He was captain-coach of the East Devonport NWFU premiership team.

East Devonport won the flag that year in exactly the same way that the Western Bulldogs won the AFL flag in 2016.

Came from nowhere, won games at the right end of the season, got inspired and went on a dream run. 

I’ve written about East Devonport’s premiership in numerous articles, I’ve written about it in books. It’s one of three places my love of Australian football springs from.

The first was being brought up in footy culture – both my mother’s family and my father’s family had footy stories.

The second was the standard of schoolboy football in Burnie when I was growing up there. 

Six Burnie boys from that time would go on to play VFL/AFL. 

I saw the best of what the game had to offer in skill and daring early and it thrilled me at a time when nothing else did – not the religion of the religious school I attended, not the life of a boarder at that school.

Then I saw East Devonport’s miraculous run that culminated on grand final day when the team took off like a giant swan with multiple parts, all bound by the same vision, and another level of the game game opened to me.

I saw the joy ordinary people can know when they come together and share a dream, possibly mad to others, and at the centre of it was the East captain-coach, the man wearing the number 1 guernsey, Graeme “Gypsy” Lee, a wingman playing as an under-sized centre-half back, running off his opponent, slicing defences apart with his low skimming drop kicks.  

At the breaks, I crept into the huddle and heard him speak to his players.

No ranting, no false theatrics.

He spoke to them like he knew what they wanted to be as a team and he told them what they’d have to do to be it.

Move on 30 years and I’m doing an ABC radio interview in Hobart on a book tour.

I’m asked where I get my love of the game from and I mention Gypsy.

A few days later, I’m talking at an event in Launceston and Gypsy turns up.

We become good friends. 

Gypsy’s great mate in life was the player most commonly described as the best footballer to ever come out of Tasmania, Darrel Baldock, captain of St Kilda’s 1966 premiership team.

Gypsy played 20-odd games for St Kilda in the early 1960s and may be the first player with Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage to play in the VFL/AFL (Ulverstone’s Aboriginal champion Arthur Hodgson, who went to Carlton in 1948, was born in New South Wales). 

Gypsy and I talk a couple of times each year. He reads the articles and books I send him.

From the outset, it seemed that he understood exactly what I was trying to do as a footy writer and encouraged me.

I’ve met a lot of great people through footy, but Gypsy was the first to take me inside the game, to show me another depth of meaning within it.

It’s worth more to me than any sportswriting award that Gypsy says we’re team-mates.