Hockey is a family sport in the Queensland (Australia) hinterland and the history of this family proves it.
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May 31, 2001 
Keith Dickinson
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Ipswich in Queensland (Aust) is about 35miles south of the state capital, Brisbane.
In 1929 a young Gordon Newell and a group of like minded friends formed the Ipswich Mens Hockey Association and worked to establish hockey in the town.
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It may be that with three children and a wife at home that hockey became his sanctuary from the pressures of family life. Gordon’s father in law, George Baines unimpressed with his daughters exclusion from the sport formed the Ipswich Womens Hockey Association in 1930. The next several years saw Gordon and his goalkeeper wife Grace (known as Kiddee), Grace’s sister Gwynnie and the three Newell children enjoying their family interest.
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The rift in the young Newell household could not have been permanent as another child was born. Gordon retired from competition and with Norm Watson (Australian Goalkeeper) wrote the constitution for the Ipswich Hockey Association. Later he became the first life member of the Association and the entrance gates to the grounds were named after him. The three elder children of the Newell’s played, Gracie (Goalkeeper), Mickey (Halfback), and Jim (Fullback). Gracie married a Railway Worker and retired from Hockey. Mickey, after serving in Japan with the Australian Army returned with his apanese wife (just after WWII) to play for the Queensland Colts (under 21’s) in 1947.
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Jim Newell had become an apprentice foundryman with Queensland Government Railways. While playing as a fullback, he had his eye on a young female apprentice tailor who was also a fullback with one of the womens teams. June Baxter had better things on her agenda than associating with a rebel like young Jimmy Newell. After their marriage in 1949 they began a family that ended up numbering three misses and in 1958 they moved to Dalby, about 200 miles inland from Brisbane.
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Hockey was not played in Dalby. By 1965, with the children rapidly reaching playing age, Jimmy and June Newell and others established the Dalby Hockey Association. The family moved from Dalby to Bundaberg in 1969 and Mr. & Mrs. Newell’s youngest daughter Margaret took to the field. By the following year Margaret had settled into goalkeeping and was carving a niche for herself. Coincidently a young Lacrosse goalkeeper named Keith Dickinson moved from Adelaide to Darwin in 1970 and switched to hockey.
By 1990 the divorced Margaret Newell four children) and the divorced Keith Dickinson (three children) were thinking of emulating the “Brady Bunch”. Keith was working as a ranger at a sanctuary for endangered exotic wildlife in the Northern Territory. The marriage vows were eventually taken in the rhino enclosure of the sanctuary with over 100 people and two white rhinos looking on (that is a story in itself).
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Keith and Margaret plus five of their children play hockey and boast six goalkeepers and one lonely field player. The twice weekly commute to Darwin (120 miles away) for training and for games was a major logistic exercise that underlined for the children the need for commitment and organization.
Moving to Bundaberg in 1996 saw the tribe (how they refer to themselves) take Bundaberg Hockey by storm with all of the family gaining representative honours in their first year. Both Keith and Corina (number one daughter) have taken that one step further with representing Queensland and the Northern Territory at a national level.
The dynasty continues with the eldest of Keith and Margaret’s six grandchildren beginning to play junior hockey in 2000.
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