The cyclones tore Sterling McQuire in two. On 20 February, cyclone Marcia blew through his hometown Rockhampton, ripping the roof off the clubhouse of Nerimbera Magpies Soccer Club. A few weeks later, cyclone Pam flattened his ancestral island of Tanna in Vanuatu. The little huts that shelter the subsistence farmers were devastated and for days McQuire was without any contact with his family, alone with his worries. Just last year he reinforced the roof on his family home, but the roof on his second home in Queensland wasn’t so lucky. It blew clean off and was impaled on a nearby Moreton Bay fig tree, which is now surrounded by green waste and has branches dangling at right angles. The tree looks forlornly over a small retaining wall and a dusty floor slab, the last remnants of the clubhouse McQuire helped build.

You can trace the brown bed tiles of the narrow bathroom, the grey and white tiles where the kitchen stood and the worn timber of the stage. The rest, which was demolished a few days after the cyclone passed, is alive in the memories of those who came through this club. “It’s not just the soccer,” he says. “The amount of weddings and functions… the young people still talk about the blue light discos we had. Anyone under 36 years of age grew up here.”

Sterling, or ‘Sterlo’ as he is known around these parts, has lived in Rockhampton all his life and has become synonymous with Nerimbera. He maintains that it’s an editorial mistake, but it’s fitting that the club’s centenary book profiles him not once but twice. The author calls him “the walking encyclopaedia of soccer”, and after just a few minutes, I realise I’m in for a crash course not of local football but of the entire evolution of Rockhampton and its surrounds.

Driving with McQuire through the wide streets of ‘Rocky’ is a kaleidoscope of oral histories, official landmarks, folk tales and personal memory. He slows the car down to point and wave, revealing hidden gems of yore. The local presbyterian church on Denham Street was once the Earls Court Theatre; the vacant, overgrown block of land on Alma Street was home to The Winter Garden Theatre. As we approach the meatworks on the north side of the river, McQuire points out a single rusted iron pole in a vacant field. “That was an open air picture theatre,” he announces, “but it was knocked down in the cyclone in 1949.”

Sterling McQuire with Nerimbera Magpies Football Club’s centenary publication on the terraces at Pilbeam Park. Photograph: Joe Gorman/The Guardian

When McQuire speaks you’d better listen close. His accent is broader than his smile, his speech peppered with colloquialisms. He’s a natural storyteller, freely mixing Aboriginal dreamtime stories with his Christian faith. He’ll look you directly in the eye and tell you about his Darumbal great-grandmother who was part of the stolen generation, and the exact tree in Mackay where his great-grandfather was “blackbirded” from Vanuatu as a sugar-slave. But if a familiar face passes by, he’ll always pause to greet them with a friendly smile.

On Quay Street, which runs parallel to the Fitzroy River, McQuire shows me where Errol Flynn camped out in his yacht in the 1930s. “He had a bit of a reputation with the ladies,” laughs McQuire as he recounts local legend. “He was pretty quickly run out of town.” From the self-proclaimed “swampers” at Depot Hill in the west of Quay Street to the new high-rise developments which are creeping in from the east, McQuire is suspicious of council plans to protect Depot Hill from floods.

“I reckon big business is trying to get in here,” he says, pointing to the depressed old Queensland-style houses which are routinely battered by flood, a few of which are draped in tarpaulins and makeshift roofs. “Look at what they did in Haiti after the cyclone, look at the Brisbane River now. It’s all development.”

Like most of Nerimbera’s members, McQuire is a worker. Each morning he rises and clocks on for his shift on the weigh bridge at the local rubbish dump. At 15 he left school and got a job at the local slaughterhouse, and apart from five years in the Army in Sydney during the 1980s, he’s always worked locally. He’s been a clerk, a guard at the local gaol for 25 years, and these days he’s the groundsman at Nerimbera’s home, Pilbeam Park.

Neither the tip nor the grounds makes for pretty work, especially in the brutally humid summer months, but he likes it all the same. “It’s more than just a job for me,” he says. “See I’m living on country, and living on country means you look after country. It’s waste, and it’s disposing of it properly. You know, keeping country clean. Same down here at Pilbeam Park – that might just be a little piece of ground but I’m looking after country. People say ‘why is he still down there’, but we’re custodians of the land. Nerimbera, it’s a Darumbul name: I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

Pilbeam Park takes it’s name from “Rex” Reginald Byron Jarvis Pilbeam, the mayor who opened the ground in 1958. In the working class suburb of Koongal, which is Darumbal for “meeting place”, the Berserker mountain ranges that overlook the ground give the club its name. “‘Nerim’ means mountain and ‘bera’ means people,” explains McQuire. The field was carved out by an army of volunteers, including the 86-year-old Bryan Graff who has been at the club for as long as he can remember. “We were down there on the Saturday and the Sunday with rakes clearing the bloody mimosa bushes,” he recalls. The Graff family are Nerimbera royalty – Bryan’s grandfather owned the strawberry fields where the club played its first match in 1910.



A photo showing the full extent of the cyclone damage to Nerimbera Magpies’ clubhouse. Photograph: Rick England

Just in front of where the clubhouse used to stand is concrete terracing about five rows deep and perched on a small slope to create aspect. The roof is a simple construction, but McQuire is proud that Nerimbera has shade cover and top-standard lighting. At the southern end of the ground is the historic Lakes Creek Pub, and at the north end is the late Mrs Barlow’s purple house where the players would change under the verandah in the years before the dressing sheds were built.

Behind the goals to the south are 10 peltphorum trees that act as a barrier between the field and the road and railway line. One has collapsed since the cyclone, while the survivors are all freshly shorn off at the top where they buckled and broke under the wind. Behind the north end goals are an assortment of ornate pebbles, but McQuire remembers back when it was all wild mimosa bush. As a little kid he would dive in there to retrieve stray balls, the thorns tearing at his skin.

In 1979 McQuire was 22 years old with a bushy afro, a moustache and a spot in the Rockhampton representative side. Yet in a pre-season match for Nerimbera, coach John Harbin played him in the reserves. No matter. He lined up against Gladstone and scored what he still reckons is one of his best goals – a pile-driver from the right side of the pitch into the top left corner. “I didn’t play reserves again after that,” he says with a smile. You can tell that he loved playing under Harbin, who would later coach at Crystal Palace, Oldham Athletic, Coventry City and Queens Park Rangers.

Nerimbera won their seventh Wesley Hall Cup that year, a tournament that has been running continuously since 1895. Crafted in 1878 in London from sterling silver, the handsome cup stands one metre tall and is nearly as old as the English FA Cup. As well as “winning the Wesley”, Nerimbera won the seconds, thirds and the women’s competitions. “It was a perfect storm if you like,” says McQuire. “Everything coincided, eh? It was a perfect year.” Most importantly, they finished building the new clubhouse, and McQuire is listed only after the building manager as putting in the most man-hours on site – 94 in total. Within six years the clubhouse paid itself off, and Nerimbera has never looked back. That clubhouse was the springboard.

Nerimbera Soccer Club House honour board. Scanned photo from a book by the football club. Photograph: Nerimbera Soccer Club

Four floods and a cyclone in the space of just six years haven’t helped, however. The field itself is still remarkably flat, although McQuire reckons he can feel every bump. At the north end there is an ugly gash of dirt near the goalmouth where rocks washed onto the field during the cyclone. “In 2012 we had a one-in-100 year event,” he says. “We had 700ml of water in 24 hours. It might happen every six or seven years before that we’d have a big flow-over, now it’s happening all the time.” Cyclone Marcia simply drowned it in three feet of water, destroying the top-dressing and care McQuire had put in during the off-season.

“I should be fertilising now, but still, I’ve never played at a park like this,” he announces, spreading his arms wide. “I won’t be happy until it gets like Suncorp [Stadium].” Despite McQuire’s enthusiasm, the club president Rick England reckons no games will be played at Pilbeam Park this season. It’s devastating – for clubs like these, the clubhouse and ground is everything. “We’re a small club and we survive year to year,” says England. “We don’t have sports clubs or pokies backing us. We rely on canteen and gate fees. At the moment we’ve got nothing like that coming in.”

Like many other lower league clubs Nerimbera pays its way from money earned at the canteen and community fundraisers. Over Easter they’d planned to hold mixed seven-a-side gala day to raise around $15,000 for the season, but without a clubhouse everything has been cancelled. Cyclone Marcia has washed away their major source of revenue. “We can get kids on the pitch to train, but some people in town are saying we might not play this year,” explains England. “We’ve lost players because of that, and being a small club losing players doesn’t help. I’d say we’re in dire straits at the moment.”

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that McQuire became a football fanatic. The South Sea Islanders are renowned as terrific footballers, and his father Doug – an Englishman of Scottish stock – passed on his love of the game.

People like McQuire’s father have kept Nerimbera honest. A letter from Duncan Russel, a player from the 1920s, tells of his “pleasant and lasting memories of the good sportsmen, who played the game, could take a hiding without bitching, and win handsomely without boasting”. That was written in 1970, but McQuire reckons that feeling is still there. “Doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, they’ll just give you a go. They don’t care what you are, you’ll fit in.”

Sterling McQuire (left) and Rick England (right) survey the damage to Pilbeam Park. Photograph: Joe Gorman/The Guardian

Not far from Pilbeam Park is the local meatworks, JBS, which has provided jobs for locals for decades. Rockhampton is the self-proclaimed beef capital of Australia, and the local football community has always been pegged to primary produce. “I reckon I was the only one who didn’t work at the bloody meatworks,” jokes Graff. But like the rest of Rockhampton, the meatworks has changed, and fewer and fewer locals find work there. They’ve been replaced, mostly by 457 visa workers from overseas.

“They smashed the unions,” says McQuire when I ask him about the workforce, but there isn’t a hint of resentment against the newcomers. In fact Nerimbera has welcomed them with open arms. In recent years there have been Hazaras from Afghanistan, Koreans and Iranians, but mostly they’re Brazilians and Vietnamese. This continues a long tradition of multiculturalism at Nerimbera. The old club photos are a polyglot of Australians – British, Irish, Scottish, Indigenous, South Sea Islanders: the lot. The women’s teams, which began in 1973 under the tutelage of McQuire’s father, are perhaps the most diverse. The Yow Yeh sisters Gail and Caroline, relatives of the former rugby league star Jharal, both played here in the black and white stripes.

When cyclone Marcia destroyed large parts of the JBS meatworks, forcing it into temporary closure, many of Nerimbera’s players had to move to a JBS factory in Tasmania. “Half the thirds team are in Tassie!” rues McQuire. “We’re flat out filling the teams.”

The silent, perpetual cyclone, however, has been inflicted on the club by the state and national federations. In 2014 a new elite competition, the National Premier Leagues, was established around the country.

Both England and McQuire lament the loss of juniors to the new NPL franchise Central Queensland Energy. The Energy went under after less than one season, but a newly-named franchise still runs NPL junior sides which suck in other clubs juniors like a moth to the flame.

“Whoever plays for NPL can’t play for Nerimbera, and so we’ve lost some players,” explains England. “This year we don’t have an under-7s or an under-13 boys. That’s your base, that’s where you start, so losing them is tough.” Attracting new juniors is now harder now then ever. Bigger clubs subsidise the junior registration fees, but that’s a luxury little Nerimbera simply can’t afford. Ludicrously, about 75% of Nerimbera’s $230 sign-on fee for juniors goes straight to Football Queensland and Football Federation Australia. After overheads, there is nothing left in the club kitty. There isn’t even enough for the FFA Cup fee this season.

Nerimbera Magpies women’s football team, 1993. Sterling McQuire is far left, middle row. Photograph: Joe Gorman/The Guardian

“I’m dead against the concept,” says McQuire, who wonders why the juniors can’t play for clubs as well as well as their NPL sides like he used to with the Rockhampton representative teams. “The model might work for metropolitan areas, but not out here in the country. When we grew up down at Koongal, all working class kids, we could all afford to play. These kids running around now have got no chance. I see them everywhere, you see ’em playing in schools but when I ask them they say they don’t play for clubs. The NPL is who can afford to be in it.”

Nerimbera are the canary in the coal mine in football’s gradual transition from a genuinely working class, multicultural game to a whitewashed middle class game, and the members don’t much like what they see. The workers and their children who once sustained Nerimbera are struggling to afford registration, the bigger clubs in the area price them out of the market and the remaining kids all get told the NPL is the best pathway. McQuire reckons it’s nonsense – he’s watched ex-national league player Jeremy Harris get picked out of the local competition by the former Socceroos manager Frank Arok, and just last year Kajal Tighe went directly from Nerimbera to Sydney to play with the women’s side in Northbridge. “Josh Rose never made a Rocky rep side, but look where he is!”

The cruel irony is that Nerimbera helped their local rivals Frenchville discover football back in the middle of last century. As Graff tells it, the Frenchville cricketers and rugby league players challenged Nerimbera to a football game. “Afterwards they said ‘this is a pretty good game’,” recounts Graff. “So we said ‘here you go’ and gave them their first football.” These days, Frenchville have a stadium, a palatial clubhouse with pokies and the original Wesley Hall Cup behind glass. North Rockhampton grew rapidly around Frenchville’s venue, while Nerimbera stayed put. “Down in that Koongal area, it’s very small and not a growth area,” says McQuire.

The AFL also picks off their fair share of kids from football, something McQuire recently witnessed first hand. “I lost a young Murri fella last year,” he says. “He was from Woorabinda, a good young fella. Ooh, the talent! I thought, ‘righto, I’m gonna give this kid a go, he’s a good kid’, and I assisted him. He played for me, but AFL got onto him and next thing you know he’s gone. I was so disappointed, but he’s a talent! Class, absolute class! Can you blame him? AFL is putting their money where their mouth is; they’re out there at Woorabinda, a local Aboriginal settlement, and they’re looking after them.”

When McQuire offered to act as a scout in Woorabinda for the NPL, he was met with a lack of interest. But he’s held coaching clinics out there since the 1990s, and knows what the game is missing out on. “How are you supposed to grow the game out in those areas?” he asks. “Emerald, Biloela, Blackwater, Woorabinda… where do they go?”

Since cyclone Marcia there have been bits-and-pieces of help for Nerimbera from Australia’s so-called “football family”. Fox Sports generously ran a story during their A-League broadcast, Perth Glory have been kind enough to send over a signed jersey for the club to raffle, while local grassroots clubs have all offered a hand. England made a phone call to their closest A-League club Brisbane Roar asking if they’d be interested in playing an exhibition match at the ground when they expect to reopen next year. The initial response was typical – put it in writing they said, but he was warned that Pilbeam Park “probably wouldn’t be up to A-League standard”.

Meanwhile FFA have sent a signed Asian Cup jersey and put out a few notices on social media, all of which the entire club greatly appreciates. But considering one of Australia’s oldest living clubs has to mend their field, rebuild their clubhouse, fix their lights and restore water and power – not to mention find a way to generate revenue without playing at home for a whole season – it’s not much. It’d be easier for England, McQuire and the others to just pack up for a year. In August England had a life-threatening brain tumour removed and he’s supposed to be in recovery. “I didn’t need this,” he says, “but I couldn’t just walk away and leave it.”

The challenge to FFA is simple. If they care about their own, if they have a sense of their history, if they support regional football, if they value the roots in organic working class and multicultural communities, they’ll dig deep for Nerimbera Magpies Football Club. But even if not, the club will go on despite the cyclone, despite the rising costs to play and despite the NPL. “We are all going to rebuild,” says England. “My kids are under-9s and under-6s, we’ve been here too long for it to fold. We don’t want to see it fold, no way. Not while we’re here.”

For McQuire, his immediate concerns are with his family on Tanna island, but football is as football has always been – a game. “All we need to do is get our teams back on the park,” he says, “for us that’s a win.”