Letter From Australia:When I was a lad in the 1970s, my parents would pile my brothers and me into the family station wagon and we would drive about four hours north of Melbourne to visit my mother's people in a region in Australia's hinterland known as the Mallee. One of the pleasures of those visits, besides listening to my grandfather vent his frustrations on the sheep in language we never heard him utter around the dinner table, was watching the local Australian football competition.

To a boy who lived in the city, wintry Saturday afternoons at country football grounds were exotic. The Mallee is a dry region, receiving just enough rainfall to raise it above desert status. Regularly, a wall of orange dirt approaches from the north, leaving a coat of dust on everything in its path. People who live with Mallee dust storms are tough. When they play football, they play hard but fair and expect the next man to do the same.

I loved watching big Mallee farmers with enormous, gnarled hands fly for the football. At ground level, fierce contests would leave the beaten player a crumpled heap in the dirt. After gathering his breath, he would rise to his feet, shake his head and jog off towards the next contest. Courage for these men was second nature.

In later years, I realised something about these battles in the old Tyrell Football League. Almost every player in the competition was a farmer. If he didn't make a living from tilling the soil, he sold machinery to those who did. There was a great singularity to football in the Mallee. Everyone came from the same walk of life.

The same could be said for most country football competitions around Australia.

This year I've been following a football club, which in scale is much like a GAA club, in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne. The club is called Northcote Park. As befits the Northcote area, which is where I live, the club's teams consist of working-class men with names like Smith and O'Brien, as well as Greeks, Italians, Lebanese and Aboriginals. The disparities in the players' backgrounds put the Mallee competition that I watched as a lad into stark relief.

While Northcote Park has been a successful club in the recent past, this year it's struggling. Last week, against Bundoora, they were thrashed in a manner that was shameful. It was not the enormous margin that brought concern so much as the players' lack of fight. It was as if they ran out on the ground and ran up the white flag. In Australian sport, even at the scrubbiest level, nothing attracts greater shame than failing to give your all.

So why the absence of fight? I'd noticed in previous weeks that, if the match was going against Northcote Park, the players seemed not to know each other. Voices were mute and heads were largely bowed. If Northcote Park managed a goal, the goalkicker would jog back to his position without so much as a pat on the back. Successful sports teams have great camaraderie. Northcote Park was not an unhappy club, but neither was it close. I wondered aloud whether the problem was related to pulling the various cultural strands together.

After training last Thursday night, the club coach disagreed with my theory. He did admit he was forced to alter his approach for different social groups. Aboriginal players, for example, recoil from harsh words, while players from white, working-class backgrounds respond to the occasional rant.

The problem, he said, was leadership. The club needed strong leaders, of any background, who would show the others how to fight through hard times.

On reflection, I think the coach is right. The club captain is a 31-year-old with soft hands, capable of shaping the course of a game with deft touches rather than bending a game to his will. Of the other veterans, there's a 39-year-old on his last legs; he's fighting so hard to get a kick that he's got no time or energy to worry about leading others. Another older player is consumed by a leg injury that requires him to nurse himself rather than reach out to others. If there were a couple of players with the energy and personality to lead, perhaps there would be no reason to consider the club's many cultural strands.

After training on Thursday, Northcote Park wisely injected some enthusiasm into their senior team by selecting two teenagers to make senior debuts. One of them was a jockey-sized 16-year-old Aboriginal. Many Aboriginal players prefer the comfort of playing with friends and relatives in the lower grades rather than testing themselves in the senior team, but this teenager was different. When asked what he would think about playing in the senior team, he almost burst with pride. According to the coach, his attitude meant that he selected himself.

On Saturday, the 16-year-old kicked a goal and played his part in lifting Northcote Park to victory over Diamond Creek. The various cultural strands pulled together nicely.

The Northcote Park football club is a microcosm of modern, urban Australia. It's muddling along, but it's getting there.

I hope the club wins many more games in the near future.