Adam met Emma Hards when both were teachers at Kerang four years ago. They moved up to Mildura last year. With his background in sports management, Adam was a valuable acquisition.

When Jason Harmer began playing 20 years ago, two out of three players in the senior side were current or former Meringur lads.

“I played footy because I loved it to death,” he said.

“Today, I play more for the social side of it – it gets me away from the farm for a day.”

The football club, like most in the region, is integrated with a netball club. Meringur’s two netball teams are also based at Lake Cullulleraine.

“A lot of the football and netball players bring their families out to the lake, because it’s such a safe place for kids to run around,” he said.

Jason played for the love of it, but no team today can survive on love alone. Money is needed to attract non-local players and coaches. Local farmers like Ron Hards are regular and substantial sponsors.

Club supporters contribute through year-round fund-raising activities, including social nights, and gate takings augment the budget.

Last financial year, Meringur Football and Netball Club turned over $60,000; the previous year turnover was about $49,000. For a small, sparsely populated community, that’s a lot of money, and a lot of voluntary work.

Ron Hards says little country footy clubs are “pretty special”.

“My father-in-law and Jason’s grandfather were only young when they started farming in Meringur in the late 1920s.

“Except for the Depression years, and the war years, when most of the young men went away to fight, Meringur Football Club has operated continuously since about 1926.”

Other Millewa League clubs have perished over the years. The elegantly named Karween-Karawina, Yarrara, Merrinee, Benetook, Pirlta, and Morkalla all passed into history. At the region’s abandoned ovals, old, makeshift Murray pine goal posts have collapsed, but the original board wickets for cricket are still in place.

Even Werrimull had a gap year in the ’90s, but came back strongly. That may yet be Meringur’s survival strategy – mothballs for a year, then back to the Sherrin.

This year Meringur has only six locals on a list that is still short of at least half a dozen players. Last season, most players came from the Sunraysia area, where the jobs are.

The plight of Meringur’s 80-year old football team exemplifies the slow, inexorable decline of small, remote towns and their footy teams, across the great arc of the Australian wheat belt, from the Darling Downs in Queensland, to the Western Australian sandplains near Geraldton.

When the Millewa was cleared for wheat in the 1920s, the area of a typical farm was between 260 and 320 hectares (640 and 800 acres).

By the post-war period, 300ha was far too small to provide a living for a farming family. In the 1950s, a reallocation saw uneconomic properties consolidated into new farms of 1200 to 1600 hectares (3000 to 4000 acres).

Since then, buyouts have seen the average size of farms increase to 3000ha and larger.

Farms have become highly mechanised, as the cost of labour, machinery, diesel fuel, fertilisers, and sprays has reduced most of them to one-man operations. Farmers have formed mutual-help alliances with neighbours and friends, sharing machinery and their own labour to get the big jobs done.

But that doesn’t increase the number of young men in the district, the lifeblood of any football team. And it doesn’t increase the number of potential helpers.

“At the end of the day, a footy team needs more than just 20 players – it needs more like 40 people every week, to man the gates at matches, run the scoreboad, serve at the bar,” Mr Hards said.

“Often, clubs have to supply their field umpires on game day. You need a goal umpire, a boundary umpire, a water boy, and a trainer

“You just about need another footy team to run a footy team,” Jason Harmer quips.

Monday night’s postponed meeting at Chaffey Park at 7.30 is crunch night.

“We’ll look at the option of giving it another 12 months, and see what happens,” Mr Hards said.

“The coaches spend half of Friday night trying to encourage players to come in and fill the gaps in the side, and you turn up on Saturday and find some of your volunteers are either crook or away.

“We’ve got top-class facilities out at the Lake – a good playing surface, good change rooms, and a brand-new netball court.

“But if we can’t get a few more helpers, we’ve finally run out of ideas.

“The disappointing part is that we’ve had hundreds of people through the club over the past 40 years, and not many have stuck around.

“I’d like to think there are some people out there with Meringur blood in their veins.”

This article appeared in Saturday’s Sunraysia Daily 28/01/2012.