Marooned: A Memoir of Fandom, Fatherhood, and the Far Side of the World
Darren Groth
Hawkeye Publishing, 2026
Darren Groth’s memoir opens on a single, precarious morning: watching a State of Origin replay in a Vancouver townhouse with his elderly parents and brothers, uncertain whether it will be the last time he shares the ritual with his father, Des, who is living with incurable blood cancer. That moment becomes the hinge for a much longer story, one that ranges back across five decades of Groth’s life.
Structured as 37 chronological essays, the book traces Origin matches from the series’ inception in 1980 through more than forty years of fandom, moving from a hardscrabble backyard in the outback Queensland town of Hughenden to the unlikely, frostbitten rugby league landscape of British Columbia, where Groth has lived as an immigrant since becoming a Canadian citizen in 2012. Along the way, supporting the Maroons becomes the connective tissue for his relationships with his father and his autistic son, and a way of staying tethered to home despite the distance.
What elevates the book above a straightforward sports retrospective is this emotional throughline. Groth doesn’t simply recount matches; he uses each one as an occasion to circle back to family, migration, and identity, so the football becomes a vehicle rather than the point. That approach invites comparison to books like Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Helen Garner’s The Season, sports writing that uses a game as a lens on something larger, and the premise suggests Groth is reaching for that same territory, even for readers with no particular stake in the Maroons or NSW.
You don’t need to know a State of Origin scoreline to be pulled into this one. At its heart, it’s a book about fathers and sons, distance and belonging, and the strange, specific things we cling to when we’re far from home. Anyone who has ever felt homesick or watched a parent grow older from another country will find something to recognise here.
