been going out to the huddles and getting into the East rooms at half-time. I knew how he spoke to his players. He didn’t rant or roar. He talked to them – and they listened. He spoke to that thing inside them that’s inside all of us, that understanding we share, and he brought them into a single mindset. Gypsy wasn’t just a great player, he was a great captain, a great coach. He wore number one because he was number one. I’d found my first footy hero and, in a sense, my last. No-one opened me to the joy and wonder of the game more than Graeme Gypsy Lee did over those four brilliant weeks in 1968.

Grand final week was nerve-wracking enough but then, on Tuesday morning, the local press declared in big black print that boundary umpire Sid Singh had received a death threat, that if he drove from Burnie to Ulverstone on Wednesday night to give evidence against Gypsy Lee he would be driven off the road. This was bigger than the Cuban missile crisis. Thursday morning, The Advocate and The Examiner told us Gypsy has been cleared to play. I could breath again.

The grand final was played at Burnie on a rare windless day – spring weather, sunny blue sky. Gypsy was corked early – he believed deliberately and for the rest of his life was more than happy to name the Ulverstone player responsible. He was much restrained in what he could do but stayed out there as this football carnival took off around him. Ulverstone were powerless. East Devonport, the competition easybeats, had been elevated to another sphere just as the Western Bulldogs were in 2016. Afterwards, no-one at the Bulldogs could explain the force that lifted them, but no-one denied its existence. I didn’t doubt them for a moment. I’d seen the same thing happen 48 years earlier on the north-west coast of Tasmania.

Lee in 2014 at the opening of the memorial to his great footballing mate Darrel Baldock memorial in 2014.

When I met Gypsy in my 40s and found he was exactly the man I thought he was when I was 13, I was proud. I’d got something right back then. I loved being round Gypsy, there was so much I didn’t have to say, it was like he already knew. What he did when I was 13 excited me at a time when precious little else excited me. He made my spirit soar. Nothing else made my spirit soar. He was also the first significant person with Aboriginal heritage to enter my life. He didn’t parade the fact of his Aboriginal ancestry, but he was open about it. He told me he was descended from Tasmanian Aboriginal matriarch Dolly Dalrymple. That means he’s descended from the legendary Tasmanian warrior chief Mannalargenna, of whom it was said, spears would rain down upon him in battle but none ever hit him.

In 1968, following East Devonport, I saw the power of the game as sporting drama. I saw its magic and mystery. Everything I have written since on football owes something to that time. I’ve written about it a lot but the only reason I have is that it keeps coming back to me as fresh as a Beatles song and I can’t help singing along. One of my brothers said to me once, “You’ve got to stop writing about Gypsy”. I told Gypsy. I said, “They reckon I write about you too much”. He said, “Well, no other bastard does”.

Over the years, we talked a lot. He read a lot of what I wrote. One time he was watching “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” and Eddie McGuire said I was the best sportswriter in Australia. Gypsy was on the phone in a flash, couldn’t get down the line fast enough to congratulate me and because he was so pleased for me, I was pleased for me. No sportswriting award could mean as much to me as Gypsy’s belief, because he’s where I got so much of my vision of the game from, the vision that’s informed my writing for the past 50 years.

Gypsy gave me a gift for life and today I want to say thank you. I think there’s a lot of people here today who want to say thank you to you, Gypsy.