Purple Prose

by Liz Byrski

  It is a mode of representation that might, at a glance, seem exemplified by a recent article by Rosie Duffy on the Dockers website celebrating the one hundredth birthday of Margaret Doig, the devoted, unfailingly supportive ‘matriarch of a famous Fremantle football family’ whose men played for WAFL clubs East Fremantle and South Fremantle for generations and who give their name to the Dockers annual award for best and fairest player, the Doig Medal: ‘In 1937,’ writes Duffy, ‘she married East Fremantle football legend George Doig.’ According to Margaret’s eldest son Don, ‘George and his brother Charlie played against Swan Districts the same day. After the match, they changed and walked across to the church, which is just across the road from the oval, to get to the altar on time.’ Asked, some seventy-seven years after becoming a football bride, who her favourite Fremantle Dockers player is, she is lauded for a motherly diplomacy that handily endorses both continuance and community – ‘I just love them all because they are Fremantle.’ 9

  Mama Mia! And yet, while I understand (and share) Krien’s concern with the persistence of stereotyping, when I look at the picture of stalwart, sweet-faced Mrs Doig, it’s not just that I’m enough of a Dockers tragic to be charmed; more importantly I can’t help but respect the hard yards, the years of emotional and physical labour that she has obviously put in – as indeed have so many women in the history of the game. It is not that this legacy of women’s work (in the past, often taken for granted and obscured) should not be celebrated; rather, what matters is that this is not mobilised in such a way as to obscure a clear view of other stories, of problems that persist, and of empowering new possibilities of difference.

  At a personal level, but one that I think crucially affects the way I, as a woman, relate to the game, the story also makes me think about my dad, an East Fremantle supporter from boyhood despite a western suburbs upbringing and stints at Melbourne Grammar and Guildford Grammar. He would have been fifteen in 1937, was devoted to the gritty, stylish East Freo, and worshipped greats like the Doigs. It was my father who indoctrinated not just his son, but his daughters – my sister and I – into his footy passion, regularly taking us all to games, telling us of the mighty team triumphs – not least of which was the great year of 1946, when the team won every single game they played. His stories filled me with the belief that the blue-and-white kitted Old Easts (this was before they took on the nickname The Sharks in the early 80s) with more premierships under their belt than any other WAFL team, could, perhaps in conjunction with erstwhile port town rivals – the tough, redand-white kitted South Fremantle – one day produce a reunited Fremantle team (reunited, as there had once been a Fremantle team in the late nineteenth century). This dream team could enter a national competition and there prove mighty enough to topple the great Victorian teams of the evil VFL.

  A few decades later – my father has passed away, I have returned from many years living interstate, and the once and future Fremantle team has duly emerged into the AFL and is rapidly proving itself, through a series of erratically played losing encounters, to be far from Arthurian. A young man in one of my tutorials tells me that the Dockers chose purple as one of the team colours because it was what you get when you mix blue and red: the two Freo teams, long locked in ferocious port-side rivalry ritually slugged out in twice-yearly derbies now, or so it would seem, improbably merged as one. Of course, experts would quickly note that the Fremantle Football Club did not have its roots as an AFL club in an actual merger of the existent East/South WAFL clubs. Moreover, I’ve never found any empirical evidence to support the tale of red+blue = purple. Official club historian Les Everett points to an initial marketing preference for purple as a unique and strong colour,10 and his illustrated history of the club, along with G. A. Haimes’ doctoral thesis on the club’s organisational culture, indicate that purple is a colour known to have various traditional uses on the docks,11 thus chiming in with the maritime associations of the other two colours that made up the original Dockers strip – red and green – which signify port and starboard respectively.

  All very sensible no doubt, but for symbolism and sentiment, I still choose to believe in the mythic equation blue+red = purple.

  By rights such romanticism, and such a heritage, should put me at the ground and out front of the purple cheer squad, week after week, but I tend to prefer watching the game in the privacy of my own lounge room, especially if there’s a chance of rain. There, whether alone or in company, I can be found firmly planted in front of the TV for every Dockers game, exhibiting the full gamut of fanesque emotions: wearing my Dockers scarf, marvelling at the arcane knowledge, anecdotal detours and verbal eccentricities of the commentators, whistling and clapping when the boys run out, leaping off the sofa, fists clenched in evangelical triumph when a freakish Ballantyne or ‘Son Son’ Walters snap flies us to unlikely victory, marvelling at Mick Barlow’s dogged determination in working a ball out of a tight pack, heart soaring as Nat Fyfe’s haystack hair flies into the stratosphere, sighing at the graceful, laconic kicking style of defender Michael Johnson, puzzling at the perversely fierce defence of well known Baha’i follower Luke McPharlin, slumping head in hands in ‘oh not again!’ despair when a poster by Pav plummets us into yet another cycle of hell, celebrating with the club song when one of his monster kicks sails through and we rise again to fight another day.

  Very occasionally I go to the game when a friend has a spare ticket, but I’ve been known to baulk if the seats aren’t under cover and there’s a chance of getting wet. Maybe there’s a part of me rebelling against a childhood structured around Dad’s regime of family footy visits, my little legs (I was the baby) sometimes struggling to keep up as we raced on a day of blustery winter weather from some far-away parking spot to make it for the first bounce. Maybe the sullen lefty-femmo arts student rejecting family tradition (including footy) still exerts her will occasionally, or maybe I just find (or so I like to kid myself) that the mediated spectacle on the TV screen provides superior coverage for the connoisseur, with its careful close-ups, multiplicity of angles and slo-mo replays. Then again, maybe I’m just lazy – my heart beats purple, but my guts are yellow and my failure to commit is down to dilettantism. Truth is, I fear at times that I’m a bit of a Clayton’s supporter; Dockers-lite, not a battle-scarred true believer, ready to stand by my team come hell or high water.

  On Saturday September 21st, 2013 though, I find myself humming with anticipation, filled with a sweet, uncomplicated buzz that takes me back to sunny childhood days of East Freo triumphs, and bounces me forward on the balls of my adult feet across Hadyn Bunton Avenue to meet Caroline at an appointed spot outside Gate 24. Around me the building crowd is a carnivalesque swirl of purple, tempered with the white trim, with chevrons and anchors and thick, bold FREO and DOCKERS lettering, flecked here and there with occasional hints of red and green, tangible reminders of the club’s original red, green and purple strip, officially abandoned in 2010 for the superior recognition and marketing value of pure purple. The faithful are swaddled in scarves, caps, beanies, jumpers, hoodies, shirts and jackets; kids and adults shoulder Dockers bags and flags, carry banners, swish streamers and balloons. White inflatable anchors bob around, faces are painted purple and white, and someone hands me an A3 size poster, a wobbleboard to wave and shake our boys to victory. It’s purple of course, with GO FREO in white block letters on one side and includes a triptych of heroes on the other: Danyle Pearce, Stephen Hill and Michael ‘Sonny’ Walters, all key team members and part of the Dockers’ great tradition of fostering Indigenous talent – one of which I, like so many supporters, am genuinely proud.

  I see a guy strolling past, fully rigged out in a snappy purple velvet suit – shades of 60s Carnaby St, barring the finishing touches of white trainers with purple stripes and a dark purple beanie. In my modest way I too wear my passion. I don’t own a team jumper or jacket but I do have a non-merchandise purple polo of just the right shade which I wear over a black jumper. I have a Dockers cap too,
a cheap knock-off, closer to maroon than purple, a joke gift from a tennis mate, a rusted-on Eagles fan, who won it in a Christmas work raffle and handballed it to me with pantomime disgust, on strict instructions that I never wear it against her on court. Local footy rivalry being what it is I’ve made sure to ignore her on key occasions, but for this serious footy outing the oddly maroonish colouring worries me and I shove it in my bag prior to reaching the ground. Getting your footy colours wrong is not an option, and heaven forbid anyone should mistake me for a displaced toothless Brisbane Lion! One sartorial touchstone is beyond doubt though: I have my Dockers scarf. It’s an old and treasured item bought some years before from the store down at club headquarters at Fremantle Oval. And, because it predates the 2010 rebranding exercise, it’s not just purple and white; it’s red, green, white and purple.

  I’m actually a fan of the new all-purple kit: after all, it’s blue+red, it’s distinctive, it’s unique as a footy colour and, well, it’s so wonderfully, unintentionally queer. But nevertheless, I have remained true to the old scarf because it seems to me (and comparing notes with others I know I’m not alone) that it signifies endurance. Call it overcompensation in my case at least, but this scarf says (to me at least) I’m no blow-in, I haven’t just climbed on board because the team’s started winning big, with a likely chance of a grand final. I’ve suffered, in my rather sheltered way, through near two decades long of winters of Dockers discontent that have now led to this glorious sun of September. The Shockers, the humiliating on-field cock-ups, false starts, the nearly made-its, the drubbing defeats, the endless ribbing from the commentators and the supporters of other clubs, especially Eagles fans, the next year in Melbourne predictions that fall flat, the brand new starts with another coach or a new repertoire of players, an important (albeit ageing) interstate star who turns out to be a dud, or else does stalwart but limited service before puttering out to grass-ture with a bung back or a dud hammy. I’m still here; we’re still here – and now it’s our turn.

  Caroline and I touch base, both grinning, and begin the mountainous assent to our seats, scaling the stairs to the top tier of a big lump of ugly concrete behind the goals at the Subi end. It’s normally the sort of windswept Stalinist tower I’d cite as evidence for the virtues of TV viewing, even though the big screens at either side of the ground these days provide more than adequate compensation. On this day though I’m as happy as Hillary, surveying the swarm of excited Dockers fans as they buzz in below and around me, interspersed by the blood-red of the Sydney Swans’ faithful. I feel the concrete under my feet throb with the crowd’s excitement. As we settle in, the boys are warming up, thumping practice shots into the temporary nets behind the goals, much to the thrill of kids pooling close by to watch. Then there’s the hoopla of the pre-game entertainment, so banal I struggle to remember it, the bum-wiggling, foot-crunching manoeuvres as new arrivals in our row weave past, the juggling of beverages and the wafting aromas of richly fried and salted, onion-saturated and sauce drenched fast food, comparing notes with Caroline, killing time snapping photos on the mobile, the eruption of cheers and chants as the players finally run out and crash the banners, the due diligence to a national anthem that’s about as daft as our club song (just who is this old duck Gert-by-sea?) the coin toss, the crowd exploding at the bounce … our giant of a big man Aaron ‘Sandy’ Sandiland’s fist crashing like Thor’s hammer through the clouds … so this is why people GO to the footy!

  In the first quarter the game is as ugly as a street brawl. The Dockers mount a relentless forward press and lock down Sydney in a rolling maul of tackles; the pressure is blistering, but the kicking is wild, and by the siren we’ve managed a disappointing 2.9 to their 2.2. We should be streets ahead, but instead we’re stuck revving at the intersection. The crowd vibe is still festive, but my gut tunes in to a collective twitching of nerves; an understandable reflex when you’ve spent twenty years watching your team invert the triumphal cliché – snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Two old guys sitting next to us, with drawn, leathery faces beneath weather-worn Dockers caps, both with an ear dangling the small white cord of a transistor radio, exchange terse, worried words. I think of my dad, suspecting he’d tune a ready eye to these characters, and I imagine the impossible pleasure of having him beside me. Then I realise that ‘the old guys’ are probably closer in age to me at fifty-two than to him, at what would have been ninety-one. Time can be a relentless bastard of an opponent, and a trickster to boot, and in that moment I miss my father more intensely – and yet feel closer to him – than I have since his death.

  Meanwhile, the game is on again and our boys – revved up by Ross Lyon – are flying goal-wards with a precision that now matches the intensity of their play. The crowd is ballistically pro-Docker, but just behind us a young guy in a Sydney jumper, chosen, so he informs the mates he’s sitting with, not for affiliation, but with the express intention of pissing the purple people off, persists in niggling, offering spicy if increasingly redundant advice to Freo, until eventually one of the old guys tells him to ‘watch his effing language’. The unfortunately contradictory choice of adjective brings guffaws from the recipient, but (and for all the daft, blokeyness of the exchange, I’m more than happy enough to own this) the last laugh is with us (me, the Dockers and the old guys) as a spectacular – and very accurate – second quarter closes with the purple firmly ahead 7.11 to 2.2. Now for a carton of those delicious salty, hot chips – crisp on the outside, and warm and juicy with potato squish on the inside after the crunch. Junk food never tasted so good.

  The Dockers maintain their dominance for the rest of the match, although a Swans fightback and a slight easing of scoreboard pressure by our boys towards the end of the game unleashes an eleventh-hour quiver of worry, with the final margin closing to twenty-five points. In the last five minutes, though, it is clear we simply can’t be beaten and the ground begins to echo with one short repeated riff. It’s not the seesawing Freeee-ohh, Freee-ohh we’ve come to expect, but something cryptic that I find myself chanting like a mantra before I fully grasp its meaning: MCG, MCG, MCG, MCG, and MCG. Yes, that’s where we’re going. Tomorrow in Jerusalem; next Saturday in Melbourne. We’re off to challenge for the Holy Grail.

  A week later, unable to make it away from Perth, I watch the game on TV with my mother at her nursing home, proud but ultimately gutted as, despite the gusto of the mighty purple army that floods over to Melbourne to cheer them on, the Dockers falter horribly at the MCG – a slow start, wasted opportunities in front of goal, and then a desperate, gutsy lunge to come back too late at the end. I speculate, like many a pundit, that maybe the big occasion overpowered the ingénues. I concede that maybe – just maybe – our wily and experienced opponents Hawthorn were just too good. I wax mythical too – we stumbled because we were forced to wear our away strip for the match: the white jumper adorned with purple chevrons and white shorts. Unfair advantage to the Vics of course! We’re just like poor old Samson with his hair shorn. Mum listens to all this with a sympathetic, diplomatic nod and a cheeky, happy little glint in her eye. She’s a Melbourne girl by birth and upbringing, and a football lover who accompanied us to all those East Fremantle games, gamely supporting her husband’s team, then went over to the Eagles with the AFL entry in the late 80s and stayed there. Whenever the Eagles are out of the equation though, she gets a double dip, reverting to the Melbourne team of her youth – Hawthorn.