Back Roads: June 22

Guest presenter Lisa Millar presents a Back Roads COVID-19 special program about how a community comes together in Rokewood-Corindhap, Victoria.

Sporting clubs are the ‘lifeblood’ of small communities, but they take on extra-special meaning in farming areas, where most locals work on their own and many kilometres separate them from their neighbours. The club creates the social fabric that binds a community.

The members of the Rokewood-Corindhap Football Netball Club, known as the Grasshoppers or more commonly, the ‘Hoppers’, have always loved their club for exactly that reason.

Since the towns of Rokewood and Corindap in Victoria, just six minutes apart, merged their teams in 1932 and became the ‘Hoppers’, they’ve played and stayed together through a world war, droughts and bushfires. But COVID-19 presented the biggest threat of all. By forcing people physically apart, it threatened to tear the fabric that bound together this tiny community of just three hundred and fifty locals.

8pm Monday on ABC.