Picture Perfect Penneshaw Oval plays host to Kangaroo Island’s finest

By PETER ARGENT

Boasting stunning views across Back Stairs Passage to the mainland at Cape Jervis, the Penneshaw Oval on Kangaroo Island is one of the most picturesque regional football venues in South Australia.

The Kangaroo Island Football League (KIFL) is one of just three “Island competitions” in Australia, along with the Tiwi Islands Football League, an hour’s plane flight off the north coast of Darwin, and the King Island Football Association, on a piece of land between Victoria and Tasmania.

Dudley United Football Club – sporting green and gold – is the team which plays its home games at the Penneshaw Oval.

DUFC is a combination of the Dudley Football Club and the United Football Club, merging together back in 1965.

The KIFL is a five-team competition, which includes rival clubs Parndana Roosters, Western Districts Saints, Wisanger Panthers and the Kingscote Bloodhounds.

The Dudley United Football Club won its previous a flag in 2016 and is currently captained by former South Adelaide Junior, athletic 19 year-old Zak Keir.

Western Districts is the reigning premier, with Sturt premiership defender Sam Jonas winning the 2024 KIFL Mail Medal.

Sam and his brother Tom, the former Port Adelaide AFL captain, were members of the 2024 flag win.

At the Parndana Roosters, the next generation of the Westbrook clan is taking his first steps in A-grade football.

Jed Westbrook has played a handful of matches alongside his father David – a 2006 SANFL League premiership player with Woodville-West Torrens – this season.

In one game this year, David Westbrook, now 40, wound back the clock, kicking seven of his team’s 10 goals according to the records on PlayHQ.

“They must have lost one as I reckon I kicked eight that day,” Westbrook smiled.

David’s father Ian, a multi-country club premiership coach, also played two seasons and 10-games at Woodville Peckers in the 1980s.

A 200-game South Adelaide defender, Bradley Crabb, is still playing on the Island for Western Districts and enjoying premiership success, while a current SANFL employee Bailey Gaskin recently came back to play with his siblings at Parndana and celebrate his mother’s 40-year service to sport on the Island.

Kangaroo Island has a strong history of players who have come across to the SANFL and been successful.

One of the he first of these was Alan Howard, who was a member of both the 1971 and 1972 North Adelaide premierships and the Championships of Australia success in the second year, after coming across from the Parndana Roosters.

He played 144 games at Prospect and earned Mail Medals in 1980 and 1981 back on the Island.

David “Sticks” Stoeckel had a 267-game career with the South Adelaide Panthers between 1985 and 1997, captaining the club for two years and earning the leading goal kicker award on three occasions as a power forward.

He played in a pair of night premierships for the Panthers and was inducted into the club’s Hall of Fame.

The 1982 Jack Oatey Medallist, and three-time premiership player at Norwood, Danny Jenkins, is also a Kangaroo Island lad having won the League’s best-and-fairest in 1974.

He was captain of the 1984 Redlegs title-winning side, when they came from fifth to lift the Thomas Seymour Hill Cup, and played five games for South Australia and is also in Norwood’s Hall of Fame.

Brilliant ruckman Brendon Lade began his career as a Wisanger Panther before progressing to South Adelaide and then Port Adelaide in the AFL.

He was an AFL premiership player in 2004, twice an All-Australian in 2006, 2007 and the John Cahill Medallist in 2006.

Once his playing days finished, Lade moved quickly into the coaching ranks and has had assistant roles at Richmond, Port, St Kilda and the Western Bulldogs and has been touted as a future AFL senior coach.