That’s the same distance from Sydney to Bathurst and back.

He hands over his $7.50 bus fare and settles in for the long trip west on the Barrier Highway with no guarantee there will even be boots to bring back to Wilcannia, a town of 826 people.

“There’s no shop around here that sells footy boots,” says Whyman, an indigenous man who coaches Wilcannia’s junior footballers, the Boondies.

At a Monday afternoon training session, about half the children are not wearing football boots.

“Everybody thinks they run faster without boots,” says Rashaun Harris-Wilson, a die-hard Rabbitohs fan and team captain. “We play touch footy every recess and lunch and sometimes after school in the backyard, with no shoes on.”

In reality, football boots are something every child from Wilcannia wishes for.

Fairfax Media travelled to rural Australian locations to find out the impact football has on young, unprivileged kids, ahead of the “Boots For Kids” campaign run in partnership with Coles and Linfox. Readers can donate their children's boots, their own, or buy a pair and deposit the boots in bins located in Coles supermarkets across NSW and Victoria from Monday. They will be collected by Linfox and, after being cleaned up and paired with some socks, trucked to the communities in need.

An 11-hour drive west of Sydney, Wilcannia is a town beset by high crime rates and alcohol and drug problems. A river town, when wool was king it was an important port but people started leaving last century. Low wool prices and the occasional ‘‘race riot’’ did not help. But perhaps behind the boarded up, desolate town where indigenous males have a life expectancy of just 37, the love of football plays a pivotal role in holding Wilcannia together.

“Mate, we don’t know what we’d do without football,” says Dave Clark, who was part of the first Wilcannia Boomerangs team in the '60s. “Most of the kids camp with their footballs, you’ll hear them all hours of the night, the balls bouncing and the kids are laughing. The kids have done that all their life."

He’s not wrong. Driving through the streets at 11pm, the children from the afternoon training session are passing a football near a bus stop. It is four degrees.

Clark and Whyman personify hope in the town. They are sick to death of the stigma associated with Wilcannia, and now , it's their turn to tell a seriously good story.

"It's about everything in life," says Clark with a twinkle in his eyes. "If we can get these kids settled, into the game that they love and attend school and get a better education for themselves, they have an opportunity to find out their culture. That's all we want."

The pair spoke of rounding up youngsters early on Saturday mornings in the borrowed school bus, to take them to play the Broken Hill Young Guns or the Menindee Yabbies.

"They have a bit of fun on the bus and when we first started, they were little rascals, but we look after them," Clark says. "We make sure the kids get something to eat and drink. If they haven't got money, me and ''Horse'' and his missus take it out of our own pocket."

At the only football field within a 200 kilometre radius, a brief head count reveals more girls violently smashing tackling bags than boys. Fearlessly dropping her shoulder into a front rower is Dorothy Mills, who loves playing every day at school, even if it means getting into scuffles with anyone who wants to play soccer.

"Some of the girls are better than some of the boys on the other teams I tell you," says Wilcannia Central School principal Sandra Bailey. "I don't think the girls are trying to prove a point, but they're really good and they want people to see that."

Whyman works in partnership with the school to improve the school's poor attendance rate and holds the kids to ransom; if they muck up in the classroom, they don’t play weekend football.

"Some of them get very upset," Bailey says. "Without football, the kids wouldn't have anything to do that's organised for them on a weekend."

Wilcannia needs football. And the kids need boots.

Find out more about the campaign at bootsforkids

Follow the campaign on Twitter at  #bootsforkids