The hardest heart could understand,

Just to feel your wilderness,

Your silence sings to me.

That song, by Shane Howard, is one of my favourite pieces of Tasmanian art. Another is the Tasmanian football guernsey.

The guernsey's colours - originally listed as myrtle, magenta and primrose - are now described as green, yellow and maroon. Green as a Smithton paddock after rain. I was at Burnie's West Park when the Smithton Saints won their first premiership. On the front of the dark green guernsey, a yellow map of Tassie - a rich yellow like the late afternoon sunlight I saw as a kid come the last quarter at Longford football ground. Longford, a small town of only two or three thousand, were state premiers in 1957. They're still talking about it.

Inside the yellow map of Tassie, a vibrant red T, a colour like the waratahs I saw on the west coast when my family moved there when I was eight. The west coast had its own football competitions. On Wednesday night, at the Tasmanian Football Foundation event at Crown Casino, Brisbane Lions coach Chris Fagan spoke about the west coast club that his father coached - Gormanston, otherwise known as Gormy or the Mountain Men.

Triple Brownlow medallist Ian Stewart also hails from Gormanston, a town of a few hundred in the bare quartz hills above Queenstown. Stewart also spoke at the function, essentially to say Darrel Baldock was the best footballer he ever saw and, by inference, better than he was. After captaining St Kilda to their only premiership in 1966, Baldock returned to Tasmania and took Latrobe to four successive premierships.

Baldock began with East Devonport Football Club, as did Matthew "Richo" Richardson, the guest speaker at Wednesday's event. Richo was a Tasmanian kid who had the ambition of playing AFL football; he identified the people and circumstances that made it a realistic ambition.

A video with a soundtrack showed a series of Tasmanian footy grounds in all their abundant greenery, each one criss-crossed with stories that in many cases go back over 100 years. One of my favourite football stories from my mother's side of the family is about her dying uncle, a young man hardly 20, sending his brother to a grand final between Devonport and Ulverstone with two carrier pigeons, one to send home with the score at half-time, the other with the final result. This was in the years when Europe was building to the calamity of World War I.

My Dad's father only went to Hobart once in his life. That was to see the North West Football Union, led by Gallipoli veteran Ivor Warne-Smith - later to win two Brownlows with Melbourne - take on the Hobart-based Tasmanian Football League. My father, who lived to be nearly 100, said that when he was a boy Victorian football was just a brief report with the final scores in the local paper.

He saw his first games in a paddock 50 kilometres south of Launceston beside a railway siding called Cleveland. These were the years just after World War I. My grandfather, a railway worker, was president of the Cleveland Football Club, doubling as goal umpire. The Cleveland footy stories are all to do with getting a team, so many young men having been killed and maimed. Cleveland also had the memory of a champion, local lad George Challis, Carlton's best in the 1915 grand final, blown to smithereens on the Western Front the following year.

My Uncle Tom played with Cleveland and later with the City club in Launceston. City were then coached by Roy Cazaly of Up There, Cazaly fame. One day at Longford, Cazaly told Uncle Tom to drop the Longford ruckman at the first bounce. He did, the crowd jumped the fence and Uncle Tom took off across the paddocks in his playing gear.

The City club became City-South then South Launceston before being bumped into a minor league by AFL Tasmania. And so a club whose roots could be traced back to 1879 was replaced by a "franchise" that lasted a mere two years in the state-wide competition. This is by no means the only example of how football in Tasmania has suffered from the AFL's bureaucratic excesses.

The elephant in the room at Wednesday night's function was that Tasmania did not get a single player drafted in this year's national draft. Two years ago, John McCann, the president of one of Tasmania's biggest surviving clubs, Glenorchy, said the "footy ecology" in Tasmania was sick. Furthermore, it appeared that no one outside Tasmania cared.

Two weeks ago, Nick Riewoldt wrote that money was not the issue with Tasmania having its own AFL team. Clearly, he's right. The AFL subsidises other states. On Wednesday night, Chris Fagan made the case that, for Tasmania to recover its vitality as a foundation state of the Australian game, it needs its own AFL team. He argued from heritage and culture. Only the hardest heart could not understand that.