Redtails in the Sunset

PRE-ORDER for release on 22 September

Redtails in the Sunset follows the story of an Aussie rules football team from Central Australia fighting to enter the game’s final frontier and play in the Premier League in Darwin.

This book tells the gripping tale of a mighty four-year effort to take a rag-tag bunch of footy part-timers and community Countrymen head-to-head against their semi-professional city-cousin counterparts. Coming up against the ‘butterfly effect’ of a rising bloc of South Asian nations, a footy chief whose inbox was redlining, flight timetable changes and a Red Centre ‘jewel’ that sat so close yet so agonisingly far, local representative football has never been so thrilling.

Wadjarri-Tharrgari man and long-time sportswriter Darren Moncrieff brings together his journalistic skills, love for Australian rules football and keen eye for humour to tell the inspiring story of the Redtails. To this day, the Redtails legacy lives on through the Redtails Pinktails Right Tracks Foundation, which mentors and helps young people in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and remote communities gain employment and become community leaders. Now a Central Australian success story, this is where its story began.

Production Details

• paperback
  
• 230 mm x 152mm,
• 272 pp + cover
• Releases 22 September 2025
• ISBN 9780855752064
  

Content

Chapter 1: Something good must come of this
Chapter 2: They might be Giants
Chapter 3: Forks in the road
Chapter 4: Adapting to colonisation
Chapter 5: Building a blueprint
Chapter 6: ‘Show me the money!’
Chapter 7: Big Sky Country
Chapter 8: Football’s seismic shifts
Chapter 9: The ‘Code Wars’ – A condensed history
Chapter 10: Putting the hard word on Darwin
Chapter 11: Key personnel
Chapter 12: Redtails’ First 22
Chapter 13: Televising the Revolution
Chapter 14: A happy afterglow
Chapter 15: Scores on the board
Chapter 16: Show-cause just because
Chapter 17: Survey surprise
Chapter 18: Charting a new flight path
Chapter 19: Cricket schmicket
Chapter 20: Bloc of Nations
Chapter 21: Erasure
Chapter 22: The ‘Butterfly Effect’
Chapter 23: Top End — The Sequel
Chapter 24: Roll up! Roll up!
Chapter 25: These numbers don’t run
Chapter 26: Fingers pointing in all directions
Chapter 27: Credence
Chapter 28: Touching the Sun
Chapter 29: What impact did Right Tracks have?
Chapter 30: Regrets? There’s been a few
Chapter 31: When those stars align
Appendixes with scoreboards, goal kicking ladder boards and more.

About the author

Darren Moncrieff is a Wadjarri-Tharrgari man and a long-time sportswriter from Western Australia. He had a front-row seat to the Redtails phenomenon as the sportswriter for the National Indigenous Times covering the Northern Territory, and as an Aussie rules player, in the NTFL in Darwin at the same time as the Redtails’ presence in the Top End.

A lifelong footy fan, Darren has played Aussie rules football for almost 40 years, reluctantly hanging up his boots only a few years ago. He has written about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues and extensively on Indigenous sport since the late 1990s.

Darren has held the roles of sports editor and sports reporter for Koori Mail, Torres News and Yamaji News. This is his first book

About the cover

Cover design by Upside Creative. Cover photo: Redtails players (from left) Jayden Prior, Tyson Carmody, Caleb Hart, Reggie Smith and Bradley Turner jubilant after defeating Darwin powerhouse club St Mary’s by four-points in their NTFL Premier League debut match at Traeger Park in Mparntwe/Alice Springs. (Photo: Justin Brierty / Centralian Advocate, Tuesday 9 October 2012)