Footy Passions [1 ed.] 9781742231952, 9780868409573

Citation preview

footy

passions

John C ash is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Philosophy, Anthropology and Social Inquiry at the University of Melbourne. He has published on politics, psychoanalysis, social theory, the conflict in Northern Ireland and reconciliation in Australia. He is a lifelong Carlton supporter.

Joy Damousi is a Professor of History and Head of the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She has published on Australian cultural history, the history of emotions and living with the trauma of war. She is a lifelong Collingwood tragic.

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footy

passions John C a s h J oy Da m o u s i

unsw press

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A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © John Cash and Joy Damousi 2009 First published 2009 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Damousi, Joy, 1961– Title: Footy passions/Joy Damousi, John Cash. ISBN: 978 086840 957 3 (pbk.) Notes: Includes index. Subjects: Australian football.           Australian football – Psychology.           Australian football – Sociological aspects.           Australian football – Psychological aspects.           Fans (Persons) – Psychology. Other Authors/Contributors: Cash, John. Dewey Number: 796.336 Design Di Quick Cover Fairfaxphotos Printer Ligare This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

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Contents



Acknowledgments



Preface

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1 A Passionate Attachment 2 Loss and Redemption

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3 In the Name of the Father

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4 Fathers and Daughters at Play 5 Reality Bites

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6 Australian Rules

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7 Living through Loss

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8 Football and Place: Home and Away

Final Siren



Appendix: Some names, places and details

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195 199



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Acknowledgments

First and foremost we would like to thank the footy supporters who we spoke with at length about their passion for their AFL club and team. Each of them generously shared their stories about their attachment to their club and its significance in their life. We have not been able to include all the extensive interview material we gathered, but everyone who spoke with us has given us insight and understanding as to how footy passions are formed, shaped and sustained. In most instances interviewees’ first names were altered to ensure anonymity. We owe a debt to our research assistants, Nick Melchior and Mary Tomsic, who gave us valuable assistance in arranging interviews and collecting material.

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Gabrielle Murphy provided important administrative support with great calm and efficiency. Finn Cash and Conall Cash assisted us greatly with the transcription of the interviews. We received significant feedback and advice on earlier drafts from Carmel Reilly, which was very much appreciated. Ann Turner and Gabrielle Cash were sources of support, wisdom and insight throughout. Further deep-felt thanks go to our publisher, Phillipa McGuiness, who has been a magnificent supporter of this project from the beginning. Her encouragement and enthusiasm for the ideas in the book have sustained both of us while writing and researching it. Thanks are due to Neil Conning for his editorial expertise and his advice and guidance throughout the editing process. Heather Cam has demonstrated patience and wisdom, for which we are very appreciative. In most cases the names used in this book are pseudonyms. However, occasionally we use actual names, as their stories readily identify the person interviewed. In cases where we do use an actual name, that person has kindly granted us explicit permission to do so. This book has been a genuine team effort. We have been there at the centre bounce, have handballed to each other as we streamed out of defence and we have eventually kicked some goals, or so we think. We would therefore like to thank each other for the fun we have had while working collaboratively on a topic close to our hearts. Without our own passion for football, and

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our own memories and experiences as keen barrackers, this book would never have been conceived and written. For this we would like to thank our respective clubs, Collingwood and Carlton, for giving us a lifelong opportunity to engage emotionally in the game with all of its triumphs, its inevitable losses and much else in between. We also want to thank our families and friends who have shared and endured our footy passions. This passionate attachment to footy and all it has come to signify continues for us both.

Acknowledgments

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Preface

This is a ‘footy book’, but it is different from most. Instead of focusing on certain players, clubs or matches, it looks closely at some devoted supporters of AFL clubs. It explores their passion for their team. It enters the personal world of keen supporters and examines the significance they attach to the fate and fortunes of their club. It looks at the ways in which devoted supporters use their attachment to a club to express aspects of their own personality and their relations with family and friends. It reveals a new way of thinking about the passions that are aroused at the start of each new season and that accompany the devoted supporter throughout a season and, eventually, a lifetime. The supporters we spoke with are drawn from across

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society. They were contacted through personal associations, by a snowballing technique in which friends of friends referred us on to people who might be interested, and through footy websites. We spoke with about 50 keen supporters who responded to our invitation. However, we could have continued interviewing indefinitely, as we were swamped with responses from keen supporters. Not only were they passionate about their footy club. They were also passionate about talking about their club and about what it meant to them. We were not conducting a survey. Rather, we listened at length to the stories supporters told about how footy has figured in their lives and relationships. We asked about their first memories of the footy, about how they came to support their club, about the significance of footy at home, at school and at work, and about how footy played through family commitments and tensions. As these were potentially sensitive topics, we sought and were granted ethics approval for this research from the University of Melbourne, to which we are professionally attached. In most cases the names used in this book are pseudonyms. However, occassionally we use actual names, as their stories readily identify the person interviewed. In cases where we do use an actual name, that person has kindly granted us explicit permission to do so. Previously, both of us have written books and articles that interpret what people have told us about aspects of their lives and their social and political conditions. For instance, Joy Damousi has written

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about living with war trauma and John Cash has written about the conflict in Northern Ireland. Clearly, both of these topics touch upon deep emotions that are not always readily spoken about. However, in our interviews with football supporters we were struck by how immediately deep emotions surfaced. When talking about the footy, keen supporters candidly reveal aspects of their own emotional life that are less readily expressed when the talk is about political conflict, violence, war and their aftermath. All of our interviews with keen football supporters were suffused with emotion. The stories we were told, and that we summarise here, reveal personal emotions, disappointments, rivalries, conflicts, loves and attachments. Together these make up the personal dimension of those footy passions that play such a major role in Australian culture and in the weekly routines of a multitude of supporters throughout the footy season.

Preface

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1: A Passionate Attachment

There are other things in my life, but … football usually takes precedence. Mary, Essendon

Imagine a family sitting around the kitchen table on a Saturday morning in mid-winter somewhere in Melbourne. The paper is open at the sporting pages, the radio is tuned in to the Coodabeen Champions and the family is slowly preparing for the day’s principal activity. Over the next few hours they will dress for the winter weather, adding caps or scarves or other insignia that mark them as the supporter of a particular team. They will then begin their pilgrimage towards the ground where their team is playing that day.

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If they are travelling by car, they will leave their suburban home and drive along the familiar streets towards their destination. As they get closer they will begin to notice the occupants of other cars who are also heading their way. Some of these will begin to appear as really nice and, indeed, quite beautiful people, dressed as they are in their Carlton scarves or their Collingwood beanies. But others will begin to look quite unattractive – even unpleasant – dressed in the insignia of the opposition team, perhaps Essendon or West Coast. As they park and walk to the ground they will find themselves among a throng of like-minded souls, all intent on getting into the ground and finding a seat before the match begins. Some of their fellow travellers will be wearing the same markers of identification, including caps, beanies, badges, scarves and footy jumpers. They will try to sit close to these people, and as far removed from the others as they can manage. Soon the umpires and players will appear, the ball will be bounced and the crowd will roar its approval as the ruckmen rise towards the ball. Now all the unidentified ones – those sitting nearby who have not given away their preferred identity – will start to voice their identifications. Our family may learn, unhappily, that the three huge men sitting two rows in front and spoiling the view, as well as spoiling for an argument, are supporters of the other team. There will be a clash of players – someone might go down holding his head – and by now the crowd

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will be in full voice and fully differentiated into us and them. Our family, like all the other individuals, couples, friends and families attending the game, will have moved, in a couple of hours and through a few kilometres, from their normal roles and identities to a momentarily transformed group of Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon or West Coast supporters, all seeing the events in front of them unfold through one of two sets of coloured lenses. The story is commonplace and highlights what we already know about AFL football, especially if we live in the southern states. Indeed, if we have had any exposure to Australian sports culture – and how could that be avoided – we know that multitudes of Australians have formed a passionate attachment to one of the 16 AFL teams. What is all this intensity about? How do people make use of their support for an AFL team as they live their lives among family and friends, and workmates or schoolmates? How does all that passionate intensity resonate throughout a person’s life history? What are the emotions that accompany these repeated rituals of everyday life through a Melbourne or Adelaide or Perth winter? And, increasingly, through a Brisbane or Sydney winter? What does an immersion in this way of life entail for the psychological and social wellbeing of the avid football supporter, and even for the momentarily lapsed ones? Is all this immersion in a passionate attachment to a football team merely ‘entertainment’ or is something more significant at stake?

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In Footy Passions we try to answer such questions by examining how keen supporters understand their own attachment to an AFL club and team. In order to do so we have interviewed some keen supporters at length, encouraging each of them to tell us their story of how they first formed an attachment to a team and how this has figured throughout their life and relationships. Our interest in such questions arose, first of all, from our own personal experience of barracking for our respective teams – the traditional rivals – Collingwood (Joy) and Carlton (John). Indeed, the idea for this book came to us accidentally, prompted by an upset win and an email exchange about a talk on psychoanalysis in Australia! Joy, who is a historian, had prepared a draft of a talk she was about to give to a group of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and had sent John an email asking him to look it over. John did so in the early hours of a Saturday morning in April 2003, having been unable to settle down to sleep after watching Carlton, against all expectations, defeat Essendon by 11 points in a night match at the MCG. When emailing back to Joy in the wee small hours, John commented in passing about the unsettling effects of such a satisfying victory – with its echo of Carlton’s shock win in the 1999 preliminary final: ‘I was so excited and restless that I stayed up reading most of the night! What an affliction (and delight) football can be. It is truly melancholic and yet it resonates with such meaning and vitality throughout one’s life.’ When he awoke the next day a reply from Joy was

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waiting. Just as you’d expect from a historian, she had listed, off the top of her head, as it were, the key melancholic moments, with dates, for each AFL club. We both realised that there was something in this complicated relation to a footy team that we should investigate further. So we decided to write about these footy passions and discuss them with other supporters. Why have we chosen to focus on footy passions? The answer is that passions and emotions are pervasive aspects of a keen football supporter’s attachment to their team. While this is obvious, it is seldom given as much serious attention as it deserves. Popular culture is saturated with sport and the Australian media promotes and caters to this taste with elaborate coverage and commentary. However, such saturation coverage proceeds with the flimsiest understanding of the ways in which the supporters of the sport actually engage with their team and derive meaning and satisfaction from their attachment. This book tries to remedy such a major oversight. It takes readers into the personal experiences and emotions of keen supporters of Australia’s most popular sporting competition, AFL football. It explores the significance that supporters attach to the fate of their team and asks how this figures in their lives and relationships. Talk about football is revelatory. In telling us about their support for a beloved team, supporters also tell us about themselves, their life stories, their family relations, their friendships and their anxieties, disappointments, hopes and fears. They do so in passionate ways.

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The full range of emotions is on display as soon as the footy stories begin. Such highly charged attachments to a team and a club are often dismissed as immaturity or mere diversion, but only by those who have never had such an attachment themselves or have never taken the time to listen with attention to the multitudes who are committed supporters. This book gives voice to such devoted supporters and discovers a far more intricate story than the one that is usually told. In this book we do listen with attention as we explore the significance of such identifications, attachments and emotions in the lives of the supporters we interviewed. They tell fascinating tales about how the fate and fortunes of their beloved club intersects with their own life. They reveal how they use their attachment to a club, especially when it is over a lifetime, to create meaning and significance for themselves and with others. They tell us about the myths and memories that they create and share with family and friends. They take us on a roller-coaster ride through the passions of triumph and despair, mourning and melancholia, joy and fulfilment, sacrifice and resurrection. To identify with an AFL football team is to find oneself caught in a curious dilemma. That identification regularly transports the supporter into an intense drama that repeats itself with each new season. How can this be? After all, this is merely a game played on a large field with an odd-shaped ball by professional athletes and administered by a corporation. Moreover, the supporter has virtually no capacity to influence

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the fate of the team. Given all this, why do supporters care so much? What psychological and cultural satisfactions flow from this curious intensity? The personal dilemma of the keen supporter lies in the fact that, at one degree of separation, fantasies and memories of loss and accomplishment, of triumph and despair are revivified through a weekly ritual that is played out in public and in the company of friends and family. The team, merely a group of professional footballers pursuing their own agenda of accomplishment, recognition and wealth, is also the beloved team. Moreover, this team represents a club – an institution with a long history and a record of victory and defeat. The melancholic fact is that the ultimate victories (premierships) are few and far between, while defeat is a common experience. Moreover, the defeats of the past and anxieties about the future are always close to the hearts of keen supporters. Victories are sweet and are cherished as moments of satisfaction, ecstasy and sometimes the sublime. But the prospect of loss, along with the memory of loss, always haunts the keen supporter. All those scripts about the need to win at all costs fail to recognise the way in which the love for the team draws the supporter into a passion play of intense emotions in which anxiety and loss are major themes. With each new season the team emerges as if revived and raises hopes anew. It prepares for battle yet again, and the keen supporter is hooked back into a ritual of precarious pleasures that is played out within quasi-

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tribal cheer squads, intense friendship networks and, at least momentarily, united nuclear families. What hooks them back in and why do they care so much? What are the personal and communal meanings that supporters create and share? These are the questions we set out to address. For the keen supporter, the club occupies the position of being, at once, both a social institution and an object of fantasy with which they identify. Once the attachment to a club is established, each new season brings with it a new set of illusions and anxieties that cannot be avoided. Even those keen supporters living in Europe or America or some other far-flung location cannot escape. Once upon a time these poor souls searched about for scraps of information in the local press and awaited news from home via telephone and mail. These days the internet supplies running scores and ready access to radio coverage. More than ever for the loyal supporter there is no real escape. In this sense the clubs are like vampires that cannot be killed, and once they have sunk their teeth in, you are forever lost – forever marked by that particular identity. It becomes an infection of the blood, or so it can seem. Indeed, Richmond made this insight the theme of their appeal for club members in 2003: ‘Yellow and Black … It’s in the blood!’ Perhaps it is not surprising that in that same year a very concerned father rang in to radio talkback on 3AW and affiliates – the Rex Hunt extravaganza – seeking guidance on a really pressing issue. The caller

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wanted to know whether it would be fair to his young son to start taking him to Richmond games, given that this would almost certainly condemn the child to a lifetime of disappointment, loss and frustration. A few weeks later, just after Richmond played Geelong, another distressed Richmond supporter rang 3AW and asked to talk to Rex and the panel. This time it was an elderly lady who was ringing in to discuss the dilemma that had confronted her in a doctor’s surgery on the previous Friday afternoon. This dilemma arose due to the coincidence of her own failing health and the continued poor form of her beloved Richmond, two conditions which, in her own mind, appeared as one. On the Friday her doctor had told her that she was so ill that she needed to be admitted to hospital immediately. However, the next day Richmond was playing a crucial game that would determine whether they could still make the finals. To her doctor’s astonishment, she refused to go to hospital. She explained that she had to support Richmond the next day. Richmond duly lost the game and she was so troubled that she felt compelled to share her despair on radio. In talking about the disastrous match she was very forgiving about the players but objected to the coach and his histrionics. However, she was profoundly troubled by a dawning recognition, no doubt prompted by the prospect of hospitalisation. She suddenly realised that she might die before Richmond could win their next premiership. Rex and the panel seemed to think this was quite likely.

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Once a supporter enters the fray, they are exposed to intermittent bouts of loss, depression and despair tinged with paranoia, often directed at the coach, the umpires or the AFL. If the team is losing, the umpires are often seen as extra players for the opposition, the coach as a visitation from Hell and the AFL as the Devil himself. For some supporters the paranoia turns to denigration of one’s own players – the most severe of footy afflictions. However, if there is a circuit of loss and despair, relieved by moments of joy and delight, which most football supporters experience – there is a parallel story that is more about the supporter than the team, although it is mediated through love for the team. This is because the team can become the container for feelings of connectedness and significance that are shared with family and friends and, sometimes, whole communities. After Collingwood won the 1990 grand final, its first since 1958, the suburb of Collingwood transformed into a vast street party that brought traffic to a halt and raged all night. As the Collingwood website says: ‘1990 Premiership – The drought breaks’. The team is like a child’s security blanket. As with the security blanket, loss is traumatic and can even produce tantrums or dejected withdrawal. The big difference is that the team as security blanket not only contains fantasies and memories but it is also shared. It is part of an ongoing social conversation. Moreover, all the ambivalences of friendship that cannot be directly expressed – the negative, hostile, perhaps envious or

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competitive feelings – can be articulated somewhat indirectly via the ups and downs of the weekly matches and the yearly finals. Friends who would never, or only in very unusual circumstances, express a range of negative attitudes and feelings can quite brazenly take delicious pleasure in the defeat of their friend’s team, and might keep referring to it long after the day itself. They might even make a special phone call a couple of days after their team has just beaten a friend’s team. Mixed footy marriages often only survive by a shared amnesia when the two teams play each other, or by a pretence that nothing is actually happening punctuated by secretive dashes to the car radio to check out the score. Our relationships are built and maintained through shared identifications and attachments. This is particularly so within families and across the generations. The man who wondered whether he should take his son to Richmond games almost certainly did go ahead and do so. If the son’s identification with Richmond is established, then the two will share a common space where they can, through talk about the team and its fate and fortunes, talk to each other about themselves and share with each other the transports of delight and the traumas of despair. This is a powerful connection that can reverberate down through the years. As the supporters we talked to testify, such a shared identification across the generations is a precious, yet common, feature of a football supporter’s experience – one that binds and enables the sharing of intimacies

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and understandings. In this book we explore these footy passions by looking closely at the stories of some devoted football supporters. We begin by looking at loss and redemption. How upsetting are those losses that all supporters endure, some more regularly than others? What is it like when a string of victories finally arrives? We then look closely at families and the ways in which children inherit and use their attachment to a team. For the group of supporters we interviewed, fathers figure as the main culprit who exposed them to the risks and delights of a lifelong devotion to an AFL team. However, we also hear some delightful stories of how mothers sometimes took over this fatal role, even after they had promised to let the father decide. How does the surge of emotions at times of family break-up and divorce get entangled with footy? For children suddenly confronted with the collapse of their family, how does support for their team play itself out? We also explore what it is like to be the son of a famous footballer. Was this a dream come true or did it all seem just part of family life? How has such a close encounter with footy reverberated down through the years? Australia’s population has changed in the postwar period. Immigrants from Europe and Asia have arrived carrying old traditions with them and looking for new opportunities and life experiences. Feeling at home in a new place is a dilemma that confronts all migrants and that they attempt to resolve one way or

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another. Footy has provided one of those ways, a most effective one, as we will see. Personal tragedy can strike any of us. At such times the footy can provide much more than a distraction. As with the children of families experiencing marital break-up, personal tragedies such as the death of a child, or of loved siblings, partners, parents or friends can become enmeshed in thoughts and feelings about the beloved team. We look at some heart-rending examples of how bereaved and distressed people can use their attachment to a footy club to express, share and work through experiences of profound loss and desolation. During the lifetime of the supporters we talked with, the competition itself has changed dramatically. The original Victorian Football League (VFL) competition with 11 clubs based in Melbourne’s suburbs and one based in Geelong has transformed into a national competition with 10 Victorian clubs, two South Australian and two Western Australian clubs and one each in NSW and Queensland. A second Queensland club will join the competition in 2011. The old South Melbourne club was transported to Sydney in 1982 and Fitzroy merged with the Brisbane Bears in July 1996, playing as the Brisbane Lions from the start of the 1997 season. All these changes can be distressing, especially if your beloved club disappears or is changed in some fundamental way. What is it actually like if your club disappears? How do you cope with that kind of loss?

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In Melbourne, the old local grounds where matches were played on Saturday afternoons have been retrenched. Games in Melbourne are now played either at an improved MCG or a new stadium with a retractable roof at the Docklands. These matches are no longer played simultaneously on Saturday afternoons, as they traditionally were. Now they are played night and day over the weekend. This often stretches to a long weekend. For instance, the 2009 season commenced with a Thursday night match between Carlton and Richmond. Testimony to AFL football’s continuing appeal, this game attracted 86,972 supporters to the MCG on a Thursday night. The old local grounds are shadows of their former glory. No Essendon supporter could ever forget the terrors and physical discomfort of away games at Victoria Park, Collingwood’s traditional home ground. No St Kilda supporter, indeed very few supporters of any team, could forget Nicky Winmar, an Indigenous St Kilda player, exposing his dark skin as a challenge to the racist taunts emanating from a section of the Collingwood crowd. ‘Black is beautiful’ is one of the many memories etched deeply into the fabric of Victoria Park. All the other old grounds have similar myths and memories embedded in their terraces and stands and in the turf itself. Malcolm Blight’s amazing winning goal for North Melbourne in 1976 after the siren at Princes Park, Carlton’s traditional home ground, comes to mind. Everyone except Blight thought the game was over and were beginning to

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leave as he took his kick. Blight’s kick sailed more than 70 metres straight through the middle. North Melbourne supporters were transported with delight, as Carlton supporters filed away convinced that, yet again, the gods were against them. No mere mortal could have kicked the ball that far! No supporter of either club who was at the ground will ever forget having witnessed that miracle moment. In Adelaide and Perth, strong local competitions with a long history have lost prominence as newly formed clubs and revamped local clubs have joined the national competition. All these changes challenge old habits and old affiliations. A sense of place is disturbed. Among all these changes there are also continuities. While new clubs like the Fremantle Football Club and the West Coast Eagles have emerged and captured the loyalty of many supporters, especially in their home state and city, most of the old VFL clubs have survived in the AFL competition. The Port Adelaide Football Club, which played its first game in 1870, entered the AFL competition in 1997. The national competition has brought many changes, but, as we will see, a golden thread of emotional attachments runs through them. These attachments to a club’s name and identity, once formed, are tenacious. In what follows we explore the various forms that such tenacity takes and the experiences, memories and passions that drive it.

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2: Loss and Redemption

It really hurt when you lost, so I was pretty hurt for most of my childhood I suppose. They say it makes you stronger. I don’t know. Maybe. I must be the strongest person in the world! Caveman, Footscray

After each round of the home-and-away season, about half of those supporters who identify closely with the fate of their team have to endure a loss and negotiate their way through whatever remains of the weekend as best they can. Some manage better than others, but in all cases a loss, for keen supporters, is a source of distress. During the finals, when only the most successful

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teams are playing, fewer people are as directly affected, but the intensity for those whose team has made it so far, only to stumble or fall, is amplified. Mary is a lifelong Essendon supporter. Asked how long it would take her to recover when Essendon lost, she replied as follows. Even today, I still need a full 24 hours. I’m depressed for a whole 24 hours. I don’t say much about it. I’ll talk about it with Essendon friends. But I feel terrible. I remember, it was in the ’80s, we’d won something like 15 games in a row and we lost the last game of the year out at Waverley to Geelong. I remember it because I went with two Geelong friends of mine. And on the way home, I said, ‘I don’t think we’re going to win next week.’ We were playing Fitzroy. And they said, ‘Oh, of course you will, don’t worry about it.’ But I just had a feeling that the bubble had burst. We lost the game to Fitzroy, and I remember getting in the bus at Waverley after the game, and a Fitzroy supporter started really sticking it up me. I just burst into tears. And of course, he was so apologetic. Felt like the schoolyard bully I think. But I was just so upset.

When Essendon lost it would ruin her weekend. While disdainful of those supporters who overreacted when Essendon was defeated (‘sometimes you’ve got to accept that we’re not good enough’), there were times when a loss was particularly difficult to handle. The loss in the 1990 grand final against Collingwood was one such occasion.

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It took me a long time to recover because every time I turned the television on, some Collingwood player who probably couldn’t string two words together had written a book. And there it was being advertised. They made a million dollars out of that bloody premiership! You couldn’t get away from it.

Essendon has been a highly successful club throughout its history. But, of course, some clubs and their supporters have not been so fortunate. For some, losing seemed routine. Joe, a devoted Fitzroy supporter almost from birth is one of these. He became so accustomed to Fitzroy’s losses that he began to think that ‘it was above my station in football life to follow a successful team like Collingwood.’ Bruce remembers what losing was like when, as a young boy during the 1950s, Hawthorn went through a losing streak. ‘I can certainly remember seeing them being convincingly beaten,’ he recalled, ‘it seemed like week after week.’ Football provides children an exceptional entry into an adult world where they see adults behaving with less reserve than is usual in other settings, and often showing their vulnerabilities. Bruce recalls how, as a young boy, he was deeply impressed by the emotional intensity of the games he witnessed and how he suddenly recognised, with something of a shock, that his pleasure in victory was based on another’s distress. The thing about football that first gets you is the idea of seeing such emotional intensity and displays

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from people. Grown-ups behaving in a way that grown-ups don’t usually behave. I do recall that I was up at the eastern end of Glenferrie Oval and there was a kid about my age bawling his heart out because his side had lost. I remember feeling that my elation was suddenly punctured by seeing this distressed kid. But I never cried – I can’t recall ever crying myself. I can recall getting upset or frustrated, but I do remember being rather struck to think that my pleasure was based upon this person’s acute pain.

Witnessing the physical pain of a player for the first time was confronting. There was a half-back-flanker for Hawthorn in the late ’50s who, towards the end of a home game, went for a mark and came down and broke his collarbone. And then the siren went and we all went out on the ground, and I can recall trainers just sort of put him on their shoulders. He wasn’t on a stretcher, nothing as sophisticated as that. And he was crying with the pain of it all and the shock, and I can remember thinking, ‘Footballers aren’t meant to cry.’ And you suddenly saw on his face that he was just really in huge sort of pain and shock. That seems quite memorable.

For Bruce, the destruction of the opponent was not just something that happened on the field. It was also the fantasy that fuelled his identification with Hawthorn, and he regards this fantasy as a charac-

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teristic of most keen supporers, whether they own up to it or not. I suppose barracking consists of a fairly extensive form of irrational emotional identification and a desire to sort of vanquish the opponent, but when it’s suddenly made real in physical damage! And certainly as a kid I can recall the absolute irrationality of some supporters, the way in which they were impervious to any logic at all. One minute they would be accusing their opponents of being animals and then they would be telling their own players to bash them. And the way in which there was a certain class of supporter, you’d really wonder why they went, because they spent most of their time complaining about the umpiring. And they’d get very little pleasure out of the entire day.

Margot, a devoted St Kilda supporter, describes her weekend routine during the football season and how it is always emotionally charged, win or lose. Weekend leisure time dominated by football passions was a common theme for the supporters we spoke with. Say it’s a Friday night. You go to the game. You win. Say you beat the Lions by 140 points. Hooray. You come home. A couple of your struggling mates might come with you. You sit and you watch Foxtel. You watch the whole of the game again, taping it of course as you go. So you get to bed about 2. Get up the next morning, read the paper, read all about it. And I do a personal training session on Saturday

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mornings and straight after that the ABC radio starts, and they run down the game and I’m flicking between them and 3AW. And then there’ll be another game on, or something, and you’re on this natural high. You get about your business with the radio going in the distance or whatever. That night you’re not going out, you’ll watch whatever game is on. On Sunday morning you read the paper. If you’re on a low, if you’ve lost, you go to bed. Wake up the next morning, you don’t read the paper. You wander round, yell at the dogs. Do your thing, depressed. Don’t watch footy, can’t be bothered. Kind of get yourself together by Sunday night, unless there’s something fabulous happening. And particularly if it’s an important game that you’ve lost, switch off!

Margot recognises that football occupies a huge part of her life. ‘Sometimes I worry,’ she confesses, ‘that footy just takes too much of my life.’ With so much investment in the game’s outcome it is not surprising that, for some supporters, their mood can be left very flat over the weekend if the team has lost. On the other hand, as Margot highlights, winning can put you on a ‘natural high’. Margot believes that the idea that only winning premierships counts offers far too narrow a vision of success in football. For her – and we agree – there are many more dimensions to success than just winning a premiership. Of course, this might be special pleading from a St Kilda supporter still traumatised by

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St Kilda’s loss to Adelaide in 1997. But Margot rightly points out that the attachment to the team is far more complex than just wishing and hoping that one day the holy grail of a premiership will be achieved. There’s a lot that happens in those 22 weeks that you can look back on. We still talk about games back in the ’70s and the ’80s and ’90s and special memories attached to those games. Of course winning the flag, you want it. You want it for them. I want it for all the boys who have struggled their guts out, you know. It took me two years to get over ’97. Adelaide – those bastards, who I despise more than … I just haven’t had the words for how much I despise them.

Every time St Kilda gets into the finals, she is very anxious: ‘So it’s a big risk, it’s like downhill skiing going into the finals. Without a pole, you know. It’s just freaky.’ Each supporter has their own method of coping with defeats. As we have seen, Margot switches off. Caveman, a fanatical Western Bulldogs supporter, describes how, after a Western Bulldogs loss, he prefers to stay close to other supporters – ideally in the social club. You just felt like you weren’t outside where everyone else was happy. It was more a case of after a game people want to go somewhere and be happy, whereas there in the social club you’re more in the mind-

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set of people who think the same way you do. And I wasn’t always a social club member, but in that era, if they ever got a real hiding or lost by a point, like that Geelong final they lost that at the siren in ’94, that’s the only place you wanted to be that night, because people there were all thinking the same as me. You don’t want to be cheered up I suppose. Someone might try and cheer you up, but you’re not interested. You want to stay depressed for that night and you want to be with people who are not going to be different to you in their thinking.

He prefers to live with the feeling of loss; to preserve it until it slowly dies away; to stay in the cave among his own tribe, grieving together. Caveman carries his identity as a Bulldogs supporter wherever he goes. It sometimes haunts him, as this story about attending a wedding reception illustrates. You’d go to the bar or whatever and someone would say, ‘What happened to your lot today?’ Even the bloke who made the wedding speech. He was a Footscray fan. At the end of the speech he had to make mention of the footy. ‘Rod, you barrack for North, Michelle, you barrack for Carlton. I’m a Footscray fan, what happened to them today?’ And people kept looking at me, and others too, who were Footscray, but me in particular. That’s when I wanted to be at the social club that night, just to get away from all that.

We asked if it was like being back at school.

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It is, that’s right. When you were a kid back in the late ’70s, that’s all you had. You didn’t have other things to worry about. You couldn’t hop in a car and drive somewhere. It really hurt when you lost, so I was pretty hurt for most of my childhood I suppose. As a kid you’d be that shattered. They say it makes you stronger. I don’t know. Maybe. I must be the strongest person in the world!

We suggested that his memory of school days and his recall of the wedding were remarkably similar. That’s right. People look at you, some laughing, others possibly with a bit of feeling, sorry for you in a roundabout way. But I think it was more joviality laughing, cop that, whatever. Those defeats stick in your mind. I wasn’t as disliked as others. You barracked for Footscray at school and you were sort of not necessarily a freak show, but different.

Following a less successful club can have its downs, but it does mean you are not as despised as other supporters. There were a few kids in my school who followed Footscray, but it was different because you didn’t follow Collingwood or Essendon or Carlton. We were a team that wasn’t rated at the time. Because you followed them it was like some people would almost metaphorically pat you on the head and say, ‘Oh, you follow Footscray. Oh, that’s alright, good on you,’ that sort of stuff. But in some ways it’s been helpful.

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You’re not as hated as other supporters. Some people don’t like you, but …

Byron, an avid North Melbourne supporter, has vivid memories of going (and not going) to school on Mondays after his team had lost on the weekend. He reflects that, even today, if North wins after a Friday night game, he is ‘up for the whole weekend’. If the team loses, however, the loss is carried throughout the entire weekend. He remembered what it was like as a child, ‘that angst about Monday morning at school’ and how much he loathed being teased, to the extent that he didn’t want to go to school if North lost. It was anger rather than depression that consumed him; anger about players’ mistakes and about the scores in close games. At times the frustration of losing was expressed very simply and yet powerfully and dramatically. Murray remembers the way in which his father, a passionate North Melbourne supporter, coped or failed to cope with the frustration of losing. During the 1950s and 1960s North Melbourne usually lost. For Murray, and especially for his father, it was not easy dealing with regular defeat. Murray recalls one Saturday night when he and his father returned home after another loss. I remember my mother saying ‘it was only a game’ or ‘they’re only umpires’. My father took the butter from the table and threw it at the wall. It ended the discussion very quickly.

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We wondered how Murray coped with North’s regular losses. He admitted to resorting to praying, especially in the second half of games. When North was losing, and ‘the earthly authority in the form of three umpires was failing’ he believed that it was only through divine intervention that the ‘grave injustices being done’ could be redressed. However, when prayer failed, as it usually did, being ironic and a bit condescending came to the rescue. Regularly confronted by the celebrations of the opposing supporters, the young Murray took refuge in social observation. ‘As a perennial loser, you were able to quietly observe the absurdities of the victors.’ Keen supporters develop passionate attachments to their team (the current group of players who they watch each week), and to their club (an institution with a history and tradition). It is also common for supporters to have favourite players whose strengths, talents and virtues they identify with and admire. Mary initially followed and ‘loved’ Essendon’s Billy Hutchison, one of the best rovers to ever play in the VFL. But in later years Simon Madden came to epitomise strength, loyalty, skill and what can only be termed virtue. My favourite of all time is Simon Madden. Simon Madden walks on water. He played 376 games I think. He’s our club record-holder. He’s kicked over 500 goals. He was the best ruckman of his era. I think so anyway. I just remember him as somebody who would literally run himself into the

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ground to win games for us. He was a very good tap ruckman. He didn’t get into too many fights, so he wasn’t always getting reported. He was just a great club man and a wonderful player, and I just loved watching him. And it was probably about five years after he retired before I sort of got used to the fact that he wasn’t going to be there any more. In ’85 the Sydney Swans tried to get Simon to go to Sydney. And I told my family that if Simon Madden went to Sydney, I would never go to the football again. And they said, ‘Oh, yeah, right!’ I said, ‘No, I’m serious.’ I couldn’t possibly watch him running around in a red-and-white jumper. It would upset me too much. That would be it for me. And then he came out and said, ‘You can take the boy out of Essendon, but you can’t take Essendon out of the boy,’ and turned down a lot of money to stay. He certainly got a much better deal out of Essendon over it, but. If he had left, that would have been devastating for me.

For Mary, Simon Madden’s loyalty to the club matched what she regards as Essendon’s collective virtue. We’re very proud of our history. Not just winning 16 premierships, but doing the right thing, treating people properly. Our past players group is, I think, still the biggest, and certainly one of the most successful. And it always has been. It’s not a club that alienates its old players. Everybody’s welcome there and they’re regarded as important by the supporters as well.

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In these comments about Simon Madden and the Essendon club we can see quite clearly the extent of Mary’s identification. She slips readily into speaking of Essendon as ‘we’ (‘We’re very proud of our history’) and her identification with Madden is such that his ‘desertion’ would have been too much to witness and bear. We should also notice how the pain and melancholy associated with supporting her club so intensely is quite near the surface here. In telling us ‘that would be it for me’ Mary gestures towards a final insult that would release and consolidate all the distress that she usually manages to work through over a painful weekend, following one of Essendon’s losses. The campaign to support and nurture Indigenous players is another major achievement of which Mary is very proud. ‘It’s probably the only thing that we white folk have ever done for them. It’s probably the only arena – and I guess rugby would be the same – in the country where they are treated with respect, and can strut their stuff, and get the credits that are due to them.’ Bill remembers that when he was growing up he identified with Dick Reynolds, the Essendon champion who played 320 games between 1931 and 1951. In an era when the VFL was admirably amateurish when it came to advertising and promoting the game, football cards were the only way in which football personalities were marketed. We asked what it was about Reynolds that was so appealing.

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It was the way that he was portrayed to me. He was an absolute champion. And as a kid, I guess, you’re starting to sort of formulate your ambitions and ideas within life. And what you’re looking for is role models. But kids have millions of role models these days. It all comes from the marketing side. But in those days they weren’t marketing them other than through footy cards. And Dick Reynolds and Don Bradman were my two main role models. Well what better two role models could you have! Dick Reynolds carried us through.

Like Mary, it wasn’t just a special individual with whom he identified. It was also the club, with its proud history and tradition. You just felt proud to be part of it, because you knew that nothing was going to go wrong, the wheels weren’t going to fall off. You knew there was no sort of stigma attached to the place. They had tradition a mile deep. You came off the back and you thought, ‘Gee, you’re on a winner here!’

For others it was the sheer courage of playing the game in an inspirational style. Patrick, a keen Richmond supporter, was drawn to two Richmond champions – Royce Hart and Francis Bourke – both icons and stalwarts of the game, who played in the teams of Richmond’s golden era during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hart, a forward, played 190 games between 1967 and 1977 and Bourke, a back man, 302 games between 1967 and 1981.

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Royce Hart, he just seemed to be able to do anything. I particularly remember playing Collingwood in a semi-final in the early 1970s. He was really courageous, got in often and played it with flair. Wherever the ball was, he was ready to go. He was just fantastic. And Francis Bourke, I admired his ability to play injured. He is famous for playing a game against North Melbourne while injured, with blood coming down his jumper.

Patrick admired the fact that both these players were ‘not unfair in any way, they were just really courageous and fearless’. Ted especially remembers the 1960s, when the Collingwood side dazzled its supporters with its combination of strength and skill. Ted was a teenager at the time and vividly remembers Terry Waters, one of Collingwood’s leading players in the Club’s stellar era of the 1960s and early 1970s, as someone whose masculine strength and athletic skill stood out. Terry Waters was a great footballer. He was a super mark for his height. It is a masculine thing. You sort of stand in awe of that physical ability.

Courage, strength and commitment were the virtues Ted found most admirable. I was caught up in the 1964 finals. I remember Des Tuddenham flattening almost everyone on the field in one of the semis and kicking six or eight goals. And we also had a champion called Laurie Hill,

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who was a truly great defender, you know, one of those dour old-fashioned players. You couldn’t get a kick on Laurie Hill.

Ted also identified Peter McKenna, one of the game’s most distinguished full forwards in its history, as one of his idols. He especially admired his kicking style. There was something so special about McKenna, because no one has kicked like McKenna. I don’t think even Lockett has kicked with the accuracy of McKenna. I might be mythologising this, but I just remember someone who was so perfect in his action, whose goals-to-behinds ratio was, again you’d have to check it, but I would say, through the fog of a mythologised past, he was one of the best ever. And you’d have an image of him as you ran in to kick for goal when you were practising. You’d even be trying to model the movement, and you’d think, yes the follow-through and you’ve seen the photographs of the head, the foot is about two feet above the head. And you’d think, ‘Now that’s what I’ve got to do.’

Much has been written about the appeal of players like Trevor Barker, whose courage inspired unusual devotion from St Kilda supporters and who was universally admired and respected. Margot recalls the day, soon after his untimely death from cancer, when he was publicly honoured before the start of a game. Oh, that was one of the most moving events. I’ll never forget that day. It was St Kilda versus

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Western Bulldogs (Footscray I think they still were). And Trevor Barker had died and they were having the memorial to him before the game. And they had all the players lined up and they had this beautiful music and they released all these pigeons and everyone was crying. There was absolute silence and these tears, they were real tears! The bloke next to me was crying, everyone was crying. Just the sound of sobbing in the crowd. And absolute silence. And these pigeons … it was just beautiful.

Margot explained her attachment to Barker because ‘he was so courageous. He played with some crap teams. You know. But he was always worth going to see. And he stuck, he was loyal.’ If special players can serve as the figures that bind supporters to a club, players can also disappoint. Bruce tells of an early disillusionment following Hawthorn’s 1961 premiership victory, when he was 14 years old. My elder brother and I went down to Glenferrie Oval. I was about fourteen at the time and these were my heroes. And at about 11 pm my brother was saying we should get going. There was a sort of a noise up in the grandstand, and the players were doing a conga line, basically, all pissed out of their skulls, all ragged. And I was sort of quite shocked.

Another loss, this time of a young boy’s idealised view of his team, at the very moment of redemption

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through victory. These themes of redemption and loss, of joyous bliss and profound depression, are the shared emotional fare of devoted supporters; the wedding feast, with all its miracles and the funeral procession, with its mourning and melancholia.

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3: In the Name of the Father

Who do you barrack for, Dad? Richard, Geelong

As each new football season begins to take shape, millions of supporters feel a familiar tug at the heartstrings. Yet again they find themselves thrown into a ritual of hope, anxiety and despair as their beloved team takes the field. That is the thing about being a keen supporter of an AFL team. There is no escape. The new season revives the old love, and all the joy and pain that such a love entails. For most supporters, this passion has its roots in childhood and is infused with memories of family. And for many, although certainly not all, the father is the primary

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figure around whom the attachment to one’s team takes shape. Here we recount the stories of some devoted male supporters, and some defectors, for whom footy and father are profoundly intertwined. In the next chapter we go on to discuss how fathers and daughters use footy as a way of sharing an emotional relationship. Richard knows who to blame for his lifelong addiction to Geelong, with its perpetual promise and its litany of loss; until the halcyon days that arrived after our interview with him, with Geelong winning the 2007 flag. The fatal moment occurred when he was just seven and his father was taking him and another boy, who lived nearby, to school. The three of them were chatting away when the conversation shifted to football and the upcoming season. So Richard asked his father: ‘Who do you barrack for, Dad?’ The fatal reply came, like the wisdom of the elders, and it said, ‘Geelong.’ Captured by the intensity of the moment, Richard cemented his identification with his father with just two words: ‘Me too.’ This immediate identification with his father was a significant moment. It condemned Richard to decades of football misery, now finally redeemed. ‘And that’s the moment that’s killed me,’ he confessed, ‘I’ve been suffering ever since.’ It was also the consolidation of an enduring connection with his father, mediated through football, a space where expressions of intimacy and emotional connectedness could be shared.

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For Richard, the history of Geelong, as he has experienced it, symbolises one of life’s clichés, that of unfulfilled talent. As a club that has fielded some of the most talented teams ever to play in the competition and that has been involved in some of the most memorable finals, Geelong had never fulfilled the potential that keen observers of the game believed it was so capable of fulfilling. Richard remembers reading a journalist’s account of the Geelong sides of the 1960s, an account that stuck with him, as it resonated with his own sense of talent unrealised. Geelong – what a great side they were in the 1960s. What a waste they only won one premiership. The issue has always been talent unfulfilled. Always. That is Geelong’s theme. This is where it gets personal, because you always feel about your own life, have you wasted your own potential promise? I realised that was the issue for me in barracking for Geelong, that it was a personal issue. I think it was Noel Coward who once said about someone ‘that he went from promising to has-been without an intervening period of achievement’. That’s Geelong. One of the issues for football has been this thing about Geelong being this great side that never fulfilled its potential.

For Geelong, Richard reiterated, ‘It was always coming; everything was always about to happen. The terrible “ifs” accumulate.’

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As the son of a politician, the expectations for his own personal achievements have been high and demanding, and his personal dilemma is mirrored in his allegiance to Geelong. It relates to being the son of a successful person, and so feeling a kind of sense of self-imposed expectation of wanting to do well. They all come together somehow. So there’s my sense that you haven’t done as well. As a young person you had these inflated, grandiose expectations of what you would achieve and so the club represents that. And, in my case, that is set against a father who was very successful, and so my feeling was I had to be very successful as well; more driven than some people might be because of my father’s public position. Then you chose the side, your father’s.

Football also served as a way for Richard and his father to be intimate, but not too intimate, as the conversation was always mediated by a focus on the game. Richard recalls how at the age of about nine or 10 he became fanatical about football, and that his father began going as a way to be with Richard and his brother. For a father not accustomed to sharing inner emotions and thoughts, the football provided a perfect forum. I think he started to see going to the football as a way that he could be with me and then later with my brother as well. With males in particular, where the talking is not easy – and my father is of the

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generation which doesn’t have that sort of easy way with language (he does in certain ways, he does in public life, but not in that private family) – football provides that way to actually relate through a third thing, which is the game. And you can relate through the moments of the game. Like threequarter time, scores are level or one point the difference and he’ll say, ‘So how are you going, anyway.’ He doesn’t mean footy, he means in your life. And it’s great, because you’ve only got 60 seconds. You can’t get too touchy-feely, and intimate because they’re going to start the game.

Football loyalty, observes Richard, ‘is forged in the childhood experience’. Football is a way of relating to the adult world. You learn about how adults are and you learn about this passion that adults have and you start to be inducted into it. You make your allegiance at this point. It’s not a thought process you can reverse.

Just as this loyalty is formed in childhood, so too are its manifestations primal. Richard becomes quite Freudian when he describes the feelings that come with a Geelong defeat. In selecting a football team based on my father – there have been times Geelong have lost when I feel angry with him – I can feel it. It’s like I feel angry with my father. We’re at the footy and say like we’re three goals up and eight minutes later

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we’re five goals down, and I turn to him and I say, ‘Oh we’re fucked’ or ‘they’re hopeless’ or whatever, ‘they’re gone now’, and it’s partly a shot at him. It’s like some hereditary failure thing passed on from him to me, and how dare he do this to me. There is definitely a feeling of Oedipal anger, a sense of you made we what I am and you gave me this bloody godforsaken side.

It is his father who has often been the bearer of bad news about Geelong. Richard was living in New York during the famous 1989 grand final when Geelong lost by 6 points to a Hawthorn team that was running on willpower and rapidly fading in the last quarter. I wouldn’t nominate ’89 as my melancholic moment, because I was living in New York. I wasn’t at the game. I missed it. And this is a terrible thing to say, but part of me was a little bit relieved. My dad rang in the morning and said we lost by 6 points. One of my thoughts, in the way you can’t control your thoughts, was I didn’t miss them winning the premiership. And also it will be alright because we will win one soon.

According to Richard, it was when he and his brother became interested in football that his father began going regularly. As a boy growing up in country Victoria and going to secondary school in Geelong after the war, he had followed the Cats. He let that lapse at university and in the early stages of his career and raising a family. But as a father he became a fanatical

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supporter, following in the footsteps of a son whose own passion was set in motion by his father’s voice intoning the name Geelong, on that fateful trip to school. As Richard explains: I don’t think he was as obsessed with football then as he became later, when we became really keen about football. So at the age of nine or 10 I became obsessed with football and then he came back into football at that point. He didn’t go to the 1963 grand final. I don’t have a sense that he was a regular football guy until I started to go.

Richard’s father consolidated his own identification with Geelong in tandem with his sons. That initial naming of Geelong on the trip to school not only reached out to Richard and captured him for life. It also rebounded in his father’s life, turning a mere affiliation into a devoted identification. As his young sons discovered the footy and the shared company of their extremely busy father, their father experienced a deepening of his own connection with the club. As Richard recalls, his father developed a devotion to Geelong that went even deeper than did his son’s, whose boyhood obsession had first brought his father back to football. Joe’s father Ron needed no such prompting from his paternal role to wed him to his beloved Fitzroy. His commitment to Fitzroy was a family affair that long predated the birth of his children. As a consequence, Joe took his place in the well-established family ritual

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from the age of five. By the age of 10 he was already a veteran supporter, having attended every Fitzroy home game for about five years and most of the away games. This family ritual involved both parents and their five children. We were, I suppose, a really passionate family that definitely went to all home games and most away games, including Geelong. We used to go down there on the train. We did all the things I suppose in those days that were central to information about football. So we used to listen to the teams on a Thursday night on radio, and there were preview shows on channel seven on a Friday night, a show called Football Inquest on a Saturday night and World of Sport on a Sunday. We really did follow it quite in depth. I had a really strong connection to the game through family.

This intense ritual of attending weekly games and following the commentary on radio and television was a central feature of family life. I knew the game intrinsically and I would say quite honestly that until I was about 14 – as a family following the football – that was the one thing that we did as a family. It was central to our life, particularly in winter.

At the apex of this family ritual stood Joe’s father Ron, who had trained with Fitzroy and had hoped to make the team, but wasn’t picked up. Nevertheless, football

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remained central to his life and became a principal means through which he created a shared set of family experiences; experiences resonant with meaning and significance and free from the tensions that otherwise played through the family. Following Fitzroy was the one thing that we could do where it was unproblematic, there wasn’t a tension between us. I didn’t get on with my father. He was a very violent man. But football was one thing where he had incredible knowledge, incredible passion and an interest in his children. So what he put into the football was a lot. My father also had an incredible, uncanny ability and interest in physicality, so he knew the footballers’ weights and sizes; he knew their running speed. Those sorts of statistical things that are a knowledge he was able to acquire just by watching.

Here we see the wisdom of a father finding a means to connect with his children in a way that supported their desire to love and idealise him. We hear the son latching on to this as a way of holding onto an idealisation of his father, despite not getting on with him in most other respects. Like Richard and his father, Joe and Ron used supporting their team with passion and devotion as a means of being emotionally together and in sync. This was a benign collusion that offered these men and boys a way of sharing moments of triumph and despair together; sharing emotionally charged experiences without embar-

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rassment and talking together about loss, success, strength, fairness, injustice, fate and reconciliation; talk that stretches across their life span and that continues in reverie after the father’s death. Quite a good deal for the price of a family membership of the club. The role of the father in a family setting can also be destructive and perverse. Keith’s grandfather was part of the Essendon training and support personnel during the 1940s and 1950s and had cast a very long shadow over his own son, Robert, who followed him in his choice of profession and also became an avid Essendon supporter. By the third generation, when Keith was born, a devotion to Essendon was non-negotiable within the family, as was the expectation that all the sons would be keen sportsmen. This dual emphasis on sport and Essendon did not suit Keith at all. His passions ran elsewhere and, unlike his two brothers, Keith fiercely resisted his father’s desire that he, too, should identify with Essendon and its fortunes. But it was impossible for Keith to avoid the emotional pervasiveness of football in family life. ‘The emotional welfare of the family was very strongly linked to football,’ he reflected. Keith grew up in a fanatical football family where attendance at games was considered compulsory and a central part of family identity. However, for Keith this was a forced allegiance and one that he fiercely resented.

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I can remember those Saturday night dinners where, depending on whether they won or lost, there would be a definite mood. I actually feared them losing. I remember going with my father when I was very young and if Essendon lost he would drive really close to the person in front and slam the brakes. I dreaded all of that.

Keith associated football with ‘the kind of randomness of the emotional mood that my father would then bring home. Even as I grew older, if they lost it would be a horrible night.’ His father’s own frustrations at not being able to excel either as an athlete or at football were projected onto his sons. They had to excel at sport to make up for his limitations and to avenge him against his own father. As Keith explained: My father felt as though he could never be the man that my grandfather was. That whole search for the mythic masculinity was not something that I wanted. In fact I actively resisted it from a very young age.

Keith’s father Robert felt the losses of the club quite personally. Losses would be felt very, very strongly and personally, possibly too close to home for him. There was a sort of attribution thing. If Essendon was strong, it had to do with his father. If they were weak, we wouldn’t want to think about it.

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Keith reads these intergenerational family dynamics around the themes of strength and weakness and winning and losing. For Keith, Robert felt Essendon’s losses as signs of his own weakness and associated Essendon victories with his own father’s (the grandfather’s) strength. My father and my eldest brother used to taunt me a lot, but what I suddenly realised – it took me quite a few years – my brother was kind of my father’s substitute, because my father actually wasn’t good at any sport. But he would have a lot of anxiety about his children, therefore, being good at sport and a lot of shame if you weren’t. So I was a bit my father’s shame.

Keith worked out ways of avoiding the compulsory attendance at the football. My differentness was marked from the outset. I would work out ways of escaping going to the football and sneaking down to my neighbour’s place, who had a piano, because I started learning the piano but my father wouldn’t have a piano in the house because he said it was taking me away from outdoor healthy sport.

Indoors and away from home, pursuing quite different cultural pursuits is how Keith resisted his father’s demand. The ‘curse’ of selecting a football team along the lines of family tradition was a burden many of our

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interviewees experienced. ‘In selecting Footscray,’ noted Caveman ‘I stuck with the family tradition. That’s the worst decision I’ve ever made. Ever.’ At the crucial moment of selecting a football team, Caveman could have selected Essendon and, in retrospect, believes that this was a fatal mistake. I made the worst decision of all time, because if you look at Essendon, what they’ve done – won four premierships in that time, won a few night flags, a few Brownlow medallists, whereas all we’ve had really is a few Brownlow medallists, not even a grand final, not even what you’d call a night grand final. You remember the night final that they used to have at Waverley from ’77 onwards, we didn’t even play in any of them. Not a grand final. Every other club’s played in a grand final. Even Fitzroy won the night flag in ’78. So others have seen things, and old Footscray is a bit of a long old dusty road I think.

However, for Caveman the pull of family tradition is very strong. If he became a parent he would find it very difficult to break the family ties. Why should his children escape the fate that he has suffered through? And the Bulldogs might copy Geelong and win a premiership after all. If I ever become a parent, well, they all have to barrack for the team I do. I’m going to say, ‘You’re going to have to follow this family tradition. I’ve done the bad times, you know the law of averages

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will swing round for you. That’s if it ever comes.’ You like your family to follow the team that you follow, I think, in my case anyway; others may be different. It gives you a bit of a connection with the past.

In rejecting Essendon and all it meant within his family, Keith stood out strongly against his father’s demand that he conform. Everything about that central aspect of his family’s culture was anathema. Keith’s was a total rejection of the identity his father had imagined for him and had so strenuously, if unsuccessfully, tried to instil. Theirs was an elemental battle over identity and lifestyle, with no middle way. Defections of a less fundamental kind are sometimes a feature of family life. Saturation coverage of the games on television means that children can become well acquainted with another team just by sitting at home. At school an admired teacher or friend can lure them away. Michael told us about how his son Anton defected from Richmond. Michael regularly took his son to watch Richmond games during the 1990s, where Anton would watch his father get routinely upset. ‘He did watch me getting upset at the football. Because I got upset, he would get upset.’ Eventually the losses and the accompanying distress became too much and, inspired by his school sports teacher, Anton switched to Port Adelaide. One day he announced, ‘That’s it, Dad. I’m tired of Richmond. I am going to become a Port Adelaide supporter.’ Michael, who valued the fact

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that his son could make a decision and then stick by it, accepted this defection with good grace. It also relieved him from being stuck in a shared emotional pattern with his son that he had come to be quite unhappy with. ‘He also got frustrated with my anger. He saw the hopelessness of my anger.’ Anton then found himself on a new emotional journey that brought its own disappointment when Port lost successive preliminary finals, after both of which Anton was desolate. But there was great happiness when Port Adelaide did win the grand final in 2004. ‘They’ve got him for life now,’ Michael ruefully concluded.

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4: Fathers and Daughters at Play

My dad barracked for St Kilda, so I barracked for St Kilda. Nadine, St K ilda

As we have seen, for many supporters the father is a pervasive presence, not only in the formative moment of initiation into the support for a team, but also as the ongoing presence through which support for that team takes on much of its significance. Although less frequently commented upon, this applies equally to daughters as well as sons. In this chapter we tell the story of several daughters for whom this emotional connection between their team and their father remains a vital aspect of their ongoing relationship.

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Nadine describes her passion for the Saints in the following way. My father was a St Kilda supporter. And I was the youngest of three, the only girl, Daddy’s girl. My dad barracked for St Kilda, so I barracked for St Kilda. I wouldn’t even know when that occurred. I have no idea at which point I decided. Because my dad barracked for St Kilda, that’s who I was going to barrack for. I remember once or twice, I was probably eight or nine, going to the MCG with my dad, and just being overwhelmed by being in such a place. You could almost feel that it was a sacred place. Then, as I got older, and could venture out on my own, I’d go with friends from school to Moorabbin. Religiously on a Saturday afternoon, you went to Moorabbin.

Such a sacred devotion had become, for Nadine, a precious family inheritance, one that produced a dilemma when she fell in love with and married a Collingwood supporter. I actually married a Collingwood supporter. So we had an agreement. Any girls would barrack for St Kilda and any boys would barrack for Collingwood, which was fine when our daughter was born. A bit of a problem happened when we had our son, because my husband said to me, ‘I can’t wait to see him in a Collingwood jumper.’ It just hit me then what I’d agreed to, the image of my beautiful baby boy in a Collingwood jumper, and I just said to

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him, ‘No way! If I have to give birth to a 10-pound baby, he’s barracking for St Kilda.’ So he said, ‘Alright then.’ So I used to sing the song to my son, to get him to go to sleep – a bit of subliminal advertising.

The family mood would be shaped by football results. After the defeat of St Kilda in the 1971 grand final, there was a melancholic mood in the family. Mum said to me, ‘Don’t talk to your father.’ Not that he would ever have yelled at me or anything, but just give him some space. If my dad was upset, I was upset. I had no idea why I was upset. So, ’71, I remember it, but I didn’t understand the significance of it, and I also didn’t know that it would be so long before we even looked like getting to another final.

Nadine’s father died at a St Kilda game, and Nadine thinks that if he had to die, this would have been his preferred way. As she says: The day my dad died, we’d beaten the Western Bulldogs and gone to the top of the ladder, so that was the last thing he knew. He died at Waverley Park after seeing that happen. He couldn’t have died happier. And that was the one thing that sort of got us through it. That would have been his script. If you could write your own script, that would have been his. St Kilda were on top of the ladder. That was something that you never ever thought would happen. That year they

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sort of just limped into the finals, and I was still pretty numb anyway, but as soon as they went out of the finals, I thought, ‘Well, good.’ And there hadn’t really been much hope since then, until recently.

The association of the football with her father is very strong, and persists after his death. Now, I think – I try not to, but you just can’t help it – I think, I wish you could be here for this team. My maiden name was the same as one of the current players, and every time he does something, I just think, ‘Dad would’ve just loved that.’

The way Nadine recalls such a profound loss of her darling father highlights the extent to which sharing a love for St Kilda bound them together, and continues to do so long after his death. I’d sat next to him for the whole game. He’d got up at half-time and had a chat and everything. Final siren went, and we were just rapt because St Kilda were on top of the ladder. The players came over while they were playing the song and acknowledged all the supporters in the members area. For some reason – it was the first time I’d done it, because we used to go in the same car – I’d rung Dad earlier that day and said, ‘I’m running a bit late, you guys go and I’ll take my car and meet you there.’ So I had driven there myself that day. I got home, and the phone rang, and my daughter

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came in and said, ‘Auntie Jenny’s on the phone.’ I answered the phone and she said, ‘Oh, just ringing up to let you know your dad had a heart attack at the footy today, and he died.’ And I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t my sister-in-law, it doesn’t sound anything like her. And who’s the idiot that would be ringing up?’ And I said, ‘Bullshit. I was at the footy with him all day.’ And she said, ‘I wouldn’t joke about something like this.’ And then I realised that she was crying, and that’s why it didn’t sound like her. I thought, ‘No – he was standing there singing the song when I left him. He was fine, nothing wrong with him.’ Then, afterwards, I found out that they’d gone down to the car and got in the car and they were trying to get out of Waverley. And the car in front turned, and Dad didn’t go, so Mum turned to say, ‘What are you doing?’ and he was dead, like that. He was talking about Robert Harvey when he died.

The funeral had a strong St Kilda theme. The funeral director was a St Kilda supporter as well, so he went out and got this new CD of the St Kilda song. It just set the tone. We walked out thinking, ‘That’s what he would have wanted.’ And even now, it always comes back to, ‘Gee, Dad’d be proud of them.’ Robert Harvey won the Brownlow again that year, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, he should have been here to see it.’ And I think probably for the rest of my life, it will always be, ‘Gee I wish Dad could see this.’

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As is evident, Nadine continues to draw a sense of being close to her father, even after his death, through their shared devotion to St Kilda. Every game she attends with her own children further embeds this connection that spans the generations. When St Kilda plays, Nadine inhabits an ‘as if’ magical world in which time is eclipsed by the co-presence of a litany of special moments, stretching from when she was a little girl sitting with her dad at the game and sharing a passion that has linked her to him throughout her life. At once, Nadine’s is a deep attachment to both her father and St Kilda. It is so deeply embedded that it has taken on a quasi-sacred status. Listen to Nadine talking about buying a footy jumper for her daughter. I wanted to get the new heritage jumper for the kids last Christmas. I was in the AFL shop in Frankston, and I was trying to work out what size to get for my daughter. I was holding up the jumper, umming and aahing, and the guy said to me, ‘Here’s a Richmond one in a bigger size if you want to just hold that up to see.’ And I said, ‘You’ll have to hold it. Sorry, I can’t do it.’ And he said, ‘It’s just a jumper,’ and I said, ‘It’s a Richmond jumper.’ And he said, ‘You won’t get germs from it.’ I said, ‘Someone might walk past and see me though. I’m sorry, you’ll have to hold it up.’ And I thought, ‘I like Richmond, I don’t even have anything against them.’ But my hand went out and I just couldn’t.

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As with Nadine, for avid Carlton supporter Cheryl the football will always be associated with memories of her father Alfred, affectionately known as ‘Alfie’, even if, in her case, these are as much memories of absence as they are of his presence. Her earliest recollections of the football, at the age of three, merge the figure of her father with a place apart, a place that Cheryl was determined to enter and inhabit. I can remember we first got a TV in 1956 and it was black and white and it was in the lounge room. I can remember vaguely watching it as quite a young child on a Saturday afternoon and I always knew Dad was at this place.

Cheryl’s entry into the inner world of football was unusual for a woman at the time. Her uncle played for Carlton in the 1930s and 1940s, became a chairman of selectors and was a member of the Carlton board. Her father, a lifelong Carlton supporter, was a member of the social club. This strong family connection meant that Cheryl was imbued with Carlton culture from a very young age. I remember on Sunday mornings you used to watch the footy show. There was always a big discussion on the Sunday lunchtime around the table, because you’d be sitting down with the extended family. So, yes, lots of talk about Carlton and footy.

Her father had regular access to the latest news and gossip about Carlton from both his close involvement

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in the club and from the players who worked at his factory. Each night he would report home that ‘so and so has happened, such and such is going on, because he’d be picking it up during the day’. Just like her father, throughout her adult life Cheryl has been the inside dopester, the one with the most up-to-date news about players, draft picks, coaching arrangements, etc. – the whole business of the club. This is one of the main ways in which her identification with her father took form and is reiterated with each new bit of news. Given this deep family connection, it was preordained that Cheryl would barrack for Carlton. She vividly remembers her outings to the football with her father as a child. Dad was very old-fashioned. He did not swear in front of women. He was very proper like that. Inevitably there was language and inevitably he turned around – he was quick tempered – and would tell someone off and they’d start on the old man and I would think, ‘Here we go.’

When she was a bit older, Cheryl became an active member of the cheer squad for two years, in 1970 and 1971, where there was ‘lots of drinking, lots of smoking and having a lot of fun’. She was fiercely independent and something of a rebel. This was a time of meeting guys at the social club, kissing strange men on grand final nights. It’s all bound up with growing up and being a teenager,

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a young woman enjoying yourself. I can remember flirting outrageously at the club. There were different guys that you’d meet and you’d sort of sneak off and have a quiet smoke somewhere or go and have a drink away from father’s eyes. It was part of growing up for me.

The ‘very old-fashioned’ style of Cheryl’s father, who was born in 1918, was demonstrated in ways that did not always suit the latest crush of the young Cheryl. Her father was intent on ‘protecting’ her within the male culture of the football club. Although this behaviour might be regarded as patriarchal, Cheryl experienced it as a kind of paternal chivalry. The presence of so many handsome, virile young players, to whom she was clearly attracted, placed Cheryl ‘at risk’ in her father’s eyes. Being the youngest and the only daughter they kept a pretty eagle eye on me. And I was a bit of a rebel. You’d try and disappear from them because you had to go and get your kicks somewhere. I desperately tried so hard to get close to the players but it never worked. They would never, never, let me. There would always be someone watching me. So I used to have to always flirt with the supporters. If I had walked out of the room with one of the players, they would have seriously followed me. It was strange. Dad and my uncle would keep quite an eye on me. They would never leave me alone with any of the players. Because there were some really

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attractive players. I remember them saying, ‘Syd Jackson is the only player we would ever leave you alone with.’ He was the one that they trusted. They said, ‘No way.’ I tried to go to the discos. I was never allowed to.

This attempt to constrain Cheryl’s blossoming sexuality was clearly in tension with Cheryl’s own preferences and, more broadly, with the ’70s generation of young women who were becoming more overt in claiming their sexual independence. Cheryl recalls that the early 1970s was a ‘dangerous time’ and that her own attitudes were consistent with the mood of sexual liberation of the day. She was aware of the type of women that footballers went for, and she wanted to be like them: ‘The gorgeous blondes. You knew the type footballers were going for. I always tried to be like them. That’s what I wanted to be at the time.’ Carlton footballers worked in her father’s factory and she idolised players such as Brent Crosswell from a distance as a teenager. She recalled how football even penetrated the ritual of going to school. I remember going to school via Dad’s factory at 16 or 17, putting make-up on to go to school back then. Now it’s commonplace, but then you’d make sure your school dress was pulled up and get out of the car and go around the factory a bit. And it was really in your face. I must have been a terrible little tease at the time.

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Cheryl enjoyed being part of the culture of the club and always attending the best and fairest awards and other social club functions. These events were significant because being part of Carlton has ‘never been just the football’. She wanted to accompany her father at the club, but found herself barred from many of the places her father could go. Finding herself excluded from the parts of the club where only men could congregate had the effect of politicising her. It was a hugely male culture. It’s probably what set me onto a feminist path in a way. For example, before the match we’d get there at 11 am and Dad would go to the president’s lunch and I’d be sitting upstairs with the sandwiches. After the game he would go to the president’s after-game drinks. All the players would come in. It was almost as if there was a white line marked ‘Women don’t cross’. And I remember standing out there thinking, ‘Bugger this, this is just not right. Why aren’t I in there?’ I would be standing out there with Mrs Deacon and all those older women who again were not allowed in and I thought it was so senseless.

The role of women within the club was limited and did not encompass an involvement beyond traditional women’s tasks such as the women’s auxiliary. ‘You weren’t meant to be interested because it was a men’s thing anyway. Mrs Deacon used to tell me all that was going on. She was a lovely woman. Structurally there was no place for women.’

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At Cheryl’s first grand final – the 1968 Carlton– Essendon grand final – Jean Deacon, the widow of the club champion of the 1930s to 1950s, Bert Deacon, gave her a memento, which she treasured. On the occasion of Carlton’s first premiership since 1947 she warmly recalls sitting with all the wives of all the committee people: ‘I can remember sitting with Mrs Deacon and she gave me a little Carlton doll that I had until very recently when the dog got it. That was an introduction into the inner sanctum.’ Football served a dual function. It was the place where Cheryl struggled to assert her sexual identity as a teenager, and to claim an independent space from her father’s paternal control. But at the same time it provided a shared interest, which bonded her closer to her father. It provided an identification and source of connection with him. This identification was so strong that after his death in 1985 Cheryl did not go to the football or the social club for two years. ‘I couldn’t go. It was too associated with him.’ When she did resume her membership of the social club in 2003, she made a habit of sitting in a different spot from the one that she and her father had regularly shared. Her sense of loss was too intense and the football revived it with every match she attended. Cathie offers another perspective on the ways in which a connection to football originated within the family and linked to her father. Unlike Cheryl’s family, Cathie’s family was fragmented in their football allegiance. None of them followed her father’s team,

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Essendon, and only one followed her mother’s team, Melbourne. In a family of seven and when the VFL consisted of 12 teams, Cathie’s family between them barracked for four of these teams. This spread of allegiances might be common enough in a family where the football was marginal, but that isn’t what Cathie’s family was like. Cathie grew up in leafy Camberwell. Her mother, who married a boy from the western suburbs, insisted they should live in the eastern suburbs, a part of Melbourne generally regarded as more middle class. Her father was a member of the Melbourne Cricket Club and could take his daughter to the Members Reserve at the MCG to watch the football. Cathie would go with him regularly from when she was about 10 years old. However, Cathie actually barracked for Hawthorn because her eldest brother – who she idolised when she was a child – barracked for Hawthorn. He ‘put Hawthorn colours on my bassinette and my sister’s bassinette, so we just barracked for the Hawks’. A second brother barracked for Carlton – because of a barber who had Carlton paraphernalia in the shop when he had his hair cut, while yet another brother barracked for Melbourne, just like their mother, who, however, really didn’t follow the football anyway. ‘So to me barracking for the footy I identified with my father, although nobody barracked for Essendon.’ Here we have the odd conjunction of an identification with the father’s keen interest in football, yet support for a different team.

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This is a kind of companionship in isolation, as we’ll see. Many of the people we spoke with regarded going to the football with their father as ‘our time together’. In Nadine’s case her mother, a Hawthorn supporter, always came along as well, and thought that this was her time out with her husband. But as she didn’t barrack for St Kilda, unlike both father and daughter, Nadine was both adamant and entirely confident that the real couple at the football were father and daughter. They would huddle together and discuss the game as it unfolded. Cathie’s story is different. She and her father would go to the football together, but would each sit alone, either side of a ‘little wall’, usually in the Ponsford Stand at the MCG. She associated – and still associates – going to the football with her father, but she never barracked for his team. Instead, she followed the team bestowed upon her, almost from birth, by her handsome, intelligent and much beloved eldest brother who, oddly enough, did not himself go to the football when Cathie was a young girl. Cathie herself went regularly to the MCG with her father, just to watch the game, and, of course, not necessarily to see Hawthorn, whose home ground was at Glenferrie Oval. So Cathie grew up seeing teams that she didn’t barrack for and can quite happily do that now. She developed a love of football almost at her father’s knee, but not a devotion to her father’s team. As she says: I’d sit up the top of the Ponsford Stand to the right, because it was sunny. I loved sitting up in the

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sun. And Dad would sit just across the little wall. And sometimes he’d come across through that little gate, and sit with me, but usually he’d sit on the other side. So when they knocked that down, I was actually quite devastated, and I went to meetings and stuff. But I loved that pavilion because of the associations with Dad.

Cathie went on to describe how she would sit alone in the Ponsford Stand and would eat her lunch alone while her father did the same on the other side of the little dividing fence that separated male members from ladies and children. We asked if her father ever met up with friends and Cathie responded: ‘No, never. He was a solitary man, totally, always.’ Even after the game they would accompany each other in silence. ‘No, he didn’t talk. We’d get on the train and we wouldn’t talk and we’d get home and watch the post mortems.’ When she wasn’t trekking silently to and from the MCG with her father on Saturday afternoons during the football season, Cathie would accompany her ‘adopted’ family, the Sharpes, to Glenferrie Oval. The Sharpes were not only close family friends, they were also, just like Cathie, ‘mad passionate’ Hawthorn supporters. Throughout her teens she accompanied them to all of Hawthorn’s home games. As she says: So it was sort of split. It was me going to the footy with Dad, who mainly would go to see Essendon games at the MCG, but if he wanted to see another

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game he would go. And then there was me going with the Sharpes to watch the Hawks.

Into this story about football steps another narrative about the break-up of the family when Cathie was about 17. Her mother left the family at the beginning of 1974 when Cathie was in her final year of secondary school. ‘My mum left my family that year. So I actually stopped going to see Hawthorn. I’d just go with Dad to the MCG. And really I stopped barracking for the Hawks actually.’ Her inability to barrack for Hawthorn has continued. We asked Cathie to explain further. Well, my dad was left with me. I stayed with my father. My mother had been having an affair for about eight years, and she ended up leaving him one year. And I was just about to start my HSC. She left in ’72, I think. So I stayed with my father. My brothers were all grown up, and my sister worked with my mother. And she wanted me to go, but I didn’t want to leave. Not really because I didn’t want to leave Dad, but because I didn’t want to live with my stepfather. Because she went with the guy she’d been having an affair with. So I stayed at home with Dad, and just did whatever I liked, actually. And nearly failed my HSC, because I didn’t study. I was sleeping in a sleeping bag. I’d get $10 a week to buy groceries and I’d buy party pies. We ate extremely badly, and I didn’t do any study. I’d go to the footy though with Dad, nearly every week.

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We then asked whether he went more frequently that year. Yes, he did and it was sort of like catharsis for me and him. It’s the way we kind of stopped fighting, because I was a shocker. You know, his wife had just left him and I was very unhappy, and I’d yell at him. We were probably deeply traumatised. So we went to the footy together, the MCG together.

Cathie stayed with her father after her mother left the family. Her brothers had already left home, and her sister left with her mother. Cathie’s mother wanted Cathie to join her as well, but Cathie made the decision to stay because she was just about to start her matriculation year and because she didn’t want to live with her new ‘stepfather’. In that year, as she tells us, Cathie did what she wanted, but with one major and rather telling deviation. She could no longer support Hawthorn, her beloved team throughout her childhood and adolescence. Nor could she change to Essendon. She would just accompany her dad to the footy in smouldering silence and watch the games unfold. Much later, Cathie started following St Kilda, from 1990, after seeing them play a match against Melbourne. I started watching this team and I was hooked. My allegiance to Hawthorn had gone, but not to the point where I ever call St Kilda ‘we’. You can’t really change sides, unless you are really

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young. I don’t have the same feeling about the Saints that I did about Hawthorn. The identification in my case is far less emotional. I don’t feel that ecstatic feeling when they win that I did about the Hawks.

We asked Cathie to describe that feeling. It’s like when you took a penknife to school and wrote, ‘Leon Rice is very nice’. I carved it into the desk. You know just the kind of thing where you take it into yourself how much you love them. I took all the posters and knitted myself a scarf. You know I was in love with them. When they lost, I was miserable all week. But they won a lot.

As well as testimony to her love for Hawthorn and its players, Cathie gives a powerful description of identification when she tells us of ‘the kind of thing where you take it into yourself how much you love them’. Taking it in to yourself is exactly how Freud would describe identification. Despite the strength of her love for Hawthorn, the family break-up killed it in its tracks, while reinforcing Cathie’s identification with her father. This odd situation, in which Cathie linked her devotion to the football with her father, while barracking for a different team, lies at the root of her resolution to the trauma of the family break-up. She continued going to the football with her dad, but could no longer barrack for Hawthorn.

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This resistance to following her beloved Hawks was also strongly influenced by her relationship to her eldest brother, who she continues to associate with Hawthorn. He was responsible for her barracking for Hawthorn in the first place. Later, ‘he kind of opted out of the family, so there was something there missing. He was very rarely around’. Cathie idolised this brother. ‘He was the clever one, the really goodlooking one. He was eight years older and I wanted to be like him probably’. But she never went to the football with him. At the time of her mother’s departure from the family home, Cathie was very upset with her favourite brother because he ‘basically turned on my mother and wouldn’t have anything to do with her’. I think he was very resentful towards my mum. Maybe not barracking for the Hawks and not wanting to barrack for them might have something to do with the fact that it was all about him and not much about my dad. And my allegiance went to my father. So I switched allegiances. Not that I was barracking for Essendon but that I wasn’t going to barrack for Hawthorn or that I didn’t need to or I didn’t want to. So, no, I don’t feel any desire to barrack for Hawthorn now. So I don’t really have a team. Which is sad.

Cathie’s relationship with her family found expression through her love for and loss of Hawthorn. When my dad was dying, I had a drink with my big brother, and he was surprised to learn that I had

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stories about Dad that he had no idea about. In his mind the family romance finished when he left home in 1970. From my end I have always found it hard to accept that the boys ever went with Dad to the footy. In my mind it was always Dad and me.

Cathie’s attachment to St Kilda captures her reaction to the family break-up and preserves it into the present. St Kilda are not really my team. They’re like my borrowed team. Well, you can enjoy watching football and you can identify with a team, but I miss not really being able to love a football team. And I think that is melancholy. Because in some way you’re guarded, you’re guarded you know, you’re protected. It’s not as if you’re partaking in the whole gamut of what it is to follow a team. You don’t expose yourself, so you don’t make yourself vulnerable. You’re sort of standing on the sidelines.

Cathie’s account of how she lost her ability ‘to love a football team’ is also a story about her relations with her family. Her unconditional depth of attachment, with its risk of loss and profound disappointment, has been replaced by a more measured and guarded engagement, one in which she is ‘sort of standing on the sidelines’. By choosing St Kilda she revived her interest in football while avoiding any of the teams her parents or siblings supported. It is as if she is again at the football watching a team she doesn’t support,

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just like she used to be with her father. The footy story and the family story have collapsed into each other through her engagement with footy, yet disengagement from passionate support for a football team. This is the ground zero of ‘football melancholia’. For Helen, it was not her father’s presence, but rather his absence, that consolidated her devotion to Melbourne. In her case it was the father who left the family home, when Helen was a young schoolgirl. Like Nadine and Cheryl, Helen’s devotion to Melbourne, from a young age, offered her the opportunity to be both independent and yet attached. Helen has supported the Melbourne Football Club all her life. Now in her 50s, she is a passionate, committed and involved supporter, with the trials and tribulations of the club being a daily and ongoing preoccupation for her. Through her passion for the Demons she found a creative way of separating from the bruising experience of her parents’ troubled relationship, while preserving a connection with her – now mainly absent – father, a strong Melbourne supporter. It provided a context in which she could work through her feelings of abandonment and confusion. Indeed it served a role akin to what Freud called the ‘family romance’, in which ‘the child’s imagination becomes engaged in the task of getting free from the parents of whom he now has such a low opinion and of replacing them by others, occupying, as a rule, a higher social station’.* * S. Freud, ‘Family Romances’ in Collected Papers, Volume V, London: Hogarth Press, 1950, p. 76.

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Freud argues that to achieve this the child will make use ‘of any opportune coincidences from his actual experience, such as his becoming acquainted with the Lord of the Manor’. In Helen’s case it was not so much the lord of the manor – in the form of Melbourne’s renowned coach Norm Smith – but rather his ‘adopted son’ Ron Barassi, who took this role, or one akin to it. However, through one of those disconcerting connections that seem to recur in the experience of many football supporters, the issue of separation itself returned when, in 1964, Barassi announced that he was leaving Melbourne to take up a lucrative contract with rival club Carlton – almost the ultimate betrayal. Our interview with Helen focused especially on this episode, due to the significance it held for her. As well as being one of the greatest players ever to have played Australian Rules football, Ron Barassi was also captain of the Melbourne team. At that time, transfers to another club were exceptional, as players were expected to give loyal service to one club throughout their playing career. In retrospect, Barassi’s transfer to Carlton signalled the beginning of the professionalisation of the game. In the same year Barassi left Melbourne, Helen’s dad left her mother and the family home. An only child, Helen’s outings with her father were moments of close bonding, leaving her with vivid and resonant childhood memories. And now her father was to be an occasional visitor to the home of his wife and 14-year-old daughter.

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Football offered a space within which to deal with this rupture. While as a teenager Helen was happy to go to the football alone or with a friend, one season she also found a surrogate family with which to go. With her female friend in this family, football became a way of talking about other things. It was a very important friendship for me at that stage. We could talk about other intimate things because we had this bond and every weekend I would become part of her family and we would truck off to the football together and that was great fun doing that.

Barassi was a star player and was her special favourite. She would get his autograph after the matches and collected them in her autograph book. There is a little sequence where I had his autograph once a month. There are a couple more Ron Barassi autographs where I’ve obviously become emboldened and asked him to write a little bit more and so by the last one he’s actually written, ‘Dear Helen, Best Wishes, Keep Barracking Hard’. This was late in September ’64 – that was the last one.

At a moment of felt abandonment by her father, this adolescent girl found that going to the football with her friend’s family offered her a perspective on other families. It also presented her with an opportunity to try out her looming independence from family. And it

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brought her into the proximity of young, vigorous men, while keeping her at a safe distance – the other side of the boundary, so to speak. Several women we have interviewed tell a similar story. Going to the football as an adolescent gave them an opportunity to escape the pressures of family life while also offering entry into an (almost) adult world. In Helen’s case she seized the opportunity and regularly attended training sessions and club meetings, as well as the weekly matches. This is a ritual she continues to observe 40 years later. Helen’s father was a good sportsman and had a close connection with the Melbourne Football Club. Barassi and the other players seem to have shared certain qualities with her father, while being younger and at the elite level in their sport. This was particularly true of Barassi. In a way he symbolised the whole club for me. They did seem to be so daring and such an interesting mixture of players of all shapes and sizes. And just to be so sort of powerful and brave – so completely kind of death defying in things that he would try and do. He just wouldn’t let anything stand in his way. I used to find watching him play just aweinspiring. He was someone that I felt I could bowl up to and speak to. It was a fantastic thrill. Here was this amazingly brave, heroic figure and at the same time I could have a little relationship with him.

When Barassi left the club, it was as if her world had been turned upside down. For her, it was inconceiv-

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able. She was baffled and it seemed unintelligible that he would leave the family of the club. Tellingly, she compares it to a family break-up. I suppose I just couldn’t believe it. It’s a bit like the family break-up thing in a way, because you find out that it’s happening and then you sort of think back and you think well why was I naive enough to think that this wouldn’t ever happen, even though that was the first time anybody had left a club that you could think of. I suppose it was a shock because I used to go around thinking that the players felt the same way about the game as I did and so, that they had this intense loyalty and that their own club was everything, their team mates were everything to them and all that. And so, for me, it was all that incomprehension of how and why you would leave all that. I suppose I didn’t really understand how money could be important to anybody. I was too young to really think about money. It was literally inconceivable why he would do that, and why to Carlton is the other horrifying thing!

Helen could not easily fully understand and describe her own family break-up, just as she found it difficult to discuss, at the age of 14, how she was despondent about Barassi leaving the club. It was a difficult relationship then I think … the whole family thing. It was not something I remember talking to Dad about. At 14 you found

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it difficult to talk about something that means a lot to you I suppose.

The difficulty of talking referred to here mixes together the separation from her father and the defection of Barassi. This is a dual grief in which the two aspects of family and footy overlap. Helen’s father was a hard person with whom to discuss intimate subjects at the best of times. So intermingled with her own family’s disruption are the meanings and feelings associated with Barassi’s departure that Helen found it impossible to discuss the matter with the very person whose identification with Melbourne she had so enthusiastically taken on and, since, has so meticulously preserved. It is not her mother’s team, Collingwood, that she supports. Rather it is her father’s club. The ‘family romance’ Helen was thrown into was not one of her own devising. Rather it emerged from an odd conjunction of personal, familial and broader social processes. Supporting Melbourne so passionately and devotedly over a lifetime has offered her a way of working through the trauma of her parents’ divorce while preserving valued, and valuable, aspects of her relation to her father and all he represented for her. Like Nadine and Cheryl, it has also played through the networks of family and friendship in ways that connect the generations. Her more recent football companions have included her son, close friends and, now, her son-in-law. Helen’s attachment to the club provided her with a safe haven at a time of turmoil, yet

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even this adopted haven was not really secure, as Barassi’s move to Carlton highlighted. Still, it served as an entry point into a wider world – one populated by heroic, handsome and virile men. It acted as a lure and a promontory; holding out the promise of excitement, pleasure, success and, most of all, independence. At the same time, it preserved, with a difference, a connection to that which had been so radically disrupted within her family at such a vulnerable moment for her. In so doing it served as a field for working through disappointment and loss, as well as possibility, success and achievement. Mary’s passion and knowledge of the game came from her father, an avid Essendon supporter. Mary, who we first met in Chapter 2, attended matches from a very young age in the company of her father and her uncles. Well, my dad and his two older brothers followed Essendon. I’ve always said that we virtually covered the twentieth century between us, pretty much. My dad’s passed away now, but he saw the Mosquito Fleet in the twenties. He used to take me and my older brother when we were just kids, and I was about three. In fact, I’m glad he did because I saw John Coleman play.

John Coleman was an iconic figure. I remember going one day and asking my dad what that bus was there for – there was a bus

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there from the Wimmera. And he said, ‘They’re country people. They’ve come down to see John Coleman play.’ And I was so impressed. Even going to Geelong in those days was a big deal. In fact we didn’t go to Geelong because it was regarded as too far, and we didn’t have a car.

Not only was Mary lucky enough to see Coleman play. As a young child she also observed the extent of Coleman’s charisma and turned to her father for an explanation. My father was always my reference for information in those days, and I remember asking him why were all the people changing – at the end of the quarter they all moved down to the other end. John Coleman was changing ends, that’s why. You know, things like that, and ‘Why is he sitting on the ground?’ Because he used to sit on his heel, on the ground and lean up against the goalposts when the game was down the other end of the ground. See, nowadays you’d probably be regarded as arrogant for doing that. But it wasn’t, it was just him having a rest I think. He was very white-faced. Maybe he had the heart condition then and didn’t know. So that was something else I remember about Coleman.

Turning to her father for explanations about the football became a habit that served her well, while also deepening their relationship.

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I think that’s why a lot of people say that I know a lot about football, as in, I understand the game. Well why wouldn’t you? I’m a woman, I’ve never played it, but, you know, we’re not totally dense. But my father taught me about football, and taught me why this move was happening.

She never missed going to the finals right through the ’50s and the ’60s when finals tickets were bought in a set through coupons out of the paper. One year she joined the cheer squad camping outside the MCG for finals tickets. Her father chaperoned her there. My dad wouldn’t have a bar of that, so he came with me. And, you know, just the thought of my father sitting up all night with me to make sure I didn’t get into any trouble. And I was glad he was there, because, round about midnight they were all blind drunk, and, you know. But we got tickets.

Mary’s mother was born and raised in Richmond, and she barracked for the Tigers. However, when her parents were married in 1946 they had a deal that they would go to Essendon one week and Richmond the next. So of course you know where they went the first week, they went to Essendon. The following week, Mum told me, was a split round, Anzac Day weekend, so they went to both. They saw Essendon, they saw Richmond, but soon afterwards she became an absolutely passionate Essendon supporter.

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By the time Mary was born into the family, it was an entirely Essendon family. There was no residual affection for Richmond within the family, indeed quite the opposite. I don’t like Richmond’s supporters. I think they’re as rough as bags, to be honest. When they were successful, she thought that there was too much bragging about how good they were – which is true, that’s what they did. And she didn’t like that, so that just set her even more so against them.

Although coming from a Richmond family, Mary’s mother didn’t just switch allegiance. Rather, she actively rejected Richmond and took great pleasure when Essendon beat them. This shift to Essendon is clearly about family, but it also suggests that issues of class mobility were part of the story. Mary’s father died in 1977. For Mary, very like Nadine, Cheryl and Helen, being at the football summons intense memories of him. It sets in play what we earlier termed an ‘as if’ magical world in which time is eclipsed by the co-presence of a litany of special moments. Well, when we won the flag in ’84, I was coming out of the MCG and I just suddenly burst into tears, and it was because he wasn’t there. Both of them, they weren’t there, and we’d just won this amazing grand final. We came from behind. And I really felt him, I really felt that he was there with me. And, of course, when Sheedy

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came – because Sheedy was a plumber from Prahran, and so was my dad.

These stories about themselves and footy that Nadine, Cheryl, Cathie, Helen and Mary told us are all extremely powerful and moving. However, they are not that unusual. Once you notice the ways in which keen supporters find meaning and significance in the fate of their footy team, you realise that other aspects of their life are folded inside all that passion about the team. At the same time, the very fact that the team is something that supporters share with parents, family and friends ensures that their secret, private passions can be voiced and shared, even if indirectly through an attachment to a team. Football identifications position the individual supporter within a field of memories and attachments that are, all at once, personal, familial and more broadly social. They express significant aspects of the supporter’s life history, their attachments and their life dilemmas. Every time the team plays, all of that history and passion is revived, whether at home, at work or at play.

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5: Reality Bites

Perhaps because my father had played football, and I just took it as a sort of fact of life, you know, my family had played football, and it was mentioned all the time, and I suppose I enjoyed that, but I never attached any particular significance to it. Chris, Melbourne

For keen football supporters, having a father who played the game with distinction would be a dream come true. But what is it actually like to be that close to the footy? Interestingly, such familiarity can temper all the passionate intensity we have seen in support-

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ers who do not have a direct family connection to the game. Here we look at how such an up-close exposure to the game from childhood has played itself out in the life story of two sons of renowned footballers, both named Chris. Football as a family affair was the reason that Chris Cordner was drawn into following Melbourne, but his relationship to the game was very different to others we talked with. As a member of the Cordner family, which became a household name through its long and illustrious association with the Melbourne Football Club, Chris’s engagement with football was unavoidable and very much part and parcel of his extended family’s everyday life. Such familiarity certainly didn’t breed contempt, but it did curb any tendency to become highly emotional about the Demons. Having both a father and an uncle who were renowned Melbourne footballers, and two other uncles who also played for Melbourne, meant that the young Chris was exposed to an insider’s view of footy at home and always linked with the family’s football prowess at school and socially. Chris’s football legacy derives from his father Don and uncle Denis, who were among the best players ever to play for Melbourne. Both were selected in Melbourne’s ‘Team of the Century’: they are the only two brothers to have achieved this distinction apart from Sid and Gordon Coventry from Collingwood. They were the cornerstone of the magnificent Melbourne teams of the 1940s and 1950s and their contribution is celebrated by the naming of the Cordner Entrance

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to the Members at the MCG. Chris’s father Don joined Melbourne in 1941 at the age of 19 and played in the victorious grand final team of 1941 in only his second game. He won the Brownlow Medal in 1946, captained the team to a flag in 1948 and was team captain, again, in 1949, before retiring in 1950. Chris’s Uncle Denis won Melbourne’s best and fairest in 1950 and 1954 and captained Melbourne from 1951 to 1953. Significantly, both Don and Denis played as amateurs, as did two other Cordner brothers, John and Ted, who also played for Melbourne. Given this, football was an inescapable part of family life for the young Chris, even though his father had retired soon after Chris was born. Chris’s first football memory was his uncle’s last game in 1956. My first memory is the 1956 grand final, which happened to be my Uncle Denis’s last game, and Melbourne won that grand final against Collingwood, and I can remember him falling over, or getting knocked over, and I can remember one of the Collingwood players, unnecessarily sort of climbing over Denis as he [the Collingwood player] got up from the pack. I remember being mortified that anyone would do this. It was just unbelievable. From memory I’d now describe it as a pretty minor ‘niggle’. And that moment has always stuck in my mind.

This first memory reveals that Chris’s Uncle Denis had a persona within the family fold that didn’t neatly correspond with his identity as a footy star. Someone

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climbing over him that way in a game at the MCG seemed shocking. This isn’t really that surprising. For most of us, all we really know about footballers is the way they play the game. The exception to this is unless, of course, they disgrace themselves in pubs and nightclubs or in the company of young women. However, to live as a young child in the company of a football player who is also your father or uncle is to be exposed to that relative’s many dimensions and qualities. By contrast, the typical supporter tends to experience the players as one-dimensional. We hadn’t quite worked this out when we asked Chris whether his Uncle Denis had been a great hero for him when he was a young boy. He answered: No, not really, I don’t think so. Perhaps because my father had played football, and I just took it as a sort of fact of life … my family had played football … it was mentioned so often everywhere you went. Every time you were introduced to anybody, the subject would come up. It was mentioned all the time, and I suppose I enjoyed that, but I never attached any particular significance to it. So my uncle was just another one of the family. I always got on very well with him. I suppose he was a figure similar to my father, although he didn’t stand out specifically.

Chris’s primary school years coincided with the golden years of Melbourne’s reign and of their traditional rivalry with Collingwood. Melbourne won the prem-

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iership in 1955, 1956, 1957, 1959 and 1960, losing to Collingwood in the grand final in 1958. In response to our suggestion that during that period he must have regarded Melbourne’s supremacy as the proper ordering of the football universe, Chris commented: Yes, there was no question about that. We still have film from Dad’s old camera of the local state school football team, and half the team were in Melbourne jumpers and the other half were in Collingwood jumpers. There were no such things as school uniforms, and everybody just played in their favourite VFL football jumper. And Collingwood were known as the very respected other, so it would have been equally odd if they weren’t in there at the death knock as well. But the idea that Melbourne and Collingwood weren’t at the top was something you never even thought of.

Chris played football for the University of Melbourne and remembers his father attending those games regularly, in preference to attending Melbourne matches. While watching his son play was a major attraction, there was more to it. He still goes to the game and watches Melbourne and supports them, but he’s always felt alienated from the professionalisation of the game – that wasn’t the same in the 50s and 60s of course. But even then I wouldn’t say he was passionate, himself, about the game. Then, when I started playing for the university he used to come to the university

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matches most of the time. He thought he had much more in common with that environment than with the Melbourne environment. He was on the Melbourne Cricket Club Committee for years and on the Melbourne Football Club Committee as the MCC representative for some years, so he still had some hands-on contact, but he never chose to hang around the club as a way of spending time.

Chris, a philosopher at the University of Melbourne, has inherited his father’s keen love of sport of all kinds. He fondly recalls playing tennis with his parents and siblings as a child, playing Australian Rules at school and university and playing rugby and tennis when studying as a postgraduate at Oxford University. My father was interested in and continued to play sport of various kinds. We … played a lot of tennis as a kid, with him and my mother and my siblings. And my father was still playing cricket after he stopped playing football. He used to organise swimming training at the local pool, and we used to play golf. So … football was … part of that mix, but it wasn’t a distinctive thing.

Today, Chris supports Melbourne and sometimes goes to matches with his children. However, he is more passionate about Australia’s Rugby Union team than he is about the Melbourne Football Club. Most shocking of all, he probably prefers rugby to Australian Rules! He told us that, for him, unlike our passionate supporters, there was not much hanging on Melbourne’s success

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or failure. Continuing along these lines of thought, Chris explained: I don’t think there was much hanging on it. Whether I would have said this without the luxury of there having been all those grand finals in the early years, I’m not sure. There’s also a temperamental thing that I just don’t think that I ever attached quite the same significance to it. Now I get more involved in Australia’s performance in rugby because I played rugby for a bit and ever since then I’ve liked rugby; I think it’s a wonderful game; and I tend to get more excited about the Wallabies’ performance by far than I do about Melbourne’s performance.

This is a lover of sport, himself the son of a renowned sportsman, talking. But the story is complicated. If passionate intensity is missing from Chris’s attachment to Melbourne, his knowledge reveals a sustained interest. I was disappointed about the ’87 preliminary final. I thought we had momentum in 1987 and we could well have won; we should have won that game, we had so many opportunities. So I can’t help feeling that that was a real lost opportunity and we lost it because we didn’t take our chance, having done tremendously well to get there. Over the next eight or nine years, I thought Melbourne – apart from being in the finals each year, and the results being good – got more out of what they had on the field than any other team, in that period and they had a reputation in that era for being the hardest team,

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the team the opposition least liked to play because they were the hardest at the ball and their opponents. So I had great respect for their performance over those eight or nine years, they did – I probably shouldn’t say this as a Melbourne supporter – but they in those years they did what Collingwood had done for decades. I don’t believe in the collywobbles, I think Collingwood used to get to the finals with teams that other clubs would never have made it to the finals with – and in the finals everybody’s going flat out, when during the year only Collingwood was going flat out, and so quality would come to tell in the finals and Collingwood would lose. I think Melbourne’s performance in the late ’80s and ’90s was a bit like that, so even though I would have liked them to have actually finished better, on the whole maybe with the exception of 1987 I think they performed above themselves, and that was a bonus as far as I was concerned.

As we saw in the last chapter, for Helen the move by Ron Barassi from Melbourne to Carlton was devastating. It was a betrayal. Also, as it coincided with her father’s departure from the family home, it overflowed with emotional resonance, a resonance that echoes down into the present. For Chris, however, Barassi’s move, although disappointing, made sense. Strangely enough – I was 14 at the time – I don’t have any recollection of thinking of it as a betrayal. It wasn’t because I had some terrifically sophisticated idea about how a bloke’s got to earn a crust,

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and he’s entitled to sell his labour. It happened and of course I was disappointed, particularly at the way the performance unfolded after it – Norm Smith being sacked and reinstated and so on. It had a lot of consequences. How much they were caused by that and how much they were a kind of symptom of some other things that might have gone wrong anyway is another question. But the actual event, it was a big thing, and perhaps I also thought, ‘Well, okay, Barassi’s been terrific, we’re a good team anyway.’ But I certainly don’t recall having any sense of outrage or betrayal, of the kind a lot of people did have.

What did trouble Chris was Melbourne’s refusal to try to get Barassi back as coach only a few years later, when his contract with Carlton ended. What the club probably saw as standing on principle, Chris saw as foolish stubbornness, and along with some other poor decisions made by the club, this contributed to his loss of passionate interest. The fact that he played matches on Saturdays and then went overseas also had an impact. At university I still used to follow Melbourne, and I must admit I did get a bit fed up with them. I was speaking just a while ago to a former player who played for Melbourne for three years from ’69 to ’72, and he was saying how disorganised and badly prepared the club was at the time compared to many other clubs. To me it seemed as if they hadn’t realised that they would have to earn their place in the sun.

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Barassi’s return may have made a difference. After Barassi’s initial success with Carlton my memory is that there was a real opportunity for Melbourne to try to get him back when his contract at Carlton ended, and I think for a pretty reasonable price. But there seemed to be a sort of indignation at the idea of getting him back. Of course in the end when they did swallow their pride – this is how it seemed to me at the time, I might be wrong, but that is how I saw it – his asking price had gone through the roof, and by then he’d lost a lot of his charisma because the players he was coaching could not remember him as a player, and I think he had also perhaps lost some of his own earlier enthusiasm for the job. Anyway, all of that did irritate me at the time. How much that had to do with my loss of interest I’m not sure, because I used to follow the league at school. I couldn’t really go to see them, because they played on Saturdays and I was playing on Saturdays, so I didn’t get to see much football except for the finals. I mean I still followed the competition reasonably closely and watched replays and so on. So, probably, those views about how Melbourne were handling things were probably a small part of my general moving away from the game, but it had more to do with my situation on Saturdays; and then I went overseas of course and that increased the situation too.

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his father was a love of sport, not particularly of any specific team or sporting code. He commented on his father’s attitude to Barassi’s move to Carlton, which was very similar to his own. Dad’s view was simple: if a bloke says he wants to go somewhere else to play, you should let him go. Not, I guess, a view that has much place now in a professionalised sport.

This is entirely consistent with his father’s and family’s commitment to the amateur ethic, where sport is one important aspect of a rounded life and played for recreation. The story of how Chris’s father and uncles came to play with Melbourne is revealing in this regard. My father became progressively less interested in football as it became more professional. He and his brothers played as amateurs. Indeed, the only reason they finished up playing football with Melbourne was because of the war. They had all started playing at the university, and then the amateurs disbanded in 1940, eight games into the season because of the war. The next year, 1941, my father was still only 18 so he formed the first University under-19 team and put it into the competition with him as captain. His elder brother Ted had been playing for the Blacks also the previous year, and Melbourne had invited him down in the middle of 1941, and then at the end of 1941, Dad got invited down to Melbourne as well, and he in fact played

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his first league game in the second semi-final and his second in the grand final when Melbourne won their third premiership in a row. And so he just kept playing the next year because he wanted to play football. He was enrolled as a medical student, and he had already tried to enlist several times unsuccessfully, they wouldn’t let him enlist, same as his older brother, so he just kept playing with Melbourne through the war, and then continued on afterwards. He still goes to some Melbourne games, and still supports them, but he’s always felt alienated from the professionalisation of the game – that wasn’t the same in the ’50s and ’60s of course. But even then I wouldn’t say he was passionate, himself, about the game. And then when I started playing for the university he used to come to the university all the time. He thought he had much more in common with that environment than with the Melbourne environment.

Even so, football remained a vital part of Chris’s growing up. So yes, we talked about it at home, and I think, despite all the hype these days – I don’t think this is just an illusion from childhood, but I may be wrong – that league football was a bigger social phenomenon then than now; three hours of World of Sport, replays on every television channel on Saturday night, and not nearly so much else to do! So it was big, for any kids and families that were into football it was actually in your face all the time. So, yeah

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we discussed it, I don’t think we were particularly statistically or analytically minded about it, it just occupied a big part of your life … but not a bigger part of my life, or our lives, than other people’s.

There are similar themes that emerge from Chris Green’s story. Chris’s father, Michael Green, played for Richmond between 1966 and 1971 and again from 1973 to 1975, eventually playing 148 games for the Tigers. Mike Green first ‘retired’ in 1972, a year after Chris’s birth, to pursue his law career and due to his family responsibilities. However, after Richmond’s grand final loss that year he was asked to return and he then played in Richmond’s next premiership teams in 1973 and 1974, finally retiring in 1975 at the age of 27. Such was his prowess in his relatively short career that he was selected for Richmond’s Team of the Century in 1999. Despite this, Chris describes his father as a ‘nonfootball person’. My father, even though he played, he’s actually a non-football person, which is weird in that he played for 10 years … he was on a committee, he was on a coaching panel for a while, he was chairman of selectors, he was reserves coach, he did all sorts of things over a 25-year period. And yet he had never actually been that in love with footy. I think he loved the guys he played with and all that sort of team thing, but he retired two or three times and finally retired by the time he was 27,

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because he ranked footy below his family and his work and he had a law practice by the time he was about 22. He kept getting dragged back by the club, but he’s never been a mad footy guy.

Chris’s grandparents on his father’s side were the passionate Richmond supporters. My grandparents on my father’s side were very, very strong Richmond people. My great-grandfather was a tram driver in Richmond and classic Richmond sort of Depression-era family with 10 or 11 kids … and Jack Dyer lived in the same neighbourhood and Jack owned shops there … the classic inner Richmond, very poor upbringing … I would say a lot of it was passed down from my grandparents. They went, they were Richmond supporters, they went every week in the days when you could follow thirds, seconds and then the firsts, and often particularly the seconds and then the firsts always played consecutively and they would go and sit and watch the whole day, they’d watch Dad play when he was 16 or 17 he played for the seconds, all the way through to the 10–12 year, 150-game career.

As a young boy Chris and his younger brother were often around the club on weekends. We used to go, particularly on a Sunday, to the recovery session with Dad. So we grew up at Punt Road, my brother and I. And if you talk to Richmond people of that era ’65 though say ’75, they’ll

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often talk about how there were four or five kids, sort of my age, who would hang around and be pests to the players. Some of my earliest memories are of being put in the crèche as Dad was going to play. There was actually a crèche for many years in East Melbourne where you could drop the kids while you played. There are a number of people that I’ve been lifelong friends with whose dads played together, and I’ve been friends with the kids forever.

Chris did not idolise his father as a footballer – he had retired before Chris could remember him as a player. He was retired before I remember, so not really. In actual fact, because he’s not into footy, he’s actually downplayed it himself. He downplays footballers constantly. To the extent of, these guys aren’t saving the world. So, while it’s been something that’s been a central plank of his life, he’s certainly never, we’ve never, I’ve literally never got an autograph in my life. And I wouldn’t know why anyone would ever get an autograph. And some of that’s probably because I’ve been in the inner sanctum growing up so why would I get Kevin Bartlett’s autograph when he comes for dinner? Equally, across any sport, I’ve always thought that it’s ridiculous that a sportsman would be idolised in that sense.

In this refusal to idolise any player, Chris is very like his father. However, as a Richmond recruiting advertisement said, ‘It’s in the blood.’ Chris takes consid-

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erable pride in having grown up with such a strong Richmond heritage, but he links that as much to his great-grandfather and his grandparents, who were devoted Richmond supporters, as he does to having such a famous Richmond player for his father. Certainly, it’s always been a very central part of my make-up, is the Richmond thing, and a little bit is about the family history. I’m actually as proud of the Richmond origin grandparent, great-grandparent part as I am of anything else.

His own memories are shaped by the stories told about his father rather than the memory himself. My grandparents, for example, have got scrapbooks. They kept a scrapbook of his whole career. They’ve got 16 of them, of these clippings, of Richmond’s golden era. So it’s a bit hard for me to say how much of that I remember and how much I just know because we used to read them.

Due to his father’s continued involvement with the club after he retired as a player, Chris Green had a far longer insider’s exposure to Richmond than Chris Cordner did with Melbourne. He recalls that when he was 10 and his father was coach of the reserves, he would go to games every week and to training after school. His childhood was, indeed, any footy fan’s dream come true.

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Although Dad would say he is not a footy person, his life has been inside footy in the sense that he ended up coaching the reserves in ’82 and ’83 – when I was 10 or 11 – and we’d go every week, and we’d go to training if it suited with school, we would go every Saturday and be there before the game. School footy would often be on Wednesdays when I was in grades 5 and 6. We’d go to reserves games before the seniors and be there from 10 or 11 o’clock, kicking the footy around in the rooms. Players would play; we’d hang around in the rooms; we’d be there after the games. The seniors would run out and we’d watch the game. Dad was reserves coach and on the selection committee for the seniors. Then, a few years later, he came back as chairman of selectors when Kevin Bartlett became coach. So then we had three or four years, again, where we were – and this is largely my brother and I, but at this stage we have other younger kids in the family, but, largely the two of us, again, in the rooms and in and around the club a lot. As a result of these circumstances I’m a passionate Richmond supporter.

Chris Green has carved out a career in sports management, after a postgraduate training in the United States. His training began at his father’s knee and around the kitchen table, where he would talk with his father as much about the management side of footy as he would about the on-ground performance. Chris was a good footballer, playing for Richmond under19s, but he quickly realised that he was never going to

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make it as a player in the seniors. Rejecting acting, his other love, as too insecure a career, he realised, with the help of a wise career counsellor, that he was ideally suited to sports management. All those years around the club and in the rooms with the players, capped by those long discussions with his father about how to manage players, contracts and club administration bore fruit in the guise of an interesting and rewarding career. Chris now has children of his own and has started taking his eldest to see Richmond games. Like the troubled father discussed in Chapter 1, who phoned in to radio station 3AW asking about whether he should impose a lifetime of Richmond supporting on his young son, Chris often wonders whether this is quite fair to the boy. I don’t know whether he deserves to go through what I’ve gone through for the past 20 years. And they’re the most unsuccessful team for the past 20 years. And for everything that they have buggered up, there is still a large group of people who love ’em.

Chris gives his thoughts about the age profile of Richmond supporters. Richmond has a huge group of supporters who are 35 plus, because those people were young when they were successful. Then they have this massive gap and then they have a strong supporter base

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that is under 10. They are the kids of the 35 plus, who get it passed down from Dad, as with me and my son. But then there is this whole gap where they were just terrible for 20 years. And they have virtually zero supporters in that group. So Richmond has just lost that whole generation of people.

Chris no longer gets depressed when Richmond lose; he just gets angry. Like Chris Cordner, he is very critical of the way the club has been managed through the ’90s and early 2000s. Of a former club president, he observes that he was quite up-front about taking on the presidency of Richmond because it would help his business interests. ‘And he wasn’t even a Richmond supporter.’ It is clear that Chris still cares deeply about Richmond. His young son Patrick has drawn the generations together at the football again. The three of us have gone a number of times this year, and Dad loves it more for that, because he sees my son who just loves the Tigers in the classic irrational way that a kid loves the Tigers. And he and I say, ‘Oh God, I hope they are going to be better for the next 20 years,’ because it has just been horrible for the last 20 years to actually follow the team.

On the day that Patrick first attended a match in 2005, the extended family came along – his uncles, aunts and grandparents – to celebrate the big day. Unfor-

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tunately, Richmond were ‘smashed’ by Geelong and Patrick, already a Tiger to the core, wondered out loud to all his family: ‘Does this mean I have to barrack for Geelong?’ Of course, it didn’t, but Chris did wonder what future disappointment he was subjecting his precious son to.

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6: Australian Rules

This is the greatest game I’ve ever seen … it just possessed me as a game. Wilf, West Coast Eagles

As the population of Australia changed due to immigration, so too did the composition of the crowd at the footy. The massive post-war migration was one of the largest in Australia’s history to that time. Between 1947 and 1969, two million migrants arrived in Australia. While immigrants from Britain were preferred, large numbers came from Southern Europe, such as Greeks, Italians and Maltese. During the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, these ‘New Australians’, as they were called, were expected to assimilate into Austral-

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ian society and disperse within the community. For generations growing up at that time, football was often a way in which they forged an entry into Australian cultural life. There were, for instance, over 60,000 permanent arrivals from Greece between 1945 and 1959. The majority of these Greek immigrants settled in Melbourne, mainly in the old inner suburbs such as Fitzroy, Brunswick, Carlton and Collingwood, all of which had established cultures in which football played a large part. To see how football figured among immigrant families and their children, we begin with the experiences of Christine and Nick, both of whom identify themselves as Greek Australian and as keen Carlton supporters. As young children, Christine and her sister barracked for Richmond, but without much passion. Christine describes herself as having been a ‘pseudoRichmond supporter’, so slight was her interest. She never attended games or even watched the replays on TV. Her support for Richmond was entirely gestural, the product of growing up in a football-obsessed Melbourne culture in which every child was expected to have a team. Christine tells a revealing story about her parents’ visit back to Greece with their Australian-born children in 1978, when she was five years old. While visiting their aunts, uncles and cousins in their Greek village, the two Melbourne-born sisters found themselves sorting out their personal relationship in a way that connected directly to the

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Melbourne they had left behind for a while. As Christine put it: I remember being in the village square and my sister pulled me aside and she said, ‘When we get back to Australia, I’m changing to Collingwood like the rest of our cousins, but you’re not allowed to copy.’

Christine’s sister used the family’s return to its roots in Greece to drop her support for Richmond and reconfigure, somewhat unexpectedly, her relationship with her cousins in Melbourne. At a moment of deep immersion in the family traditions, this young girl reached out towards family in an entirely unpredictable way, by distinguishing herself from her sister while choosing to identify with her cousins, that is, her Melbourne cousins, the Collingwood supporters. It is unlikely that her parents anticipated quite such a reconnection to other family members when they took their young children back to Greece to expose them to the old culture. The new culture in Melbourne had made its impact and this was expressed through a desire to barrack for Collingwood. In her teenage years Christine took little interest in football – leaving that domain to her sister and her cousins. But things began to change when she met Nick – who manfully tried to merge his new passion for Christine with his long-established devotion to Carlton. He took her to some games and Christine sat there with her book in hand, reading away in defiance

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of all that she regarded as ‘bogan’ culture. For Christine, football was ‘very Anglo Australian’ and associated in her mind with racism and the exclusion of migrants. That was her firm opinion until she sat with Nick and her book in the stands at Princes Park. At first, she ‘refused to look at the game’, but after a few games Nick discovered the siren song that would catch her attention and turn her into a lifelong addict. He recited the names of the players – his favourite players – and as the recitation went on – ‘That’s Koutoufides, that’s Christou, that’s Franchina, that’s Camporeale’– Christine realised that ‘there are lots of wogs in this team and that’s when I got addicted’. She continues: I could relate to it. There were boys coming from similar backgrounds to mine playing football. I thought, ‘That’s pretty good.’ And I started to get into the game and following those particular players. There were a lot of Italian supporters so you’d go to the games and you’d see them and you thought, ‘Okay, well, I fit in here.’

Perhaps the most profound potential of football for both Christine and Nick lies in the way it has provided them with an opportunity to enter into mainstream Australian culture and, at the same time, reinforce their distinctive ethnic identity as Greek Australians. Nick recalls one Carlton victory where there ‘was a moment there in the last quarter where three Anglo Australians who we wouldn’t be mixing with in a different social context … We were embracing each other

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at the end of the game … I felt that sense of being one – so to speak’ Nick, as a Greek Australian, identified with, and took particular pleasure from, the Carlton supporters’ embrace of players like Anthony Koutoufides. In one game in 1996 against West Coast he recalled how Koutoufides had given an ‘unbelievable individual performance’. The whole crowd chanted, ‘Kouta, Kouta, Kouta.’ It moved me. It moved me. I thought this guy is ethnic. I could relate to that. It’s almost like, they’ve embraced him, they have accepted him.

Of course, Nick is also noticing how ‘they’ have accepted ‘me’. After all, it is he who, at least at the football, experiences that feeling of ‘being one’. For some years now, both Christine and Nick have been passionate Carlton supporters, travelling each week to watch their team and enduring the pain of a succession of the worst defeats Carlton has ever experienced – culminating in 2002 in their first wooden spoon, for finishing bottom of the league ladder. They provide exquisite testimony to the pain and humiliation such an experience can induce. Christine reflects. We were going to every single game apart from obviously the interstate games. I kept saying to Nick we are going to win the wooden spoon. He was in denial. I am a pessimist by nature so I thought, ‘we

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are going to get it’. But we would go week in week out. I would get angry but I wouldn’t cry or anything like that. So although it was painful getting the wooden spoon, particularly when we had to play Essendon in the last round and Essendon supporters turned up with those wooden spoons. That really hurt. But apart from being frustrated after every game, I wasn’t devastated. I think last year was more devastating because we thought things were going to change. We thought, ‘No, it’s just the coach, it’s not the players, it’s the coach.’ I think I was more devastated last year. We went overseas for six weeks and when we returned I stopped going to the games. I didn’t go to another game. Only because I couldn’t endure the suffering any more. It was suffering going. It wasn’t a waste of time, it was painful. I found last year a lot more painful because we were promised. There was a Fight Back campaign and you thought this is going to change and it didn’t happen. We won three games. Our win against Essendon was a moment of ‘catharsis’. There was still hope, but it wasn’t to be. When we returned from overseas, I thought, I can’t do this any more. I can’t go to the game and get upset and get angry and allow it to effect the rest of the week. I was tired of it.

Nick tells a similar story about 2002 and the wooden spoon. His mode of coping was outright denial. I thought they were not going to allow it to happen. There was so much pride there that they would

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do anything in their power to avoid that kind of humiliation. For me it was hurt, it was humiliation, it was just denial sometimes. I still didn’t think we would win the wooden spoon with two games to go. I was in denial. The culture of success warped my understanding of the game.

Although Carlton’s recent troubles have involved pain, anger, frustration, denial, hurt, humiliation and feelings of devastation for Christine and Nick, they feel that their attachment to their team has played a positive role. Clearly it has become part and parcel of their relationship, part of a ritual through which they share time, feeling and experience together. It has also provided them with a shared culture of feeling, experience and reference within their families and social networks, as well as affecting their sense of inclusion within an increasingly multicultural society. Christine, as a late convert, provides telling testimony to this. Having been the girl who was a bit different – who would read her book at the football – and who was determined to reject the ‘bogan’ culture she identified as on offer from Anglo Australia, she has found, through her allegiance to a team, a world of common and shared meanings. Christine encapsulates this world of shared meanings when she describes how football conversation has drawn her closer to her family and, within the family, has broken down the segregation between men and women that epitomised her parents’ generation.

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It was a way of reconnecting with cousins. We don’t have much in common. So football now is a means of reconnecting. When you see them, you can talk about football and you can tease each other about your teams. Before that we had very little to say. Now we have something to say to one another. In terms of existing friendships, because a lot of our friends are from the same background as us – Greek Australian. I think it’s broken the gender segregation. We are finding that in our generation they are replicating our parents – in terms of socially the men will sit in a corner and talk about things and the women will sit in another corner and talk about various other things. The football has really broken that because we all sit mixed together and talk about football. And it’s great, it’s a lot of fun, it allows us to cross these traditional boundaries.

Football conversation provides a space for a more creative engagement with family – for a new cultural arrangement that offers an opportunity to challenge and transform previous cultural patterns. While paternal relationships are often identified as being reconfigured through football, we have noticed that maternal relationships figure just as centrally here. ‘I will pray for Carlton, so you will be happy,’ Nick’s mother would say. He reflected that his mother, rather than his soccer-loving father, would ‘get more emotionally involved because what is at stake is her children’s wellbeing’. Christine’s mother became an

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obsessive football follower as a way of connecting emotionally and establishing a new form of communication with her daughter and her son-in-law. Through the potential football provided, Christine also reestablished a relationship with her mother. She was trying to connect with the daughter who left home. Because that was what her daughter was doing on the weekends. She would sit and watch the games to see, and she would think ‘Oh, they are winning. If they are winning, Christine’s going to be really happy’. We’ve always had difficulty in communicating. I communicate much better with my father. Through football, it’s just been amazing with Mum. It’s also a way she connects with Nick as well. It’s his footy team.

Christine’s passion for Carlton opened a rich vein of reference, meaning, feeling and experience that helped her both to be and to feel connected. Sophie’s story also reveals these themes of connecting and disconnecting with family and Australian culture through barracking for a VFL/AFL club, in her case Collingwood. I grew up in Fitzroy, the child of post-war immigrants. We regularly played football in our street. Language was not a barrier. Although my first language was Greek, I don’t recall any problem with joining in with children in the street and kicking the ball. At my local primary school – George Street Primary – football of course was the rage

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and boys and girls joined in. There were kids from all backgrounds at the time I went there – Greeks, Italians, Turkish, Yugoslavian. It was no barrier and did bring us together. As I grew older, I read up on the game and became very passionate about statistics and the history of the game. Very quickly, I think, I realised just how knowledge and support of the game allowed for immediate entry into Australian culture and conversation. It may be a familiar story now, but it is remarkable how for kids from non-English-speaking backgrounds it immediately brought us into the mainstream, which our own parents found difficult at that time.

It was through her passionate following of the game that her parents became involved, but it was also a point of difference with the family and, to some extent, a rebellion. There was no question that I brought the game to the household. Neither of my two sisters showed much interest before I did that, and it was too far removed from my parents’ world for it to matter to them. It was also, I suppose, a way of rebellion for me as a young child. My father made a point of saying how inferior Australian Rules was to soccer – which he was very passionate about and followed in Australia. It was a point of slight friction between us. Following Collingwood heroes of that era – Peter McKenna, Len Thompson, Wayne Richardson – was anathema to him. Looking back now, it was a real indication – the first of many – that my

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identity was not going to be simply Greek, and that this embrace of football and of Collingwood signified an embrace of things outside of Greek culture.

Sophie’s mother embraced her daughter’s passion. My mother was certainly more supportive of my passions and following the football. She knitted me a Collingwood scarf, socks and beanie, and would follow the results each week. I think she was, and remains, rather perplexed by my intense passion for the game. But she has been very supportive. In 1990 when Collingwood finally won the premiership I called her in excitement and she was equally as excited as I was. It has certainly been a way of bringing us together.

Growing up in a Greek family and in this climate certainly provided ideas about injustice, but one of Sophie’s sharpest memories of ‘injustice’ was listening to the 1970 grand final, where Carlton staged a remarkable comeback in the second half of the game. During the 1960s I grew up with a very strong sense of a world of injustice. My parents and their friends spoke openly about their treatment at the hands of racist bosses and some of the disgraceful Australian attitudes towards immigrants. The injustice and ill-treatment of the Indigenous people was all around us. At an emotional level, however, for a nine-year-old, there was nothing quite like confronting the pangs

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and pain of the collapse of a moral universe – what was right and wrong – when your team is ahead by 44 points and then loses by 10 points. It just seemed so wrong! I remember listening to the game on my elder sister’s transistor radio – one of those small ones with a leather back cover – while she did the ironing. I couldn’t work out how this could happen. Of course years later as an adult, I realised I wasn’t alone.

Following the football assumed quite a presence in the household and those who returned to Greece recalled the centrality of football at that time. An uncle by marriage who had lived with her family in the late 1960s left in 1973. When Sophie visited him in Greece in 1995, they recalled those years in Fitzroy. But there was one question he returned to in their reminiscence. We recalled the Greek cafes in the area and the way in which Smith Street Collingwood had become a great shopping area for Greeks living in the area. But above all, he wanted to know how Collingwood had gone all those years and what had happened to the team. His memory of those years in Australia were coloured very much by the presence of the Collingwood Football Club.

Football provided an easy topic of conversation in all types of social and professional situations and certainly eased over any gender and cultural differences. But there were some contradictions about the extent to which this involvement was acceptable.

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Although it is now more accepted for women to have an opinion on football, or show some knowledge of it, this has not always been the case. This respect has been hard-earned and obstacles that have marginalised women in the football world have been hard to overcome. This to some extent has been the case with supporters from backgrounds other than white Anglo Australian. We should remember how racist some of the football crowds were in the 1950s and 1960s and how peculiar it seemed for immigrants to be talking about football, let alone going to it and playing it. So later in life, as a young Greek Australian female adult, having a knowledge about the history of the game, or just being interested in it, was something which was seen in some circles as unusual. So I guess now, thinking about it in retrospect, while at one level it allowed a way into conversations and Anglo Australia, somehow there was a sort of limit to the extent to which you could actually engage as both a woman and as a Greek Australian. Up until fairly recently, it has been a very Anglo-dominated game. These aspects have thankfully changed, and there is a greater inclusiveness in watching and following the game.

Coming from an Italian background, and also a Collingwood supporter, Ashley reiterated these views about the way in which football gave supporters access to a wider society when she was also growing up in the 1960s. I guess it made me feel like I belonged to the Australian culture in a way. Even these days, when they

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talk about other nationalities and how they form ghettoes or whatever, and I sort of think, just give them a generation because that’s what happened with us. Our parents went out and worked their butts off in factories and whatever, and they had children, and the children started doing things, the football for example, and eating meat pies and the rest of it, then they started moving outwards.

This world of immigrants, with its difference from Anglo Australia, was precisely what drew Rosie to following an inner-city club like Fitzroy. Growing up in the 1960s in the middle-class, white Anglo-Saxon bayside suburb of Hampton, the world of Greeks, Italians and other nationalities was completely alien to her. When she got a job in Carlton ‘it was just a new world’. Rosie recalled that, as a family, they had travelled around the world when the children were young. ‘But there was not a lot of multicultural anything in the bayside suburbs.’ The rich multiculturalism she encountered at work took her interest and inspired her enough to follow Fitzroy. I couldn’t believe this cosmopolitan sort of life. I had friends who lived in Fitzroy and it was fabulous. People were eating late and were not eating meat and three veg. We had that white AngloSaxon Protestant upbringing. My interest then in Fitzroy was ‘I want to break away from this little cul de sac that I have lived in’. I loved the differences in people. It was more inclusive. In Beaumaris you would walk at 9 o’clock at night and people would

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ask where are you going. In you go, behind the wall. Nobody was doing anything very interesting. Whereas here it was noisy, there was a different way of eating, drinking. There was a slight racism in the bayside suburbs … And it was open at night. It didn’t close at 7. You could shoot a gun through the Beaumaris concourse at 5.30, there was nobody there. These people were living. We weren’t.

Fitzroy’s removal to Queensland was not so shocking for Rosie, ‘It is still Fitzroy to a degree. They had that core of Fitzroy players.’ The premiership success that followed with the Brisbane Lions inspired a stronger allegiance to Brisbane. For English immigrant Wilf, football and his allegiance to the West Coast Eagles provided an important connection to Australian culture. It was a bewildering game at first as he was more familiar with soccer. Also, seen long distance, he thought it to be an odd game, but it didn’t take him long to become completely hooked. Well, being born in England, I didn’t really know anything about football. I was brought up with soccer you see, loved the game of soccer and I played it – not very well, but always enjoyed it and supported my team.

Australian Rules football drew his interest when he first watched it on television in England. He happened to see a West Coast Eagles’ match and was especially impressed by one of their players.

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I remember watching it on the TV, and in those days Australian Rules was about an hour long on Channel 4 at 7.30 on a Saturday morning, or something like that. Something completely ridiculous, completely inaccessible, and I thought, I’ll watch this game and see if I like it. And I saw there was a team there from Perth, the West Coast Eagles, and they seemed to be part of the national competition. And there was this little, slim-looking black player, number 28, who turned out to be Chris Lewis, and every time I got up to watch this I thought, ‘Gee he’s good’. But I couldn’t get into it on TV, as a TV sport I couldn’t really relate to it at that stage.

At the age of 28, Wilf and his wife and first-born daughter left England and arrived in Perth. I’d been here a few months, and made a few friends here, and I was invited by a friend to the first game of the 1991 home-and-away season, West Coast versus Melbourne. Later I was regularly reminded by my friend David that when I was invited to go to this game I said, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll give it a go, go along and watch it.’ So we went along to Subiaco Oval, and watched this game with West Coast. It was absolutely pouring with rain, and we were in the top tier of the three-tier stand. Subiaco Oval was made up of three tiers when there seemed to be four, and I still don’t understand that – but we were in the very back row at the top, and there was a hole in the roof. So we’re sitting there having a couple of beers thinking, ‘Yeah this is good.’

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Anyway, they came out and you got a panorama view of the entire ground. And after 10 minutes I thought, ‘This is the greatest game I’ve ever seen.’

The 1991 season totally gripped him and he became addicted to the game. I had never seen anything like it. The ball would be thrown to the middle and everyone would just run at the ball, and there’d be this huge mark, and when this mark was taken, everything just stopped. And people would come from everywhere, wearing all different colours, and I thought it was incredible. And I watched the entire game transfixed, barracking for the local team, which was the Eagles. And I thought ‘This is good, my teams never normally win!’ So I thought it was good, and of course history shows that the Eagles went on to win the first 11 or 12 rounds that season, and only lost a couple of times with some extremely dodgy umpiring.

Wilf became a regular supporter, watching games and going to them. It was the excitement, physicality and level of skill that inspired him to continue to follow it, in contrast to soccer. If it was live, we’d go to the game without fail. If it was interstate, we’d watch it on TV. It was a remarkable game, it just possessed me as a game. It had everything. It had the speed, it had the strength, it had the endurance, the pace, the use of all parts of the body. In soccer you’re really only using your

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legs and your head, except for the goalkeeper, whereas in this game you simply had to use everything. And the toughness – of course back then it was a much tougher game. When you watch the old tapes you see players doing things on a regular basis that if they did that today they’d be rubbed out for weeks. So it was a different game in those days, and I guess it would be fair to say that I was encouraged by the success of the team as well. It’s nice to follow a winner.

Like some other passionate supporters we have spoken with, following the game became a major way in which Wilf and his family could enter Australian culture. At his workplace, there were immigrants from around the globe, but he was keen to explore a more local culture, of which football was a major part. Perth is an interesting town. If you step into a lift you’ll be surrounded by Scottish, South African, Dutch accents … the chances of finding an Australian accent in there are quite low. It’s a funny town, full of migrants who rush in when there’s a boom, and when there’s a bust it all goes down. But underlying that is a real Western Australian culture, and Australian football is an integral part of that, so I follow West Perth in the WAFL competition as well, where you meet real salt-of-the-earth Western Australians.

Since coming to Australia, Wilf has taken delight in the contrast with life in England.

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I remember when we first arrived all the English people would invite us to their gatherings so that we could fit in, which I think was meant to perpetuate the Englishness, and I was never a great fan of England for a number of reasons. I don’t like the snobbery, the class attitudes. There were too many people in too small a space, a lot of smoke and drink and people sitting in a pub watching telly. That sort of attitude, and I’d much prefer to be on a Western Australian beach running around, so I really wanted to embrace all the nature of Australia, and the football has certainly been a major way of us getting into it. People can’t believe that someone with an English accent can be so interested in football and enjoy it so much. I remember someone who’d had a few drinks at one of the functions we put on at work, and he was going on about something or other, and he said, ‘I bet you don’t know which two Eagles players come from Mukinbudin.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, Rowan Jones and Mark Seaby,’ and he sort of went white. And it took him about an hour to come up with a question I couldn’t answer, about some umpire in the ’50s. At that stage he was really struggling. But it’s part of life in Australia. And the physicality of it – my mum has come out here a few times, and she says it’s such a physical country – and it is. You’ve got wild weather, wild terrain, wild beaches with big waves, and the footy is a wild game. There’s no body armour to protect you.

Playing a game that utilised the wide open spaces was also an aspect of Australian Rules football that appealed to Wilf.

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It’s ironic that the game Sydney have played for so many years that’s brought them so much success has focused on trying to negate that space, trying to constrict the play to as small a space as possible. It annoys me still that the Eagles don’t get credit for the way they play, because the one thing we do try to do is use as much of the space as possible. So I don’t like the way Sydney play. I don’t like flooding either which is the same sort of negation of space.

After several years in Perth, Wilf and his family moved to Melbourne, before eventually returning to Perth. By the time they moved to Melbourne, West Coast had become such a passion that the whole family, now with a second daughter born in Australia, joined the Victorian cheer squad of the West Coast Eagles. Their allegiance to West Coast has helped to bond the family. Nowadays I’m a partner in a major firm, so I’m busy most of the time. Even when I’m on holiday I have to make sure everything’s under control. You’re effectively running your own business. I tend to work flat out 50 to 55 hours per week. And once you’ve done all the other things, sleep, eat, shop, wash, etc. you don’t have all that much free time. But I think football has been very much a family bonding experience. I think since my wife got into it in the mid-90s we’ve managed to see more of each other, and the girls as well. It’s something we all do together. When we were in Melbourne from the mid-90s onward, we were in the Victorian cheer

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squad, and in those days the girls were relatively young. In those days they made the West Coast banner down in Albert Park in this huge church hall, and we’d go down and help them make the banner, it would take literally hours, and we did all those things for years.

When Wilf began working for periods in New Zealand, he still managed to regularly get to games. There was one occasion when I was working for a firm in Carlton, and I was flying over to New Zealand, but I insisted on coming back on weekends, so I could see my family and the footy. I’d catch the plane on Friday afternoon and we’d go banner making that night straight from the airport. You worked like a maniac. So I’d spend the weekend with the girls and catch the 1 am flight back on Monday morning, and then get there, meditate, exercise and work the whole day on about two hours sleep. Around 4.30 that afternoon you were just about dying, but I managed to do that eight weeks in a row I think, and it was hard yakka but gee I was fit by the end of the eight weeks. And it was a great time, and building all those banners with the other cheer squad people, you know, we’d drive or fly to Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, all those places.

Attending the Brisbane match became a family ritual. We made it our annual holiday to take the girls to the Brisbane game at the Gabba. We flew up there and had our annual holiday with them in Noosa,

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and we went to the Brisbane game. It’s a family thing, and if your whole family’s into it that’s great. I remember going to the MCG again in the late ’90s. The ’98 final against the ‘Doggies’, we’re on the train on the way and the children are wearing these tiny West Coast Eagles jumpers and this old lady looks at them and says, ‘I don’t suppose they had much choice in that did they?’ And that’s probably true but I think they’ve got a lot out of it.

Greg is an enthusiastic Carlton supporter whose parents migrated to Australia from Sri Lanka. Australia’s sporting culture made it appear a most desirable destination. Mum and Dad migrated to Australia in 1948 from Sri Lanka. Dad was a champion Rugby Union player, and a champion cricketer. This story is perhaps apocryphal, but I like it anyway. When I was young I asked Dad why he came to Australia, and he said, ‘Son, I could have gone to England – that was too cold. We never thought of America. Canada we thought of – too cold.’ New Zealand he liked. As for Australia, well, Don Bradman was from Australia, and we all knew about Don Bradman. That was one of the reasons Dad came.

Oddly enough, Greg’s parents first encountered Australian Rules football through the Sri Lankan community. Greg’s mother was a close friend of Monica Fernando, the fiancée and later the wife of Essendon’s most famous full-forward, John Coleman. His mother

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recalled how at her wedding in 1951, all the talk was about how John Coleman had been reported in the preliminary final against Carlton. Mum and Dad got married towards the end of 1951. They got married on the day that John Coleman was reported for striking in that very famous preliminary final. Apparently all the guests were talking about John Coleman, especially Monica’s family, the girl to whom Coleman was engaged. Coleman was reported for striking a Carlton player. My mother had no interest in football at that stage but got interested in footy in a general way after that.

But they didn’t actively go to football games until footy culture walked through the door in the shape of Greg’s brother, Glenn. Then the breakthrough happened in about 1960, when my older brother Glenn, who’s six years older than me and who went to a state school, came home and said, ‘I can tell that you guys weren’t born in this country. All my friends are going to football games, and we don’t do anything on a Saturday.’ So my dad promised to take Glenn to the football.

Their next-door neighbour then took them to a Carlton game and Greg’s fanatical support began from that time onwards. His father was pleased for his sons to follow the Australian code, but made the stipula-

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tion that if they were to follow football, they were to all follow the same team and barrack together. Asked why his father insisted on this, Greg explained that his father believed this would help unify the family. He also saw it as a means of accepting into their home a mainstream feature of Australian culture. I don’t think he liked divisiveness within the family, and he often talked about adopting a new country’s institutions. Just the idea of the three boys following the same team; we could go as a family; we wouldn’t be divided. So I think it had more to do with that than anything else. So he used to take Glenn along, and then I’d tag along a little bit later.

Once Greg was old enough to attend the football, his passion was stirred. We then went to a couple of games in ’66; didn’t quite grab hold. But the real clincher was the first game of 1967. That was the first game Alex Jesaulenko played for Carlton. It was at Princes Park. Carlton played Fitzroy. My younger brother Dirk and I went. We were actually in the outer. We were standing, and Carlton had gone from being just a mediocre team to a brilliant team. Ron Barassi had taken over and Carlton won something like 13 games in a row at the start of the season. It was that game against Fitzroy, and Dirk and I had a plastic football. Every day for about three years after that, it was John Nicholls to Adrian Gallagher, to Brian

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Quirk, to Alex Jesaulenko, goal! We just played that out, with an intensity and with a joy that you can’t explain to people who don’t know the game.

Part of the attraction was that Carlton had such a strong and exciting team. I think it had to do with winning too, and winning so well. Of course now I look back as a mature adult and think, ‘Poor Fitzroy’. We could have been the Fitzroy team. It just happened that we followed Carlton at a time when they had some money and they were recruiting well. That really was the killer blow. That was the punch where I really developed a passion. Thereafter, I thought of almost nothing but football.

Following Carlton became a focal point of family and local community life. It created bonds of affiliation throughout the neighbourhood, bonds that were not just restricted to the three brothers. It bonded us to ourselves, but bonded everyone within our street as well. We followed the team that our street followed. Until recently my mother would go to the football with some of the women from our street. So there were bonds made between adult women through football. They went without men.

Greg’s fondest memories of footy as a child are the games of kick-to-kick in the street.

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One of the things I remember during this period of my life is that we all had plastic footballs. They were bloody awful to kick, because one end was soft and the other was hard. It would just hurt so much. There was a guy down the street, Johnny, who was about a year younger than me, and he got a leather football, a fair dinkum football. We would kick this in the middle of the street. We would start at about 5 o’clock and play until 8 o’clock in winter and summer. They were from Calabria. He would kick it a certain distance, and I had to kick it a further distance. In terms of bonding, he was Italian, I was from Sri Lanka, there were Turkish kids, Greek kids. The Aussie kids were often pretty poor. There was a cohesion in those working class suburbs that I think hasn’t been appreciated enough. Football has really done a lot to bring people together as a multicultural society. That’s certainly true of my generation. I don’t know if that’s ever been appreciated by journalists or, even, academics. Maybe it has, but I’ve not really sensed that.

Over time, Greg came to appreciate ‘the place of the game in Australian life much more’. When he was overseas practising as a psychiatrist in the United States, there were three things that he identified as distinctively Australian. I remember thinking, the three things that really stood out as different about Australia. The first was Indigenous culture; the second was Australia’s natural heritage in terms of its wildlife;

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the third one, believe it or not, was Australian Rules football. Because I thought that is different, that is supremely different. Every time I go around Melbourne now, when I visit from Sydney, I think about the history of Melbourne, and how it’s reflected in football, and why that was so important. The codes in Sydney don’t have the same importance. You travel around the suburban areas where these teams grew up, Carlton, Collingwood, etc. So that’s what I take from it. I didn’t think of it so much as an entrée to Australian society. Though I suppose it was, in the immigrant culture.

For Greg, as for so many of the supporters we interviewed, there is a deep and ongoing connection between their love for their club and their relations with family and community. This connection takes on a particular resonance when the parents have migrated to Australia. Often, it is their children who attract parents towards supporting a team passionately. This offers the parents a way of sharing the new culture of Australia together with their children. It is a return gift from child to parent. I was about seven or eight. Dad was driving, and we were driving past the MCG. I think there was a test match being played. He said, ‘Son, see that over there – that’s the most important ground in the world. That’s the Melbourne Cricket Ground.’ And I didn’t really understand what he was saying at the time, but my take on it now,

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looking back, is that I think he was saying to me that, first, it’s a fantastic sporting ground; but, second, I think he was embracing Australia as a country. I think he was saying, ‘This is my country.’ He never belittled Australian football, even though he loved rugby. He was a passionate Carlton supporter.

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7: Living through Loss

My passion for footy does not fill a lack in my life. It enhances and helps sort the fullness that is already there. Footy dialogues with my life. Madeleine, Sy dney Swans

Unlike most people who we talked with, Madeleine did not inherit her love of footy. The daughter of a French father passionate about soccer and rugby and a mother and sister who were wholly uninterested in anything sports-related, Australian Rules football was nowhere on the horizon. In any case, Madeleine grew up in Sydney where Australian Rules was typically regarded as a perverse expression of Melbourne’s

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insularity. However, Madeleine was the ‘sporty’ girl in the family, and her father would religiously attend her gymnastics competitions when she was a schoolgirl and would take her to watch Test matches at the Sydney Cricket Ground. She did attend a Sydney Swans match, the team she would eventually come to love, when she was 13, but that game had no lasting influence on her eventual devotion to the Swans. I went with my mother’s then secretary, who followed the Swans and loved Warwick Capper ‘for his cute little bum’. I did not understand the game, nor did I want to. There was absolutely no family history. Going to the Swans was a 13-year-old’s chance to ‘hang out’ with adults who were not relatives, a chance to indulge in something completely atypical for my family.

In 1999 her partner Joseph started going to games and tried to convince Madeleine to come along by telling her that ‘it’s a game I think you’d really like’. I cannot truly remember when I went with him, how often and what occurred that year. It must have been one of those life-changing transitions about which the mind goes protectively blank thereafter – a little like childbirth. It’s better to forget how you got where you find yourself. All I know is that in 2000 I signed up as a full club member and have paid my membership every year since. It was not a slow-growing thing that accumulated gradually. I fell head over heels. But, at least, it has lasted.

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Madeleine was totally hooked. She and Joseph started going to all the Sydney matches and would travel interstate for finals. In Sydney they went with a group of male friends, something that Madeleine has come to value greatly as she finds herself included as one of the boys. Such bonding opens up new types of communication with her male friends. As the lone female of the group, I find that the game solicits a level of involvement and communication from the men which allows them to be far more emotionally revealing than perhaps straight conversation may. The season and its flux has an inherent up-and-down quality that we can all use as a support structure for our own ups and downs, or even a way to reveal them to each other. They all have partners and children. Relationships and parenting and careers, anything can be covered between the play, over four quarters. From a feminine perspective, that sort of enforced structure can be particularly helpful for ‘blokes’. You can be talking footy with them, but also be talking about ‘other things’. I certainly feel close – on a feeling/ vulnerability level – to the ‘blokes’ I go with.

As full club members Madeleine and Joseph have reserved seats and have become well acquainted with the other supporters who sit near them at all Swans home games. That camaraderie extends to the rows in front and the rows behind our reserved seats too – June in

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row T who bakes for everyone; the family in row S who bring in photos of the new granddaughter; the chorus from rows Q, R, S, T and U who grizzle a collective ‘Chewy on your boot’ before an opposition shot on goal.

As we have noticed, children are typically recruited to support for a team by following one of both of their parents. We have also noticed that late converts, like Christine, can have a transformative effect on their parents. One way of staying close to a daughter or son is to adopt their passionate attachment to a footy team. It becomes a shared ‘security blanket’, as suggested earlier. Once again, the parent can enter the now grown-up child’s fantasy world and share it with them. Listen to Madeleine’s story of how this has played out in her family, a story very similar to Christine’s with her mother. Despite the poor start in my immediate family, I have now enacted on them a kind of reverse conversion to footy. My parents follow my passion from afar, but not too far. My sports-illiterate mother now puts in a weekly phone call of congratulations or commiserations. She knows a handful of names: Barry Hall, Adam Goodes, Roosy … She will even occasionally watch a match with me when I am staying at their place in the country. She became so entangled with the drama of 2008’s Round 11 come-from-behind win over the Eagles that she gradually decked herself from head to toe, with me, in talismanic red scarves, shoes, African beads,

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bakelite bracelets – anything red! – just to will a red-and-white win. We succeeded and, although my mother and I are close anyway, it was a moment of great unity and intimacy between us, because she was willing to engage in extraordinarily strange behaviour (for her), just to enter ‘my world’, with me, for me, completely.

For Madeleine, losses hurt, but in quite complex ways that intersect with the rest of her life. Moreover, the way she feels about a loss has changed, indeed matured, as her commitment to the Swans has strengthened. A Saturday night loss has a different effect on me than a Sunday afternoon loss. A Saturday loss often means some degree of nocturnal tossing and turning followed by Sunday, a naturally contemplative day. I am susceptible to bouts of pensiveness or melancholy on the Sundays after Saturday night losses. I find it hard to respond to my four-yearold’s cheeriness. I am susceptible to bouts of cleaning on the Sundays after Saturday night losses – an effort to restore some kind of order. After a loss, I find it helpful to saturate myself in post-match press conferences and newspaper sports sections, trying to extract some sense, to pick out the crux of the matter so that I might somehow solve it by proxy for next week’s match. I need to digest a certain amount of material before my wondering can be sated. And let’s face it, Sunday’s journalism is never as comprehensive as Monday’s. A Saturday night loss means I have to wait longer for counsel-

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ling. A Sunday afternoon loss can be more quickly swept up in the ‘getting ready for Monday’ energy that often builds on Sunday evening. There’s a sense of being closer to the next round than the one that is just being completed – not so much time to wallow.

Madeleine provides a fine description of what a win feels like. The wins have the effect of weightlessness on me. They are like small, happy reference points that can be mentally snuck back to throughout the week. The sense of elation at the actual game is palpable. The mandatory, releasing rise to our feet on the final siren, singing the song, clapping the players as they approach the stands in gratitude. In direct contrast to the losses, the wins provide the happy completion to the equation of effort and outcome. They are the full circle.

Madeleine also describes how she reacted to losses. The sense of missed opportunity. The lack of resolution to all the effort, the emotional investment. The loop of satisfaction for effort is not completed. There’s no happy ending. A loss cannot provide the buoyancy of a win, although just occasionally they do bring into focus the kind of vitality you can feel when you’re up against it but still surviving. Another important element for me is empathy and respect for the players. Few of us, in our daily lives, have the opportunity to push our physical

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vessels to their extremes, to tone them and tune them as professional sports people do. I have great admiration for the discipline and commitment this requires. I have great respect for the mental capacity that allows these players to handle and often surpass their physical capabilities during a match. And I often experience real gratitude towards my team’s players for allowing me to touch those places, by proxy, in watching them. So it is always unsettling to see their disappointment when this is not rewarded. Contrary to the children’s carnival slogan, every child does not win a prize.

We have quoted Madeleine at such length because she is so eloquent, but also because there is a part of her story that it is best to tell in her own words. When telling us about how a loss affects her state of mind Madeleine said, in passing, that a loss can occasionally ‘bring into focus the kind of vitality you can feel when you’re up against it but still surviving’. Tragically, Madeleine has had such an ‘up against it’ experience in her own life, when her newborn daughter Bessie, her first-born, died at birth. Deep into the pregnancy and at the start of the 2003 season, Madeleine waddled out to Olympic Park for the first match against Carlton. Her footy friends and acquaintances greeted her with encouragement and admiration. I was due in 16 days and I made good point of milking it for all it was worth and using the stadium gold club member lifts all night. I made it to the

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Round 3 match against Adelaide at the SCG on the 13th of April. I was due in three days but knowing I’d miss plenty of games while looking after a newborn I was determined to make the most of the ones I could get to, just. The ‘gang’ in front, particularly the women, Monique and June, were very warm and encouraging as we said goodbye each time. We never knew when I was going to have to disappear from the scene for a while.

Bessie was born six days later. She had been absolutely fine through my whole pregnancy and a long labour until the moment she was born with her cord wrapped tightly around her neck twice. She could not be revived.

Madeleine went on to explain how, after such a lifechanging loss, the football slowly drew her back into society, first at home and then back among her friends at the home games. A week after her death Sydney played the Anzac Round game against the Demons. We did not go. But some time during the evening, we remembered that there was a game on and we huddled together on the couch and switched on the radio. It was nearly three-quarter time and the Swans were three goals behind. ‘Oh come on Bessie, first you die and leave us without you … the least you can do is give the Swans a win for us!’ I cried out from the couch. We may have made some tea and

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we sat in miserable silence to listen to the last quarter together. And we could not believe what began to unfold. The Swans kicked 10 goals in the final quarter to beat the Demons by 4 straight. It was truly magical. From that moment, we decided that Bessie must have heard us, that she must be their guardian angel. In that very raw stage of grief, it gave me unspeakable comfort to bring her to life again in Swans victories, to have the chance at least to story-tell her connection to something which was meaningful to us, to insert her into our world in imaginary ways even if she would never be part of it in the flesh. In my experience, it was important to do that because the death of a child is very much the loss of a future, and when you are expecting a child, especially a first child, the future is a place of great imaginings, of intentions and dreams and hopes and ‘we’ll do this and that with the baby’. Because Bessie’s death was so completely unexpected, the grief process took on two quite distinct strands for me: one, to grieve my child herself, her presence, her life; but also, to grieve the future we had built for us in our minds, among our friends, in our conversations.

At first Madeleine and Joseph huddled at home locked in grief, but soon they began to step back into the society of their friends and acquaintances. They ventured back to the SCG where they were met with the distress and concern of their friends. Tragic events such as

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the loss of a child are so unthinkable and unspeakable that the grieving parents can often meet with silence and embarrassment from family and, especially, from friends and acquaintances. There seems no way to offer friends and acquaintances a way into their grief; no way for it to be expressed and acknowledged. Miraculously, as it were, the footy helped overcome this for Madeleine. One of the hardest things about the public face of our daughter’s death was facing the people who had not seen you since ‘it’ had happened, explaining the story, seeing the expectations on their faces and then having to tell them what had happened and watching those expectations crumble into discomfort and sorrow and pity, mirroring and reminding you of your own all over again. It always felt like a desperately unsafe thing to do, for myself and for them. So, integrating back into the habits and locations of our former life, or what felt like our former life, after such a monumental change of direction, was a very precarious process for me. We did not return to our home footy crowd for a few months, even though we followed the season closely. A part of the future would have been taking her to the footy, having her footy family adopt her, seeing her in red and white, growing her up into a love and appreciation of the game. The wonderful, mythical happenings of Round 5 and the rest of that 2003 season, with all of Bessie’s impact as ‘guardian angel’, became a wonderful

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make-believe story book where her ‘might have been’ was explored, not only by us, but it was a story we could tell with our whole footy community. When we did eventually return to the stands that year, these ‘guardian angel’ tales gave our footy friends, who had obviously heard the story of her birth and death through our close friends at the game, a kind of permission to acknowledge her, to say her name to us and to chat to us about how we were going. To figure her in our community’s real, ongoing experiences, to colour in a little of that future picture, which was now impossible, helped in the process of merging the long-held fantasies and the new reality we faced.

Grieving takes time. Grief has to be worked through and our contemporary society offers very few public rituals to assist with this work. Madeleine used her identification with the fate and fortunes, and even the tactics, of the Swans to invent a public ritual of her own, one that allowed her to express and share her grief and have it acknowledged. From week to week, I felt very carried and supported by the reliability and distraction of a weekly game of footy. People always tell you that time is the only thing that makes grief better so I spent a lot of time that year just waiting for time to pass. And games of footy became little signposts that made the distances smaller. With each round, I knew I had made it through another week. The

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game performed the same function when I was again very nervously pregnant with our son. The rhythm, the repetitiveness, the non-negotiability of the fixture were indeed a great support structure. There is never any question, from the clubs’ end, of: ‘We don’t feel like doing this game of footy.’ ‘We can’t get up for this game of footy.’ ‘We don’t have the courage to play today.’ I took courage from the weekly strength, the will and intention of the players too. Interestingly enough, I developed my passion for the half-back line that year. I don’t think that was a coincidence either. It happened at the exact time I found myself standing deep in defence looking for clues about the psychic manoeuvres that would help me turn grief around. I became fascinated by the responsibility and craft of rebounding, of creating a new, offensive play from a position of defence. I watched the half-backs intently that year: finding the opportune moments, assessing when to toy with a forward movement and when to drive it, when to dash and carry themselves and when to find support. It’s a position that is all about the subtleties of changing direction. That position became my model for working with grief.

In reflecting on what her family and friends really make of her identification with the Swans and her fascination with footy, Madeleine comments: I’m aware that some family and friends wonder at me during the winter months, as I design my social commitments around the footy fixture, spend cold

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Sunday nights tallying tips, read and read and read and listen. You can almost hear them whisper: ‘She’s obsessed. Doesn’t she have anything better to do?’ I would reply that my passion for footy does not fill a lack in my life. It enhances and helps sort the fullness that is already there. Footy dialogues with my life.

Four years ago Madeleine gave birth to a healthy, thriving boy, Oliver. All those hopes for the future have been mobilised again, as they first were for Bessie. Of course, this includes the anticipation of his devotion to the Swans. However, Oliver has plans of his own. Our son Oliver turned one the day before the grand final and we had scheduled his birthday party for the Saturday morning, long before the Swans even made the grand final. We thought we’d make his party a kind of laid-back grand final breakfast, no matter who was playing. So when the Swans were actually in the grand final, it was decided that we would make the event a red-and-white grand final experience. We asked all our friends to sport red and white, which they graciously did – most of them complete AFL ignoramuses. This in the nicest possible way. It was voluntary on all their part. My sister and I decorated the cakes in red and white – she painted the Swans logo, in icing, atop one of them – and we had a huge and festive grand final barbecue in a park in Sydney’s inner west.

After such an initiation, Oliver’s fate would seem sealed. But loss is hard to take when you are only two,

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especially if the winning team wears very bright colours! We secured tickets to the 2006 grand final and jumped on a jumbo jet on grand final day with twoyear-old Oliver. It was an amazing day. Despite the agonising 1 point loss, I will always be grateful that we got to experience the atmosphere of a grand final, especially in the context of our most normal daily activity – looking after our child. However, we feel the result may have done long-term damage to Oliver.

It seems that Oliver has a long memory. Perhaps because of a desire to distinguish himself from his parents, at the start of the next season he filled them with consternation mixed with pride after watching the opening rematch between the prior year’s grand finalists. On the Monday morning after the 2007 Round 1 rematch between the Eagles and Swans, Oliver stood on his stool at the dining table. ‘Who are the blue and yellow ones?’ he asked, quite casually, looking at a photo of Daniel Kerr (West Coast) and Brett Kirk (Sydney Swans). ‘They’re the Eagles,’ I replied. Pause. ‘But we don’t go for the Eagles in this house. We go for the Swannies,’ I added with all the confidence of collusion. ‘I don’t,’ said Oliver. ‘I go for the Eagles.’ It came out of nowhere! This is a child who did an entire Swans season in utero, a child who was knitted red-and-white bootees and

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dressed almost exclusively in red and white for his first winter, a child who celebrated his first birthday the day the Swans won a premiership! But he has stayed true to his claim. There have been promises of red-and-white merchandise, attempts to prey on his four-year-old need to belong, more handknitted garments. Nothing works – he will not be a Swan. Joseph sees it as a delightful expression of his individuality and is secretly proud of his defiance. On a recent work trip to Perth, Joseph procured some West Coast socks for him. I was faced with the humiliation of hanging Eagles socks on the washing line. Perhaps I, too, am secretly proud of his individuality. But there is a large part of me that hopes one day he will come to the footy with his old mum and cheer the Bloods. When I confessed this particular failure as a mother to June, who sits in front of us at the SCG, she told me the story of her two sons. She took them to a grand final when they were young – Hawthorn versus Geelong. One supported Geelong on the day and one took Hawthorn. And they never looked back. Now in their twenties, they remain committed Hawks and Cats fans. It doesn’t bode well.

Geraldine is another keen supporter who made use of the footy to, finally, give expression to a grief that, as a young girl, she at first bottled up and repressed. She, too, linked a family tragedy to the fate of her team, St Kilda. However, unlike Madeleine, she was unable

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to acknowledge how in grieving her team’s loss she was indirectly grieving her lost brother. The shame of his suicide made her unwilling to grieve publicly. Even within the family she quickly moved on, after a brief period of obligatory grief. Her father regarded this as heartlessness and failed to recognise how her grief over St Kilda’s loss in the 1971 grand final was an indirect expression of her grief for her brother. Unlike Madeleine, Geraldine was not able to publicly link her lost loved one with her footy team. But she could cry for St Kilda. Her identification with St Kilda was a pivotal way in which she coped with her brother’s suicide. The youngest child of a family of five, she lost her 21-yearold brother when she was 12 years old. St Kilda’s defeat in the grand final against Hawthorn that year provided a way of expressing her grief indirectly, in a way she could not, as a young girl, manage directly. Her immediate response was to shut out the emotions: ‘I blocked out the immediate time after his death. I just remember my parents crying all the time and it just being pretty horrible.’ When she did finally cry, but for St Kilda, her father was furious. I cried and cried and cried after that defeat. I remember my father was really annoyed with me. He was a man who atypically could show his emotions. He did weep for my brother and continued to do so for a long time afterwards, probably for the rest of his life, really, looking back as

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an adult. But he was cross with me because I bottled up my grief, I think. I had mourned for the statutory few days and then you get on with it.

Geraldine went to a Catholic school where suicide was not talked about. The school atmosphere was so oppressive that Geraldine denied that she had another brother, or, if she did admit it, she said he died in a car accident. But a few months after his death when St Kilda got beaten I cried buckets. Pity you didn’t have something better to cry about was Dad’s reaction. Here I was crying over a football game – it was quite cathartic, it was quite clearly disappointment and grief, the loss of the footy unleashed something. I thought it was weak to cry for my brother – to mourn publicly – whereas it was legitimate to cry for my footy team. It was that sort of palpable feeling of grief that I had felt.

Ashley is a long-standing Collingwood supporter who is passionate about the game and about her beloved Collingwood team. Going to the games gave her comfort and distraction when her close cousin, Maria, was diagnosed with cancer. One of my cousins got sick three years ago. She got cancer. We were brought up really close. We were born two weeks apart. She was the prim and proper one and I was the tomboy.

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In later life Ashley along with her husband and children went regularly with Maria’s husband and children to watch Collingwood play. But Maria usually stayed at home. Ashley told us about what happened when they learned of Maria’s cancer. She was diagnosed in the July and so it was the middle of the footy season, I just didn’t feel like going that next day, and the next game which was a few days later and then the following one, and then she insisted that her kids and her husband keep going: ‘Go to the footy, that’s what you love doing. Forget it. I’ll be alright. I’ll stay home and do whatever I used to do,’ she said. ‘I’m not dead yet’. That sort of thing.

The football provided an important release from Ashley’s own distress at her cousin’s plight. I remember walking through the Docklands stadium getting to our seats, my arm around her husband and I said, ‘This is the last place I sort of want to be right now.’ But that really lasted only a really short time, because then I was thinking ‘What is it?’ I know it’s only a game of football, but it’s what the living do. It’s participating, belonging to something and it’s what those that are dying and those that go too early give up. Everyday sort of things, and that year, you’ve got no idea how many times I thanked God for the Collingwood Football Club, because it just sort of like for those three hours of the game, it was just a total distraction.

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The football was also a way in which she could connect with her cousin outside of the illness. I remember Brownlow Medal night, when Nathan Buckley won the Brownlow that year, she was going into surgery the following day, she was having a kidney removed and she ended up having 80 per cent of her liver removed as well, and I remember thinking, thank God for Collingwood. Thank God. I don’t know, it was just something that we could share together that wasn’t the illness I suppose. Ashley and her cousin were both delighted that Buckley, the Collingwood captain, had won the Brownlow Medal. Together they lamented that they had not spent more time with each other. The fact that he’d won, she was just so happy and excited too, and you know part of that was her own, because she was great, for the next couple of years, she actually came to quite a few games with me when her husband couldn’t make it or something. So she’d use his ticket or whatever. She was great. She was actually a lot more passionate than all of us … She would really get into it. I thought, ‘Why didn’t she come all those years with me?’

For Joe, the demise of Fitzroy also coincided with the death of his grandmother. In his memory the two events are merged. When they announced the amalgamation of Fitzroy with Brisbane on the fourth of July 1996 I’d been at

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St Vincent’s Hospital for a week. My grandmother who was in her mid-80s was dying of renal failure and I’d basically sat next to her bed. I kept looking out of her window, looking over Fitzroy and thinking about childhood. So I was thinking about her place in the suburb and my place. Football loomed in those memories. She died that night. I remember getting in the car. I picked my mother up from the hospital and she said, ‘Can we drive down Gertrude Street,’ where my grandmother used to hang out, and we put the radio on and just as the 10 o’clock news came on they said that Fitzroy had gone to Brisbane. And everyone was stunned. It was strange, because as much as we were saddened by my grandmother’s death, this seemed to strike us as something much more difficult at the moment.

For Barbara and her ailing father, the games played by the Adelaide Football Club served as a great source of comfort and support when Barbara was nursing her father in the final years of his life. Dad had been a great Norwood supporter – a member of the club and a regular supporter during his youth. When Adelaide was formed, he immediately began to follow then and became very passionate. When he became ill, I moved from Melbourne to Adelaide to nurse him through his cancer. Although I didn’t share his love of football, I would sit and watch the games with him. It was a very special time for us. We knew time was limited and I remember his joy and enjoyment at watch-

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ing those games – Adelaide was quite successful in those years – when he was so ill. Watching Adelaide was one of the few things he could do for pleasure and entertainment. He became quite immobile and tired, so he was very limited in what was available to him. His favourite players were Smart, Ricciuto, Edwards, Burton and Johncock for their speed, skill and flair.

Adelaide’s success, combined with the constant round of football news, provided a comforting routine and shared interest that connected father and daughter during the last stages of a loved father’s life. From Madeleine’s loss of her newborn infant to Barbara’s loss of her elderly father and Joe’s of his aged grandmother, all these stories about death and illness illustrate how attachment to a football team figures as a means through which passionate supporters can express and share aspects of themselves and their relationships, even at the very worst of times. For these supporters, caring about their team turned out to be a way of caring for themselves and their family and friends.

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8: Football and Place: Home and Away

The thing is Melbourne has changed. You don’t have a whole lot of people living in the inner suburbs; they moved out. So all these inner suburban grounds were like churches of their own: Carlton, Collingwood, Richmond, Fitzroy. It was very tribal, and I think gradually that’s changed. But, I still think we’ve lost something. Mary, Essendon

As the names of the AFL clubs suggest, a sense of place has always been important for football supporters. That reservoir of passions that is drawn from at

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each match was originally filled by the loyalties and rivalries of supporters from the inner suburbs of Melbourne. Geelong, as a regional city in Victoria, had similar intensities and rivalries of its own. However, this story about the strength of local affiliations is not just true for Victoria. A similar story could be told about Adelaide and Perth before the formation of the national competition. Lucy’s allegiance to Port Adelaide illustrates this in a most interesting manner. Lucy has lived in Melbourne all her life, but is a fanatical Port Adelaide supporter. Despite how it first sounds, there is nothing out of place about this. It can be traced back to October 1913, when Lucy’s paternal grandparents arrived in Port Adelaide by ship. They chose Australia to settle for a new start, as my grandfather, who had left the Prussian merchant navy to marry my grandmother, had feared the commandeering of merchant navy vessels into Prussia’s pre-war build-up. However, in Australia he was declared an enemy alien, not allowed to work on the docks, had to report to police weekly, and was sent inland to work as a carpenter on a big property. My grandmother was left in a rented room in the port with a new baby. She said that the people of the port were so good to her that she never wanted to leave the place. They lived there their whole lives, sadly dying quite young, both of them. They were very involved with church and sports groups, including the Port Adelaide Football

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Club, which, according to family lore, was a boon to all during the Depression.

Lucy’s father was orphaned at 16 and moved to Victoria to complete his schooling. He eventually married and settled in Melbourne, where Lucy was brought up. In Melbourne she barracked for Collingwood in the VFL and Port Melbourne in the old Victorian Football Association competition. Collingwood was the obvious local choice, because they were called the Magpies and wore the same black and white colours as Port Adelaide. Port Melbourne was chosen because of the name. Despite these local options, Lucy and her siblings were brought up ‘believing that Port Adelaide was our “real” team’. Her earliest memories of football are ‘watching Port win another flag on television on a Sunday afternoon after Collingwood had lost yet another one on the Saturday. I think it must have been 1966.’ From 1970, ‘when we got a car, Dad drove us to Adelaide once a year to see a Port game. This is a tradition my husband, whom I’ve converted to Port, and I still follow.’ We can sense the intensity of feeling that leads back through the generations as Lucy talks about Port Adelaide. The fascinating aspect is that she also inherited a sense of commitment to place. In addition to her attachment to Port Adelaide as a special place in the family tradition, Lucy also took on some intense rivalries. These were exacerbated by the shift from statebased competitions principally based in the capital

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cities of the southern states to the national AFL competition. Lucy makes this very clear. For me, Port Adelaide is a ‘real’ club, not an invention like the Crows, Freo, West Coast, Brisbane or Sydney. It has close community and family roots. Going back to the Alberton club rooms after a game is such a buzz. There are people from all walks of life, all united in joy or regret, but always passionate about the team. I like its community outreach projects and its care for good causes. It was a byword during the Depression for looking after its players and their families, and it certainly made an impression on my grandparents during some very hard times. I’m also really disappointed with the attitude of Collingwood. Having been brought up to think of them as a brother club, I’m shocked by their mean and selfish insistence on being the only team to wear black and white, even when we’re not playing them. They obviously don’t know much about international-level sports such as English soccer where different team strips are common. And of course the AFL just bows to them – financial pressure I guess. I’ll be thrilled when or if the day comes when we can wear our heritage jumpers as a matter of course.

Lucy was brought up supporting her ‘real’ club, Port Adelaide, even though it didn’t play in the VFL, the premier league in Australia at that time. Port only joined the national AFL competition in 1997. Lucy’s club was suddenly available to her in ways it had never

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been before. Given that Port play about 60 per cent of their away games in Melbourne, she could see them play quite regularly. Instead of the annual pilgrimage, she now had the chance of a quite regular feast. But for some supporters the story was very different. When Fitzroy and South Melbourne were relocated, many supporters embraced the new clubs and made the transition to following the new team – the Brisbane Lions and the Sydney Swans respectively – but others were left adrift without a football team to support. How does that feel? What is at stake when your club migrates north?

South Melbourne Jeff McGee’s experience is testimony to how attachment to a club was usually determined by where you lived. Often supporters shared their attachment to the local club with their friends from school and the mates they played with after school. This accumulation of connections to place usually fostered a sense of community and belonging that embedded families of supporters very firmly within their local suburb. Jeff played for South Melbourne in 1967 and 1968. He followed in the tradition set by his grandfather William, who played for South Melbourne from 1903 to 1905 and captained South Melbourne in 1904. Jeff’s brother Terry also played for South Melbourne between 1963 and 1965. Not surprisingly, the whole family were avid South Melbourne supporters and this was a major link in the chain of associations that

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attached the family to the suburb and its loyalties, rivalries and traditions. Jeff and his siblings attended the Catholic schools in the area. As a child and a teenager, Jeff could readily walk to the South Melbourne ground. This was his patch and both the cricket club and the football club played a key role in his upbringing. Football was a major preoccupation for both family and friends. Living in Kerferd Road, we had the nature strip down the middle so we spent most of our time out there banging the footy up and down, terrifying the traffic. We were talking about footy all the time. They used to announce the teams on a Thursday night on the radio, so we’d listen to that. Always if we couldn’t go to the games we’d listen to it on the radio on a Saturday afternoon. Even when the TV came in, the radio was still pretty important.

A sense of location was very important. Often that meant they would not travel very far beyond the immediate borders of South Melbourne. I can remember listening to games that were, say, played in Footscray. We very rarely went to Footscray to watch a game. We’d go to St Kilda. That was the other end of the park. I remember going to Richmond, the MCG, maybe occasionally to Essendon because my cousin played for Essendon, but not really often. Carlton sometimes, because it wasn’t so far to go. I remember going to Colling-

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wood in 1959. That was a famous game because it was the first game in the season and Collingwood had just unfurled their 1958 premiership team flag. And out came South and beat them by 45 points. We didn’t go to the further grounds. Didn’t go to Geelong, very rarely. We didn’t have a car in our family. We were inner-city people, so we took public transport or rode bikes everywhere. So the outer-lying grounds like Essendon and Footscray and Geelong, only very rarely would you go to them.

This strengthened the loyalty to one’s team, especially without live telecasts and access to watching other teams play. The focus was very much on the local area. Jeff even recalls the Swans losses in a way that connects with the local area. You could get very upset. Walking home down Kerferd Road back from the ground you wouldn’t be very happy. The old saying was that if you lost then they wouldn’t sell the Sporting Globe in the area that night and that was true, but you didn’t go into depression about it. By Sunday morning, it was okay. You might not want to go and watch World of Sport. But if you won, you’d want to watch every replay, watch everything that was on television, every football show. Get up on Sunday morning and watch them again.

Following the football and going to mass were the family’s two major observances.

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It was one of those strange things that, probably, most people frown on now, where often you have your Sunday lunch with the telly on, watch the World of Sport. It wasn’t always the case, but in the footy season that was often the case, we’d have it on. Being a Catholic family, the ritual was we’d get up, go to mass, come home, have the roast lunch and watch World of Sport. And then, as we got older, we went and played football on Sunday afternoon, so footy was a big activity. I’d play on Saturday mornings and then go to the football on Saturday afternoon and I’d play again Sunday afternoon, so that was quite common for a weekend. It was basically all you did.

The move of the South Melbourne Football Club to Sydney is one the major events in the history of the VFL/AFL. It ushered in the beginning of the national competition. By the late 1970s, South Melbourne was in a desperate state financially and its on-field performance was poor, languishing at the bottom of the ladder for most of the post-war period. In the period from 1946 to 1981, it had the worst performance of any club – making the finals only twice in that period, both during the 1970s. For some it was a cruel betrayal by the South administration, but for others, it was inevitable, given the finances of the club and its continued abysmal performance. The ‘Keep South at South Committee’ attempted to resist the efforts to move the club, but with its diminishing membership and flagging per-

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formance, the forces of change were insurmountable. The South Melbourne Football Club played its final game in August 1981. It was moved to Sydney and played as the Sydney Swans from the start of the 1982 season. As the Sydney Swans, the club’s success was not immediate and the 1980s and 1990s continued to be a financially volatile period. But when they reached the grand final in 1996, finally, for some supporters of the old South Melbourne, the move seemed vindicated. For other supporters, however, their allegiance to South Melbourne could not be transferred and barracking for the Swans was not somehow a given, nor a natural transition. It seemed very foreign and alien. When South Melbourne moved to Sydney and became the Sydney Swans, several of Jeff’s family members severed ties with the club and moved their allegiance elsewhere. His own connection also lapsed, largely because by the time the move happened he was living away from South Melbourne. That local connection was not so immediate. Even though the club had been moved to Sydney in ’82, it probably didn’t impact as much on me as it did on other people because I hadn’t been going to the games that much anyway by then. My brother got more active about it than I did. He got on the ‘Keep South at South Committee’. Another relative was a committeeman at South and he led the ‘Keep South at South Committee’. So there was a lot of activity. But because I was, for a time, living quite a distance away and when I moved back I didn’t

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go to that side of town, I stayed in North Fitzroy or around that area. I never went back to live in Middle Park or Albert Park.

The impact of the move to Sydney was dramatic and heartbreaking for some supporters. My mother’s cousin, her husband and both his sons now hate the Swans, hate ’em, went to North Melbourne, and there’s still a lot of bitterness there. My sister stopped barracking and started barracking for St Kilda. She doesn’t barrack for the Swans any more. Actually all my sisters don’t barrack for the Swans, and that was purely because of the going-to-Sydney business. They thought they’d been sold out. There are plenty of people who are still bitter about it. There are still plenty of people around who supported them, even I remember my sister-in-law, she had a job just working in the South Melbourne area, visiting people, like elderly people, she’d go in there and she’d find people with little shrines in the corner with pictures of Bob Skilton and Ron Clegg with candles in front of them and things like that. These people were in their 80s and their 90s. They kept the faith all the way through, barracking for the Swans in later years, even though it was not their team any more.

However, the move to Sydney had been talked about for a long time and this prepared Jeff for the loss. I think it had been talked about for a long time, it wasn’t something that was new. It was just a matter

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of, oh they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it, that sort of thing, who are they going to do it to? You know that sort of thing.

And for him, there was not the bitterness that remained with others. Well at that stage I didn’t have a lot of connection with it because I was playing Saturdays myself, South Melbourne districts are like part of the club anyway because so many of its players play for South Melbourne, wear the same colours, have the same song, all that sort of stuff. I don’t think it had as huge effect on me as it did on other people. I wasn’t happy about it I was sad about it but I wasn’t bitter about it because it seemed to me that it was almost inevitable that it was going to happen.

Others were, however, very bitter, and Jeff reflects on how a part of this bitterness was very personal. It was also the end of a connection to place in a particular way. They’d lost part of themselves I think. Something was taken away from them that they could never get back again. For some people, football’s their whole life. You’d go down to Lake Oval, and the same people would be in the same spots every time. Even if you didn’t know their names, you knew who they were.

The biggest ritual in their lives had been taken away, and only replaced with a distant, remote substitute.

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I remember somebody saying you go down to Clarendon Street on a Saturday morning or to the South Market now and people just don’t know what to do, they don’t know what to say, they’re sort of, they’re empty, because that was always the big ritual. You’d go Saturday morning shopping and then to the footy. I can remember when I was selling papers at what used to be the Bleak House Hotel and some of the players, of a Saturday morning would come in and have a couple of pots after work and then go and play for South Melbourne. That would be their ritual. They’d work down the wharf on Saturday morning, knock off about 12.30, couple of pots and then go to the footy.

Liz’s experience was similar to Jeff’s. Like Jeff, her family was located in South Melbourne and that sense of location was a crucial part of her early football experience. She, too, had to deal with the dilemma of what to do when a club relocates. A passionate and avid Swans supporter – the oldest of four girls – she came from a family that had a long history of barracking for South Melbourne. Her father grew up in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, attended school in the area, and played cricket for South Melbourne. Liz’s allegiance was formed in her childhood. It is ‘something that becomes part of you and I find people who change teams, I can’t relate to that at all. It’s something that’s instilled in you if your family puts a value on it and it’s important that you follow the family team.’ Like Jeff’s relatives, Liz’s father was also involved in the

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‘Keep South at South’ campaign and she recalls how the move took up so much time and energy. There was a lot of bitterness. It took up a lot of family time. I can just remember a lot of heated discussions. It was a real agony for a lot of people and a really hard thing. It was unfathomable that your footy team could be transported to another state. It took a long, long time for it to really be embraced.

Liz ‘dropped off football for a bit’. She didn’t ‘want to desert them, but didn’t feel it could be the same’. Ultimately, she and her family embraced the move, and have become passionate supporters. Neither Liz nor her father could barrack for another team. The choice was stark: either barrack for the Swans or no footy. These were the only two options. The latter was unimaginable for a family so attached to the footy. ‘It was so important in our family life that not to have that would be a huge void.’ However, Liz had flirted with the possibility of barracking for another team, but her father made clear to her the possible repercussions of such a move. Liz often went to the football with a friend who was a Richmond supporter, which was her ‘second team’ – so she could have followed Richmond after South Melbourne moved. However, ‘Dad said, if you ever want to barrack for Richmond you can go right ahead, but you’ll never be going to a game with me and you’ll never be living in my house.’ Her continued allegiance to the family tradition was eventually rewarded as the

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Swans experienced a golden era during the late 1990s and early 2000s, finally topped off with one of her lifetime’s most memorable moments, the Swans premiership win in 2005. It was just the most memorable moment ever apart from children and all that sort of thing. In terms of your individual life it was huge. My father, giving him this huge hug. He was so emotional. He never thought it would ever happen. He kept saying, ‘I can die happy now.’

Fitzroy The second team to move interstate was the Fitzroy Football Club. Fifteen years after South Melbourne had played its last game in 1981, Fitzroy ended its life as a football club playing in the premier league in 1996. One of the oldest clubs, it was a foundation member of the VFL in 1897, and had an illustrious early history. Until 1924, it boasted seven premierships, but this early success did not continue and from 1925 to 1942 it failed to make the finals. Fitzroy’s eighth and last premiership came in 1944. The post-war period brought some finals success but overall its record was very poor and during the 1990s it consistently languished at the bottom of the ladder. In 1997 Fitzroy became the Brisbane Bears and then the Brisbane Lions. This move continues to anger many supporters today. They strongly resented the move, citing the AFL’s insatiable desire for profit and its determination to create

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an interstate competition as the only reasons for the move. Could the Brisbane Lions ever be Fitzroy? Could such allegiances be easily moved? Margaret explains that the Fitzroy Football Club was ‘taken from me in 1996’. It was the centre of her life, her ‘love’. Fitzroy was my life – meant everything to me – but I understand that when you lose what you love you have to get on with life. I don’t look lightly on my loss. I hurt every day. Nothing will ever replace Fitzroy for me.

Joe grew up in Fitzroy and going to the football consolidated his connection to the place and to his family. Although he followed Fitzroy during the worst period of the club’s history, it didn’t matter to him. It bonded his family and his identity was very much connected to Fitzroy. We were, I suppose, a really passionate family that definitely went to all home games, most away games including Geelong – we used to go down there on the train – and we did all the things I suppose in those days that were central to getting information about football. So we used to listen to the teams on a Thursday night on radio. There were preview shows on Channel Seven on a Friday night, a show called Football Inquest on a Saturday night and World of Sport on a Sunday. So we really did follow it quite in depth.

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The connection to the game came through family and Joe has vivid and detailed memories dating from when he was ‘quite young’. One of things that strikes me is that even now I retain a really strong knowledge of those years even though I was quite young. In a team that was very bad – we won very few games. I still remember a lot of the players and the numbers they wore and I have a very strong understanding of the VFL in those days. I can remember the sort of clubs that, when we played them, we could possibly win. Other clubs that really struggled at the time were North Melbourne, South Melbourne, Hawthorn and Footscray. Then there were clubs – particularly Collingwood but Carlton from the late ’60s – where you were really in awe of those clubs because they were so strong and powerful. You understood yourself as part of something – that thing called the VFL – but also you realised that in relationship to those big Melbourne clubs you were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

He remembers how, during the 1960s, houses in Fitzroy were demolished to make way for the Housing Commission flats, and people moved out to Preston, Reservoir and other suburbs. The football ‘became the one place where you still saw all those people’. Up until the mid-1980s, Joe saw people at the football he’d known as a child, who he ‘wouldn’t have seen otherwise’. It was very much a gathering of the old community at the football. ‘People who’d lived in Fitzroy

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and then moved out all over Melbourne literally did come together at the football. And I could name those people and know where they would fit in the community. A definite sense of that community existing in another way.’ Growing up in Fitzroy, there was never any chance that Joe would even contemplate following another club – it was as natural and given as his Catholic upbringing. It was quite seriously unquestioned, because I imagined that it was something as natural for me at the time as going to church on a Sunday, because we were Catholic. Those sorts of things that you did as a child and that you took for granted. It was more than following a sporting club. You followed Fitzroy. And because they were a lousy sporting club I suppose it could have begged the question of following another team who were successful. But I didn’t think of that.

Despite Fitzroy’s poor performance, the ‘identity with the football team and the place that you grew up was very strong’. Even so, there was desperation in the losses: ‘I would actually go down to the toilets behind the goals and pray that they can at least win this game. Because I was an altar boy and believed that prayer worked. I would literally take this very seriously.’ There was an air of inevitability to Fitzroy’s demise and when it came it was not a shock. But it did leave an emptiness about who to follow.

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After 1986, each year was closer to extinction. It was clear that they were going to die and the AFL wanted it to die. It was as if the AFL had a terminally ill patient and they weren’t going to give it any medication, but they weren’t going to put it out of its misery – just wait for it to die. And that’s what happened with Fitzroy. By the time they finished in 1996 it was so inevitable. It was really hard watching young footballers really try their guts out and getting thrashed continually. It was clear that it was over before they said so, so it was inevitable.

Removing the club from its locality left Joe and his family in search of a team, somewhat rudderless, and they split in various directions. The idea of us as a family following another team just didn’t seem to make any sense. From that moment of the demise of the club people in the family went various ways with new alliances. Some stayed or went to Brisbane – I don’t see it as staying with Fitzroy. My mother, who’d been born and grown up in Carlton, went to follow Carlton immediately – my younger daughters started following Essendon and my son started following Richmond. None of those people actually follow football with any real interest.

The family’s connection to the game has disintegrated. Joe’s daughter and mother haven’t been to a football match for many years. ‘None of them actually go to the football now.’ There is no discussion about

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football ‘that engages us emotionally at all. We don’t talk about football.’ While most Fitzroy supporters were angered by the AFL’s intervention in Fitzroy’s fate, Joe experienced fear. My anger wasn’t that strong. What struck me more than anything was a fear. A fear of what does it mean not to have a football club. Because, I’d never had a life without a football club that I followed passionately. It fulfilled a real emotional need. I did think of my father – what would he do without football, because he talked about football all the time. He basically, like a lot of people, drifted and it has left a real hole in his social life and in his ability to conduct a conversation with his children. It’s a safe subject but it’s an informed subject. I recognised and appreciated his knowledge.

After Fitzroy collapsed, Joe realised that he watched the game with little passion and simply as entertainment. However, for different reasons, he found himself in a similar situation to Cathie. For Joe, ‘with that neutrality there was a real absence of emotion and passion’. Unlike Cathie, however, perhaps because the disruption he suffered was externally imposed and not the effect of a family breakdown, Joe was in search of a new team to attach his passions to. But the selection of the next club was difficult. I didn’t not follow Brisbane out of some anger towards that club. I drifted around. I went to a few

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Richmond games. It was a social decision. I know some guys who barrack for Richmond. But that didn’t work because there were so many Richmond footballers I didn’t like.

It took seven years for him to finally find another team. ‘It’s a bit like after a relationship failure. A relationship on the rebound is probably not the best one. You need a bit of time out.’ He eventually chose Carlton in 2003, the place where he and his mother were both born. Although he began barracking for Carlton during the worst period of its history, Joe discovered that ‘there’s only one thing worse than having a football team on the bottom and that’s not having a football team at all’. He was somewhat comforted by the irony of his choice. As Carlton dropped to the bottom of the ladder, Joe reflected that ‘this is a Fitzroy turn of events’.

Footscray/Western Bulldogs While other clubs have not experienced the upheaval of South Melbourne or Fitzroy, some did have a change of name. Even that can cause anger and distress of vast proportions for some supporters. They object to a loss of tradition, but also to the loss of connection to a particular place. The club’s very identity is threatened or devalued. For instance Footscray Football Club was renamed the Western Bulldogs, with the intention of broadening its appeal in the western region of Melbourne. While Caveman, a devoted Footscray supporter, could accept the move away from the Western Oval

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because this move away from the local grounds was becoming a trend across all clubs, the name change didn’t make any sense to him. It was an insult. Now I can sort of accept or tolerate they’re not at the Western Oval. I can tolerate that because other clubs except Geelong have all left. Collingwood left, they didn’t play many games there, Carlton have gone, all other Victorian teams are out bar Geelong. But no others except North Melbourne have changed their name. That’s one part of it. I couldn’t accept that no one else has changed their name. Now I changed other people’s names on my website for a bit of a laugh and trying to draw attention, calling it the Eastern Tigers and the Northern Blues and the East Magpies and the Country Cats. A lot of that’s just being silly for the point of being silly, but I think it isn’t really totally silly because that’s what happened to us. I don’t see what’s the difference between Western Bombers and Western Bulldogs. It’s the same sort of thing, a direction and a nickname. I’ve given many reasons for why I dislike it. Another one is the name really doesn’t mean anything. Western Bulldogs. It doesn’t really. Western is a direction. Bulldogs is a nickname, it doesn’t mean anything. And Footscray, the club, had been around before the start of the VFL, had been around since the 1880s. For me you’re throwing away a lot of the history. Now I was born there. The fact is, when they changed the name, there were a lot of derogatory things said, like, ‘When you think of Footscray, what do you think of?

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Third-rate losers lacking success’ and all that sort of stuff. To me that was terrible. And the arguments used, like they had to change the name to get people, well I don’t think it’s ever worked.

As someone whose family has strong roots in the area, Caveman is keenly aware of what he regards as the class condescension at work in the push for a name change. With the name change, like my dad came from there, grandmother came from there, people changed the name that had never lived in Footscray or the western suburbs, or wouldn’t admit they have. They probably thought they were doing the right thing, they probably still do, but to me it’s just alienated so many people. They would have more of a following if they changed it back.

To take away the name of the place is to obliterate its history, and to rewrite it. To me Footscray is the history of the place and it’s been there for ages. You’ve trivialised a name of a club, and also, you’re cheating history. I saw the other day a function was going to be attended by Leon Cameron, the Western Bulldogs 1993 Best and Fairest. He wasn’t. He was the Footscray winner. The Western Bulldogs wasn’t thought of in 1993. That annoys me too. It’s like a form of revisionist history. It’s revisionism, and I can’t have that.

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The name change is also at the heart of the commercialisation of the game. When you’re a club, the more you change things, the more you alienate people, and you’re just trying to attract people that are there for the short term, the money, the marketing thing. When they get sick of that, that’s a fad, they’ll go to something else. But when you lose your core value, when you’ve got people, you’ve got to keep them, you keep them happy, you can try and attract others but when you lose what you’ve always had to attract others, you know, it just denigrates the whole place.

Caveman’s attachment to the club is so deep and profound that he takes these changes personally, as if it is a slight on his own identity. As someone who grew up in the area and whose family is also from the area, to change the name negates his identity. Caveman feels personally insulted. It’s a reflection on me as a person too, in the sense that I come from there, I was born in Footscray Hospital. And they’ve said you’re third-rate losers, we’ve got to change our name to appeal to marketing, the name means nothing. Now even if you don’t live here, which I don’t now and haven’t for years, it still is to me, I take it as an insult. And I think a lot of people do too, like my dad does a bit, and he went to school there. To him, his generation, but even my generation, it’s still insulting.

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Even the club song has been changed. When they changed the song, they changed a few words. They deleted all mention of Footscray. I just cannot stand that. One of the lines is ‘Sons of the ’Scray’. Well that’s now ‘Sons of the West’. Now just any mention of Footscray’s been deleted. To me that’s just, I can’t stand it. To me, purely, it’s like you’re embarrassed by what you are as well. And to me coming from there, the same with my father and all that other stuff, it’s just, I don’t really want to be part of this.

Caveman speaks about what he regards as his club’s loss of identity in a manner that expresses a very strong sense of place and belonging, along with feelings of betrayal. Having deep family roots in Footscray, and a long family tradition of supporting the Footscray Football Club, the obliteration of a reference to ‘Footscray’ in the rebadged club’s name and song is felt as an unacceptable personal insult. These emotions that Caveman experiences underline how the loved football club can take on a deep layering of personal significance.

Hawthorn For some supporters their connection with their club is not disrupted by such changes as moving to a new home ground. However, a threat to their club’s identity is another matter entirely. In 1992, Hawthorn began playing their home games at Waverley Park. This fol-

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lowed an earlier shift from Glenferrie Oval to Princes Park in 1974. Getting to Waverley Park was a long drive for Jane and her family. However, rather than resenting this shift to another home ground, Jane saw it as an opportunity to spend family time together. When we moved to Waverley people used to complain about the fact that Waverley was miles away, but we actually really liked it. Because we would drive, listen to the Coodabeens and we would chat, as we were going backwards and forwards. For me and my brothers and sisters, it certainly was the weekly meeting. It was very much the thing that pulled us all together when we were adults.

This capacity to draw her family together is one of the aspects of the game that Jane ‘loves’. I love the fact that it is family. I love the fact that there’s three generations of us now who go regularly. I love the fact that my father keeps a ‘facts book’ of all the things that have happened in games. I love the fact that my husband and his family barrack for St Kilda and we’re arch rivals. This rivalry was actually referred to at our wedding. There have been times when we say, ‘God, I wonder what the people who don’t follow football do.’

It also gives her the chance to spend time in the company of her teenage daughter, Annie, and her friends. Among the Hawthorn supporters of a certain age group there is this view that all the teenage girls

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are actually attracted to them because the players are good-looking boys. I am sure that that doesn’t hurt. But I know from my experience of going with Annie and her friends, who have come at times, I have to actually tell her to shut up and that we’re going to get belted. She enjoys nothing more at the age of 13 than sitting in a nest of Essendon or Collingwood supporters and ribbing them. She loves it.

Jane could live with Hawthorn’s shifting of home grounds, but she was totally opposed to the possible merger with Melbourne. The efforts to merge Melbourne and Hawthorn in 1996 resulted in heated and passionate public meetings for and against the merger. As we saw with Helen, many supporters from both clubs regarded any merger as a personal loss. Jane recalls that at the time when the proposal was publicly discussed, there was a very strong sense that the Hawthorn identity would disappear completely if the merger went ahead. We actually believed that they would lose the jumper, which was important. And the name was very important. If they were going to be called the Melbourne Hawks it would eventually just be shortened to Melbourne, not Hawks and they actually wouldn’t exist any more.

Jane believed that supporters should have a say in the future of Hawthorn because of their emotional investment in the club. ‘You are giving a large part of your-

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self attached to that membership. It’s not just a footy team. It was about losing bits of yourself.’ For Bruce and his post-war generation, barracking for the club named after the suburb you grew up in was commonplace. We have just observed as much with Jeff, Liz, Joe and Caveman. Like them, Bruce was a committed supporter of his local club. In his case this was Hawthorn. Both my mother and father had grown up in Hawthorn, or my father had grown up in Hawthorn and my mother had come there when her father, a minister, had come. So, my mother and her brothers had all gone to school in Hawthorn and they all supported them, naturally. My father didn’t. He barracked for Carlton.

Barracking for Hawthorn was an integral part of growing up in the area. If I think about it, at the state school I went to which wasn’t the closest one but it was where my mother and her brothers and sisters went, in my grade I think there were only two kids who didn’t follow Hawthorn. So everybody did. And from the age of seven or eight, I think, we were going down to Glenferrie Road on Tuesdays and Thursdays for training. And I think I probably would have gone down there before I went to the game. And I probably started going to games when I was 9 or 10. I have a keen memory of going to training. Glenferrie Oval was only 10 minutes walk away. And my

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parents didn’t mind. I was walking to school from the age of six or seven. So they didn’t mind me walking down to the football.

One of the highlights of going to training was the access you had to the players. You were allowed into the dressing rooms. So you could actually go in while they were rubbing them down before going out to training. And the players would, you know, horse around and include you. That was terrific. Probably most clubs in the ’50s, if you turned up at training and you were a kid, they’d let you in. I’m sure we weren’t always allowed in. But down when they were getting ready for training there was no problem about going in.

St Kilda Bruce’s story leads back into the old traditions of the game, when even the elite teams were accessible to the kids of the neighbourhood. Jack’s stories about the football track back much further still. Jack was born in 1904, and grew up in Prahran behind the family shop. He and his father would take a cable car to the games or they would walk. He recalled one occasion when he was about 10. We walked home from South Melbourne to the tram in High Street. It’s a pretty long walk, you know. And we talked football, the men did, my father especially, all the way home.

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While his mother would sometimes accompany them, this was unusual. ‘There were not as many women who went to the football then,’ he recalled. ‘You’d never hear women talking about football.’ Living in Prahran, St Kilda was the obvious club to follow. Jack said that, recruiting as they did from the local area, St Kilda was at a distinct disadvantage. St Kilda seemed to depend on fast, small men. They couldn’t get as many big men as the fellows over in Collingwood and Fitzroy. They got the boys working in factories, they were built up, you know, they were a different type. We tried to win it with a bit of brain power, whereas they did it with strength. They were big tough fellows.

In an era before radio and television coverage, the only way to watch or closely follow matches was to actually attend the game. For children like Jack, going to the football was a special treat. It gave you a lot of kudos with your mates at school. You could tell them all about St Kilda’s performance. You also got to mix with the men as they stood and watched the match and as they talked and quarrelled about it afterwards. It was a big thing when we were young, to go down and get the money from your mother to go, and you’d sort of feel a bit more grown up. I used to get among the men, and listen to what they were screaming about. There were no television replays of the game, so you had to form your own opinion,

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and when you left the ground your version of the game might be miles away from what your friend thought of it. So that made it a terrific thing. On television, everyone’s looking at it the same way. You can’t keep arguing about it. I could talk to the kids and tell them all about the game because either I went or I got the story from my father.

Jack grew accustomed to the sad fortunes of St Kilda. However, there was never any question about any other allegiance. Well, you’re sort of bred with it. If you’re bred in St Kilda, nine times out of 10 you’d be a St Kilda supporter. They were more Prahranites I think, than St Kilda. Most of the people came from the Prahran side, although they were called St Kilda. It was a heartbreaking team to follow. And they not only didn’t win but they used to get a damn good thrashing.

Jack followed St Kilda throughout his long life, despite the many thrashings they suffered. When they played Essendon in the 1965 grand final, more than 50 years after he first barracked for them as a young schoolboy, he was determined to be there, despite having to work until near the start of the match. I was at the shop on my own and I couldn’t shut the shop before one o’clock. So I got in the car and when I got to the MCG, there was a little stretch of grass running parallel to the railway

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line where no one had parked. So I left my car on the grass. I knew it was wrong, but I was so eager to see St Kilda that I did it. A policeman came. I could see him, and he screamed at me, ‘Don’t park there, don’t park there.’ So I got out of the car and I ran, and he chased me about a hundred yards and then he let me go. And I thought, ‘When I go back he’ll be waiting for me.’

Essendon beat St Kilda by 35 points and when Jack did get back to his car he discovered that he had been booked. Still, seeing St Kilda play in its first grand final since 1913 was well worth it, despite the loss. The next year, St Kilda reached the grand final again. This time they won their first and only premiership, beating Collingwood by a single behind, kicked by Barry Breen in the last minute of the game. There were 101,655 people at that grand final and Jack was one of them. He was in the standing-room-only section and had an obscured view. I could only see half the ground. I could see what went on down there, on the Melbourne side, but the other side I couldn’t see. I had to put up with it. And I didn’t know how long they had to go. I didn’t know anybody and there was a great roar, a terrific roar, and I said, ‘What happened?’ Someone said, ‘St Kilda won.’ And I started to cry, the tears rolled down. I’ll never forget it as long as I live. And when I walked home – I didn’t take the car – to think that they could’ve won a final! They only won it by a point!

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At about the same time Lucy’s grandparents docked at Port Adelaide, young Jack was heading off to the St Kilda Junction Oval with his father to watch the Saints play. Just as in Lucy’s family the devotion to the local club has stuck across the generations, the same is true for Jack’s children, grandchildren and even his greatgrandchildren. Whenever Jack’s children or grandchildren watch St Kilda play, Jack’s memory hovers nearby. It is likely it will be the same for his great-grandchildren. These connections between family and footy run deep. Together they form a wellspring of passions that keen football supporters draw upon and replenish with each match and each passing season.

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Final Siren

There have been times when we say, ‘God, I wonder what the people who don’t follow football do.’ Jane, Hawthorn

We began this book by describing an imaginary family of devoted football supporters as they progressed from kitchen table to their seats at the footy, where they joined both their fellow and rival supporters in immersing themselves in their footy passions. The stories we have told reveal the range, intensity and intricacy of these footy passions. We have learned that the ways in which supporters talk about their team also tells us a lot about them. It reveals an intricate con-

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nection between the supporter’s personal life and the meaning and significance they attach to the fate and fortunes of their team. Usually footy passions trace back into childhood. We have seen this in all its variations, from Nadine’s continuation of her deep connection with her father via football, even after his death, to Keith’s total repudiation of anything to do with his father’s and family’s club. From Cathie’s loss of her ability to love Hawthorn as her family fell apart, to Richard’s consolidation of his relationship with his father, as they deepened their obsession with Geelong and its fate. The supporters who discover a passion for AFL footy as adults are often just as committed as those who were born to it. There is a difference, however. Rather than tracing back into childhood, for the newcomers the significance they attach to the fortunes of their team reaches forward, out into the families and friendships they have formed as adults. As we have seen with Wilf and Madeleine, these newcomers get to establish a tradition. In doing so, they draw family and friends into their intensity. Those who have been devoted supporters since childhood also use their attachment to their team in this manner. They, too, form and maintain intense relations as adults, especially with their own children. For them, however, that tug from childhood is always lurking, adding a depth of associations that accompanies them to every match. This is another reason why Madeleine’s story is so distressing and, yet, also revealing of how foot-

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ball passions work. Having anticipated that Bessie’s future would eventually lead them both to adjacent seats at the SCG, Madeleine finds that the proper sequence has been reversed. Like, yet unlike, Nadine with her father, for Madeleine the significance she has found in the footy keeps her old hopes for Bessie alive. We also suggested that being devoted to a footy team somewhat resembles the way young children attach significance to a special teddy-bear, toy or blanket. This special object is part of the child’s fantasy life, but it is also real. It sits between fantasy and reality. But it isn’t shared with others. Like the loved security blanket that the child will not surrender, the football club as special object also sits between fantasy and reality. It also becomes the container of dreams, memories, ambitions, hopes and desires. When it is damaged it hurts. We have seen how a loss can plunge the keen supporter into a bout of depression. The difference with the football club is that it is shared with many thousands of others. It is also disliked, even detested by many thousands, especially on match days. The other difference is that its fate on the field is totally out of the supporters’ control. To have so much emotionally invested in something that is beyond your control is a precarious state to be in. However, the stories we have retold highlight that this state of mind is rich with meaning and significance, as the attachment to the club tracks back into the life and relationships of the devoted supporter.

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We hope Footy Passions reveals in detail what most devoted footy supporters already intuitively know about their passionate attachment to a footy club. We have tried to trace out the intricacy of how intense memories and emotions play through the lives of supporters. We invite our readers to continue this line of investigation by talking with family and friends about their footy passions. As a way of getting started they might consider Madeleine’s story about young Oliver, who already knows who the enemy is. My four-year-old son was holding some yellow, black and white Lego blocks in his hand the other day and he said to me, ‘Yellow and black is a good colour combination, Mama’. ‘Yeah, that’s the Tigers,’ I replied casually, just framing life for him. ‘Who are the white and black again?’ he asked. ‘The Magpies,’ I said, trying to sound impartial. ‘Ooh, yucky, stinky Magpies,’ he said.

It starts early!

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Major stadiums MCG

The Melbourne Cricket Ground, founded in 1838 by the Melbourne Cricket Club, is the ‘home’ of Australian Rules Football. Colloquially referred to as ‘The ‘G’, weekly games as well as some finals and the grand final are played at the MCG. It is the largest stadium in Australia. Internationally, it is best known for hosting the 1956 Olympics, the 2006 Commonwealth Games and an annual ‘Boxing Day’ Test Cricket match. It is currently the home ground for Collingwood, Hawthorn, Melbourne and Richmond. Docklands Stadium

The Docklands Stadium was opened in 2000 and was designed for AFL football, unlike many stadiums that were originally designed for cricket. Since it opened, the stadium has been known by its sponsored names: in turn, Colonial Stadium, Telstra Dome and now Etihad Stadium. It is currently the home ground for Carlton, Essendon, North Melbourne, St Kilda and Western Bulldogs. Football Park Stadium

Also known as AAMI Stadium, both the Adelaide Crows and Port Power play their home games at Football Park. The Gabba

The Brisbane Cricket Ground, usually referred to as the Gabba, is the home ground of the Brisbane Lions. It also hosts international Test Cricket matches.

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Kardinia Park

Also known as Skilled Stadium, Kardinia Park is the home ground of the Geelong Football Club. SCG

The Sydney Cricket Ground is the home ground of the Sydney Swans Football Club. Internationally, it is best known for hosting an annual ‘New Years’ Test Cricket match. Subiaco

The West Coast Eagles and The Fremantle Dockers both play their home matches at Subiaco.

Brownlow Medal The award given annually to recognise the fairest and best player in the AFL and, previously, the VFL. It was introduced in 1924 and named after Charles Brownlow, a player and administrator at Geelong and a VFL President, for his long and distinguished service to Australian Rules football.

Wooden Spoon The team that finishes last in a football season is said to have won the ‘wooden spoon’.

The game A season of football is played over 22 rounds and a finals series that stretches over four rounds, culminating in the grand final, usually played on the last Sat-

Appendix

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urday in September. In the 22 home-and-away rounds teams play on their ‘home’ ground (called home games) – and play ‘away’ games at the grounds of their opponents. A game is divided into four quarters. The scoring consists of one goal (worth six points) and a ‘behind’ (worth one point).

Finals series The top eight teams at the end of the 22 rounds played in the home-and-away season play off in the finals. • In week one: there are two qualifying finals (QF) and two elimination finals (EF). • In the first QF: 1st plays 4th; in the second QF, 2nd plays 3rd. • In the first EF, 5th plays 8th; in the second EF, 6th plays 7th. • In week two: there are two semi-finals (SF): • In SF 1: The loser of the 1st QF plays the winner of 1st EF • In SF 2: Loser of the Second QF plays the winner of the second EF. • In week three: there are two preliminary finals (PF): • Winner of first QF plays winner of second SF • Winner of second QF plays winner of first SF • In week four: the grand final • Winners of two PFs play off for the premiership in the grand final.

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Team history Team

Year formed

Year joined Club emblem VFL/AFL names

Grounds

Adelaide

1991

1991

Crows

Football Park/AAMI Stadium

Brisbane

1986

1986

Bears, Lions merged with Fitzroy in 1997

Carrara The Gabba

Carlton

1864

1897

Blues

Princes Park/Optus Oval Docklands

Collingwood

1889

1897

Magpies

Victoria Park MCG

Essendon

1873

1897

Bombers

Essendon (‘Windy Hill’) MCG Docklands

Fitzroy

1883

1897

Lions merged in 1996

Brunswick Street Oval Princes Park Junction Oval Victoria Park Western Oval Whitten Oval

Footscray

1875

1925

Bulldogs (Re-named Western Oval Western Bulldogs Optus Oval 1997) Docklands

Fremantle

1995

1995

Dockers

Subiaco Oval WACA

Geelong

1859

1897

Cats

Corio Oval Kardinia Park/Skilled Stadium

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Year formed

Team

Year joined Club emblem VFL/AFL names

Grounds

Hawthorn

1873

1925

Hawks

Glenferrie Oval Princes Park Waverley MCG

Melbourne

1858

1897

Demons

MCG

North Melbourne

1869

1925

Kangaroos (‘Shinboners’) Renamed Kangaroos 1999 2008 reverted back to North Melbourne

Arden Street Coburg Oval MCG Docklands

Port Adelaide

1870

1997

Power

Football Park AAMI Stadium

Richmond

1860

1908

Tigers

Punt Road Oval MCG

St Kilda

1873

1897

Saints

Junction Oval Moorabbin Waverley Park Docklands

South Melbourne/ Sydney

1874

1897

Swans (‘Bloods’)

Lake Oval Princes Park Junction Oval SCG

West Coast

1987

1987

Eagles

Subiaco WACA

sources The Clubs: The Complete History of Every Club in the AFL/VFL, Viking/Penguin, 1998; Rob Hess et al., A National Game: The History of Australian Rules Football, Viking/Penguin, 2008; Jim Main and Russell Holmesby, The Encyclopedia of League Footballers, Wilkinson Books, 1992.

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