Bette Little proudly sporting the Carlton team photograph of 1932 featuring her father Eric Little.

Bette Little’s recent pilgrimage to IKON Park was an act of impulse, born of an urgent need to connect the dots of a scattered past. Inside the frame was a moment frozen in time by the photographer Charles Boyles: members of a between-the-wars Carlton team posing for posterity in the shadows of the long-demolished Robert Heatley Stand.

Among those broad-shouldered men of the 1930s was Eric Little, Bette’s father. He had run out in the dark Navy Blue twenty-five times starting in 1931. To everyone else, he was a former VFL footballer who later captained and coached Kyneton to its first Premiership pennant in the then Bendigo League.

Bette Little by the heritage flipboxes, one carrying her father's name.

To Bette, he was an unknown.

Bette had been born in Kyneton in 1937, the year after her father, a Bendigo-born wood machinist, had taken the local football team to the Promised Land. Not long after, Eric and his wife May resolved to return with their infant daughter to Melbourne, and they found lodgings in a two-storey Carlton terrace by the cobblestones on Drummond Street.

But as was the case with so many,  the looming shadow of World War II fractured their lives after Eric, a wood machinist by profession, enlisted for service in 1938.

Eric Little at the time of his wartime enlistment.

Eric was duly relocated to Darwin, where, for the next 18 months, he served as an aircraft hand with the 6th Battalion. The Lance Corporal returned to Carlton to be with family for a brief period, but following the birth of Bette’s younger sister Carol, he joined the RAAF’s No.1 Discharge Squadron and was gone for good.

“My late sister Carol was born in 1942, but as young girls we didn’t know Eric,” Bette said, her voice softening with the weight of an old memory.

“I can remember telling a teacher at school that I didn’t have a Dad and the teacher telling me ‘Yes you do’, so I went home and asked Mum if I had a Dad. She said to me ‘Yes you do,’ and I said ‘Well where has he gone?’.”

Eric Little, as identified by Bette.

In his absence, May raised her two girls alone through the bleak and rationing-filled years of the war. It was a tough, lean existence in Drummond Street, but May ensured it was a home defined by warmth.

“It was tough in those days for Mum to bring up two young people through the war,” Bette, now 89, reflected. “As desperate as it was there was always food on the table, and Carol and I were well looked after. We had a wonderful relationship.”

From Betty’s scrapbook - Eric Little receiving treatment from the Carlton masseur Vic Leveson.

The Carlton territory itself became Bette’s anchor. Her mother was a local Carlton girl, the suburb’s many and varied ratepayers were all bound by Blue, and at Rathdowne Street State School, where Bette and Carol carried their books, every child’s heartbeat for the local club.

On Saturday afternoons, Princes Park became Bette’s playground. She and her closest girlfriend would wait outside the ground, ears tuned to the roar of the crowd inside, waiting for the gates to creak open.

“We used to sneak in at half time for free,” Bette recalled with a mischievous smile. “My earliest memories of Carlton are of the players -  ‘Chooka’ Howell and Ken Hands, just as Patrick Cripps is now.”

Though she spent the greater part of her latter years in St Kilda, Bette’s blood remained strictly Navy Blue. Her loyalty was an inheritance - a bridge to the father she only ever knew from a distance. As she grew older, hers and Eric’s paths invariably crossed - not at a football ground, but on the polished parquetry of venues like the Melbourne Town Hall where they both competed as ballroom dancers.

Perhaps it was on those same floors that her mother and father had once met.

Bette's mother May Little is the woman second from the right sporting the dark-coloured beret, matchday, Princes Park, time unknown.

Bette shared a rhythm and a quick wit with Eric through a mutual acquaintance in dance instructor Mickey Powell, but the gap between father and daughter never truly closed - and Bette remembered the sharp reality of their distance as she readied for her wedding.

As she said: “When I was getting married, I remember him ringing Mum and saying, ‘I’ll give her away’, to which Mum replied, ‘You gave her away years ago’”.

As she stood inside the modern walls of IKON Park, holding the enlarged team photograph like a shield against the passage of time, Bette reflected on what prompted her sentimental journey back.

“I came here today because I have this team photograph, which is pretty much all I have of Eric other than an old cigarette card,” Bette explained. “I’d arranged to have the team photograph blown up and just wanted to know a little bit more about the players photographed with Eric and the year that they played.”

For the record, the Carlton team in which Eric is featured took to the field for the Round 7 match with St Kilda, on the afternoon of Saturday, June 18, 1932. Eric lined up in the centre for that one, and the legendary full-forward Harry ‘Soapy’ Vallence booted eight in the Blues’ 64-point rout of the Saints.

In a serendipitous moment by Cafe 1864, Bette caught glimpse of Carlton Captain Patrick Cripps, this club’s modern-day titan who took an immediate and reverent interest in Bette’s story and the old team photograph she carried.

A chance meeting – Betty Little and Carlton Captain Patrick Cripps.

The chance meeting profoundly validated Bette’s lifetime love of her football club from the grand old days - and as with her father’s 1932 team photo she left with the 2026 Cripps version close to her heart.

“I think that’s what I treasure,” said Bette of her true Blue allegiance, “that Eric played for Carlton and Carlton is the team I love with all my heart.

“The club means everything to me.”