Hailing from Wudinna, talented siblings Hannah and Harrison Petty have driven each other to achieve sporting success on the national stage.
Optus Stadium, Perth. Twilight has fallen on what has been a turbulent 2021 AFL grand final. It’s late in the third quarter. Just one goal separates Melbourne from the Western Bulldogs. A record crowd is stacked deep into the colosseum of grandstands, which thump and thunder to the ebb and flow of the play beneath.
On centre-wing, engaged in a battle for possession of the precious yellow footy is 21-year-old Melbourne player Harrison Petty. Up on the second level, watching from the edge of her seat is his elder sister, Hannah Petty, captain of the Adelaide Thunderbirds.
Beside her are their parents Simon and Karen.
Since Harry was drafted to Melbourne in 2017, the family’s football allegiances have all turned the Demons’ way. Right now, things are tense.
In a sweat, Simon – as Harry takes desperate possession – faces Hannah, cursing that his body “is so tight it’s f…ing cramping up”. Hannah laughs. Harry’s rammed into the turf, done in a tackle. The stadium shudders. The clock ticks.
In just under an hour’s time, their no. 35, Harry Petty, will be called to the podium as a premiership player – the club’s first in 57 years.
In two hours, all the Petty family were down in the rooms together, sharing proud embraces and wide smiles, hands on the premiership cup.
At the same time in country South Australia, at the showgrounds of the Petty’s Eyre Peninsula hometown of Wudinna, a 40th birthday will have morphed into a wild celebration for Harry and his Demons. The legendary opening lines of the club song, “It’s a grand old flag” – will be heard on repeat, reverberating across town.
In a footy sense, the night will become the crescendo of Harry’s career to date.
But to suggest it is, or will be, the crowning sporting moment for the Petty family – well, that would be unjust and shortsighted and – it could land you in a hell of a lot of trouble at the dinner table.
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The night before the grand final Hannah Petty is at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre, making an acceptance speech during Netball SA’s Awards Gala.
She’s been voted by the coaches and playing group at the Thunderbirds as the recipient of the Spirit Award, which embodies the club’s culture and values, on and off the court.
It’s the second time in three years Hannah has received the honour, but accepting it tonight as captain carries extra significance.
“This is a very special award to win no matter what, and to do it as captain, I hope that means I’ve done my job in driving the culture and making sure we all live to our club’s standards,” Hannah says.
“For my peers to think I was the best at it this year is super humbling.”
Simon and Karen aren’t here to celebrate. They’ve just arrived on the other side of the country, having spent the last couple of days driving 2125 kilometres across the Nullarbor from Wudinna to Perth, to watch Harry in tomorrow’s grand final.
They don’t know it yet, but it won’t be the last time the Petty parents journey from Wudinna to watch on, as their blood battles it out for one of Australian sports most coveted trophies.
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Growing up as a couple of country kids in the sport-centric small town of Wudinna – population 550, one pub, an abundance of agricultural retailers and a six-hour drive west of Adelaide – sport, as Harry Petty puts it, “is everything”.
“It was pretty much the only thing we did,” he says. “After school we used to come home and we had a basketball ring in the backyard or we used to kick the footy on the front lawn, normally with all my mates.
“If they weren’t around, it would have to be with Hannah,” Harry laughs.
At that time, the siblings’ parents Simon and Karen were influential A graders in the Wudinna United football and netball teams and those who remember their kids, Hannah and Harry, growing up around the club recall a relentless sporting struggle between the two.
“Honestly, we were always out there going at anything and everything,” Hannah says. “Whether it was footy, cricket, tennis, basketball or in the pool – no matter what season it was, we were pretty full-on really.”
Wudinna locals often attribute the Petty kids’ sporting successes to the sheer intensity at which those brother-sister encounters were held. Be it a leisurely hit of backyard cricket or shooting hoops down the courts – if Hannah and Harry were involved – it would nearly always, so they reckon in town, end in a do-or-die battle for sibling supremacy.
“It’s been 100 per cent rivalry our whole lives,” Hannah laughs. “We are two very competitive people, especially against each other and so whatever it was – from footy to basketball to who could run from the shack to the jetty at Venus Bay the fastest, there was always some kind of serious challenge going down.”
Harry recalls, with a little trepidation, that Hannah – who grew up prodigiously talented and three years his senior – was often the bane of his backyard sporting conquests.
“I would always get belted by her,” Harry laughs. “I used to bloody hate losing to her, when all you wanted to do as a kid was win and me being a little bit fiery when I was younger, there were plenty of arguments.”
The rivalry came to a head on the Elliston footy ground in July of 2010, when Hannah – who grew up an avid and gifted footballer but had relinquished the game to focus on netball – was asked to fill in for Harry’s under 16 team.
Harry, aged 10 at the time, was by all accounts ropeable that his older sister, then 13, would be pulling the boots on alongside him. While Harry had little to no impact on the match, Hannah – playing off the half-back flank before her netball game – ran amok and was named third best on ground.
Although Harry reckons the Elliston game is long erased from memory, his father Simon can still remember the fallout from the match.
“From that day on, that was it, Hannah was not allowed to play football ever again, according to Harry,” Simon laughs. “In the end, it did turn out to be Han’s last ever game for Wudinna, because I tell you what, that trip home from Elliston was a long one.”
These days, Harry acknowledges the sibling rivalry helped drive and shape him into the sportsman he is today.
“It was challenging but I wouldn’t be where I am now without her,” Harry says.
“Growing up with Hannah being good at sport drove me to want to be better than her, so I guess that’s where my competitiveness comes from. I was always out [in] the backyard trying to figure out how I could improve this or that to find a way to beat her.”
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As teenagers, the pair followed somewhat different pathways from Wudinna United to sport at the elite level. Where Hannah’s prodigious netball talent was identified and acted on early, Harry’s propensity for football took a little longer to materialise.
In January 2015, Harry – remarkably just three years away from being drafted to Melbourne – was still overcoming the disappointment of being left out of last year’s U15 Eyre Peninsula squad.
Meanwhile Hannah, at just 17, was making her debut for the Adelaide Thunderbirds in the national pre-season competition.
Fast-forward to the first week of July 2017 and Harry had somewhat closed the gap.
He was in Melbourne representing SA in its final match of the national U18 championships, where he was continuing to enjoy a breakout run of form he had displayed all carnival.
After the game, he was named South Australia’s most valuable player for the tournament and subsequently, selected in the year’s U18 All-Australian team – the catalyst for his eventual signing with Melbourne.
But as had always been the case, Hannah had one up on him.
She was, at that very moment in time, captaining Australia’s under 21 team to the final of the Youth World Cup in Botswana.
Now, Harry says that his move to boarding school as a 15-year-old – which took him to Adelaide, away from Wudinna and out of the substantial shadow cast by his older sister – was an important step.
“Growing up in Wudinna, with Hannah doing what she was doing, I felt it was always about her in some ways,” he says.
“So, me going away to school in Adelaide and playing footy at Rostrevor and trying out for Norwood in the SANFL, all that let me create a bit more of my own,” he said.
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Age has done little to dilute the Petty rivalry. Speaking in late 2021, months after Harry’s AFL flag, Hannah conceded her brother’s success with the Demons had poured fuel on their already hyper competitive relationship.
“I’m very jealous Harry has a premiership before me,” she said. “Of course, I really couldn’t be happier for him, but it makes me that bit hungrier to show him the Thunderbirds can get one too.
“That’s the number one goal – a Thunderbirds premiership.”
Asked, back in 2021, if an approach had been made by the AFLW attempting to lure her sporting services to women’s footy, Hannah was rather vague in response.
“Ah… nothing too much, no,” she replies.
But father Simon suggests her reluctance to speak on the matter is most likely out of loyalty to netball and the Thunderbirds. There has been interest in Hannah’s footballing potential.
“I know she’s definitely had a serious nibble from the AFLW, but she shut the door pretty quickly on that. She’s always wanted to give netball a 100 per cent go,” he says.
“Though I reckon she’d handle herself pretty well out there on the footy field, so you never know.”
Hannah, who admits to football being her first sporting love, asserts genuine contentment with her chosen netball path.
“When I was younger, I probably loved playing footy more, but now I’m like, ‘thank god I chose netball’. I’m very comfortable with my decision to do that,” she says.
On the footy front at the family’s Wudinna home, in the off-season after Melbourne’s flag, Hannah spills the beans that Harry hasn’t been shy in mentioning his newfound premiership credentials around the dinner table.
“He definitely likes to bring it up – regularly – that he’s won a premiership and I haven’t, so that gets thrown around whenever I’m complaining about him,” Hannah laughs, eyes narrowing.
The banter between the siblings isn’t borne from self-absorption but rather, it is done in the endearing way that, as many country town sporting families do, the Pettys keep each other humble and grounded behind closed doors.
“In our family I think we definitely show our love by hanging a bit of crap on each other,” Hannah says. “I wouldn’t have it any other way, I think it’s great to get that, rather than someone thinking you’re the best thing ever.”
During an ABC radio interview in the week leading up to the grand final, Simon was asked about his daughter – who the host described as being “the great netballer with the Adelaide Thunderbirds”.
Simon’s on-air reply, “I’m not sure about great, but yeah, she’s giving it a red hot go,” came off a little blunter than he’d anticipated.
Hannah didn’t miss the opportunity for retribution when doing her own media the next day, declaring that “Harry got all the talent from Mum, and none from Dad, which is true.”
While Hannah got the last laugh, Simon offered some context around his response.
“Hannah is certainly great in my eyes and has done a magnificent job to get where she has, but greatness is a strong word to use, it is hall of fame sort of stuff. She needs to know, if she wants to reach her goals, that she has to keep working bloody hard to get there.”
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Listening to Simon speak about his children’s ambitions, it’s easy to see the truth behind the running joke in Wudinna: that Hannah and Harry get their strong will and determination from their father, but not so much their abundant natural talent, which is often bantered to stem from their mother Karen’s side of the family.
Simon was a solid footballer in his own right, playing more than 200 games for Wudinna’s A grade across a career that included two flags and stints as captain and vice-captain. But the quips are nevertheless well founded.
Karen’s father, Graham Sampson, won a record four Mail Medals as a country footballer in the 1970s and was later named captain of the Le Hunte league’s all-time greatest team, with him starting in centre.
Then there’s Karen, considered one of the finest Eyre Peninsula netballers of modern times. Across an 18-year playing career with Wudinna United’s A grade, she won an unsurpassed nine club and three association best and fairest awards, as well as 13 premiership titles. The final two were won alongside her then early teenage daughter, Hannah.
“It was awesome to play with Mum and to this day being on the same court with her is still one of my favourite netball memories ever,” Hannah recalls.
“To win a couple of grand finals together, that really topped it off.”
Aside from that, all members of the family agree it took an immeasurable amount of parental dedication for two of their children to reach the heights of professional sport, having grown up six hours from the sporting infrastructure of Adelaide.
Before Hannah was awarded a sporting scholarship to complete her final two years of schooling at Immanuel College in Adelaide, she and her parents lived their weekends in one of two places: on the road or on the netball court.
At the time, a standard weekend for Hannah would begin with local Eyre Peninsula matches on Saturday, followed by a six-hour drive to Adelaide for representative netball on Sunday, and then 550km back to Wudinna that night, ready for 8.45am class at school Monday morning.
“I was very lucky. Mum and Dad said if I wanted to play netball in Adelaide, they were more than happy to drive me to the city every weekend, but only if I understood that I wasn’t the only one making sacrifices, that it was everyone else as well. I think that was a massive lesson in becoming the person I am today,” she said.
“It wasn’t the easiest pathway but it’s one I’m very proud of and hopefully I’m able to inspire young girls and boys to chase their dreams from the country. You don’t have to live in the city to make the big time.”
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John Cain Arena, Melbourne. Twilight has fallen on what has been a turbulent 2023 Super Netball grand final. It’s the dying stages of the last quarter. The Thunderbirds trail the NSW Swifts by a single goal. The stands are heaving.
Simon and Karen are amid the rampant crowd, of course. Along with close to 50 of Hannah’s Eyre Peninsula family and friends.
Just seconds remain when Hannah – with the premiership in the balance and in the face of the Swifts surging momentum – steals the netball against the run of play.
The Thunderbirds take the intercept and go end-to-end, shooting the equalising goal. This final will be going into extra time. The arena is frenzied.
Courtside, esteemed commentator Cath Cox sums up the gravity of Hannah’s intercept.
“Oh Hannah Petty! The captain. What an intercept. And what a time to do it.”
At the extra-time huddle, captain Hannah addresses her troops.
“This is our opportunity, we’re all about making memories, yeah? Well, this is a pretty good day to make a pretty good memory. Let’s go.”
And go they do. The Thunderbirds get up 60-59 at the final whistle.
Hannah, the skipper, finishes in centre. Soon, she’s up on the awards podium – like Harry two years earlier – sharing with teammates in one of Australian sports most coveted trophies.
Only this time, she is the one lifting the silverware – as a premiership captain.
The queen of the Petty household is back where she belongs – at the helm and with sibling bragging rights.
For now.
– A version of this story was first published in SA Weekend magazine as ‘Eyre Force’.
