Tweet
Dogs dare not dream just yet
Gary Tippett | September 18, 2009
WE KEEP a lid on it in Footscray. Despite being urged to Paint The Town Red, White and Blue in the run-up to what might be the Bulldogs' first grand final since the disaster of '61, the dominant tone along Barkly Street yesterday was rain-swept grey.
No bunting along shop fronts; no tricolour flags decorating the Mall; no council-sponsored banners on the power poles. The Chinese restaurants, Jimmy Wong's and Poons, have tried, with a few sticky-taped ''Go Dogs'' signs in their windows, but otherwise you'd never know we are at a vital juncture in the history of our place. That might be a function of the changing Africa-meets-Indochina demographic; it might be the underdog ethic ingrained in the suburb; it may be just that it's a week too soon to hope.
And perhaps it's the history of heartbreak that's soaked into that mundane couple of hectares at the foot of Mount Mistake - the ghosts of preliminary finals past.
Author, Victoria University academic and Doggie fan Matthew Klugman knows the feeling: people who remain Bulldog supporters have done so through a history of disappointment, he says. ''In a way, it's failure that bonds them together, that shared suffering.''
The year 1997, when we gave up the lead to Adelaide while some supporters were lining up for grand final tickets, is imprinted on our psyche, he says. ''It's simply enough to say to another Footscray supporter '1997' and the answer will be 'Brother, I know what you're going through'.''
In his book on football supporters, Passion Play: Love, Hope and Heartbreak at the Footy, Dr Klugman says one of the key metaphors used by Bulldogs fans for that day is death. ''People will say it feels like a death in the family. I think that's the [prospect] that faces a lot of Bulldog supporters this weekend, and possibly Saints too. There's the promise of something absolutely glorious, but if a loss happens, it is literally traumatic.''
For myself at least, it's in the blood. I literally owe my life to the Scraggers.
In the wartime winter of 1943, Hazel Anderson was working at the munitions factory at the other end of Gordon Street. A workmate invited her to the footy to meet ''a couple of nice young sailors''.
They didn't turn up but one of their mates, a nuggety little bloke called Tom Tippet was there. ''It was love at
first sight,'' he told me 58 years later, the day before he died.
I was born in '53, the year before our only flag. I never saw it but there's a greying Football Record from the day in a drawer at home and a framed Weg poster on a wall.
I remember us taking the tramways bus to the town hall after Brendan Edwards did us over in the '61 grand final and we all cheered the valour and Doggedness, and Teddy Whitten apologised for not being able to do it for us. And that, so far, was as good as it got.
In Unleashed, the history of the footy club, the chapter on the next 10 years is Underdogs - which is what we were. With few wins we've always taken our pleasures where we could find them, such as John Schultz's 1960 Brownlow and Libba's too; Merv Hobbs' ''mark of the century'' in the '61 prelim; Gary Dempsey's historic return in 1969 after suffering terrible burns in the Lara fires; Teddy Whitten and everything he did; and, of course, the Fightback in 1989 when they tried to kill us and we raised a couple of million and told them: ''Up yours.''
And so we still dare to dream. Out on Hyde Street, Jack and Wendy Pearce's cottage is a rare explosion of imperial red, white and blue. There are Bulldog scarves and jumpers tacked to the walls and a tangle of streamers along the fence and under the rose arbor. The flag flies from a homemade windmill.
Mrs Pearce, now 75, has been a Bulldog since her children were in that other Footscray tradition, the Hyde Street band that marched around the oval each half-time. With her daughters and grandchildren, she has rarely missed a match since the late '60s.
''Nineteen eighty-nine really pulled us together as a community,'' she says. ''Out here we always feel no one rates us as a club or a suburb, we never get kudos because we're in the 'deprived west' and so many of us are working-class people. We feel we're always the underdogs and now we're waiting to go to the top.''
Gary Tippett | September 18, 2009
WE KEEP a lid on it in Footscray. Despite being urged to Paint The Town Red, White and Blue in the run-up to what might be the Bulldogs' first grand final since the disaster of '61, the dominant tone along Barkly Street yesterday was rain-swept grey.
No bunting along shop fronts; no tricolour flags decorating the Mall; no council-sponsored banners on the power poles. The Chinese restaurants, Jimmy Wong's and Poons, have tried, with a few sticky-taped ''Go Dogs'' signs in their windows, but otherwise you'd never know we are at a vital juncture in the history of our place. That might be a function of the changing Africa-meets-Indochina demographic; it might be the underdog ethic ingrained in the suburb; it may be just that it's a week too soon to hope.
And perhaps it's the history of heartbreak that's soaked into that mundane couple of hectares at the foot of Mount Mistake - the ghosts of preliminary finals past.
Author, Victoria University academic and Doggie fan Matthew Klugman knows the feeling: people who remain Bulldog supporters have done so through a history of disappointment, he says. ''In a way, it's failure that bonds them together, that shared suffering.''
The year 1997, when we gave up the lead to Adelaide while some supporters were lining up for grand final tickets, is imprinted on our psyche, he says. ''It's simply enough to say to another Footscray supporter '1997' and the answer will be 'Brother, I know what you're going through'.''
In his book on football supporters, Passion Play: Love, Hope and Heartbreak at the Footy, Dr Klugman says one of the key metaphors used by Bulldogs fans for that day is death. ''People will say it feels like a death in the family. I think that's the [prospect] that faces a lot of Bulldog supporters this weekend, and possibly Saints too. There's the promise of something absolutely glorious, but if a loss happens, it is literally traumatic.''
For myself at least, it's in the blood. I literally owe my life to the Scraggers.
In the wartime winter of 1943, Hazel Anderson was working at the munitions factory at the other end of Gordon Street. A workmate invited her to the footy to meet ''a couple of nice young sailors''.
They didn't turn up but one of their mates, a nuggety little bloke called Tom Tippet was there. ''It was love at
first sight,'' he told me 58 years later, the day before he died.
I was born in '53, the year before our only flag. I never saw it but there's a greying Football Record from the day in a drawer at home and a framed Weg poster on a wall.
I remember us taking the tramways bus to the town hall after Brendan Edwards did us over in the '61 grand final and we all cheered the valour and Doggedness, and Teddy Whitten apologised for not being able to do it for us. And that, so far, was as good as it got.
In Unleashed, the history of the footy club, the chapter on the next 10 years is Underdogs - which is what we were. With few wins we've always taken our pleasures where we could find them, such as John Schultz's 1960 Brownlow and Libba's too; Merv Hobbs' ''mark of the century'' in the '61 prelim; Gary Dempsey's historic return in 1969 after suffering terrible burns in the Lara fires; Teddy Whitten and everything he did; and, of course, the Fightback in 1989 when they tried to kill us and we raised a couple of million and told them: ''Up yours.''
And so we still dare to dream. Out on Hyde Street, Jack and Wendy Pearce's cottage is a rare explosion of imperial red, white and blue. There are Bulldog scarves and jumpers tacked to the walls and a tangle of streamers along the fence and under the rose arbor. The flag flies from a homemade windmill.
Mrs Pearce, now 75, has been a Bulldog since her children were in that other Footscray tradition, the Hyde Street band that marched around the oval each half-time. With her daughters and grandchildren, she has rarely missed a match since the late '60s.
''Nineteen eighty-nine really pulled us together as a community,'' she says. ''Out here we always feel no one rates us as a club or a suburb, we never get kudos because we're in the 'deprived west' and so many of us are working-class people. We feel we're always the underdogs and now we're waiting to go to the top.''
).
Comment