This year on 10 January 2026 marked thirty years since Colin Matheson passed away at his home at 31 Moore Street, Port Hedland.

Going back through what he left behind, I keep landing on the same thing: how much of his life was shaped by football, and how much of North Pilbara football was shaped by him.

It started a long way from the Pilbara. Dad arrived in Kojonup on 15 October 1952, a postal worker transferred from Mt Hawthorn. It even made the local social pages (“New arrival in Kojonup is Colin Matheson… Colin will work at the Post Office”). He’d gone there to work, but it was watching his brother Gus Matheson play for Railways that got him onto a footy field himself. He fell in with a few fellow post office blokes, Robin Baggs and Kevin Brenally, in a social Sunday competition, and before long he’d graduated to playing Full Forward Pocket for Kojonup in the Upper Great Southern National Football League.

In Peter Harland’s 1997 biography of Dad, Johnny Come Lately: The Life and Times of C P Matheson, has a photo from those Kojonup days captioned “Colin Peter plays for Kojonup.” A Katanning newspaper clipping from 1953, “Nyabing ‘B’ Grade Champs for ’53,” backs it up covering the day Kojonup and Nyabing met for the B-grade premiership. Kojonup lost, comfortably, but right there in the best players for Kojonup: “C. Matheson.”

Link to Trove Article: 01 Oct 1953 – KATANNING PAGE – Trove

That could have been the whole story. A young bloke’s few seasons of country footy before life moved on. But it wasn’t.

In 1962 Colin bought his new bride Cecily Matheson to Port Hedland, and it’s here that football stopped being just something he loved and played to became something he built. He formed the Degrey National Football League in 1969. By 1971 he was elected to Port Hedland Shire Council, and served for 15 years. In the first seven years of it as the Pilbara Ward Delegate to the WA Country Shire Council executive, and as Chairman of the Shire’s Works Committee.

In his own words from a 1979 council election campaign letter: “When I was first elected to the Council in 1971 there was not a blade of grass for field sports of any kind in the Shire… now we have second to none in ovals, change rooms, swimming pools and Libraries.” That’s not a small thing to be able to say. Every kid who’s ever run out onto a Pilbara oval owes a little something to men like Dad, who sat through Council meetings so there’d be grass to run on at all.

So that’s why he loved football so much, I think. Not just the game itself, but everyone gathered around it: teammates, post office mates, a whole town’s worth of kids who needed somewhere to play. Thirty years on, that’s the part of him I want to keep alive in memories and in Port Hedland.

If anyone reading this remembers Colin Matheson from Kojonup, the Degrey League, or Port Hedland in the ’50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s I’d love to read your comments below.