Purple Prose (18 page)

I, however, wouldn't have surrendered my ticket for a truckload of fascinating footwear, and while I'm not much of a shopper at the best of times I'm hardly a complete freak among females for putting a footy final first. For all the blokeyness of the culture, Aussie Rules, like all the big, male-dominated sporting codes, has traditionally had female fans aplenty, and they can be found in all ages, races, sexual preferences, occupations and ethnicities. You just have to go to a game, or more telling still perhaps, watch one on TV as the cameras pan the crowd in response to a controversial umpiring decision to see, framed in close-up, gesticulating girls and growling grannies alike directing well-seasoned advice to the ‘white maggots' (these days dressed in almost anything but white) on such subjects as where they can stick their umpire's whistle.

In fact, over the last decade or so the AFL and its clubs have sought to address the gender divide and the kind of sexism that, as Miriam Cannell's 1997 documentary
Game Girls
amply testifies, ritually beset female sports commentators like the pioneering Caroline Wilson. Most notably, according to the AFL Community website, the 2005's AFL Respect and Responsibility Policy works to ensure that ‘people throughout the AFL are aware and have
structures in place that recognise that violence against women and behaviour that harms and degrades women, is never acceptable.'
²
Initiatives which work to support the officially stated key principles of ‘respect', ‘responsibility'
and
‘participation' range from academic consultants and education workshops for male players, to increased participation by women in AFL administration and board memberships, to women runners and goal umpires (well there seem to be one or two who feature fairly regularly), to little girls getting a guernsey along with their boy cohorts in half-time Auskick, to support for female players through development, sponsorship and provision of information about competitions and achievements. When I scroll across the AFL Community website section dedicated to ‘Female Football'
³
it certainly seems a long way from the days of several decades ago, when this little barefoot tyke sped around the backyard pretending to be one of her WAFL heroes – usually the diminutive quick-as-a-flash East Fremantle goal sneak, Tony ‘Budgie' Buhagiar – all the while grumbling that only boring bloody netball and hockey were on offer as winter sports for girls.

This said, the brave new world of sensitive new-age footy is not quite as reconstructed as it appears. The reality is that women who play the game still remain firmly on the outer paddock, devoid of the pay cheque and public recognition afforded to their male counterparts, while, as argued by Anna Krien in her powerful 2010 study,
Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport
,
⁴
despite the R&R code, double standards are still evident and young women who socialise off-field with players can find themselves negotiating behaviours ranging from casual misogyny and objectification to sexual abuse and a band of brothers/big-business network that seemingly closes ranks to protect its own. As for gay men, while the powers-that-be have, in fairness, certainly shown some recent efforts to be supportive, we have yet to see any AFL players ‘come out', and meanwhile verbal slips by various football ‘identities' make it pretty clear a culture of casual homophobia remains,
despite whatever official or unofficial censures are brought to bear. Like many a Dockers supporter pursuing the everyday world of fandom, I've heard (or read on discussion boards) the alliterative and associative purple poofs and pansies thrown casually into the mix – or implied in the subtext – along with the perennial Shockers or sinking-anchors taunts; schoolyard stuff that's no less indicative of a homophobic mindset for being framed, as it sometimes is, as knowingly ironic or harmless jest, and undoubtedly a lot cruder when mobilised in the actual schoolyard.

Docker, femmo, lezzie, queer. Only the innocent or the irredeemably cynical can believe that colours are just decorative whims or markers to flog brands – they can show our loyalties, point to our passions and our vulnerabilities, shape and mark our identities, signify subversively, and sometimes, without intention, result in very strange bedfellows, in improbable points of unity. That's the case for me with purple and the various shades along its spectrum: Purple for the Dockers; the violet/purple in the Rainbow flag; purple, mauve and lavender with their network of historical associations with queerness, from Oscar Wilde to The Lavender Menace; the purple worn on days like IDAHO, May 17
^th
, international day of action against homophobia, or Wear it Purple Day, in solidarity with bullied LGBT youth; even the purple of the suffragettes factors into the equation.

You've come a long way, baby. Well, one thing is for certain, in the fan stakes women are now a key market demographic courted by the AFL and its clubs, and are wooed with tempters designed to cater to what are perceived to be their tastes. For instance, as an $85 ‘add on' to my membership in the ‘Purple Army', I have the option to join the official women's supporter group ‘The Sirens', and thus ‘[e]njoy exclusive merchandise' (travel pillow, magnet photo frame, etc.) ‘and events in the company of like minded ladies and build life-long friendships.'
⁵
I, however, am not a member of the Sirens. Needless to say, I can't quite envisage myself as one of Homer's temptresses, although in fairness the name
seems an innocent attempt to draw on the club's brand-specific nautical theme, while also referencing a football term. Certainly, I struggle to see myself in the description of ‘like minded lady', and just maybe I suspect, like Krien, that such gambits are less about equity and inclusion than they are about harnessing a hitherto undervalued resource. Mum's attendance, or her compliance with Dad's disappearing to the footy solo cannot be taken for granted anymore, nor can her willingness to let her boys play nasty brutish Aussie Rules, when seemingly softer sports like soccer beckon.
⁶
I should add though that I'm not such a sceptic as to knock the idea of women building life-long friendships, or to ignore the valuable outcomes of the work the club does in supporting charities and community initiatives. Indeed, I'm quietly proud of the fact – well, some may say it's more of a serviceable myth – that, with its strong immersion in the traditionally working-class and multicultural Fremantle community, its history of hard knocks and mishaps, a battler fan base and notable Indigenous player representation, the Dockers have an egalitarian appeal that – as the late Matt Price cheekily noted in his book about the trials and tribulations of Dockers fandom,
Way To Go
⁷
– seems to stand in strong contrast to the blue-chip, establishment veneer of much vaunted cross-town rivals, the West Coast Eagles. This said, though, I can't quite exempt my team from Krien's shrewd feminist question about the AFL's public celebrations of ‘forgotten heroes' and ‘good women'. Yes, there is certainly evidence in the footy narrative of less traditional roles, new modes of participation, but it's hard to deny that the dominant representations in media and marketing remain: selfless mothers, nurturing support staff and, of course, glamorous WAGs on the red carpet. ‘Are we changing stereotypes here,' Krien asks ‘or simply reinforcing them?'
⁸

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.