G’day, Merv: How a country town helped Tiger great rebuild his life

Merv Keane rediscovered the tiny wheatbelt town of Wycheproof four decades after he left it behind.

He drove down the main street, alongside the railway line, stopped at the bakery, and when he stepped out into the country air, it was like he had never been away.

Melbourne Cup tour ambassador Merv Keane holds the famous trophy at the top of Mount Wycheproof.Credit: Jay Town/VRC

“G’day, Merv,” they said as he walked inside to order a coffee.

It didn’t matter that he had become a triple premiership player at Richmond, or later an assistant coach at Essendon under Kevin Sheedy, or an AFL life member. To the locals, he was still just “Merv”.

Melbourne Cup tour ambassador Merv Keane and the trophy at his home town of Wycheproof.Credit: Jay Town/VRC

“They’re so matter of fact, country people,” Keane says. “They don’t even blink. We haven’t seen each other for 40 years, but it is like they saw me yesterday.”

It was the same again on Friday, when Keane, 71, returned to Wycheproof as an ambassador of the Melbourne Cup tour. There was fuss and fanfare about the day, of course, as the 18-carat trophy was paraded down Broadway Street, but not about Merv.

He was only a small part of a big celebration for a town of 600 people that was once most famous for an annual event in which competitors lugged a bag of wheat up the world’s smallest mountain, Mount Wycheproof (42 metres).

Keane’s reconnection with the town of his youth after a “40-year hiatus” led to him becoming the Cup ambassador.

He re-established a friendship with Kevin Thompson, a local real estate agent who is also president of the Mt Wycheproof & District Racing Club, and was thrust into the role by local Jackie Noonan, who is also a member of the race club committee.

“She’s an absolute goer,” Keane says. “I caught her one day sweeping up leaves in the street with a broom and a wheelie bin because she was sick of seeing them lying around.”

Wycheproof holds its cup meeting on Derby Day.

Keane says he visits the town every fortnight, a habit that began during a time of great sadness.

In 2014, when Keane was about to settle into a period of semi-retirement in suburban Melbourne and follow an urge to write a novel, his doctor daughter Emily lost her way.

An obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Royal Women’s Hospital, she battled alcohol addiction for several years and succumbed to the disease in 2017. Keane’s wife, Kaye, a primary school teacher, was so crestfallen she took her own life 25 days later.

It was the sort of devastation that would stop most people in their tracks. But it is what Keane did next that truly set him apart.

Along with his two sons, Joel and Zachary, he honoured his daughter by setting up the Emily Keane Gumboot Program to promote mental health among young medical practitioners.

He continued to honour his wife by presenting the annual Kaye Keane Writing Award to year six students at her Clifton Hill Primary School.

He started travelling the world to finish off his book. And then he found Wycheproof. Again.

It was the family farm that drew Keane back to his roots – a 300-acre property that he and his seven siblings had leased out to a neighbouring farmer since their parents died.

With the original home in a state of disrepair, the Keanes decided to build a shed. Then they added an annexe and when Keane sold his Ivanhoe home after the death of his wife and moved into an Abbotsford apartment, they rebuilt the farmhouse – complete with a bullnose verandah, pink gutters and yellow eaves.

“The only thing we retained was the chimney stack, and the outdoor dunny,” Keane says.

“I suppose I financed it with the selling of my family home. And, you know, we all enjoy it. It’s like a country kind of retreat.”

When asked about growing up in Wycheproof the second eldest of eight, Keane says he was a boy who hunted rabbits and caught yabbies. A boy who could recite the names of premiership teams and premiership players and all the Melbourne Cup winners. A boy who wasn’t “much good” at school except for grammar.

It was this skill, he says, that led him to write weekly footy reports as a teenager for the local paper. Then, when he moved to the city to play for Richmond aged 17, he learnt to craft letters in his role at Australia Post.

He was good at football – three premierships at Richmond (1973, 1974 and 1980) and a member of the club’s team of the century – but it was not until he attended a funeral for Scott Field in 2014 that he was overcome with an urge to write a book.

Mervyn Keane (centre) in his time as a recruiting manager at Essendon.

Keane coached Field at Sturt in Adelaide during the late 1980s. They had lost touch, but he was shocked to hear that Field had died, aged 45, while hiking on Mont Blanc in France.

The power of the eulogies struck a chord. The young man he had mentored as a footballer had become an academic, studying agriculture in Israel, becoming obsessed with Middle East politics, spending 24 days in a Palestine Liberation Organisation camp in a bid to meet Yasser Arafat and later serving as special envoy to Syria for the United Nations.

“I wasn’t the only one affected by the funeral,” Keane recalls. “We just heard the most amazing story about this guy, who was a nobody really in the world. Unknown in the world. Just the tales and the stories and the brilliance of this guy.

“And that’s when I said, coming out of the funeral, ‘I’ve got to write a book.’ I felt responsible. I’m not going to let this guy go down the plug hole today, and we’ll never hear from him again, sort of thing.”

Keane and his wife, Kaye, agreed to work together on the project at the start of 2015.

“We decided to do the research, and then, of course, we had shocking issues with Emily, our daughter,” Keane says.

“We were trying to keep her alive, you know, for a couple of years, trying to get her well, trying to get her to overcome her illness. So it [the book] did go into hiatus, probably in 2016 and 2017. Kaye and Emily passed away in 2017.”

As Keane dealt with his untold grief, the book idea kept simmering away. Twelve months later, he picked up his research.

“The writing helped I’m sure,” he says. “The writing was part of the recovery.”

Keane packed his bag and his notebook and retraced Field’s steps – he travelled to San Francisco where Field lived, visited Lebanon where he got married, stood on the French mountain where he died and stayed in New York where he had just started work with the UN.

“I really revisited his whole life,” Keane says. “What I did in writing the book, I followed him around the world when I worked out where he’d been.”

The book, Playing with the Field – The story of Scott Field, was launched in Abbotsford on September 12, 2019 – the fifth anniversary of Field’s death.

Keane had scratched a writing itch, but he wasn’t done. Almost five years later, he self-published another book, You Don’t Understand, the story of Bombers cult hero Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti.

Keane met McDonald-Tipungwuti as a recruiting manager at Essendon.

Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti celebrates a goal for the Bombers in the 2023 season.Credit: Getty Images

With two books done, Keane says he considered writing about his wife and daughter because they were “brilliant people”, but he went off the idea because “enough has been said about Emily”.

He is pushing on though, he says, with the Emily Keane Gumboot Program – named because his daughter was known for wearing fluoro gumboots in the birthing suite.

He said the initiative, to promote welfare among junior doctors, lost impetus during COVID, and he has only just reconnected with some “incredible women” at the Royal Women’s Hospital.

He said the biggest issue was the lack of hospital funding.

“You talk about AFL football,” he says, “we have two, maybe three, welfare officers for 45 players. The Royal Women’s Hospital has got hundreds of junior doctors and all that, and they haven’t even got a welfare officer.

“Really, for my money, until we can actually have a full-time welfare officer ... ‘That’s your exclusive job, and you’ve probably got a team of people helping you’, well, then that’s when I’ll be happy. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.”

When asked about his wife, Keane says, “the most honourable thing to say about Kaye is that they created a stone seat in the playground at her school, Clifton Hill Primary School, with a plaque on it”.

“Two of her favourite sayings are carved into the ends of the seat – ‘If you need help, give me a hoy’, and, secondly, ‘I do love a good story’. That seat’s going to be there forever, I guess.”

They are his wife’s sayings, but it is fair to say that they also inspire Keane on how to live his life, whether he is in Abbotsford or Wycheproof.

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