JE Hands Memorial Park, more commonly known as Hands Oval, is a stadium in South Bunbury, Western Australia. The ground is mainly used for

Australian rules football Australian football, also called Australian rules football or Aussie rules, or more simply football or footy, is a contact sport played between two teams of 18 players on an Australian rules football playing field, oval field, often a modified ...

matches, but has also hosted

cricket Cricket is a Bat-and-ball games, bat-and-ball game played between two Sports team, teams of eleven players on a cricket field, field, at the centre of which is a cricket pitch, pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two Bail (cr ...

and

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 Football player, players who almost exclusively use their feet to propel a Ball (association football), ball around a rectangular f ...

Uses

Australian rules football

The oval has been the home ground of South Bunbury Football Club and in the South West Football League since the early 1950s. Hands Oval has also hosted five

West Australian Football League The West Australian Football League (WAFL "waffle" or "W-A-F-L") is an Australian rules football league based in Perth, Western Australia. The league currently consists of ten teams, which play each other in a 20-round season usually lasting f ...

matches, with the first being held on 1 April 1984 with East Perth defeating Swan Districts by 14 points. The record attendance for the ground was set during this match, with 6573 spectators attending the game. The ground is home to the South West Football League headquarters and hosts its grand final each year, with 4,075 spectators attending the 2024 grand final. The ground also hosted two Fremantle Dockers pre-season NAB Challenge in

2009 2009 was designated as the International Year of Astronomy by the United Nations to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's first known astronomical studies with a telescope and the publication of Astronomia Nova by Joha ...

and

2011 The year marked the start of a Arab Spring, series of protests and revolutions throughout the Arab world advocating for democracy, reform, and economic recovery, later leading to the depositions of world leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen ...

: Hands Oval hosted a pre-season match between the West Coast Eagles and

North Melbourne Football Club The North Melbourne Football Club, nicknamed the Kangaroos or colloquially the Roos, is a professional Australian rules football club. The men's team competes in the Australian Football League (AFL), and the women's team in the AFL Women's (AF ...

on 1 March 2025, with a crowd of 7,032. On 8 June 2025, the ground hosted its first AFL match for premiership points, with defeating by ten points, in front of a record crowd of 12,715. This was the first game in a three-year deal for North Melbourne to play two home matches in Western Australia, with the other match played at Optus Stadium.

Cricket

Hands Oval has hosted three

List A List A cricket is a classification of the Limited overs cricket, limited-overs (one-day) form of the sport of cricket, with games lasting up to eight hours. List A cricket includes One Day International (ODI) matches and various domestic competit ...

cricket matches with the Western Warriors as the home team:

Soccer

Hands Oval hosted an

A-League A-League Men, also known as the Isuzu UTE A-League for sponsorship reasons, is a professional soccer league in Australia and New Zealand and the highest level of the Australian soccer league system. Established in 2004 as the A-League by the ...

pre-season match between Perth Glory and Gold Coast United at the beginning of the 2009–10 season, with Gold Coast defeating Perth 1–0. A crowd of 2985 people attended the match: The ground will host the Australia women's national soccer team in a friendly v

Panama Panama, officially the Republic of Panama, is a country in Latin America at the southern end of Central America, bordering South America. It is bordered by Costa Rica to the west, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north, and ...

on July 5, 2025.

Redevelopment

Between 2022 and 2024, the stadium underwent a $17.5 million redevelopment. It received a brand new grandstand and new changerooms, as well as coaches boxes and a media centre.

References

{{AFL grounds West Australian Football League grounds Multi-purpose stadiums in Australia Sport in Bunbury, Western Australia Sports venues in Western Australia Cricket grounds in Western Australia Sports venues completed in 1954 1954 establishments in Australia