HEARTNEY

Our silvan-land school played
the game 'Heartney’ !
Even the sky heard South-Silvaner's
yell: 'HEARTNÈE!'
as we threw a tennisball over our
school sheltershed,
by which If it was caught, we'd be run,
branded and 'dead' !
Stinging and singing a world before
Paul McCartney.

Each team, 'home' on one long-side of
the sheltershed,
resurrected their number as the other side
was brandéd.
All grades joined, the ground grooved, ringing
out Heartney
we belonged, right there, shed-rounding unwound
our heart's free.
As we did that shed, Flinders round Australia never
circumnavigatéd!


2002 © Wayne David Knoll

1928-1980 Silvan South Primary School, Burleigh, Victoria


This poem won the prize of a new edition Macquarie Dictionary as one of seven runners-up in the ABC- Macquarie University/ Macquarie Dictionary WORDMAP of Australia for a poem of less than 100 words based on a regionalism: that is, a word used only in a distinct locality. This poem, ‘Heartney’ - is also published on the National ABC Website, under Competitions.
http://www.abc.net.au/wordmap/competitions/default.htm

Heartney - or Hartney- as a word was used for the game in the former district of South Wandin, and played at primary schools both in Silvan & Silvan South. My father tells me his younger Chapman uncles who attended Silvan Primary school taught the game to him and his siblings who then took it to Silvan South school. It must have sown itself down the next generations from older children to younger as I never saw any teacher coaching students in Heartney.

I have also heard of a similar game played at small schools in the Broken River area north of Benalla, Victoria. My youngest brother, who is sixteen years younger than me, played Heartney there in the early 1980s, until the teachers banned the game after it became a rivalry between kids of Italian and non-Italian families. In the mid 1990s

All you need is a detached building, preferably without spoutings (for ball-return reasons) and a tennis ball. I taught the game to a group of home-schooled children at the Fusion Arts Colony in Malmsbury, Victoria . The detached building that we used at Malmsbury was a caravan-bodied Bedford motorhome.