Where is Buddy Franklin now? 

By Caroline Overington

 

Nobody is ever going to look at Lance “Buddy” Franklin and say: “Oh wow, he’s so tiny.” Still, to see him these days is to do a bit of a double-take.

How much has he lost?

“I played at 108 kilograms,” he says, cheerfully. “I’m under 100 now. So, yep, I’m shrinking.”

Shrinking but also expanding. Something similar happened to Tony Lockett, remember? The first thing to go when a player gives up football is the bulk. Next to come off is the stress. Buddy has a new life as a gentleman ­farmer, nappy-changer and beekeeper alongside his wife, Jesinta, and their three children under six, all of whom have moved onto a property on the banks of Coomera River in southeast Queensland.

The closest town has just 800 people. The closest shop is a timber market stall selling ­avocados at 29 cents apiece.

It’s a much quieter life than the one they left behind, where crowds bayed and surged in Buddy’s presence (and melted at his bride’s beauty, too). And it suits them, this new life.

“I loved playing football, I’ll never say I didn’t,” Buddy says. “But this … this is better for me.”

We are gathered in the kitchen of the house they’re about to bulldoze to make way for a ranch-style property, where their kids will grow up. Jesinta is at the stove, searing a side of beef sourced from an organic farmer. Two of the children – Tallulah, six, and Rocky, five – are with their grandparents, and I’m getting a cuddle of the baby, Bam.

“He’s so chill,” Jesinta says.

They all are.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Their move here from Sydney marks a ­return, in a way, to the life they both knew as children: Buddy grew up in a small settlement in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt named Ejanding, where, according to Google, there’s a “grain bin, a railway siding and a go-kart track”. The nearest town isn’t much bigger: it’s called Dowerin, and that’s where Buddy went to primary school with eight other kids. His Mum, Ursula, a Whadjuk-Noongar woman with a strong connection to country, and his Dad, Lance Snr (that’s how he got Buddy, so they wouldn’t get confused) let him move to Perth to board on a sports scholarship at ­Wesley College when he was 15. It was probably the first time he’d ever been in a room with more than 20 people.

Then he was drafted, by Hawthorn, straight out of Year 12.

“I straight away wanted to move back,” he says. “They ended up bringing my parents across to support me, because I was pretty ­immature, even as an 18-year-old. I was a kid going into the spotlight and I had trouble ­adjusting to that ... but once my parents came, it was good.”

Jesinta’s story isn’t dissimilar: she grew up in Clagiraba in the Gold Coast hinterland, where the population at the last Census was 601. She attended Silkwood, a creative community school founded by her Mum.

“She wasn’t a teacher,” Jesinta says, turning the beef with an expert hand. “She was in hotel management. She’d never been to university, none of that stuff. But when it came time for my sister and I to go to school, she looked around and thought, ‘OK, I will start my own.’ It was just me on the first day, and then one other ­student, and then we were drawing families from the area, until there were five students, then 15, then 20.”

Jesinta was always – and still is – a beautiful girl, and it was no surprise to her proud parents when she entered and was crowned Miss Universe Australia in 2010. Two years later, when she was still only 20, she met Buddy.

Champion footballer chats up gorgeous model in smoky night club, maybe?

They couldn’t be further from the caricature.

On their first date, he ordered green tea, and she did the same, and he decided, pretty much on the spot, that he wanted to marry her.

She was smitten, too.

It should go from there like a fairytale, but in fact there was an early speed bump. Buddy moved from Hawthorn in 2013 to take up a ­rumoured $10 million, 10-year contract with the Sydney Swans. A short time later, he had to take indefinite leave to treat mental health ­issues, including depression. His decision saw him miss the entire 2015 final season.

Jesinta was advised to shrug him off, but she was having none of it, bringing calm, kindness and an unusual maturity to the problem.

“I have fallen more in love with him through this process,” she said at the time. “He has stood up, he’s been a man, owned his feelings and his emotions and he’s said, ‘I’m not OK. And sometimes it’s OK to not be OK.”

Buddy does not often speak about his ­difficulties, but offers this: “Jesinta obviously loves deep conversations, which I’m not absolutely amazing with. I think her loving nature, and family orientation … I thought, ‘Better get hold of her, quickly’.”

They married in 2016, in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. The paparazzi were taken by surprise; none of their supportive guests had breathed a word. Three years in, she began trying to get pregnant. Tallulah was conceived via IVF. Rocky arrived just 13 months later. Buddy had long since returned to the field, dazzling opponents with his aggressive footwork and brutal ­confidence. On March 25, 2022, he became only the sixth player in VFL/AFL history to kick 1000 career goals, reaching the milestone before a delirious home crowd at the SCG.

And then, a little over a year later, he retired.

And then came the question: What next?

He didn’t really know. One thing Jesintaknew for sure, though: she wanted a free-range childhood for their kids. So they sold up in ­Sydney and moved to their “little pocket” in the hills above the Gold Coast, an area she knows well. Her parents live just eight minutes away.

“We wanted to give the kids what we had,” she says. “Running around, climbing trees. We’re not completely free-range. I do think you have to manage the risk, but the five and six year olds are very independent. They even make their own breakfast.”

She doesn’t mean Weetbix in a bowl. “They get out the cast-iron frypan and crack the eggs,” she says. “I said to them, if you touch the pan you’ll get burnt. And they only touched it once.”

Jesinta says she encouraged Buddy to “take a year” before he decided what he wanted to do with himself, “because I think you really need a year to come to terms with not playing anymore.” Buddy agrees, saying: “So many players leave the game with nothing and no idea what to do. There have been some pretty sad stories about ex-players not coping.”

It’s not just the money that former players tend to miss: it’s the camaraderie, the purpose, the sense of being part of something bigger than themselves.

“Sydney helps the guys transition [to retirement] really well, and I think Hawthorn does it well,” he says. “But even for me, the transition, initially, was difficult. I think when you do something for so long, and then all of a sudden it’s gone, it takes a while to feel comfortable.”

Jesinta saw an opportunity to focus on her career, and asked her husband: “Do you want to be the stay-at-home Dad for a while?”

He immediately agreed, committing himself to all the things you’d expect the stay-home parent to do: finding gumboots, removing splinters, putting Band-aids on scraped knees.

Did he love it?

“I’ve loved it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved playing footy, but I’ve seen the older kids grow up spending nearly every day with them, ” he says.

And Bam? He’s the bonus baby – proof-positive of the couple’s happiness, probably – who arrived last December.

“Yep, I do the nappies, I do everything,” Buddy says.

The Franklins’ property is near an Indigenous community and heritage zone, meaning they can raise the children with knowledge of their Indigenous ancestry.

“I don’t have the lived experience that Bud has, so I am guided by him,” says Jesinta. She admits to a “little knot of anxiety” in her tummy when she thinks about the kids encountering racism for the first time, “because I know it’s not if, but when it will happen. But my job is to instil pride in the kids, knowing where they came from. I want them to be resilient, and to know that whatever anyone who is prejudiced might say, it can’t touch their spirit”.

To keep his fitness up, Buddy started running. He’s done the New York marathon and has others in mind. They bought into a business, Honey for Life, and signed up for various brand ambassadorships, including one with health and life insurer AIA Insurance, where they “represent the company’s wellness goals, living naturally, close to nature, making healthy life choices”.

So, like Hannah Neeleman, her hog-farming husband and their nine children on Ballerina Farm, maybe? (If you don’t know what I’m ­talking about, go immediately to Instagram).

“Not exactly like that,” says Jesinta, a little nervously (I mean, nine kids? It would be awesome, right? But maybe also exhausting.) “But the health and wellness is something we can model – eating good food, getting exercise, being outdoors.”

One of the first things the company organised was a trip for Buddy back to his hometown, to play a game of football. If that sounds pretty low-key, you should have seen the crowd. Only 357 people live in the town of Dowerin, yet ten times that number – 3500 happy souls – backed their cars up to the fence and cracked open their camp chairs, ready to watch him play. Kids lined up for an hour ­hoping to toss the ball to him while he had a practice kick.

It was Buddy’s first game since retiring from the AFL, and there’s no doubt that he helped the Dowerin Tigers secure the 33-point win over the Gingin Eagles. But his proudest achievement was helping raise over $200,000 for new club lights (AIA Insurance kicked in quite a bit of that.) Dowerin reserves coach Sloan King told the local paper: “Everyone who came is going to remember the day forever.”

Back at home, Buddy and Jesinta aren’t ­celebrities. They live a quiet life, which suits Buddy in particular, because “I never minded having photos with young kids, but sometimes with adults it can be overwhelming. You learn to go with it, and you mature with it too. Like, when I was younger, I used to really struggle with how people wanted to rush up to you.”

OK, so, confession time. I’m a mad Swans fan, and I live in Sydney, yet I am not one of the tens of thousands of people who stormed the ground when Buddy kicked his 1000th goal.

Why not?

Because, going into the game, he needed four goals, and it had been a while since he’d kicked four. I thought it would take another week, and I was wrong.

Buddy says the Swans management had ­discussed the possibility that he would reach the milestone on that particular day, and there were plans to get his teammates around him, to protect him from anyone who maybe tried to sneak onto the field.

Sneak onto the field? Are you kidding? It was pandemonium. The celebrations started before Buddy had even pulled his foot back. Watch the footage: you can see fans creeping up behind him, quiet as cats, as he lines up the ball. And when it sailed through the posts, ­delirium took hold. Essentially the entire ­stadium emptied onto the field.

Was he alarmed?

“It was OK,” he says, laughing.

“You were anxious beforehand,” says Jesinta.

“I was a bit,” he concedes.

Thinking back now, what does he remember of that precious moment? That it was thrilling. Of course it was. But here’s the thing: Buddy already knew, as the ball flew off his boot, that he was near the end of career. With 1000 goals behind him, how could it be otherwise? And, like everyone, he’d been through an enormous amount in the two years leading up to that game. Because it had been Covid, and Jesinta had been pregnant during the pandemic, not once, but twice. She had also been forced into quarantine, not once, but twice. Buddy’s grandmother had turned 100 without the big party they had planned. And Buddy had not been alone in any of this. All Australia was straining at the leash, ready for new horizons, and Buddy was ready too. So when he kicked that goal he was kicking it for the country, and when those fans surged toward him, hearts on fire, you can be sure that he was surging too.

​

​

First published in The Weekend Australian Magazine 06 June 2026