In November 2008, Emma Quayle wrote a piece on three young draft hopefuls, who grew up playing together in the same street in Perth's eastern suburbs. Throughout challenging childhoods, football had been their guiding force, and a welcome ally of the strong, single mothers who raised them.
The story won the Grant Hattam Trophy in 2009, which is awarded to the creator of the best piece of football journalism from the players' perspective. Here is that story.
Back in the day: Michael Walters, Nic Naitanui and Chris Yarran.Credit: Mal Fairclough
Chris Yarran and Michael Walters are in Nic Naitanui's living room, sitting squeezed into a two-seater couch. They are trying to remember the first time they met, and it's hard; they can't remember not knowing each other.
Chris can still see Nic's big afro hairstyle, and recall the day he jumped onto the PA system at primary school and called a Melbourne Cup. Michael can remember how quiet Chris used to be, how he never used to speak until someone spoke to him, and Nic can't remember Michael being anything but a chatty, cheeky, energetic kid. "Look at him!" he laughs, pointing at a junior basketball photo in which Walters leans towards the camera with a big, goofy grin. Walters doesn't even bother objecting, or even just rolling his eyes: there's another photo, on another wall, where he's hamming it up even more.
Mothers and sons: Michael Walters with Martha, Chris Yarran with Debbie and Nic Naitanui with Atetha, in 2008.Credit: Mal Fairclough
Walters was the first to move into Bushby Street - a long, wide road in Midvale, in Perth's outer-eastern suburbs - and nobody ever called him Michael. As a baby, he travelled from Perth to Adelaide with his parents and big brother, to see his father's family for the first time. As the train rattled along, and the sky turned dark outside, he refused to fall asleep, so his father made up a lullaby, calling him "my son son". It caught on: his brother, Colin, wouldn't let anyone call him anything but "Son Son" after he did, finally, drift off to sleep. These days, he'll settle for Sonny as well.
Walters was four when "Nicko" Naitanui moved in, six houses down the street, his fraternal twin brother Mark in tow. Next door to them was Yarran, who was living with his mother at her parents' place.
The 17-year-old has lived in many houses and in many streets over the years; at times, he wasn't entirely sure where he would be sleeping the next night. But Bushby was the street Yarran kept coming back to, and Midvale the suburb that most felt like home. The three boys started primary school together and - except for a few years when Yarran moved an hour away to Northam, still dropping by some weekends - they have lived within a few minutes of each other. The draft will make their long-shared dream come true, but separate them for the first real time in their lives.
Football connected the boys, from the very start. Yarran can remember the three of them clumping down the bitumen road together, to the oval at the end of it, already wearing their footy boots. They would drag a bin out onto the road in front of Nicko's place, lining it up alongside a mail box, a tree and a concrete pole - cheap, easy goal posts. Between the Naitanuis' cousins, Yarran's cousins, Walters' brother and the other kids in their street, there would be up to 30 boys on the road at once, tackling each other to the asphalt, scampering to the side when a car tore past, scoring bonus points for hitting the bin or the tree, and never craving company. "All you had to do if you were bored," said Naitanui, "was go and knock next door."
Nic Naitanui, Chris Yarran and Michael Walters back in Bushby Street in 2008.Credit: Mal Fairclough
Yarran was the kid who always hit the target; the one with the sharp, instinctive skills.
He only ever wanted to be one thing: an AFL footballer. "Son Son" was the little one, who went to bed each night with his footy and would scurry around after the bigger, older kids, all energy. At school, Naitanui could do anything he turned either his mind or body to: he was the class accountant, counting the money when his class went off on excursions, and winning almost everything on athletics day. His mother, Atetha, thought he would end up becoming a basketballer; he started kicking the football only because the other kids did, and it was actually the least of his talents.
"I was just a skinny kid and I couldn't even kick properly. I'm still struggling now with it," he said, smiling. "But most of the kids in Midvale, that's just how we played. We didn't really practice or train all our skills like some other kids, we just ran around on the street. We'd have little scratch matches, four on four, and all we did was play."
Still, he could tell even then that Yarran's plans were sensible ones. "You just knew," he said."
Some kids are just better than the rest. Chris was the best one of us all."
Life hasn't exactly been easy, for the boys or those around them. Naitanui's parents, Atetha and Bola, moved to Sydney almost 19 years ago, from the Fijian village near Suva where Nic's older brother and sister still live. He has never lived there himself, but when he goes there, each year, he feels at home. His parents moved away because they wanted opportunity, said Atetha, but the twins were just one when Bola found out he had cancer and only a few months to live.
Alone, Atetha moved the boys to Perth, simply because she had a brother there and wasn't sure where else she should go. She still sometimes wonders how she made it through, how she kept from collapsing, but she knows her boys kept her going, that they gave her no choice. "If I'd given up ... " she said, pausing. "I couldn't give up."
Atetha, who married again three years ago, always resisted signing on for a pension - she never wanted to be given anything and she always wanted to work, even if it meant things were a little bit trickier to pay for. For the past 14 years she has worked for Homewest, helping to find housing for homeless people in the eastern suburbs and working with some of the kids who grew up playing kick-to-kick with her own boys. Some seem too embarrassed to look her in the eye."
"It's like the kids here are in hiding, they turn the other way when they see that I am coming," she said. "I say to Nic and Mark always, when you see these boys, talk to them, don't even think they have been in jail. It's sad, it's very sad. Some of these young indigenous boys that played with my boys, I thought that they were going to make it. They had so much talent, so much skill. But drugs and bashings and assaults ... that's the way of life here. That's how these kids survive."
As he was growing up, Walters knew that his mum and dad struggled some months to pay the rent; that even filling the petrol tank to take him to a training session was sometimes a stretch. "It wasn't something you ever really thought about," he said. "You just sort of knew, that we had it a bit harder than most people."
He can only ever remember being a happy child, although this year has been a wrenching one. Walters' parents separated earlier this year and his father, Mick, moved home to Adelaide.
He came back to Perth mid-year, but left again in September, two days before Walters played for the Swan Districts under-19 team in a grand final. His grandfather flew straight from Adelaide to watch him play, but Walters was emotional, deflated and, said his mother, Martha, forced for the first time to reassess his biggest idol.
"It was devastating. It really hurt 'Son Son' and it's been a real struggle for all of us," she said. "He looked up to his father, I think 'Son Son' really just wanted to make dad proud, and thought what he was doing was the right way to do that. He's an emotional boy, he's a fiery boy - the only time he isn't fiery is when he's playing on the football field - but he's worked through it now.
"He knows he has some exciting times coming up and that he has a lot of support and that a lot of people love him. He loves dad, but dad has to be put at the back for a while, and that's hard."
It's something Yarran had to grapple with a lot longer back. He was eight when his father, Malcolm, was jailed; he still sees him, and talks to him on the phone, and his most vivid memories are of walking home with him from footy training, hand-in-hand. He can't remember feeling ashamed of where his dad was, and will be for a while yet, but when other kids asked him about it, he didn't want to talk.
"I just took it as life, as the way life goes," he said. "I never said much about it and it's still hard now, to think about it. But I just think of the good times with him, and I saw my mum and how she didn't let it bring her down. She didn't want it in my head, she wanted me to feel proud. With where I am, I sort of owe it to her. She's the one who kept me playing football."
Yarran had a grandfather willing to take him wherever he had to be, any time. He had neighbours willing to chip in with petrol money when they could. He had footy - and there was never a choice to skip training, he said, because Naitanui would be banging on his door, telling him to hurry.
But more than anything, he had his mother, Deb, who didn't want any of her five children - Chris is the youngest - to carry someone else's burden. Even if it meant she had to, or felt that she did. "It was hard but I adjusted. I had to," she said. "If I was to let things slip, I think the whole family would have fallen apart. I just stayed strong and did the best I could. I always said to Chris, never feel ashamed of where dad is, you have to go and live your own life."
As he grew up, Naitanui began to notice newspaper articles saying Midvale had the highest break-in rate in Perth. Men would return home to Bushby Street after stints in jail and while he was conscious of where they had been, he couldn't quite reconcile that with with how happy and safe he had always seemed to feel. Later, he had friends go off to jail; like Atetha, he'd grown up thinking they were the ones who had the best chance to go far.
"It's kind of sad to see and to even think, that you've got mates and they're locked up now. But you see them, some of them get out of jail, and they seem so happy for you. Even as a kid, you knew it was a tough place we lived in, that people were in trouble with the police, but they were always good to you. They were always looking out for you."
More recently, all three boys have felt keenly that people judge other people according to their post code. Two years ago, Naitanui had no reason to believe he could play in the AFL; when he made the under-16 West Australian squad, he told the coaches he didn't want to play. His reluctance was internal; he didn't think he was good enough. But after he was talked into taking his place in the under-16 team and met other, more fortunate kids who also assumed he wouldn't get there, his mind began to change.
"You'd meet kids who go to private schools, and they sort of looked down on you and asked where you were from and laughed at you," he said. "Looking back, I know it was a bad place we came from, but we didn't know any different, we just knew it as home. Some other kids thought they were better and I think that gave me a desire to make it even more, to show it doesn't matter where you come from, that you can still do as well as any other kid can."
Yarran agrees. "It's sort of good for the community," he said. "I reckon we could help a bit, with where we are now."
Yesterday, in Perth, three mothers and their teenage sons had lunch together. It was a kind of farewell; their last chance to spend time together before "Son Son", Nicko and Chris are potentially drafted to three different teams, to three different states. They felt apprehensive, but, more than anything, excited. They wished they had thought to take some photos back in the Bushby Street days, to have somehow known what was going to happen - but then again, why would they have? "They were just three little boys, whoever would have thought that this was where they would be?" said Atetha, proud of what the boys have overcome and achieved, but equally proud of herself, Martha and Deb. "We didn't do too bad, did we?"