The flipside to Jeremy Cameron's fame and fortune are the simple riches he left behind. His grandfather "Boots" (Denis if you must) doesn't hesitate when asked what he'd be missing. "I'll take you down 'The Hut'."
Head away from Dartmoor and take a right, and soon the bitumen narrows before the tyres crunch on gravel. Through a gate into a paddock, another gate, then another, across the rise with the cows your only company. Down among the river gums, on a bend in the Glenelg, there's an old portable. "The Hut".
At 22, Jeremy Cameron could have pretty much anything he wants, yet here is all he needs. Fishing rods and a generator in a shed, a "tinny" to get you out on the water, camp stretchers inside and out for when the cousins are nodding off from telling too many tales. Coals under a hotplate where the day's catch is cooked, a gas stove, a fridge. "To keep the butter cold," Boots says with a grin. "Nothin' worse than warm butter."
There's been some decent tides of late, which means good fishing. Mullaway, perch, bream, mullet, redfin, eel. And if they're not biting, who cares? "It's not so much catchin' the fish, it's just sittin' there, time out," Boots says. "Three or four days down here, you're a million dollars."
It's an apt number to pluck out of the fresh air. In March, Cameron signed a five-year contract extension with GWS that puts him in the seven-figures-a-season stratosphere of the AFL's highest earners. Boots reckons it's not really football, more of a job. "It's not what he had here - fishin' and shootin', havin' a bit of fun."
Yet like all around this sleepy place in Victoria's far west he's hugely proud of a young man who's "mapped the town a bit". Nothing will change him, Boots reckons, and he'll work as hard for the Giants as the generations of his family have toiled in timber mills and pine plantations. "He knows that's his commitment, so that's what he'll do."
He's unwittingly done much for Dartmoor. The local footballers and netballers are no longer the Swans, turning out each weekend in Giants colours and marking the change in style by winning the premiership last September with Cameron cheering over the fence.
The first duty each Monday morning at his old primary school is updating the Jeremy Cameron goal tally board, which shows passers-by how the local boy is tracking towards a second Coleman Medal. "It's just good for the kids to say, 'He was out here kicking the footy around', " says principal Hayden Milich, who keeps an eye out for the next Jeremy Cameron from his office window.
Milich has seen negative talk in small rural communities rub off on children, and knows the power of a positive role model can't be measured in scoreboard numbers. To have someone who drops in when he's home, sits in the classroom and talks to the kids, is a priceless teaching tool. "To say to them, 'You've got every opportunity in this environment, anything's possible', Jeremy's story shows them that."
Of course, showcasing that seemingly effortless lead-out, get-ball, turn-around, kick-goal routine against all comers can test a local's allegiance. Across the road at the shop, Daryl Heuzenroeder sells Boots his morning paper beneath an orange montage celebrating Dartmoor's favourite son.
When Cameron kicked seven to sink Heuzenroeder's Hawks a few weeks back, his son Facebooked Jeremy and wrote, "Well done, but I think Dad's gunna take the posters down!"
Travellers look at the walls and ask, "So you barrack for the Giants?"
"Well no," Heuzenroeder replies. "But he's ours."
Such devotion might even help the hip pocket. Down at the pub, Tex and Lorraine Lipscombe's footy crowd swells when the Giants are playing, and Tex confirms quite a few have a stake in his fortunes. Boots says he did better than the $9 pre-season mark for GWS to make the finals. "I got a bit better than $14 for the Coleman, too."
Tex barracks for Collingwood, and was there when Cameron kicked the first five and seven for the night against his Pies in 2013. "I went down on the fence at the end to say g'day to him, and could hear all these people yelling out. I looked around and it was like the whole of Dartmoor was there."
The footy club is taking a bus to the round-14 Magpies game at the MCG - "might even be two, there's that many going," says Tex. It's a long haul, but one Cameron's parents Kelly and Leon have become very used to.
When Fairfax Media visited the Camerons in Dartmoor five years ago this week, when Jeremy was a 17-year-old about to be taken as a GWS priority selection, his parents had never been to an AFL game. Now they go every second week, driving to Avalon or Tullamarine to fly north, or staying with Kelly's nephew in Hoppers Crossing for Melbourne games. "We still don't like driving in Melbourne."
They've moved across the South Australian border to Mt Gambier to spare Leon an hour's drive to and from the mill each day. Kelly works in a greengrocer, and they both spend the off-season doing extra weekend hours so that come winter their Saturdays are free. "I work a lot through summer time, sacrifice the fishin'," Leon says. "That frees me up to run around with the football."
They still spend time in Dartmoor, where daughter Talitha plays netball on weekends. Jeremy's younger brother Travis has been driving bulldozers in the bush outside their old home town.
Kelly says their son's success hasn't changed their lives, they're simply following him as they did when he played TAC Cup for North Ballarat - albeit doing a few more miles. Leon is more forthcoming. "It's more exciting I reckon." Sometimes being there when his son kicks a goal moves him to tears.
Leon didn't play much footy, but reckons he accounts for his son's straight-ahead approach (which landed him in strife against Adelaide last weekend). "He probably takes after me in throwing his weight around a bit, just standing up to people if you had to. If they got in your way you'd soon tell `em."
Kevin Sheedy used to say if you couldn't find Jeremy just look out on the water. He lives beside the Parramatta River with Devon Smith, who has a boat; Kelly reckons it's just like home, "only he's fishing under the Sydney Harbour Bridge". Indulging the passions of his upbringing requires a certain resourcefulness; in middle of the week before the Hawthorn game, he and Ryan Griffen went camping.
His world has broadened, and the demands on his time are such that visits home have become shorter. "We knew that'd happen," says Kelly. He has a girlfriend, a Sydney schoolteacher who, like several teammates, has visited Dartmoor and Mt Gambier. "It's good for them to come and see how far away we live."
His manager Alex McDonald is looking after investments, but Cameron isn't the type to lose his head in a lavish lifestyle. A new 4x4 ute sits in his parents' backyard for when he's home, and Kelly was rapt with the overnight bag she got for Mother's Day and "some perfume I'd never buy for Christmas". He's set up for life, but still living it simply.
Everyone asks about him; Leon reckons he gets told how his son is going as soon as he walks in the door at work. Kelly relays a recent conversation with a teenaged supermarket worker at the checkout:
"How was your weekend?"
"Good."
"Did you do anything?"
"Went to Melbourne."
"What'd you go there for?"
"The footy."
"Who do you follow?
"The Giants."
"You're not from Dartmoor, are you?"
"We were. We're his parents."
The surreal bit of having a famous footballing son strikes them now and then. Last Christmas they were driving through Warrnambool in a convoy of cars when Kelly and Travis' girlfriend spotted Jonathan Brown. "We got so excited, 'Look, there's Jonathan Brown!'
"And then we realise Jeremy's with us, and he's a footy player too."
Boots misses him, says it's hard to get hold of his grandson on the phone and you don't really want to ring in case he's in a meeting. It's a life far removed from the one they shared, but one Boots knows he'll attack the same as if he'd followed the generations of Camerons into the mill. "Long hours, put in, have a crack. You wanna turn the clock down a bit sometimes."
Leon says all they can do is support him – and they love doing it. Kelly admits their son's world is beyond their wildest dreams. "We had no idea he'd be doing this."
