Lately I’ve been asking myself why I have dedicated over thirty years of my life to following a sport that I can’t play, while I follow a team that doesn’t know I exist other than as a membership number on a system, all the while hinging my emotional state of mind on how well they play each week. It’s maybe not the most psychologically friendly thing to do, but with tens of thousands of members of the Purple Army rocking up to Perth Stadium week in, week out to practice our collective choral musings of Freeeeooooo, there’s got to be something in it.
That sport? The Australian Football League.
The team? The Fremantle Dockers.
The Dockers, or Freo, entered the AFL back in 1994, commencing their first season in 1995 under the guidance of Gerard Neesham. Their history is well documented; their legacy is one that’s full of heartbreak, on field biffos and broken jaws, bizarre legal challenges, cross-town rivals who want nothing more than to see your mob fail, and a heartening level of finding comfort and joy where you can.
Ask certain sections of West Coast Eagles supporters, Freo’s hometown rivals, what they think of the Dockers, and you’re likely to get a blunt response asking you how many premiership cups Freo have.
The answer is, after thirty-two years, none.
You’re then likely to get a spittle flecked response of ‘four premierships baby’ before they turn away.
And look, the West Coast Eagles, or the Wiggles, have done pretty well for themselves over the years. They upset the VFL turned AFL ecosystem in the early nineties by defeating Victorian royalty, the Geelong Cats, not once, but twice in 1992 and 1994. They’ve got a lot to be proud of, and their success has been well deserved and hard fought for.
I started my footy loving life as a Brisbane Bears supporter. Partially growing up in Queensland meant that you’d turn down the audio on the tellie to listen to Roy & HG commentate the rugby. It also meant getting behind the Bears, Queensland’s AFL team that eventually merged with Fitzroy[1] to become the legendary Brisbane Lions. But supporting the Bears never felt truly right. And neither did supporting the Wiggles for that matter; yeah, they’re called the West Coast Eagles, but to my mind, there was nothing distinctly Western Australian about that mob. It felt very, well, vague for a state that spans 2,527,013 square kilometres.
As soon as we moved back to Perth and there was news that the Fremantle Dockers was going to start playing the next year, well, I knew that they were going to be my team. There was something unique about them, something joyfully different about their purple, red, green, and white top. They immediately felt like odd, weird, outsiders who have found themselves in the big league and it was up to them to prove that they deserved a place on that stage.
Depending on who you talk to, what essays you read, or what interviews you listen to, the Dockers were hobbled from the get-go with the AFL or the WAFL hampering their success. History crafts legends out of memories, and those legends become some form of perceived truth. My memory of the Dockers in the nineties was that they sucked. It was miserable to go along and catch a game. If you missed a game, well, it was no big deal because you knew what to expect: a fourth quarter fade out and another loss. There’s a reason the Dockers earned the derogatory nickname of the Chokers.
Over the years, that underdog status has become part of the identity of a Fremantle Dockers supporter. We’re used to failure, having almost grown comfortable with the nature of foiled success. We each get nervous when bogey games appear on the horizon, often in the form of the Carlton Blues. When we do win, the feeling is a foreign one, it causes a strange sensation, almost like their forbidden or illicit experience that we shouldn’t be having.
What is this? Joy? Happiness? Some kind of untapped pleasure that nobody has ever experienced before?
Ask any Freo fan and they’ll have their own personal stories about when they first felt that feeling or the most memorable time that they experienced their own personal purple patch of pride.
While I take a bit of joy in seeing Freo triumph against West Coast, the memory I return to in my mind with alarming regularity was Saturday 21 September 2013 when the Fremantle Dockers took on the Sydney Swans at Domain Stadium, Perth. The game was locked away fairly early, with Freo closing out the second quarter having kept Sydney to one solitary point. But as Freo fans well and truly know best, you never get comfortable and you never celebrate too early. But there was something different in the air that night, leading to one of the loudest, most emotionally transformative experiences I’ve had in my life.
The Fremantle Dockers, after eighteen years in the AFl, were finally off to a Grand Final.
The ecstatic high of that game was dwarfed by the emotional hollow left after Freo were defeated by Hawthorn on the last day of September at the MCG. I watched the match in Fremantle, surrounded by thousands of other purple maniacs, hoping that Freo legend Matthew Pavlich would finally get to hoist that premiership cup high, only to leave the port city swaddled in a sea of sadness and misery.
For many of us, myself included, we choose our footy teams because of where we live. I spent most of my youth in Fremantle, working at the Freo Maccas on Bathers beach, watching countless films at Queensgate Hoyts, listening to John Butler busk outside the Angus & Robertson, catching gigs at the Fly By Night Club, or maybe a WAFL game at the Freo Oval. I’ve lost days wandering through Elizabeth’s book shops as they nomadically shifted around the city.
As a young teen, I’d visit the Fremantle Crocodile Park, walking around the top path and peering down at the giant beasts. I watched the trucks ferry the reptiles away when the park closed, and later whiled away many hours at Little Creatures. That was my beer of choice for a while, before they sold out and became yet another non-Australian owned brewery. I’d visit Cicerello’s – never Kailis – for a filling feed of fish and chips and watch the sunset over the ocean.
Then there were the days that the culture and history of Freo would erupt onto the streets. The Sardine Festivals have become something of a legend in themselves, with the city become a haze of fishy smells and delights. Then the annual Blessing of the Fleet event would occur, something which I took for granted as a kid, but now have immense affection for.
But it wasn’t always the big events that stood out. It’s also the fading out of the live sheep trade. Whenever the sheep ships would be in port, the town would be smothered in a different kind of haze: sheep shit. A noxious cloud of horrid smells and sensations that made spending time in the city just that little bit less appealing. But the city of Fremantle has somehow made me have a level of affection for that smell, even while I’m rejoicing at the forthcoming closure of the live animal trade industry in WA.
My love of the Fremantle Dockers doesn’t just extend to the name alone, it’s because of what the club stands for and their connection to the history of the city and what it means for the people who love it, live in it, and visit it regularly to experience the cool comfort of the Doctor.
The club leant into the working-class nature of the city, calling the team the Dockers, paying homage to the wharfies who keep the city operating day in, day out. While the club might call Cockburn home now, they still live and breath Fremantle.
Later, I’d spend time at the Fremantle Hospital, having been whisked there by emergency ambos. I found myself on a ward and in between tests or visits from doctors, I’d chat to my fellow patients, and naturally one of the first things they’d ask is ‘what footy team do you support?’
The clubs we support say a lot about who we are as people. There’s a wonderful shorthand to getting to know someone through their football club. If they’re a Collingwood supporter, you can treat them with a level of disdain, or maybe they’re an Essendon supporter, some of the most resilient supporters out there carrying a level of fortitude rarely seen across other teams. Maybe you’ve met one of the rarest of them all: a Gold Coast Suns supporter, and maybe, if you’re a Freo supporter like me, you can understand the hard road they’ve got ahead.
What I hope being a supporter of the Fremantle Dockers says about me is that I’m someone who respects Indigenous history, and connection to country and culture. Since 2013, Fremantle joined other AFL clubs in honouring Indigenous players and history by creating dedicated jumpers for Indigenous Round, with many past or present players guiding the process to weave their families history into the jumper.
The Fremantle Dockers might also say about me that I value a strong, supportive culture that provides people to be safe with who they are. In a recent interview with Mitch Brown, it was comforting to hear that Alex Pearce was one of two active footballers who reached out to him after he came out as bisexual. The leaders of the club guide the culture they want to foster and be part of. That change isn’t something that’s happened overnight, with retired players like Matthew Pavlich, Aaron Sandilands, David Mundy, Luke McPharlin, Michael Walters, Nat Fyfe, Stephen Hill, and many others, each playing their part in shifting the culture of the Dockers to being more inclusive and supportive.
There are, quite clearly, steps they need to take to be better – see the Get Off My Chest site for more details on one of Freo’s less than great sponsors – but right now, I’m beyond comfortable in saying that I’m a proud, lifelong Fremantle Dockers supporter.
There have been many voices who have shared their perspective on what it means to be a Freo supporter, with some of the links available at the bottom of this article, but one of the most prominent voices is the late, great journalist Matt Price, who once wrote about the Fremantle Dockers saying: “Supporting Freo seems to me to represent simple and honourable values. Humour, for a start. Loyalty. Persistence and struggle. Patience and tolerance. An antidote to the incurable virus of instant gratification.”
So, with no premiership cup to our name, we find joy and comfort in strange places. While the ‘in the moment’ exhilaration of a game is something to behold, it’s the memories that are forged in those moments that become touchstone experiences that we hold onto.
I’m comforted by the friendly rivalry we have between one another as supporters. Sure, I might have caused some Collingwood supporters to close the browser in disgust earlier, but I say it with jest; after all, the Fremantle of today would not be where it is without Collingwood[2].
One bout of friendly rivalry was when I was in New York at the end of 2013. It was freezing cold, snow slushed on the streets, so I had my standout Freo scarf draped around my neck. From afar, on the other side of Times Square, I heard someone shout ‘Go Hawthorn!’ I whipped my head around and saw a Sydney Swans supporter grinning and waving, delighted that they’d inflicted a psychic barb in my direction. I laughed it off later when I met a St Kilda supporter in Central Park for an unexpected counselling session where we both exposed our footy traumas to each other; he lamented the 2010 draw and subsequent loss to Collingwood in the Grand Final replay (see why we hate them so much?), while I talked through the experience of getting home after watching Freo lose to Hawthorn, stripping off my clothes, collapsing on the bed in tears and waking up at 3am hoping it was a dream.
But then there’s the time I watched the 2007 Grand Final at the Royal Perth Hospital with my Gran. She’d be hospitalised due to a stroke and was recovering. We sat and watched the game, taking the time to ponder about what it might be like to be a Geelong fan at that game, before then quickly shifting to thinking about the poor miserable Port Adelaide fans watching their team fall in the biggest game of them all by 119 points.
As an aside, while I do have a soft spot for the GWS Giants, I did take a small moment of pleasure in seeing them fall to Richmond in 2019. Sorry Giants supporters, I know it’s cruel, but can Freo win one first please?
Depending on their ladder position and finals success, Freo supporters, alongside Carlton (last premiership 1995), Essendon (2000), North Melbourne (1999), Adelaide (1998), and the saddest of them all, St Kilda (1966) supporters each end their year saying the same thing: “Well, there’s always next year.”
So outside of those memories, we take pleasure in on field success. Whether it’s watching a coast-to-coast goal take place, or a sneaky Shai Bolton goal from the pocket, or seeing Mim Strom dominate the ruck battle, or revisiting the highlight reels of prime-era Nat Fyfe, we then remember that we support our teams because they’re legends. We exit as dedicated fans and supporters and vocal spectators because they exist as the best blokes or sheila's to don the purple jumper.
There's a reason Justin Longmuir's after the siren goal and subsequent crowd dive celebration is so deeply loved. After all these years, it’s still an energy giving force.
When your team wins, it creates a pool that you dip into whenever you talk about it, or if you're in Freo, you walk through the streets and feel that level of joy and exhilaration wash over you again.
Then there’s the external joys that we get as we watch each season of footy unfurl. Sometimes they’re the most unexpected joys too, like the ecstatic feeling that comes from rewatching Dom Sheed’s match winning goal against Collingwood in 2018, or watching the final quarter where St Kilda dominated Melbourne with thanks to Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera.
Or maybe it was finding inspiration in watching the Western Bulldogs upset the finals race in 2016 to win it all from seventh place on the ladder, ending a decades long premiership drought and bringing a level of joy and excitement to supporters across Australia.
If you head north on the Mitchell Freeway in Perth, you might find yourself starting to peel away to take the Graham Farmer Freeway tunnel, its entrance adorned by two silhouettes of footballers kicking to one another. These figures are like the Argonath, or the Pillars of the Kings, in Lord of the Rings, titans inviting you to make the journey to the sacred grounds of Perth Stadium through the void.
But if you hold off on turning for just a moment and linger just before the Charles Street exit and take a look out your left hand window, you’ll find a weathered, untended roadside memorial. The flowers have long disappeared and the cross has weathered to the point where the name of the person being memorialised has long disappeared. It’s now just another piece of roadside detritus, but for decades, that memorial stood for one Graham Sanitch
In 2021, when Melbourne took on the Western Bulldogs at Perth Stadium in the Grand Final, a Bulldogs hat and stuffed bulldog appeared on the cross. This man who had existed in my mind as a fella who had passed away and was loved and cared for now had another layer applied to his memory in my mind: he was a Western Bulldogs supporter.
The cross had been there for years, long before the Bulldogs triumphed in 2016, so Graham never got to see his beloved team take home the silverware. He never got to experience that feeling that Brisbane, Geelong, Collingwood, Hawthorn, West Coast, or Richmond supporters have felt in recent years. He never got to have that touchstone memory to turn to when days were dark and things didn’t look like they could get better.
Football is more than just a sport. It’s a state of being that changes how we see the world and move through our days. These twenty three blokes out on the field might not know who we are, but they certainly hear us and respond to us in ways that they hope will lift us up.
I know that the Fremantle Dockers feel that way. They’ve talked about it enough this year as they embark on yet another finals journey, hoping to become immortal.
I’m writing the close of this piece as I sit on the train heading towards the fateful elimination final between Fremantle and Geelong at Perth Stadium. I see fellow Freo supporters heading to the game, we’re looking at each other, knowing what we’re all feeling, anticipating, sensing might come. We have braced ourselves for a loss, for disappointment, but we all hope and yearn for that feeling that we’ve never felt before, a win that cements this club in history, putting the Fremantle Dockers and the city of Fremantle on the map as a club and a place to be honoured and respected.
There’s another thing that us longstanding supporters say to one another:
“Just once before I die.”
We’ve seen what glory other clubs have had and we so desperately want to see it happen to our Fremantle Dockers. Not just for our own emotional state of mind, but for the players, the past legends who dreamed of playing in purple and got to experience that dream (thinking of you Cam McCarthy), for the coaches, for the many under acknowledged people who work behind the scenes keeping the club going.
But mostly, for the city of Fremantle.
Win or lose, we’ll always love our Freo Dockers.
Other pieces about the Dockers I recommend reading:
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/sep/06/nat-fyfe-my-childhood-afl-hero-retirement
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/aug/22/women-support-sydney-swans-betrayal-aflw
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/sport/afl/2022/06/11/the-slow-rise-the-fremantle-dockers
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/sport/afl/2025/06/07/rocky-the-freo-world
[1] Freo would play a role in Fitzroy’s last game, which was held at Subiaco Oval and saw the Fitzroy Lions lose to the Dockers away from home. You can read more about that game here.
[2] With Justin Longmuir having coached there, as well as Chris Mayne having played at Collingwood, and of course, who can forget, Fremantle legend Mason Cox.