Interactive Feature / Kick in Hope - ABC

‘Kick in Hope’ celebrates the emotional heart of community sport and offers textured, unique insights into a remote Australian community. In one of Australia's smallest football leagues, the strains of an increasingly bifurcated economy, caused by an emergent luxury tourism market, are revealed in something as simple as the lack of playing numbers on a Saturday. The story explains how the league’s preservation is particularly vital for the island’s children – in the process celebrating the emergence of young girls in the junior program (and young boys in its netball league). The article layout was not for mere visual flourish – the interplay of words and images instead used to transport readers into the cars of staunch old gatekeepers, or emphasise the island’s contradictions with competing images of luxury golf courses contrasted against trucks laden with kelp.