A CULTURE of weird nicknames and a “chicken shed” of a scoreboard box at the Chiltern Football Club helped Wodonga’s Brian Allen win a national competition.
Brian jumped on a bus to Canberra yesterday to meet 35 other young writers from regional Australia, his prize for winning the ABC Heywire Competition for an essay he wrote about the his footy club.
It all started when Brian’s dad Peter, an avid listener of the ABC, had heard about the writing competition on the radio and encouraged his son to enter.
A few weeks later, Brian was at the Chiltern football oval with a notepad and pen in hand.
He took notes about fans screaming “get in there, son” at the players and calling them weird nicknames like “Grubber”, and about how he was called Little Paddy after his older brother Patrick.
He scribbled down descriptions of the scoreboard shed, which looked like a chicken house.
It all paid off when he won the competition, with high praise given for his ability to inject the reader right into the country atmosphere.
Although Brian doesn’t know what he wants to do just yet, he said work experience at the The Border Mail last year helped him further his passion for writing.
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