ARTICLE: "The Divergence of Sporting Culture in Perth's Inner Eastern Suburbs", by Chris Egan

State premier league soccer @ Frank Drago Reserve, Bayswater. (Bayswater SC plays in the blue-and-black shirts which is a reference to Inter Milan and not to East Perth.) Chris Egan argues that Bayswater was historically a soccer town whereas neighbouring Maylands was an Australian Rules town and this difference is because of divergent immigration patterns in the early days.

The divergence of sporting culture in Perth’s inner eastern suburbs

The author Chris Egan

Sport in Western Australia is traditionally analysed on a state-wide perspective rather than a suburb by suburb approach. This skews our understanding on a rather complicated sporting environment which modern Perth is founded on.

Attitudes towards codes is variant depending on what ‘village’ of Perth you lived in. This article is to explore Maylands' fervent support of Australian Rules Football in juxtaposition to its minority status in neighbouring Bayswater.

While a British Association team was played out of Bayswater in the Great War and was allocated part of Bayswater Oval in 1928 (Changes They’ve Seen – The City and People of Bayswater 1827-2013), it did not enter East Maylands Primary School until 1973 (A History of East Maylands Primary School 1954-2003, by Laura Nolan).  While Australian Rules football was an entrenched part of Maylands' social fabric, it did not enter the City of Bayswater until 1948 when Bedford and Inglewood RSL clubs started one up for the children of returned servicemen (Changes They’ve Seen – The City and People of Bayswater 1827-2013).

This divergence shows how sporting culture is as divided on a town by town approach as in the north of England. That class, employment and social fabric was insular and cross cultural influences were constrained. Oral recounts are being supported by the historical archives to substantiate this.

We also see an evangelical rivalry. Australian Rules Football in Maylands was played by a Protestant majority, while the Church of England was also very influential in both junior and senior soccer circles in Perth. Victorian Protestants who had come over with the gold rush were fervent supporters of Australian Rules Football, while Western Australian/ British Protestants, particularly those in high positions within government/clergy, would have soccer as their code of choice.

Bayswater was on the outskirts with farms and bush a majority. Its history has been said to be ‘unconstrained’ by Western Australian fabric because the suburb was essentially a suburb of new migrants. It had little of the entrenched class system that existed in other parts of Perth with tennis and athletics being more popular than any of the ball sports (Changes They’ve Seen – The City and People of Bayswater 1827-2013, by Catherine May). With a large British migration into the suburb its sports choices began to reflect the pastimes of tennis and athletics – sports which were individual by nature. Soccer became a pastime later on, with Australian Rules Football a minority sport. This is a story that is played out throughout the different villages of Perth, not dissimilar to what occurs in the north of England.

So what occurs in Maylands, which in the 1890’s was called Falkirk?  (Original Crown grants and locations within the City of Stirling, Gordon and Olga Sherwood, 1988)

Mephan Ferguson is largely influential in the establishment of the suburb of Maylands, the name has been changed because of his daughter May Ferguson who became Mephan’s housekeeper after his wife passed away. (Original Crown Grants and Locations with the City of Stirling, Gordon and Olga Sherwood, 1988).

Ferguson was a renowned engineer and won the contract to build the Water Pipeline from Perth to Coolgardie. A Scotsman who came out to Australia during the Gold Rush and did his apprenticeship in Ballarat, he went on to develop a large engineering workshop in Footscray. After winning the contract to develop the water pipeline he established a workshop in Maylands. Migration and skills in a full employment city would have come from a Victorian economy entering recession. Skills that had been developed in Footscray would have been transferable to the ‘state building’ of Western Australia.

This development would have seen the sport of choice Australian Rules Football to be infiltrated within this community by the residents who came and clustered. We see the insularity of the region with it not infiltrating into the region immediately east. So this Australian Rules cluster which had been seen as a sport of religion in the Victorian colonies came head to head with it being given a ‘working class’ typecast in the Western Australian society.

While Mephan Ferguson donated two pounds to the Footscray Football Club in 1895 (Independent, 11^th May 1895), his role in Perth fitted into the class structure where he as an influential member of society was a patron of British Association Football (The Daily News, 23^rd March 1906). This social and class structure that had seen him move from an influential backer of Australian Rules Football to Association Football.

Ferguson’s workers however would have seen their sport of choice Australian Rules Football ingrained by their social class. Joe Barbaro said even with post-war migration, Italians within Maylands adapted to this entrenched Australian Rules culture in the early 70’s.  

“We used to play football and it was probably the only reason I came to school. We used to have a division between Perth supporters and East Perth supporters. We’d get into a few fights with kids calling us ‘dings’ in particular…but it wasn’t a regular thing. I did take on a lot of the Anglo-saxon type things. Like I didn’t play soccer, I played footy…basically we assimilated pretty well because I think we had to” (A history of East Maylands Primary School, 1954-2003, Laura Nolan).

So how does this relate to today? Well with council amalgamations being a hot topic, we see why there is such great opposition within metropolitan Perth. In 1997 Maylands residents did not want to be part of the greater City of Bayswater and wanted to maintain its links to the old Perth Roads Board – City of Stirling. In the documentation of the meeting held to discuss the proposal to amalgamate Maylands to Bayswater, a 700 strong petition was delivered stating that historical links with Stirling were stronger than they were with Bayswater.

We see the great difference in culture between the regions, Maylands established within class and economic developments linked into Perth’s culture and Bayswater developed with British and more general interstate migration, not simply working class tradesmen building the great engineering feat of the water pipeline.

Frank Drago Reserve (Bayswater City SC)

In Bayswater, the council allows soccer a part of ‘the rec’  in 1928. It becomes the headquarters for soccer in Perth in 1953. Catherine May touches on the underlying tension between amateur and professional sport within the town and that the council’s desire to bring soccer to the region was a ‘welcome move to commercialisation of sport’ (Changes They’ve Seen – The City and People of Bayswater 1827-2013, Catherine May).

This had been a driver of sport in both Perth and Fremantle. Councils such as Bayswater which had a past not defined by any of the traditional Western Australian social structures would give the round ball game its first home. Bayswater Oval was first a facility for athletics, tennis, lawn bowls and more gentle sport.

The Landscape Archaeology of suburban grounds from Fremantle to Bayswater are often around commercial hubs. This is no accident, sport defined how the city moved and breathed. Merchants would see increased trade on days where sporting events were hosted. While today we see state governments seeing the benefits of hosting events, in regions throughout Perth, businesses wanted sporting events to get the visitors to stimulate their economies.

Bayswater’s move in the 1950s was a movement to stimulate commercial activity in their town centre which was not far away from Bayswater Oval. Sporting grounds in Perth are close to town nodes and commercial activity because of the economic trends that delivered gain to the business community on game days.

In this essay I’ve elicited the juxtaposition between two suburbs that although are geographically close have a cultural and economic divide that shapes their sporting culture. While post-war migrants found it socially acceptable to play the world game in Bayswater, which had this as its football code of hegemony, Italians were forced to assimilate to Australian Rules Football in a suburb [Maylands] which lived and breathed the ‘Australian’ game.

By Chris Egan

@perthforever 

[This article is published here with the kind written permission of Chris Egan.]

Joe Barbaro is quoted here as saying that East Maylands Primary School in the early-1970s was divided into gangs of Perth and East Perth supporters without soccer being a visible presence at the school. This is despite the Italian-based Baywater City (formerly Bayswater Inter) playing in neighbouring Bayswater. Now of course the East Perth WAFL club has moved to Leederville Oval (see above picture).

The author Chris Egan (left) and friend Reuben enjoying watching state premier league soccer at Dorrien Gardens, home of Perth Soccer Club (formerly Perth Italia), August 2012.