The AFL legend stumbled across a dinner held to raise funds for a rugby league front-rower who had broken his neck in a scrum. Palmer, the MC, invited Whitten to the stage, but the former Footscray champion made some disparaging remarks about the 13-a-side game. He was soon joined by an irate leaguie and Palmer, in attempting to separate them, jobbed Whitten.

"As Whitten staggered to his feet, grasping for the microphone to have another crack at the game, a wild, bearded, rotund Irish school teacher emerged from the crowd and knocked Whitten out," Palmer recalled. "The racing writer told me that if Melbourne people could be guaranteed Whitten would get knocked out the following year, he'd get two planeloads to the next Darwin Cup."

Eighty per cent of Darwin's 120,000 people are "blow-ins", meaning some reputations are shrouded in myth. One player claimed to have forced John Gray, the dual Great Britain international, from hooker to prop while playing for Leigh University.

Gray, the story goes, claimed the team needed a runner and recruited a Wigan player with the strict instruction he should say, if asked, that he was studying mathematics.

The wide-running player subsequently scored a brace of tries off Gray's deft passes but blew his cover when a uni official asked him what he was studying. "Sooms," he said in his broad Lancashire brogue.

Asked to validate the story, Gray said he could only be certain that Leigh doesn't have a university. "It wouldn't even have a polytech," he said of the Greater Manchester suburb. "Perhaps he means Leeds."

Another north England import living in Darwin is nicknamed "Bozo" because he claims to be Bob Fulton's cousin. He is also a referee, which undermines the family connection insofar as anyone with our Bozo's DNA wouldn't associate with a whistle.

The Darwin Bozo was mentioned in a eulogy Palmer delivered last month after the death of Richardson Park groundsman Warren John Mount, known as "Shadow".

Referees are essentially blametakers, and Shadow accused Bozo of everything that was wrong with Richardson Park.

As Palmer said in his eulogy: "I asked Shadow about cigarette burns in the carpet of the leagues club. I asked him about the fan blades on the air-conditioning condenser units being bent through by being hit with the fire hose and invariably came the response - 'bloody Bozo'."

Shadow also had a vague past. "He was an intensely private person," Palmer told a massive congregation at the funeral. "He just would not discuss his personal circumstances, and any attempt to do so was met with a grunt and immediate change of subject."

Shadow arrived at Richardson Park in an old Land Rover in the late 1970s and gradually assumed the role of groundsman. "The ground got watered and marked, the place got cleaned, the bar got stocked and so much was taken for granted knowing that 'Shad' would just do it," Palmer said in his eulogy.

Shadow lost his driver's licence but made nightly visits to the pub on a ride-on mower, trimming the roadside verges. "The local residents must have thought the council was doing a great job and the police must have sympathised with this poor man having to work so long into the night."

Shadow died when three young Darwin men broke into Richardson Park at 3am in search of alcohol. As Palmer said: "I last saw Shadow a pulped, bloody and beaten mess in the back of an ambulance."

Darwin is still grieving his murder, and the city's Aboriginal population lined the road as the hearse carrying Shadow's body moved to his final resting place.