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| It's a Strange Old Flag - East Perth Football Club offices @ Leederville Oval, 6 July 2011. |
OPINION ARTICLE: My opinions on the East Perth Football Club (formerly of Perth Oval, Brewer Street, now of...well, never mind), by Phil Backshall (He's a part of the town), 6/6/2018
East Perth Football Club was and still remains today West
Perth’s arch-rivals. East Perth was a strong club throughout the 1960s and up
to 1978. However, the Perth Oval-based club generally failed to match it in the
1980s with the new powerhouses South Fremantle, Claremont, and Swan Districts
(in the early-1980s) and East Fremantle and Subiaco (in the mid-1980s). The
East Perth club had possibly begun to suffer the after-effects of a declining
junior base in its inner-city areas, a factor that may also partially explain
Perth FC’s poor years from 1980 onwards. The declining junior base was the
primary factor behind West Perth’s 1994 move to a more lucrative junior zone in
the Joondalup area in Perth’s outer northern suburbs. In hindsight, perhaps,
the 1978 grand-final between East Perth and Perth represented the end of an era,
the last hurrah of the traditional inner-city clubs.
My belief then was that East Perth supporters
were an overly serious and macho bunch that believed that their team was the
toughest and most ruthless. They generally did not respect other clubs at all
and especially West Perth. It was mostly East Perth fans who used the racist
“Garlic Muncher” tag for West Perth supporters because, like South Fremantle,
West Perth had always been (or at least since the 1950s) a multicultural club
both in terms of its playing squads and its supporter base. The club welcomed
these supporters and players and gained a reputation as a multicultural club.
Both West Perth and South Fremantle represent districts with large Croatian /
Yugoslav and Italian populations. Most of the ethnic soccer clubs, associated
with the Croatian, Greek, and Italian communities, are based in the West Perth
and South Fremantle catchment areas. Despite this, South Fremantle has never
been burdened by a tag such as “Garlic Munchers” possibly because East
Fremantle fans have always been far too gentlemanly and self-assured of their
own worth to resort to such insulting labelling of a rival club. The other six
WAFL clubs tended to be more strictly Anglo in the 1970s and 1980s, although
East Perth and Swan Districts have had significant numbers of Aboriginal
players and supporters.
The official “Royals” nickname for the East
Perth club was an enigma. On the one hand, I felt that some East Perth
supporters were somewhat embarrassed by it because it did not gel neatly with
their working-class (Aussie not British) tough-guy image. This interpretation
is based on the “Australia as a rugged colony” tradition which played a major
role in Ashes Test cricket matches in the 1970s. On the other hand, the Royals’
nickname for East Perth and the club’s crown symbol could have been viewed in
white-supremacist / British nationalist terms. If this meaning wasn’t overt
during the 1980s (it clearly wasn’t) it was arguably at least there in the
background playing with people’s collective subconscious, and especially those
of West Perth supporters when they were hit with the “Garlic Munchers” tag. It
is unfortunate that political correctness arrived too late and Royals’ fans
were not castigated for their insulting use of the racist “Garlic Munchers”
label for West Perth fans during the WAFL’s Golden Era. In the 1980s East Perth
and East Fremantle fans were probably those least likely to wear club colours
at their games although this is admittedly a subjective memory.
Our West Perth Cheer Squad believed that East
Perth players and fans took themselves too seriously and lacked charm and
humour. The cheer squad members also felt that, although both clubs were
mid-table in 1984-85, West Perth had a faster running and more skilful side.
West Perth fans thought that West Perth’s 1982 recruitment of East Perth
centreman George Michalczyk
(whose nephew is the West Coast Eagles player Dean Cox) was a
master-stroke as he fitted the team’s game plan well and he was also more of a
physical player than many at West Perth. The team’s token tough-guy in the
late-1970s and 1980s was the Vietnam War veteran John Duckworth but with Duckie
there was a humorous side to him (like Carlton’s Peter “Percy” Jones and North
Melbourne’s Peter “Crackers” Keenan) and he tended to be primarily a
ball-player and not one for king-hits off the ball.
Duckie meant a huge amount for player and fan
morale; it could be argued that his return to the senior team at age 35 in 1985
was another reason behind the team’s finals’ appearance in that year although
he did not himself play in the first semi-final versus Swan Districts which the
club lost. Duckworth missed the last two qualifying games of the 1985 season
due to the after-effects of swallowing a fish bone. He had not trained for
three weeks as at the Monday of the lead-up week and had lost seven kilograms.
He intended to resume training on the Thursday night before the first
semi-final but ultimately he did not play. Duckworth surely must have enjoyed
John Wynne’s philosophy of having minimal pre-season training. He inspired the
players and was worth much more to West Perth than his kick, marks, and
handballs tally might suggest. The extremely charismatic and popular
centre-half-forward Phil “Spock” Bradmore fits into the same category. Atkinson
reports that Peter Menaglio won the Breckler Medal for club fairest-and-best
player in 1984 while “Spock” Bradmore won the medal in the following year.
East Perth back then had a large number of fair-weather
fans (as of course did West Perth) who would turn out in force for the big
games and sit on the grassed scoreboard banks. Most of these have gone on to
support one of Perth’s AFL clubs. With East Perth there were certainly
dumb-thug elements among the fair-weather army. As an example, when I went with
Tim B., an East Perth supporter, to the big West Perth versus East Perth game
at Leederville Oval on 26 August 1978, my father lagged behind us as he had to
lock up all the car doors manually. As this was happening, Tim staged a mock
fight with me on the footpath. Just as in a cliché-ridden movie, an old panel
van, the vehicle of choice for mentally challenged thugs back in the day, drove
past Tim B. and me at that moment, and shouted out some brain-dead
encouragement to the one wearing the East Perth colours. East Perth’s
travelling supporters would sit on the huge Leederville Oval scoreboard bank at
West Perth home games and, as mentioned, usually they did not wear the club
colours. This grass bank has largely disappeared today, in the interests of the
gentrification of the ground and the takeover of the top part of the grass bank
by the Town of Vincent, but it can be seen in its full glory in the picture on
page 219 of Atkinson’s book. On very big match days, most of the scoreboard
bank crowd would end up standing rather than sitting (at least at the top and
on the sides and edges).
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| Tim B. in recent years (first on left) |
The East Perth fair-weather fans back in the
day all expanded significant effort trying to look macho and serious.
Ironically, Leederville Oval has now become East Perth’s home ground since the
club was forced to leave Perth Oval for the Perth Glory Soccer Club. It is
indeed ironic that the East Perth club, which prided itself on its macho,
Aussie, tough-guy image over the years, would have to leave its home ground for
soccer, the so-called sport of, to use the title of the late Johnny Warren’s
autobiography, “fairies, wogs, and poofters” (yes, Garlic Munchers). One might
even want to refer to the concept of “karma” here, a concept that many of the
middle-aged, and upper-middle-class “Buddhists” living in the now gentrified
East Perth suburb can probably relate to. As the Full Points Footy website
comments: “East Perth actually played its home matches at Leederville [Oval]
during season 2000 owing to Perth Oval being consigned to the heretics, i.e. it
was needed for the ineptly named ‘Perth Glory’s’ soccer fixtures”.
I can remember attending the second last West
Perth versus East Perth game ever played at Perth Oval on Monday 1 June 1998. I
sat under the tin shed in the south-western corner, just to the right of the
main grandstand if you were looking across from the scoreboard bank. There was
an official crowd of 4,853 people, a very high crowd for the post-Fremantle
Dockers era. East Perth actually won that day, 16.8 (104) to 8.10 (58),
although West Perth made the grand final in that year only to lose it to East
Fremantle. This 1 June 1998 match was the last WAFL game ever to be played at
Perth Oval in front of a crowd exceeding three thousand people.
Despite East Perth vacating Perth Oval, West
Perth supporters did not have the last laugh because East Perth then joined
Subiaco as the new co-tenants of Leederville Oval! The ground has now become a
yuppie, boutique style ground with most of the scoreboard wing gone (it can be
viewed on Google Earth) as well as the around-the-ground seating including the
cheer squad’s seats behind the northern-end goal. In the general public parts
of the ground only the seats in front of the tin shed in the north-west corner
remain. Subiaco has built a tasteful new social club / grandstand in between
the main grandstand and the tin shed which, if my memory serves me correctly,
was home to a stepped section of gravel or concreted terracing (or an upwards
sloping gravelled or concreted section) topped with a bar and / or a hot food
caravan back in the 1980s (similar to the still-existing can bar terrace at
Lathlain Perk). Despite all the changes, I still feel very much at home in the
famous old ground. The old gates in the south-western corner have gone replaced
by new Phil Matson Gates. It was somewhat cute and very politically correct to
name these gates after Phil Matson who was a successful player and coach at both East Perth and Subiaco in the first
half of the twentieth century. He can’t have had many challengers. I can’t
imagine that the Alex Hamilton Gates or the Kevan Sparks Gates would have been
deemed suitable names, these being the only two players I can think of from
more recent years who played for both clubs. Oh, wait...The Peter Spencer
Gates? I would like to see that!
The fact that Leederville Oval has become East Perth’s
home ground does not sit well with me, but, as Brian Atkinson pointed out in
personal e-mail correspondence, once West Perth moved out any other club had
the right to move in. Clearly Subiaco, after being forced out of its Subiaco Oval
headquarters by the new power-brokers of football the Western Australian
Football Commission (WAFC), perceived that a move effectively just down the
street to Leederville Oval would pose the least threat to its identity as a
name change would not be needed. Ironically and sadly, the only visible signs
of red-and-blue I observed when I visited Leederville Oval on the peaceful and
sunny winter morning of Wednesday 6 July 2011 was the colouring of the brand
name of Medibank Private, the current sponsors of the ground, at the back of
the old main grandstand. The ground is presently a mish-mash of colours, a
genuine post-modern collage, as you can see the blue-and-black of East Perth
only 20-metres away from the maroon-and-gold of Subiaco. However, despite this,
I still love the dear old ground (as I also love Dorrien Gardens).
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| Roy "The Spoon" George (centre) - EP fan at high-school. |
Evidence of the East Perth fair-weather fan
mentality is the fact that the club’s average attendances have been among the
lowest of all WAFL clubs in the post-West Coast Eagles era. The so-called
“dedicated” East Perth supporters of the early-1980s all quickly jumped ship at
the first opportunity to support the new, artificial, corporate West Coast
franchise. The concept of “loyalty” in Western Australian football since 1987
has been strained, muted, and bastardized, with some strange individuals
following both West Coast and
Fremantle in the AFL. Imagine people supporting both Manchester United and
Manchester City or both the legendary Glasgow clubs Celtic and Rangers! Other
West Australian football followers switched teams twice, once from their WAFL
club to the West Coast Eagles in 1987 and once from the West Coast Eagles to
the Fremantle Dockers in 1995.
A famous American sports fan turned
commentator, Joe Benigno, wrote in his only partly tongue-in-cheek book Rules for New York Sports Fans that the
number one “rule” for supporting sports in New York City is that you cannot
have more than one team per sport, i.e. you cannot support both the Yankees and Mets in baseball or both the Giants and the Jets in American football or both the Knicks or Nets in basketball or
two or more of the Rangers, Islanders or Devils in ice-hockey. This rule has
always been modified in Australia where you were “allowed” to support one
football team per competition in the
1970s and 1980s. For example, you could support Geelong, East Perth, and Port
Adelaide or West Perth, Richmond, and Norwood (to name the three clubs that
David Palm played for). This was unchanged in theory but became very confusing
in practice after the West Coast Eagles joined the VFL/AFL as it was then “permitted” for you to leave your existing VFL/AFL team
to support the Eagles which most, but by no means all, people did. Then in
1995 you were “permitted” to leave the Eagles to support the Dockers especially
if you lived anywhere near the Fremantle area or if you had historic or family
ties to either one of East or South Fremantle.
The Dockers, like baseball’s New York Mets in
relation to the Yankees and soccer’s Melbourne City in relation to Melbourne
Victory, became a team you supported if you didn’t like the Eagles as much as a
team you supported for its own sake. Philosophers Marx and Engels might have
called the Mets and Dockers the anti-theses of the dialectical contradiction in
that they only make sense in relation to the “big brother” that they always
measure themselves up against.
Taken from the book Fucking Hostile: West Perth Football Hooligans 1984-86 (pages 67-72), available to buy at the following links:
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