The Longest Journey

Hope & the Freo Dockers

“Fremantle Harbour, COSCO Shipping” Malcolm Hundley

It smelt funny. Smelt like a funky conspiracy, if I’m honest, like the bad fruit of those Melbourne Old Boys gathering in some mahogany-lined room and plotting diabolically against the Brave Purple Men, otherwise known as the Fremantle Dockers. After a few drinks and a poor umpiring decision, the AFL can seem to the bitterest Docker fan like Melbourne’s most influential cartel and font of all sectarian prejudice against non-Victorian sides – and we, the embittered fans, are hyper-vigilant to its imagined connivances.

And so, when Dockers fans read the unthinkable last week, we squinted and saw the faint outline of the cartel’s tentacles. “Cabin crew were forced to scoop human waste out of onboard toilets and other passengers were left to urinate directly into basins, a union says, after a charter flight carrying an AFL team ran out of water, making flushing impossible,” Guardian Australia reported.

“It reportedly ran out of water just 30 minutes into the four-hour flight. The lack of water rendered the two bathrooms onboard the 104-seater Embraer E190 non-functional, posing ‘an unsanitary and unsafe environment for both cabin crew and passengers’, according to the Transport Workers Union.”

Freo have kept a dignified silence about this ever since, observing that ancient code of pro athletes: what happens on a waterless flight stays on the waterless flight. As such, there remain plenty of questions which I respect should remain unanswered. Still, decorum can’t entirely quash my curiosity, and I’ve since wondered how well Dockers’ coach Justin Longmuir transitioned from comforting players who’ve suffered a season-threatening back strain to a man whose reassurances now included “Just hold on, we’re almost there” and “No Sean, you can’t use the sick bag, it’s too small and porous.”

I like to think that the team’s veterans – Michael Walters and Nat Fyfe, say – stepped up, instructing their younger teammates on pelvic clutches and meditation while leading with their own stoic example. I can only hope this is the case, because the sight of a two-time Brownlow medallist yielding to nature and defecating in a plane’s sink would presumably be disastrous for team morale. I’m not sure how you maintain the camaraderie necessary for a premiership after that.

Was the AFL behind this? Had they quietly deployed their Anti-Docker Agent – the faceless man or woman responsible, I can only assume, for Freo’s conspicuous lack of success for 30 years – to sabotage the flight’s water supply? One can only wonder while stalking delirious Reddit threads for clues and wondering just how deep this thing goes.  

Either way, if there are not some Brownlow votes for that day’s flight staff – the ones scooping waste from sinks, and politely discouraging Luke Ryan from a second-helping of microwaved mac-‘n’-cheese – then we’ll officially know that the AFL are not serious about justice.

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“Fremantle Harbour” Peter Kruger

Despite their blighted journey, and the unspoken but presumably harrowing consequences, Fremantle responded by beating Melbourne by fifty points at Optus Stadium. They did so with perhaps the best game I’ve seen them play for at least a decade – exquisitely fast and skilful and distinguished by transitions from their backline to their front that resembled long, silky ribbons.

Freo’s joie de vivre made them unrecognisable from the days of oppressive defence under Ross Lyon – a game-style which inspired contempt in the hearts of all fans but the Dockers’. In fact, we appeared unrecognisable from the team seen at the start of this season, and for a club known more for its slapstick, the maverick swagger and elite skill of last weekend was as enjoyable as it was alien.

So, I now find within my breast that thing with feathers: hope. “They’re the best team in the world, Daddy,” my young daughter said afterwards, and goddamn if I didn’t think she might have a point. She’s still too young to watch much more than three minutes of any game, but not too young to have discovered the pleasures of irrational pride.

In Caleb Serong, Andrew Brayshaw, and the stupendously improved Hayden Young, we have a thrilling midfield that’s formidably assisted by ruckman Sean Darcy – a man who resembles Tolkien’s Treebeard, an ancient and sentient oak, though Darcy confounds the comparison by having the face of a confused baby. 

Our long weakness – the forward line – has been strengthened by the sudden blossoming of Josh Treacy, while in Alex “Athletic Jesus” Pearce we have one of the league’s best defenders and a leader of genuine gravitas. His defensive sidekick, Luke Ryan, is almost as good. Unfortunately, having missed four games with a fractured left arm, Pearce returned against Melbourne and… fractured his bloody left arm again. It’s rare in footy to experience the sweet without some sour.

Given the fickleness of most teams this season, and the heavy congestion – after 18 rounds, only two games separate second from eleventh – I don’t see how it’s implausible to think that Freo, currently sitting fourth, could make the grand final this year. Of course, fickleness can apply just as equally to us, so we’ll see.

After full-time against the Demons, I eventually surrendered to the strange sensation of effervescence inside me which, after a while, I understood to be optimism and not a nascent stroke. I pulled Emily Dickinson from the shelf, and read loudly to my daughter: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers/That perches in the soul/and sings the tune without the words/And never stops at all.”

“Shhhh, Daddy, I’m trying to watch Garfield.”

Obviously, she didn’t want to get into it with me, so I didn’t share what I was thinking: that if the tune in question is the Dockers theme song, then it’s probably best that hope sing it without the words. Alas, the triumphant boys belted it out – lyrics and all – in the change room afterwards. “We’re gonna roll them and we’ll rock ‘em/We’re gonna send them to the bottom,” they sang, giddily splashing themselves with the Powerade so cruelly denied them on that flight home.

Having so often dwelt at the bottom ourselves, the embarrassment of the lyrics was at least softened this week by those feathers. And some pride, too. The journey home from Launceston was not, of course, the worst or most savage flight experienced by a professional sporting team. There were no fatalities; no forced cannibalism of the dead by the survivors.

But whatever horrors were experienced, previous Docker teams might not have been strong enough to withstand them. And now has come something that’s only slightly less rare than the appearance of Halley’s Comet: Victorian commentators expressing excitement (or even awareness) about Freo. “This can take them a long way,” Fox Footy’s David King said this week. “I don’t care where they finish on the table, if they want to play like this, they’re a force. Whether it’s this year or next, they are looming large.”

Did you hear that? About lil’ ol’ Freo? A force! We’re looming large! Dare I say, the pupa might now be enjoying its spectacular transformation! I can only hope that soon my daughter will come to gamble some of her time and mental health on the mercurial Dockers. That she’ll come to prefer the company of her old man performing autopsies on Freo games than the company of that obnoxious cat – or Smurfs, fairies, and talking Lego pieces, each of which continue to hold a stronger grip upon her imagination than the young and artful Caleb Serong.  

But that’s a longer-term dream. For now, I’ve got September in my eyes.